8 ms·

I don't think quality of "debate" on Twitter can be salvaged. Everything was designed for "engagement" and turned out to be rage-inducing machine. Quote-retwee

by pornel 8y ago

I don't think quality of "debate" on Twitter can be salvaged. Everything was designed for "engagement" and turned out to be rage-inducing machine. Quote-retweet is used to send followers to harass the person responsible for the awful tweet. RT is choir-preaching (you're a monster if you don't RT that kicking babies is bad), and replies to twitter-celebrities' tweets give everyone their 15 minutes of fame to post the most idiotic meme. And the only time when someone tries to make a coherent argument, it's a "Tread (1/50)" with a total mess, and every single sentence has buttons for taking it out of context. They've optimized for engagement, and they're getting a lot of enragement.

meredydd 8y ago
"Every single sentence has a button for taking it out of context" is the best single-sentence summary of Twitter I have yet seen. Thank-you.
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  People seem determined to write things on Twitter that are absolutely begging to be taken out of context. Sarcasm, inside-jokes, rhetorical hyperbole, assumptions that everyone is following the same story they are, and so on. I don't know why they do it.
  - jdmichal 8y ago
    Because you have to make assumptions when you only have 140 characters to get an idea through. And yes, I know the limit has been relaxed, but that doesn't change the habit.
  - pjc50 8y ago
    > Sarcasm, inside-jokes, rhetorical hyperbole, assumptions that everyone is following the same story they are, and so on. I don't know why they do it. Done well and taken in context, it's funny? Context-free humor is extremely hard but somehow twitter has managed to evolve that too. @dril may be the most well known example. Using the internet for "debate" is pretty difficult outside of fairly homogenous, heavily moderated environments. It just about works on HN and even here it only works on certain subjects. Besides, the entire premise of "debate" runs out for certain subjects: "we're taking away your rights because you didn't argue convincingly enough that you should get to live in peace" is inherently a disaster.
  - i_am_nomad 8y ago
    Patton Oswalt did a series of tweets that were designed to be taken out of context - they made a clever point about that. Of course, that didn't stop him from continuing to use Twitter prolifically, so perhaps he missed his own point, or at least yours.
  - mortenjorck 8y ago
    The simple answer to this problem has been clear for awhile: Make responses to quote tweets opaque to the original author. 1. Bob quotes a tweet from Alice he thinks his followers will find enraging 2. Bob's followers reply to the tweet with predictable outrage and abuse 3. (present system) Twitter becomes unusable for Alice as she is flooded with mentions from all of the angry and abusive replies to Bob's quote 3. (proposed system) Alice is not shown any of the replies to Bob's tweet. Bob's followers scream into the void. 4. (proposed system, cont'd) Bob's most clever followers know replies will not be seen by Alice, so they @ her directly. However, Twitter is even more clever and has a super-advanced algorithm that goes "if you follow someone who quote-tweeted someone else in the past 48 hours, @-ing the quoted user will not show up in their mentions." New accounts (less than 48 hours old) are also unable to @ anyone at all. There, I fixed Twitter. Jack, I'll even write out some Jira stories for a very reasonable fee.
    - simias 8y ago
      It might improve things marginally but at this point it's just an arm's race. Furthermore the people who will manage to work around these limitations will also probably be the more radicalized fringe of the community who are probably the most problematic one as well. It will deter the more moderate and give a larger audience to the radicalized. Look at how people on Reddit, 4chan and elsewhere manage to identify Twitter accounts from anonymized screenshots in mere minutes in order to have a constructive discussion with the author. I don't think technology can fix a community as large and diverse as Twitter, 4chan or Youtube. The problem IMO is that it's not even a community anymore, it's more like an amalgamation of thousands of communities with vastly different opinions and mindsets. You can try to isolate the communities as you propose and you end up with something like Reddit with mostly secluded communities. Look at how well it's working for them... That's why I prefer smaller communities like Hacker News where there's still an actual sense of communities. We all see the same articles, we probably have vaguely similar interests etc... You don't default to assuming that whoever you're disagreeing with is a literal fascist/communist/whatever.
      - kurthr 8y ago
        You had me at, "people on Reddit, 4chan and elsewhere manage to identify Twitter accounts from anonymized screenshots in mere minutes in order to have a constructive discussion". I assume you mean doxing and stalking. These are the instigators and manipulators... maybe they're the dangerous harassers, but most of the mob can't be bothered.
  - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
    > I don't know why they do it. Quite simply they're playing to the crowd. That's what gets a reaction, so they do it more. Skinner box conditioning at its simplest. Same outside the hardest moderated groups on Reddit. Threads that form a distinct pattern every time. For internet points, or twitter followers, or chasing meaningless numbers. :) Sarcasm and smart works best if used judiciously. How do you design a system to encourage quality debate? Going on the few places that have had quality debate (Here on HN mostly, Usenet prior to the inrush, well managed forums, Livejournal if you were careful), I'd suggest assembling an audience interested in discussion. Forums used to manage it. Heavy moderation, not limiting post length and minimising buttons for gathering the lynch mob (I mean buttons for engagement) seems like it helps too. :)
    - zrobotics 8y ago
      One commonality is that eberything you mentioned is a site that specifically gathers people around a common topic/interest. Twitter puts everything together, so the tweets from the hardware hackers I follow are mixed in together with joke accounts. This is one of my biggest pet peeves with all social media, I just don't understand why we haven't figured out anything better than usenet for keeping interests separated.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
sdeepak 8y ago
Completely agree. The day they decided to go with ads there was no coming back. It's a public company now and they have an obligation towards their shareholders. Ads -> grabbing eyeballs -> evoking reactions. It's quite impossible to balance the interests of your customers(advertisers)vis users if one of them is not paying. They are too far along to do that.
ElectronShak 8y ago
For a long time i thought the idea that my reply, not a quote, just a reply, to a tweet gets posted to my main timeline / follower's timelines...is also a bad idea, but I guess this also was designed for 'engagement' too
- slouch 8y ago
  Your followers will only see your replies if they also follow the account to which you're replying or if someone they follow retweets the parent or your reply. Otherwise, users will have to visit your profile and slide over to the Tweets & Replies tab.
buboard 8y ago
sure it can. the higher the effort the better. they should remove retweets too. i cant remember how many people i have unfollowed because they keep retweeting their political nonsense. (in fact they should remove retweets and keep likes for the vanity crowd, as long as those are not interfering with my timeline whatsoever)
- disprove 8y ago
  You can hide retweets of a specific user by pressing the "Turn off Rewteets" button in the dropdown menu. Or you can do it en masse in the browser: https://lifehacker.com/how-to-disable-all-retweets-on-twitter-1823550038 https://lifehacker.com/how-to-disable-all-retweets-on-twitte... I prefer individual control over central control. Maybe they should make the "Turn off Rewteets" feature more visible.
zeroname 8y ago
You must be part of some sort of culture war on Twitter. My experience is completely different. I don't follow people engaging in these battles and I don't post things that would be an engagement. It really is smooth sailing from there. Or, in the words of Steve Jobs: "You're holding it wrong." I use the "like" button for bookmarking interesting things. It would be unfortunate if I had to lose that because people on the "other side" of Twitter can't handle that responsibility.
- hugg 8y ago
  As others already have mentioned, there are actual bookmarks in Twitter, that is not the "like" button (click the share button in the Android app, for example)
  - zeroname 8y ago
    Maybe, but that feature is pretty new and it doesn't even show up on the Desktop site. I've never even heard of it until now. I've been using the "like" Button for bookmarks since forever. Those are my bookmarks.
    - danso 8y ago
      I don't blame you. Bookmarks is about as buried as lists are, but at least lists show up as an option on desktop mode.
    - lorenzhs 8y ago
      You can access your bookmarks on the desktop by going to http://mobile.twitter.com/i/bookmarks http://mobile.twitter.com/i/bookmarks, but it really doesn't make sense to me that they're not integrated into the non-mobile page. I often bookmark things because I want to read them a) later or b) on a bigger screen. Currently, only the first use case is supported by Twitter.
  - ahakki 8y ago
    In the past the Twitter “Like” feature had a star instad of a heart and was called “favorite”
yannis7 8y ago
Twitter is built short-burst/high-speed communication - the kind that works great for machines but not for humans. The result is that it has turned the world into one massive Medieval village; flash-spreading of rumours, hysteria, bigotry in-between maniacally virtue-signalling and choir preaching.
bitL 8y ago
Due to debate getting worse and worse I left both Twitter and Facebook (they both became completely useless and just a waste of time); now it looks like most of low-quality "I am here too doing trivial things, applaud me!" posts moved over to LinkedIn, so I put my account to "passive" state there as well and am considering removing it altogether. Are there still some places left on Internet for high-quality discussions? Reddit recently ramped up "moderation" and now feels like a mob mentality everywhere with prolific ban give-aways if one's opinion doesn't align 100% with the one of moderators (who sometimes fight with each other); alternatives are full of extreme content that got banned on the mainstream ones, and *chan was always a stable full of manure with some pearls hidden very very deeply for one to waste time finding them.
- ognarb 8y ago
  I'm on mastodon in a tech instance and for the moment I love it.
  - fiala__ 8y ago
    Mastodon is cool, but it's far from immune to mob mentality – see Wil Wheaton thing a few months ago: https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/31/17801404/mastodon-harassment-wil-wheaton-mobs-twitter https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/31/17801404/mastodon-harassm...
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - dvtrn 8y ago
      I don't believe anything is immune from mob mentality as long as impulsive, emotional human beings are participating.
      - mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
        I believe visible scores are the only reason for mob mentality. Take away the pluses or the minuses and the numbers attached to them and heard mentality weakens. You still have some attachment from surroundings opinions but to a much lesser extent. At that point the behavior shifts from micro to macro, from a single post to the whole platform. HN is the perfect example of this.
ajcodez 8y ago
I find Twitter delightful again but I needed the following settings: Media Preview: Off Reduced Motion: On Video Autoplay: Never Increased Contrast: On I also mute lots of accounts. It took a few months of muting anyone who replies with animated GIF or says negative things like “thanks for lecture” etc and I’m back to a well tuned information machine.
eksemplar 8y ago
Can you remove comments from your twitter posts and block users from commenting if they spam? Because giving users control of their own content frankly seem to fix many issues on social media.
ai_ia 8y ago
This makes a lot of sense. Someone had earlier posted about the design of Mastodon which uses boosts instead of Retweet Quote. I think the issues are inherently with design. It is a good first step towards that direction.
DrNuke 8y ago
Is the tool, any tool, guilty for its misuse then? It’s always the people, never the tool. It’s you too, if you are unable to make your Twitter the useful environment you want.
collyw 8y ago
It pisses me off when a Twitter storm is reported as "news". Lazy journalism.
dilap 8y ago
this is all true, but there's also so much good stuff. babies & bathwater & all that.
agumonkey 8y ago
Seems like a lot of people only see the rage storm side of twitter. Most of my stream was peaceful. That said I had the intense joy to get some quote-retweet angst, it's at best half-pleasant.

by pornel 8y ago

meredydd 8y ago

"Every single sentence has a button for taking it out of context" is the best single-sentence summary of Twitter I have yet seen. Thank-you.

chrisseaton 8y ago
People seem determined to write things on Twitter that are absolutely begging to be taken out of context. Sarcasm, inside-jokes, rhetorical hyperbole, assumptions that everyone is following the same story they are, and so on. I don't know why they do it.
- jdmichal 8y ago
  Because you have to make assumptions when you only have 140 characters to get an idea through. And yes, I know the limit has been relaxed, but that doesn't change the habit.
- pjc50 8y ago
  > Sarcasm, inside-jokes, rhetorical hyperbole, assumptions that everyone is following the same story they are, and so on. I don't know why they do it. Done well and taken in context, it's funny? Context-free humor is extremely hard but somehow twitter has managed to evolve that too. @dril may be the most well known example. Using the internet for "debate" is pretty difficult outside of fairly homogenous, heavily moderated environments. It just about works on HN and even here it only works on certain subjects. Besides, the entire premise of "debate" runs out for certain subjects: "we're taking away your rights because you didn't argue convincingly enough that you should get to live in peace" is inherently a disaster.
- i_am_nomad 8y ago
  Patton Oswalt did a series of tweets that were designed to be taken out of context - they made a clever point about that. Of course, that didn't stop him from continuing to use Twitter prolifically, so perhaps he missed his own point, or at least yours.
- mortenjorck 8y ago
  The simple answer to this problem has been clear for awhile: Make responses to quote tweets opaque to the original author. 1. Bob quotes a tweet from Alice he thinks his followers will find enraging 2. Bob's followers reply to the tweet with predictable outrage and abuse 3. (present system) Twitter becomes unusable for Alice as she is flooded with mentions from all of the angry and abusive replies to Bob's quote 3. (proposed system) Alice is not shown any of the replies to Bob's tweet. Bob's followers scream into the void. 4. (proposed system, cont'd) Bob's most clever followers know replies will not be seen by Alice, so they @ her directly. However, Twitter is even more clever and has a super-advanced algorithm that goes "if you follow someone who quote-tweeted someone else in the past 48 hours, @-ing the quoted user will not show up in their mentions." New accounts (less than 48 hours old) are also unable to @ anyone at all. There, I fixed Twitter. Jack, I'll even write out some Jira stories for a very reasonable fee.
  - simias 8y ago
    It might improve things marginally but at this point it's just an arm's race. Furthermore the people who will manage to work around these limitations will also probably be the more radicalized fringe of the community who are probably the most problematic one as well. It will deter the more moderate and give a larger audience to the radicalized. Look at how people on Reddit, 4chan and elsewhere manage to identify Twitter accounts from anonymized screenshots in mere minutes in order to have a constructive discussion with the author. I don't think technology can fix a community as large and diverse as Twitter, 4chan or Youtube. The problem IMO is that it's not even a community anymore, it's more like an amalgamation of thousands of communities with vastly different opinions and mindsets. You can try to isolate the communities as you propose and you end up with something like Reddit with mostly secluded communities. Look at how well it's working for them... That's why I prefer smaller communities like Hacker News where there's still an actual sense of communities. We all see the same articles, we probably have vaguely similar interests etc... You don't default to assuming that whoever you're disagreeing with is a literal fascist/communist/whatever.
    - kurthr 8y ago
      You had me at, "people on Reddit, 4chan and elsewhere manage to identify Twitter accounts from anonymized screenshots in mere minutes in order to have a constructive discussion". I assume you mean doxing and stalking. These are the instigators and manipulators... maybe they're the dangerous harassers, but most of the mob can't be bothered.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  > I don't know why they do it. Quite simply they're playing to the crowd. That's what gets a reaction, so they do it more. Skinner box conditioning at its simplest. Same outside the hardest moderated groups on Reddit. Threads that form a distinct pattern every time. For internet points, or twitter followers, or chasing meaningless numbers. :) Sarcasm and smart works best if used judiciously. How do you design a system to encourage quality debate? Going on the few places that have had quality debate (Here on HN mostly, Usenet prior to the inrush, well managed forums, Livejournal if you were careful), I'd suggest assembling an audience interested in discussion. Forums used to manage it. Heavy moderation, not limiting post length and minimising buttons for gathering the lynch mob (I mean buttons for engagement) seems like it helps too. :)
  - zrobotics 8y ago
    One commonality is that eberything you mentioned is a site that specifically gathers people around a common topic/interest. Twitter puts everything together, so the tweets from the hardware hackers I follow are mixed in together with joke accounts. This is one of my biggest pet peeves with all social media, I just don't understand why we haven't figured out anything better than usenet for keeping interests separated.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

sdeepak 8y ago

Completely agree. The day they decided to go with ads there was no coming back. It's a public company now and they have an obligation towards their shareholders. Ads -> grabbing eyeballs -> evoking reactions. It's quite impossible to balance the interests of your customers(advertisers)vis users if one of them is not paying. They are too far along to do that.

ElectronShak 8y ago

For a long time i thought the idea that my reply, not a quote, just a reply, to a tweet gets posted to my main timeline / follower's timelines...is also a bad idea, but I guess this also was designed for 'engagement' too

slouch 8y ago
Your followers will only see your replies if they also follow the account to which you're replying or if someone they follow retweets the parent or your reply. Otherwise, users will have to visit your profile and slide over to the Tweets & Replies tab.

buboard 8y ago

sure it can. the higher the effort the better. they should remove retweets too. i cant remember how many people i have unfollowed because they keep retweeting their political nonsense. (in fact they should remove retweets and keep likes for the vanity crowd, as long as those are not interfering with my timeline whatsoever)

disprove 8y ago
You can hide retweets of a specific user by pressing the "Turn off Rewteets" button in the dropdown menu. Or you can do it en masse in the browser: https://lifehacker.com/how-to-disable-all-retweets-on-twitter-1823550038 https://lifehacker.com/how-to-disable-all-retweets-on-twitte... I prefer individual control over central control. Maybe they should make the "Turn off Rewteets" feature more visible.

zeroname 8y ago

You must be part of some sort of culture war on Twitter. My experience is completely different. I don't follow people engaging in these battles and I don't post things that would be an engagement. It really is smooth sailing from there. Or, in the words of Steve Jobs: "You're holding it wrong." I use the "like" button for bookmarking interesting things. It would be unfortunate if I had to lose that because people on the "other side" of Twitter can't handle that responsibility.

hugg 8y ago
As others already have mentioned, there are actual bookmarks in Twitter, that is not the "like" button (click the share button in the Android app, for example)
- zeroname 8y ago
  Maybe, but that feature is pretty new and it doesn't even show up on the Desktop site. I've never even heard of it until now. I've been using the "like" Button for bookmarks since forever. Those are my bookmarks.
  - danso 8y ago
    I don't blame you. Bookmarks is about as buried as lists are, but at least lists show up as an option on desktop mode.
  - lorenzhs 8y ago
    You can access your bookmarks on the desktop by going to http://mobile.twitter.com/i/bookmarks http://mobile.twitter.com/i/bookmarks, but it really doesn't make sense to me that they're not integrated into the non-mobile page. I often bookmark things because I want to read them a) later or b) on a bigger screen. Currently, only the first use case is supported by Twitter.
- ahakki 8y ago
  In the past the Twitter “Like” feature had a star instad of a heart and was called “favorite”

yannis7 8y ago

Twitter is built short-burst/high-speed communication - the kind that works great for machines but not for humans. The result is that it has turned the world into one massive Medieval village; flash-spreading of rumours, hysteria, bigotry in-between maniacally virtue-signalling and choir preaching.

bitL 8y ago

Due to debate getting worse and worse I left both Twitter and Facebook (they both became completely useless and just a waste of time); now it looks like most of low-quality "I am here too doing trivial things, applaud me!" posts moved over to LinkedIn, so I put my account to "passive" state there as well and am considering removing it altogether. Are there still some places left on Internet for high-quality discussions? Reddit recently ramped up "moderation" and now feels like a mob mentality everywhere with prolific ban give-aways if one's opinion doesn't align 100% with the one of moderators (who sometimes fight with each other); alternatives are full of extreme content that got banned on the mainstream ones, and *chan was always a stable full of manure with some pearls hidden very very deeply for one to waste time finding them.

ognarb 8y ago
I'm on mastodon in a tech instance and for the moment I love it.
- fiala__ 8y ago
  Mastodon is cool, but it's far from immune to mob mentality – see Wil Wheaton thing a few months ago: https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/31/17801404/mastodon-harassment-wil-wheaton-mobs-twitter https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/31/17801404/mastodon-harassm...
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - dvtrn 8y ago
    I don't believe anything is immune from mob mentality as long as impulsive, emotional human beings are participating.
    - mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
      I believe visible scores are the only reason for mob mentality. Take away the pluses or the minuses and the numbers attached to them and heard mentality weakens. You still have some attachment from surroundings opinions but to a much lesser extent. At that point the behavior shifts from micro to macro, from a single post to the whole platform. HN is the perfect example of this.

ajcodez 8y ago

I find Twitter delightful again but I needed the following settings: Media Preview: Off Reduced Motion: On Video Autoplay: Never Increased Contrast: On I also mute lots of accounts. It took a few months of muting anyone who replies with animated GIF or says negative things like “thanks for lecture” etc and I’m back to a well tuned information machine.

eksemplar 8y ago

Can you remove comments from your twitter posts and block users from commenting if they spam? Because giving users control of their own content frankly seem to fix many issues on social media.

ai_ia 8y ago

This makes a lot of sense. Someone had earlier posted about the design of Mastodon which uses boosts instead of Retweet Quote. I think the issues are inherently with design. It is a good first step towards that direction.

DrNuke 8y ago

Is the tool, any tool, guilty for its misuse then? It’s always the people, never the tool. It’s you too, if you are unable to make your Twitter the useful environment you want.

collyw 8y ago

It pisses me off when a Twitter storm is reported as "news". Lazy journalism.

dilap 8y ago

this is all true, but there's also so much good stuff. babies & bathwater & all that.

agumonkey 8y ago

Seems like a lot of people only see the rage storm side of twitter. Most of my stream was peaceful. That said I had the intense joy to get some quote-retweet angst, it's at best half-pleasant.