8 ms·

“Twitter has an algorithm that creates harassment all by itself”

164 points by cwyers 7y ago

minikites 7y ago
To an algorithm, harassment looks like engagement. To the market, engagement looks like success. We're participating in a system that has no choice but to create this result.
vqdwj 7y ago
>The experience of having made a viral tweet is The Worst Fucking Thing. If you make a "viral tweet", don't read the replies. You have the tools to do so, since Twitter allows you to mute a thread.
- laughinghan 7y ago
  Most people use social media not with the intention of shouting into the void, but with the intention of getting replies that they want to read, that they then do read, and perhaps reply in turn. If that's what usually happens, but sometimes randomly they get tons and tons of replies that they don't want (as claimed by this post), that's an interesting and noteworthy flaw that I've never seen specifically discussed.
  - acjohnson55 7y ago
    Even if you like the replies, it's overwhelming.
  - whenchamenia 7y ago
    Im not sure I agree with your rather chatitable interpretation of most twitter users. Most seem firmly in the void shouting camp to me.
  - nyuszika7h 7y ago
    You can also mute notifications from people who don't follow you / who you don't follow, though it may not be desirable to keep it like that all the time.
amatecha 7y ago
Yeah, this has been a pretty obvious change in the recent months/years. I started noticing tweets in my timeline that were there because it was something someone I follow had replied to -- and these tweets were often "outrage-worthy" or otherwise click/flame-bait. I have since written my own Chrome extension to hide all "suggested" tweets of that sort (as well as hiding all sponsored tweets, and the "Favorite" button). There's a pretty long list of CSS classes you can just toss a "display: none" on, but unfortunately other stuff can only be discerned by checking that certain elements are inside a given container. I had to start writing actual JS to evaluate the contents of the page and omit/delete stuff that way.
- chipperyman573 7y ago
  Out of curiosity, why did you hide the favorite button? Couldn't you just not click it?
  - amatecha 7y ago
    Yeah, but I just don't even want to see it. It's a feature I would prefer had never been added to Twitter (just like the other stuff I omit using my Chrome extension). Visual noise distracting from the stuff I care about seeing. :)
  - nkrisc 7y ago
    If you're never going to click it, why have it there when it can be hidden?
- 333c 7y ago
  Can you share a link to this extension?
  - amatecha 7y ago
    Unfortunately it's just a folder on my computer -- I didn't want to pay the $5 to publish the extension on the Chrome Web Store (plus I speculate that Twitter would ban me if I publish it).
lilbobbytables 7y ago
"Twitter has an algorithm that creates harassment all by itself" What am I missing here? There was no harassment of any sort. Alternative headlines could have been: "Twitter has an algorithm that helps you gain more followers" "Twitter has an algorithm that helps you drive awareness" "Twitter has an algorithm that helps you get more twitter followers for your cause or business" "Twitter has an algorithm that expands your social impact from beyond your sphere." --- In other news: public posts on public site go.... public.
- badrequest 7y ago
  The alternative headlines would make sense if that was the consequence of the algorithm, but instead it seems to predominately result in folks who have runaway tweets getting harassed by folks who they don't know. Why would you sugar coat that with some noise about driving awareness?
- wmil 7y ago
  I guess the point is that Twitter could easily tone down pile ons by noticing that a tweet is generating many more replies than likes. Then reduce display of that tweet instead of boosting it to non-followers. Perhaps not for blue checkmarks (they've declared themselves central to the public debate), but for average users Twitter should try to calm down pile ons.
  - izzydata 7y ago
    That doesn't sound like a solid indicator of an issue. Two friends could be having a back and forth discussion with no harassment or conflict. You'd end up with 25+ replies and 1 like.
    - MBCook 7y ago
      That would only be two people. You could factor in # of users.
      - shakyshakyshaky 7y ago
freehunter 7y ago
My business does a lot of posting on Facebook of sometimes controversial things (we're a news site and we sometimes cover local politics). By far the most engaged stuff is the most controversial where people begin to fight and attack each other. I have ~3k followers on one of my pages. Usually ~200-300 people see any given post if it has no engagements. If it has normal engagement, it might get to 1000-2000 views, still short of my follower count. If it has sparked controversy and there is a fight, I've had the views spike up over 8000-9000 without any shares. Facebook posts to your timeline "your friend commented on this" and others start piling in too. Facebook emails me saying "this post is getting more attention than 95% of the rest of your posts, please pay us money to show it to more people". The more toxic the comments, the more views it gets and the more Facebook begs me to pay them for it. That's the problem with these algorithms that humans don't watch over. Usually it works great and good content is seen by the people who want to see it. But every now and again it goes out of control and people end up getting hurt and Facebook/Twitter profit from it and even promote it. And as the person who posted it, I have zero ways to stop it from spreading other than deleting the post. -edit- oh another story... I run a news site for a town, lets call it Townsville. There is another Townsville in another state, but it is not my Townsville. I had a post go super viral, 90,000 views from my 3k followers, because somehow the post made it to the wrong Townsville and 87,000 people were being shown the wrong news article. Again, I had no way to stop this, no tools to correct it. Absolute insanity.
- ASalazarMX 7y ago
  > By far the most engaged stuff is the most controversial where people begin to fight and attack each other. Well, duh. If people are fighting they are definitely "engaged", but not in a good way. Defining that more engagement equals more success is what made social networks so toxic. The current state that more eyeballs equals more ad money needs to change.
  - muckrakerz 7y ago
    Why do you state that? Some of the largest advances in our society have come from what would be seen as toxic or hostile engagements.
scythe 7y ago
I am slightly salty about this because I had complained about the same effect on reddit with the red inbox — I disabled my own inbox years ago — but nobody really cared. It’s a more general case of advertising pollution. Just as it benefits advertisers to make viewers uncomfortable and manipulate their attention, Reddit and Twitter (and Facebook!) systematically display messages that make users uncomfortable to get their attention, stimulate emotional vulnerability, and create opportunities for marketers to step in with a palliative, “shopping therapy”.
numbers 7y ago
It might be just me but wow, it's really hard to read multiple tweets as a timeline since I don't know where to start and where to end.
- kevingadd 7y ago
  This is because they broke threading and the replies section for a tweet now shows parent tweets. It's bizarre, and twitter breaks the replies view on a regular basis and only notices weeks later. It's not just you.
- whenchamenia 7y ago
  Yup, i skip, and often flag any twitter link and come to the comments. Unreadable and not a valid source for tech news imho. Its literally people screaming on digital streetcorners.
draw_down 7y ago
This is silly. Not sure what else to say about it.
noobermin 7y ago
The magical step is the final step in the argument. The algorithm does seemt to increase engagement altogether, but people's negativity bias will give more weight in ones' mind to the harrassing comments. The algo does incentivize replies it seems, which could potentially be negative, given people don't reply to positive things beyond to like or RT them, so that's an argument in their favor. Of course, most people don't notice this. I've never had a post with more than 100 replies for example, so I would have never been aware of this.
crb 7y ago
There are two tiers of Twitter: the early-adopter tech users, who use third-party API clients like Twitterific and Tweetbot, and everyone else. The first bucket has a vastly different Twitter experience. As an API client user I have no ads, no polls, no recommendations or friends likes, no "someone you follow replied" experience. Just a timeline of who I choose to follow, the blissful way it always was. No wonder they wanted to shut the API down. (Apropos of nothing, the first bucket contains all the tech journalists.)
- zippergz 7y ago
  I don't know if this is such a clean distinction. I have been on twitter since the first 3-6 months that it existed as twitter, and I use the website and first-party mobile apps. Are the ads and recommendations annoying? Yes. But back when I used third-party apps (tons of them over the years, I think starting with Twinkle, and then in some order Tweetie [which became the official app], Tweetbot, Twitteriffic, and probably some I'm forgetting), the experience was bad in lots of other ways. As native photos were added, they didn't display right. As native retweets and quote tweets became a thing, they didn't work. I imagine now with tweet threading, there was at least some gap between the feature existing and the third-party apps supporting it. Obviously it's a tradeoff, but I found the downsides of the official experience to be less frustrating than the downsides of the third-party experience.
truculent 7y ago
Gradient descent into hell
ankushnarula 7y ago
Why would an amoral view of user engagement be a surprise for a company's whose goal is to show as many ads as possible? And on top of all that, Twitter's own editorial team regularly stokes political/cultural controversy by boosting non-issues in Twitter Moments and Trending topics.
6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
I'm not engaged in the twitterverse, so a lot of the jargon goes over my head. Can someone translate what happened?
parliament32 7y ago
"Creates harassment" is very misleading. Twitter has an algorithm that shows high-interaction tweets to more people, that's it. I'm usually the last to defend Twitter but this title is pure clickbait.
Chris_Chambers 7y ago
You can’t “harass” people online.

164 points by cwyers 7y ago

To an algorithm, harassment looks like engagement. To the market, engagement looks like success. We're participating in a system that has no choice but to create this result.

vqdwj 7y ago

>The experience of having made a viral tweet is The Worst Fucking Thing. If you make a "viral tweet", don't read the replies. You have the tools to do so, since Twitter allows you to mute a thread.

laughinghan 7y ago
Most people use social media not with the intention of shouting into the void, but with the intention of getting replies that they want to read, that they then do read, and perhaps reply in turn. If that's what usually happens, but sometimes randomly they get tons and tons of replies that they don't want (as claimed by this post), that's an interesting and noteworthy flaw that I've never seen specifically discussed.
- acjohnson55 7y ago
  Even if you like the replies, it's overwhelming.
- whenchamenia 7y ago
  Im not sure I agree with your rather chatitable interpretation of most twitter users. Most seem firmly in the void shouting camp to me.
- nyuszika7h 7y ago
  You can also mute notifications from people who don't follow you / who you don't follow, though it may not be desirable to keep it like that all the time.

amatecha 7y ago

Yeah, this has been a pretty obvious change in the recent months/years. I started noticing tweets in my timeline that were there because it was something someone I follow had replied to -- and these tweets were often "outrage-worthy" or otherwise click/flame-bait. I have since written my own Chrome extension to hide all "suggested" tweets of that sort (as well as hiding all sponsored tweets, and the "Favorite" button). There's a pretty long list of CSS classes you can just toss a "display: none" on, but unfortunately other stuff can only be discerned by checking that certain elements are inside a given container. I had to start writing actual JS to evaluate the contents of the page and omit/delete stuff that way.

chipperyman573 7y ago
Out of curiosity, why did you hide the favorite button? Couldn't you just not click it?
- amatecha 7y ago
  Yeah, but I just don't even want to see it. It's a feature I would prefer had never been added to Twitter (just like the other stuff I omit using my Chrome extension). Visual noise distracting from the stuff I care about seeing. :)
- nkrisc 7y ago
  If you're never going to click it, why have it there when it can be hidden?
333c 7y ago
Can you share a link to this extension?
- amatecha 7y ago
  Unfortunately it's just a folder on my computer -- I didn't want to pay the $5 to publish the extension on the Chrome Web Store (plus I speculate that Twitter would ban me if I publish it).

lilbobbytables 7y ago

"Twitter has an algorithm that creates harassment all by itself" What am I missing here? There was no harassment of any sort. Alternative headlines could have been: "Twitter has an algorithm that helps you gain more followers" "Twitter has an algorithm that helps you drive awareness" "Twitter has an algorithm that helps you get more twitter followers for your cause or business" "Twitter has an algorithm that expands your social impact from beyond your sphere." --- In other news: public posts on public site go.... public.

badrequest 7y ago
The alternative headlines would make sense if that was the consequence of the algorithm, but instead it seems to predominately result in folks who have runaway tweets getting harassed by folks who they don't know. Why would you sugar coat that with some noise about driving awareness?
wmil 7y ago
I guess the point is that Twitter could easily tone down pile ons by noticing that a tweet is generating many more replies than likes. Then reduce display of that tweet instead of boosting it to non-followers. Perhaps not for blue checkmarks (they've declared themselves central to the public debate), but for average users Twitter should try to calm down pile ons.
- izzydata 7y ago
  That doesn't sound like a solid indicator of an issue. Two friends could be having a back and forth discussion with no harassment or conflict. You'd end up with 25+ replies and 1 like.
  - MBCook 7y ago
    That would only be two people. You could factor in # of users.
    - shakyshakyshaky 7y ago

freehunter 7y ago

My business does a lot of posting on Facebook of sometimes controversial things (we're a news site and we sometimes cover local politics). By far the most engaged stuff is the most controversial where people begin to fight and attack each other. I have ~3k followers on one of my pages. Usually ~200-300 people see any given post if it has no engagements. If it has normal engagement, it might get to 1000-2000 views, still short of my follower count. If it has sparked controversy and there is a fight, I've had the views spike up over 8000-9000 without any shares. Facebook posts to your timeline "your friend commented on this" and others start piling in too. Facebook emails me saying "this post is getting more attention than 95% of the rest of your posts, please pay us money to show it to more people". The more toxic the comments, the more views it gets and the more Facebook begs me to pay them for it. That's the problem with these algorithms that humans don't watch over. Usually it works great and good content is seen by the people who want to see it. But every now and again it goes out of control and people end up getting hurt and Facebook/Twitter profit from it and even promote it. And as the person who posted it, I have zero ways to stop it from spreading other than deleting the post. -edit- oh another story... I run a news site for a town, lets call it Townsville. There is another Townsville in another state, but it is not my Townsville. I had a post go super viral, 90,000 views from my 3k followers, because somehow the post made it to the wrong Townsville and 87,000 people were being shown the wrong news article. Again, I had no way to stop this, no tools to correct it. Absolute insanity.

ASalazarMX 7y ago
> By far the most engaged stuff is the most controversial where people begin to fight and attack each other. Well, duh. If people are fighting they are definitely "engaged", but not in a good way. Defining that more engagement equals more success is what made social networks so toxic. The current state that more eyeballs equals more ad money needs to change.
- muckrakerz 7y ago
  Why do you state that? Some of the largest advances in our society have come from what would be seen as toxic or hostile engagements.

scythe 7y ago

I am slightly salty about this because I had complained about the same effect on reddit with the red inbox — I disabled my own inbox years ago — but nobody really cared. It’s a more general case of advertising pollution. Just as it benefits advertisers to make viewers uncomfortable and manipulate their attention, Reddit and Twitter (and Facebook!) systematically display messages that make users uncomfortable to get their attention, stimulate emotional vulnerability, and create opportunities for marketers to step in with a palliative, “shopping therapy”.

numbers 7y ago

It might be just me but wow, it's really hard to read multiple tweets as a timeline since I don't know where to start and where to end.

kevingadd 7y ago
This is because they broke threading and the replies section for a tweet now shows parent tweets. It's bizarre, and twitter breaks the replies view on a regular basis and only notices weeks later. It's not just you.
whenchamenia 7y ago
Yup, i skip, and often flag any twitter link and come to the comments. Unreadable and not a valid source for tech news imho. Its literally people screaming on digital streetcorners.

draw_down 7y ago

This is silly. Not sure what else to say about it.

noobermin 7y ago

The magical step is the final step in the argument. The algorithm does seemt to increase engagement altogether, but people's negativity bias will give more weight in ones' mind to the harrassing comments. The algo does incentivize replies it seems, which could potentially be negative, given people don't reply to positive things beyond to like or RT them, so that's an argument in their favor. Of course, most people don't notice this. I've never had a post with more than 100 replies for example, so I would have never been aware of this.

crb 7y ago

There are two tiers of Twitter: the early-adopter tech users, who use third-party API clients like Twitterific and Tweetbot, and everyone else. The first bucket has a vastly different Twitter experience. As an API client user I have no ads, no polls, no recommendations or friends likes, no "someone you follow replied" experience. Just a timeline of who I choose to follow, the blissful way it always was. No wonder they wanted to shut the API down. (Apropos of nothing, the first bucket contains all the tech journalists.)

zippergz 7y ago
I don't know if this is such a clean distinction. I have been on twitter since the first 3-6 months that it existed as twitter, and I use the website and first-party mobile apps. Are the ads and recommendations annoying? Yes. But back when I used third-party apps (tons of them over the years, I think starting with Twinkle, and then in some order Tweetie [which became the official app], Tweetbot, Twitteriffic, and probably some I'm forgetting), the experience was bad in lots of other ways. As native photos were added, they didn't display right. As native retweets and quote tweets became a thing, they didn't work. I imagine now with tweet threading, there was at least some gap between the feature existing and the third-party apps supporting it. Obviously it's a tradeoff, but I found the downsides of the official experience to be less frustrating than the downsides of the third-party experience.

truculent 7y ago

Gradient descent into hell

ankushnarula 7y ago

Why would an amoral view of user engagement be a surprise for a company's whose goal is to show as many ads as possible? And on top of all that, Twitter's own editorial team regularly stokes political/cultural controversy by boosting non-issues in Twitter Moments and Trending topics.

6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago

I'm not engaged in the twitterverse, so a lot of the jargon goes over my head. Can someone translate what happened?

parliament32 7y ago

"Creates harassment" is very misleading. Twitter has an algorithm that shows high-interaction tweets to more people, that's it. I'm usually the last to defend Twitter but this title is pure clickbait.

Chris_Chambers 7y ago

You can’t “harass” people online.