12 ms·
Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”
- ergothus 7y agoI found this to be a rather refreshing take on the traditional "tech people didn't consider the consequences" - it doesn't place blame on the tech person, and reflects thought and awareness before and after. (It's easy in hindsight to say "people suck, so this is a terrible idea", but far harder to do in advance). Left unanswered is what do about it - the implied "require some effort" isn't likely to be successful, as the incentives to make things easier is there, and the incentive to promote long term civility is...not.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- btbuildem 7y agoSo -- remove the button. No? Why not?
- lemcoe9 7y agoAnswer: Stockholders
- daveFNbuck 7y agoThe guy in the article doesn't even work at Twitter. He's not in a position to remove it.
- splendidHaiku 7y agoMaybe other people work at twitter who could remove it? Questions was why not just remove it.
- daveFNbuck 7y agoThe people who are in a position to remove it aren't the ones who said it's like handing a loaded weapon to a 4-year-old, so they don't have the reason to remove it that the question was referring to. They have a more nuanced view and are quoted in the article saying that they're looking into how to modify the interface to "encourage more consideration before spread".
- xvector 7y agoAnd he probably was not even when he was working at Twitter.
- protomyth 7y agoBecause people will go back to the RT: convention and Twitter won't be able to sell the analytics as easily. Maybe they will finally get rid of the like acting like a retweet, ah the good ole' days.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Jach 7y agoMaybe it's not actually a loaded gun in the hands of a 4 year old.
- diminoten 7y agoThere might be a way to fix the problem that also doesn't cost Twitter money.
- wafflesraccoon 7y agoBecause users like retweeting content.
- bagacrap 7y agoFta: "A full rollback of the share and retweet buttons is unrealistic, and Wetherell doesn’t believe it’s a good idea. Were these buttons universally disabled, he said, people could pay users with large audiences to get their message out, giving them disproportionate power." Now can someone unpack that for me?
- jackfoxy 7y agoI think the real problem is Twitter refuses to make sophisticated filtering available to users. Simple mute, block, and keyword filtering are inadequate.
- ethbro 7y agoI was wondering today why Facebook et al. don't break their share functions into emotionally binned categories. "Share because it makes me angry" etc Seems like they'd get amazing whole text training sets, as well as a signal to better guide their platforms (e.g. under-weighting negative emotions in share velocity).
- black_puppydog 7y agothat's cute that you're assuming they would want to do that.
- seisvelas 7y agoPeople would quickly realize that if they share it under a negative category their share velocity would be hit. A better approach might just be to sentiment-detect negative emotion in Tweets and adjust share velocity accordingly.
- michaelt 7y agoYou mean the Liberal Tech Billionaire Elite should use AI to secretly Suppress and Censor my tweets about how They’re Building Landing Strips For Gay Martians?
- loceng 7y agoThey're designing for engagement and/or revenues, not for outcome; we (hopefully) don't raise our children to be as hyper as possible as a leading metric.
- bsamuels 7y agoI wonder if it's already possible to do this without a new button. If a lot of people close to you in your social network react "angry" to something and you choose to share it, there's a good chance you're sharing it because it makes you angry too. Graphs are cool
- ShakataGaNai 7y agoOne major problem with this: It's not like he "invented" the retweet. The userbase invented the "RT" prefixed message. Twitter the company simply took what the user base had done and weaponized it and empowered it. But at the same time they made it easier to track a single specific message being RT'd. So blessing and a curse.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- plorkyeran 7y agoThe article specifically argues that the retweet button causes problems that manual retweeting didn't, and so he did invent the thing that's actually a problem.
- derekdahmer 7y agoYea the act of copying and pasting to do a retweet required just enough extra work that people had to think about what they were typing, and so users used it in a less reactionary way. It's kind of incredible that a tweak to one small feature could have such a large behavioral impact.
- jschwartzi 7y agoIn the context of "reducing friction" to improve conversion from click-through advertising it's not unexpected that making it easier to retweet results in more people retweeting stuff without thinking it through.
- RandallBrown 7y agoI distinctly remember people typing "RT @whoever some fake tweet they never said" as a joke or to be purposefully misleading. It solved a real problem with the old fake RT system.
- eropple 7y ago
- krtkush 7y agoSimilar - https://www.nowtheendbegins.com/man-created-facebook-like-button-now-warns-mind-can-hijacked-social-media/ https://www.nowtheendbegins.com/man-created-facebook-like-bu...
- sp332 7y agoAlso a guy who did major pioneering work on infinite scrolling https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44640959 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44640959
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- malvosenior 7y agoIt's so annoying when platforms and product managers think they know better than their users. People want to retweet and they will even if you remove this feature (as they were before it existed). It basically comes off as Twitter doesn't like the users they have or the behavior they want. It's really hilarious that they use Gamergate as an example of why retweets are bad. That was a massive manifestation of the above concept. Journalists and platforms thought they knew better than gamers and users and they went to war with each other. Gamergate as a grassroots, distributed movement was very interesting and it's sadly not surprising that "the powers that be" want to reign back in control of the narrative. It's also ironic that there's a gigantic "Share" and "Tweet" button at the top of this article. As if Buzzfeed isn't entirely guilty of creating clickbait and pumping it into social media to inflame and degrade conversation. The title of this post is literally: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”. That is not elevated conversation.
- loceng 7y agoThe issue isn't the behaviour, it's the moderation - or for a better word, parenting, that happens or doesn't happen afterward. It will come down to platforms that govern well, fairly vs. those that don't.
- azinman2 7y agoThe difference is that lowering friction to perform an action has caused an exponential increase in its usage... and it’s so associated with cognitive bias and impulsive thinking that it’s allowed a lot of false information to spread quickly. I say let people go back to the manual RT
- dmix 7y agoWas there really that big of a different between “via @user” and “RT” and the retweet button?
- smacktoward 7y agoTaking something that required thought and typing and turning it into a one-click, no-thought-required operation? Absolutely. Jeff Bezos certainly thinks so -- why else would he have bothered patenting one-click buying?
- simplecomplex 7y agoHyperbole. Social media is not broken. The retweet is not why. And this guy didn't invent the idea of republishing content. Other microblog services had that, and I'm pretty sure Twitter users were doing it on their own.
- loceng 7y agoSo I'm curious what you think is the problem, or if there is one - and if so, what your proposed solution would be?
- simplecomplex 7y agoPeople create their own problems out of nothing. People make mountains out of mole hills. Twitter is one of those problems. Twitter is one of those mountains.
- loceng 7y agoSo you haven't thought very deeply into this? Those statements don't tell me anything - I can say there's the colour white, but that's actually made up of a spectrum of colours. I ask because if you haven't thought deeply into it, how are you confident that your macro statements are accurate?
- ben509 7y agoIt dropped the barrier to republishing to nearly zero, to where impulse becomes the driver.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dawhizkid 7y agoRetweets function to spread messages, but the quote tweet (combined with the retweet) is the ultimate hate/shame tool. I rarely see it use outside of "hey universe look what this idiot once said".
- dccoolgai 7y agoSo tired of these "OMG What Did I Create?" stories from social media devs. How about you grow a conscience _before_ you build these things? I have told managers to go f themselves for: Content that would demean people Lying to or misleading customers *Hosing over my fellow engineers ... among other things I don't think it's that special of a thing to do but reading these things makes it seem like it is.
- _vertigo 7y agoSo, had you been in his position about to join Twitter or working for Twitter and about to build the RT button, you believe you would have foreseen its effects and refused to participate on it based on your conscience? Did anyone actually predict in Twitter’s early days that adding an RT button would lead to it being an “anger-based platform”? What makes you think you would have?
- Jach 7y agoI would just like to understand the mental process that evolves a conscience from "This is probably fine" to "That’s what I think we actually did [just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon]". In my moral calculus giving a 4-year-old a loaded weapon is pretty damn distinct from implementing a social media button for teens and older which among its negative aspects facilitates cyber bullying or other negative social behavior. With people equating the two it's probably not even that facetious to write a cliche that goes like "first they came for my retweet button, then they came for my 2nd amendment". (Edit: I did think of one mental process that's not just the easy "say whatever in front of the media" reason, but I don't think the guy is making a more interesting consequentialist dust-specks vs. torture type of claim.)
- UnFleshedOne 7y agoHave to normalize that into utilitons first. :) Giving one 4 y/o a gun is pretty bad. Giving one teen a retweet button is much less bad. Giving _all_ teens and teen-minded people retweet buttons is as bad as a sum of all negative (and positive) consequences. Once you do that you might reasonably arrive at equivalence.
- 7y ago
- gavanwoolery 7y agoThere is a much larger problem here than RTs, and that is lack of journalistic integrity. You can spread pretty much any sort of information without research or even a logical basis. Weirdly, we tend to default to accepting it as valid rather than questioning it. The only realistic cure for this, outside of draconian authority, is to teach people how to be more skeptical and educate them on logical fallacies. These are things that should be taught from elementary school and onwards IMHO.
- ben509 7y agoKnowledge of fallacies doesn't help with the tendency of outlets to bury stories they don't like, so it's not a silver bullet. But it would help. I think you need to build the tools in such a way that education becomes intrinsic to using them. If there were the ability to mark posts or tweets such that you can see "does not follow" or "citation needed" on the specific phrases that would help. Assuming you can do this in such a way that it isn't used to spam.
- smogcutter 7y agoSo I don't remember this well enough to find a link, but some time ago there was a viral clip of someone tripping on the subway steps in NY. They drop all their stuff, look like a dork, everyone's fine, whatever. But then someone takes a longer look at security camera footage from the station (or someone independent sets up a camera, I forget), and finds that lots of people trip on that particular step. Turns out it's slightly taller than the others, so it's easy to catch your foot on it. One possible solution is to convince everyone individually to pay really close attention to their feet all the time. Or you could fix the steps. No one had to go around and convince people to be shitty to each other on the internet. A structural change made it easier and more rewarding, and our dumb monkey brains went wild. If your solution is to change the dumb monkey brain part and not the structural part, you're gonna have a bad time.
- phkahler 7y agoBeen saying for years that the Share button is what ruined Facebook. I went there to see what was up with people I know, not to get news or Memes. The problem now is that FB makes a lot of money via sharing paid content so they won't get rid of it.
- tictoc 7y agoDid they know it was a weapon? Would it be a weapon if twitter wasn't popular?
- api 7y agoThe same thing could be said of every tech product back to the sharpened rock.
- darepublic 7y agoThe mainstream media has weaponized the use of the word weaponized
- throw7 7y agoI think it's funny, this developer is calling his users 4-Year-Olds. Reminds me when we used to call them lusers.
- nostrademons 7y agoReading through some of the comments here, it occurs to me that there's a moral trilemma at play here: you can have power, you can have righteousness, or you can have impartiality, but you must pick 2 out of 3. If you bring something new into the world that gives new voice or new capabilities to previously disenfranchised groups, then you have a choice between explicitly selecting who you bestow this power on (in which case you can preserve your righteousness, but sacrifice impartiality), or giving this gift away free to everyone who can make use of it (in which case you remain impartial, but will inevitably end up empowering people you find morally abhorrent). Or you can choose to do nothing and never bring anything useful into the world, which is also valid, but means you're eclipsed by people who do. Silicon Valley (and science/tech in general) has traditionally selected power & impartiality, while nation-states and religions have traditionally selected power & righteousness. Many of the commenters here would seemingly select righteousness & impartiality, which perhaps speaks to why we're discussing this on a message board rather than bringing startups into the world.
- krajzeg 7y ago"Choose two out of three" triangles are sexy, but I fail to see how this applies here. Doing nothing doesn't really mean choosing to be impartial and righteous at the same time, and there is no way to both moderate and be impartial if you actually run a platform. I see it as every platform being able to choose a point on a sliding scale between enforcing its morality and being impartial. The more moderation you do, the less impartial you are, sure - but nobody actually wants the extremes of this scale.
- Zak 7y agoI don't think that argument applies here. The article isn't advocating censorship or legal restrictions on social media. Instead, it's saying that reducing friction from a very specific content-sharing workflow and giving it a prominent position in the UI of social media sites may not have been a good design decision. Edit: I intended this as a reply to a different comment, but it has a reply now so I'll leave it as-is.
- austincheney 7y agoRetweet is like gossip but easier. There are people who are wired to enjoy gossiping. They can have this stupidity. On the other hand I prefer to avoid Twitter all together and get my news from actual journalism.
- brokenkebab 7y agoThere seem to be a growing idea in Silicon Valley minds that we (IT crowd, devs, techies, managers) are in fact great! Way smarter then those stupid peons around us which use our products. So logically we have a mission to bring those unwashed morons to the bright side, and we must manipulate them for their own good. While it's certainly pleasant illusion for us, there are two glowing problems: 1. We are not necessary better (neither morally, nor intellectually) then other people, it's just a current importance of IT economy which makes us a bit more successful, and and sometimes gives us some sort of influence. 2. There's an empirical evidence of activist journalism which suggests the only achievable result on this way is loss of respect, and growing animosity.
- bjt2n3904 7y agoFor a long time, I've made the argument that the First and Second Amendments of the US Constitution are indistinguishable from each other. Previously, when the government was attacking encryption, I made the argument that this was gun control for software. "What you have is too powerful. No one needs 'military grade' encryption. Some people are misusing it, and we need the government to control it. No one's coming for your encryption, we just want key escrow." Of course, encryption is not only a protection for banking, it's a protection for free speech. I agree that words can be a "weapon"--but in the same way that a scalpel can be a weapon. It depends how you use it. It's frightening that people are now starting to apply the "gun control" thought process to "retweets". Before anyone jumps down my throat with "but Twitter isn't bound by the constitution", no duh. But regardless whether it's a company or a government, hearing someone with a lot of power advocate for suppressing freedom of expression isn't a great thing. Whatever happened to the "Free Speech Wing" of the "Free Speech Party"?
- 9HZZRfNlpR 7y agoTwitter was not made for serious, challenging conversation from the beginning. Every feature it has is designed for short, sarcastic tweets or replies. It's almost hardcoded to the product. Possibly that's why politicians love it.
- mattknox 7y agoWetherell was not involved with launching retweet, and didn't implement much (maybe any?) of the code in that Nov 2009 launch. He probably did write a version of the frontend for retweet at some point, and had done some backend code, but all of that was largely rewritten by launch day. To be fair, he probably didn't claim that, but making his involvement out to be more than it was probably did well for the article.