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>There we go, now the entire conversation is everything or nothing, you're either with them or against them. Then it's off into personal attacks and arguments a

by blhack 7y ago

>There we go, now the entire conversation is everything or nothing, you're either with them or against them. Then it's off into personal attacks and arguments about followers and etc. I really think this is by design at Twitter. The confusing way that the conversations are structured, and intentionally limited to allow any possibility for nuance of any kind, just maximizes outrage. Essentislly twitter wants you to go to the service and get angry. That keeps you addicted and coming back to see how the argument has progressed. It’s like a much more addicting/toxic version of cable news.

duxup 7y ago
Yeah sadly "engagement" and outrage seems to be one and the same in so many situations.
ztjio 7y ago
That's an interesting fantasy, but, Twitter's "design" originates from being nothing more than a simplistic broadcast SMS tool where every message had to fit in an SMS including the username/command part as originally SMS was the primary way people used Twitter. After that, nearly every single aspect of Twitter was actually invented by its users including @ replies, and mechanisms for "threading." All that Twitter has done is ride that user behavior by slightly conforming to it through actions like UI trying to follow threads via text relationships, or eventually adding actual reply metadata to tweets. And the increase in messages size? That came with a huge backlash from many of its users. To imply that Twitter has somehow cleverly engineered the dumpster fire that burns everlasting there is giving them FAR, FAR more credit than they deserve.
- duxup 7y ago
  I'm not sure the other user means they engineered "the dumpster fire" as much as their idea of engagement combined with the shallow text field, and the way retweets and etc work that it produced the inevitable. Both could be "by design".
  - mixmastamyk 7y ago
    Or they don't change what it's become, because they like it that way == "by design".

by blhack 7y ago

duxup 7y ago

Yeah sadly "engagement" and outrage seems to be one and the same in so many situations.

ztjio 7y ago

That's an interesting fantasy, but, Twitter's "design" originates from being nothing more than a simplistic broadcast SMS tool where every message had to fit in an SMS including the username/command part as originally SMS was the primary way people used Twitter. After that, nearly every single aspect of Twitter was actually invented by its users including @ replies, and mechanisms for "threading." All that Twitter has done is ride that user behavior by slightly conforming to it through actions like UI trying to follow threads via text relationships, or eventually adding actual reply metadata to tweets. And the increase in messages size? That came with a huge backlash from many of its users. To imply that Twitter has somehow cleverly engineered the dumpster fire that burns everlasting there is giving them FAR, FAR more credit than they deserve.

duxup 7y ago
I'm not sure the other user means they engineered "the dumpster fire" as much as their idea of engagement combined with the shallow text field, and the way retweets and etc work that it produced the inevitable. Both could be "by design".
- mixmastamyk 7y ago
  Or they don't change what it's become, because they like it that way == "by design".