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Twitter launches its ‘Hide Replies’ feature in the US and Japan
- smitty1e 7y agoI usually make it a point to retweet my trolls, a technique due to Andrew Breitbart. Another great technique is to ask simple, intelligent questions. My trolls seem to lack stamina. ADDED: The other extreme thing I like to do on social media when people are trying to troll me is offer sincere forgiveness.
- castis 7y agoedit: didnt mean to piss off the children
- fuzz4lyfe 7y agoHave you ever considered that classifying people who disagree with you as a race of subhuman monsters is "amplifying the negativity you find in this world"? If a bored fourteen year old really offers a rhetorical threat to your argument, get new arguments.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mrob 7y agoThe word "troll" in this context originates from the fishing technique, not the monster.
- A_I 7y agoProof?
- mrob 7y agoWikipedia has citations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll#Origin_and_etymology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll#Origin_and_etym...
- fuzz4lyfe 7y agoHow can someone be a verb? I'm a eating. Doesn't make sense.
- mrob 7y ago"Troll" is both a verb and a noun. Originally it was just a verb: "to provoke responses by metaphorically dragging bait", but it soon broadened to mean "somebody who provokes responses by metaphorically dragging bait". And in modern times the meaning has broadened still further to include direct insults, which is a needless loss of precision in language because there was already the perfectly good verb "flame" for that meaning . But even after all the extension of meaning, the origin of the word is still the dragging of fishing bait.
- keyle 7y agoSeems like a good move. Better than deleting. First thing I do when I see "more replies" is click on it, knowing this is where the juicy stuff or counter argument is. Like in HN, when it says [dead], I have to read it, to see whether I agree with it being [dead] or not ;-) So there is certainly psychology there, at least to me, that makes me dig further. By hiding stuff behind a click you actually make me want to read it more!
- saagarjha 7y ago> Like in HN, when it says [dead], I have to read it, to see whether I agree with it being [dead] or not ;-) And if you don't, vouch for it :)
- fuzz4lyfe 7y ago"I Disapprove of What You Say, But I Will Vouch to the Death Your Right to Say It"
- stale2002 7y agoHow about "I disapprove what you say, but you can go say it on your account, and not in mine, because your replies will be hidden, because it is my account.".
- kps 7y agoI did that — vouched for comments that I thought were on-topic and dead only because people (sometimes including me) disagreed — and promptly lost the ability to vouch.
- bscphil 7y ago> First thing I do when I see "more replies" is click on it, knowing this is where the juicy stuff or counter argument is. Exactly, which is why I don't understand this feature. If you can't really hide replies, only instead call attention to the replies you've "hidden", what is the point of it?
- impalallama 7y agoReading the name I thought it be a way you could directly reply to a tweet without it being such a public matter, and also gunking up my timelinem but it seems to be a way to self-moderate your own posts which is... interesting.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- situational87 7y agoOh dear, where will I look now to see the same seven reaction gifs forced into bad jokes every single day on every single post?
- bradleyankrom 7y agoWhen people started using emoji to express themselves, I thought it couldn't get any worse... then came the reaction gif.
- mirimir 7y agoJust browse giphy. But be careful. You never know what you'll find there.
- spangry 7y agoWon't this just make Twitter even more of an echo chamber?
- mrhappyunhappy 7y agoYes.
- alasdair_ 7y agoYes.
- caspervonb 7y agoYes
- zapzupnz 7y agoYe
- cjslep 7y agoY
- srbby 7y ago
- linuxlizard 7y agoseY
- zem 7y agowonder if they'll add a feature to autoblock someone who has hidden a reply of yours
- caspervonb 7y agoBot time.
- jchw 7y agoSeems like a reasonable response to the criticisms, but also, I dislike how Twitter just gradually gets closer to Facebook every year. I don’t like much social media in general, but I kind of liked the old, very limited Twitter. It had a zen-like property to it, in some sense.
- reustle 7y agoThe first time I saw this in the wild, the author had hidden a single tweet mentioning that they had received 50k retweets on a stolen video.
- danso 7y agoThis is to me seems like a very counterintuitive “feature” — at least on paper. Hiding tweets seems akin to telling the whole world, “here are tweets from my critics I dislike so much I’m going out of my way to suppress them”. At least when you report, block, or mute someone, no one else knows that you were bothered (or, as trolls like to say, “triggered”). It’s not the same like being downvoted on HN or reddit, where the vote to suppress is a community/crowd decision. If Taylor Swift hides a tweet, you are inherently curious to know what rando’s tweet managed to hurt or anger Swift (or her social media minder). That said, while Twitter seems to be incredibly slow at introducing new features, the trade off is that what they do push out often ends up being a good thing. The survey evidence cited in the article seems flimsy, but I give Twitter some benefit of the doubt that they wouldn’t push an obviously destructive feature.
- hndamien 7y agoPeople will use it differently. If you use it to tune out noise, nobody will bother to check in yours. If you use it to quell rational dissent, then it will be the go to place for the juice.
- tbabb 7y agoI bet it'll work. First, I think most of the time the hidden content is going to be very low-quality (and thus not gratifying to explore), rather than "juicy", and users will quickly learn that. Second, it puts a huge damper on the gratification of stirring sh#t and getting a bunch of activity, notifications, and subs as a reward. Instead, when you stir the pot, you find yourself ushered to a closet by yourself. It's not locked, but you're definitely not the life of the party anymore. The result is a social force– an adjustment to incentives— that keeps conversations on-topic and civil. Really, I think it's missing the point to frame it as a tool for silencing critics with dissenting opinions, instead of a tool for silencing people who want to call you an ${inflammatory_statement} in your thread about a cake you baked today. As I understand it, as your follower count goes up on Twitter, the latter problem gets almost untenable to handle because the strategy of coat-tailing high visibility accounts by sh#t-stirring in their threads is currently so unambiguously effective. Time will tell what effect this has, but I am hopeful that it will have a large positive impact. (I think the problem demands action no less decisive and significant than this).
- caspervonb 7y agoActually makes it easier to see outside the echo chamber of a thread
- xxxpupugo 7y agoMuch needed to detoxicate Twitter itself.
- shiado 7y agoSo will a court have to rule that Trump cannot use this?
- epistasis 7y agoI can't imagine why anybody would consider this controversial in the least. Id we are living in an attention economy where anybody is allowed to make a small debit from your account at will. Giving people more tools to manage those debits should be lauded.
- raxxorrax 7y agoKinda like a website that is limited to 160 characters. Never fell in love with Twitter and looking at the top trends I often feel like wasting time on that platform. But I agree that Twitter is basically an attention distributor. I get the impression that Twitter focuses its ambition to pander to self-expression and many topics that could have been interesting degrade to something that feels even worse than cheap PR. Sadly, however that happened, Twitter became a platform to advertise political positions. That is probably why so many people see such features with mixed feelings. I disagree that people make debits by replying, even if it is done in bad faith. If you put something out there, you are likely doing that yourself and nobody takes anything away. By hiding something you take something away from readers. #iAmAgainstEverythingThatHappensOnTwitter
- epistasis 7y agoWhat would you think of spam? Isn't that clearly an attention debit? I would say that all replies, wanted and unwanted, take at least a small amount of attention. And if the fraction of useful to not useful replies decreases, that's the SNR going to crap.
- nsonha 7y agotwiiter is going into history as the utmost failure of human communication. How such a crippled way of communication (limited characters and structure) combined with such childish disregard to discourse (blocking and shadow banning) could form a platform for "discussions" of important topics like social change and politics, I'll never know.
- rchaud 7y agoThe reason Twitter became big was coincidental more than anything else. It became the defacto tool used in the Iranian protests against Ahmedinejad in summer 2009 (and again in 2011 during the ME-wide uprisings) as the regime had blocked Facebook to keep a lid on international awareness. The use of Twitter gathered a ton of foreign media attention as there was no other source of primary information. And almost overnight, Twitter went from an obscure "microblog" (nobody's used that term in years) to "the pulse of what's happening now". The cable news media (and digital media startups a few years later) were a willing partner in its rise. Embedding people's tweets in their stories gave them the ability to generate "news" to fill their 24-hour programming at a fraction of the cost of doing investigative journalism. The latter is by its nature lengthy, wrapped in secrecy and doesn't always result in a scoop. Basically all the things that a ratings and ad-driven industry couldn't care less about.
- werber 7y agoI read this as hide reptiles and got very excited. I would love to have a way to not see photographs of reptiles, especially snakes on the internet
- linuxlizard 7y agoAs a lizard, I find that offensive! ;-)
- werber 7y agoAt least you're not a snake!
- topherPedersen 7y agoYasssss. This is the future, no replies. Don't @ me. EDIT: After reading more about this, it looks like people can still reply? Would be nice if they just added a straight up "Don't @ Me" feature where you can disable comments completely.
- derefr 7y agoWould be semi-impossible given that half the comments shown on a Twitter “thread” aren’t really comment-objects, but rather just their own tweets sitting on someone else’s timeline that have @ed you in them and twitter figured out which thread to attach them to by heuristic. Sure, in theory, you could turn off the heuristic—but you’d still see them just fine if you did a global search for your @handle. Or are you suggesting disallowing what is essentially “allowing people to refer to you on their own blogs”?
- simplify 7y agoWill politicians be able to use this feature?
- gnicholas 7y agoI would imagine so. As long as you don't block people (so they can't see your stuff when logged in, or reply under that handle), I don't think there are any potential legal issues. They can say anything they want, and anyone else can see anything anyone said (if they click through to see it). So it's a minor inconvenience, but I don't think this presents the same issue as blocking others.
- joering2 7y agoThis feature in many ways reminds me of shadowvoting on HN
- collyw 7y agoHmmm. One of the reasons I have a Twitter account is to call out shitty companies (such as my phone company) when they basically ignore my complaints via email or phone call. A bit of public shaming seems to work wonders in these cases. Now I am going to have this option taken away?
- entropea 7y agoIf you comment on their tweets, yes. If you just tweet something out, Comcast can't hide it (yet).
- zabhi 7y agoThis might go down the wrong way in India. We see a lot of misinformation, propaganda and often messages inciting mob violence floating as tweets. Reporting these tweets does not do anything immediately, if ever it does anything at all. We used to post a reply linking an article with correct facts and some context. See https://www.altnews.in/ https://www.altnews.in/ This feature would make this fight a lot harder.
- derefr 7y agoWhat about when the misinformation/propaganda/etc. is in a reply instead of in an original tweet? Two-sided sword, as they say.
- ancarda 7y ago>in the US and Japan Why only these countries? I also see this with Facebook Dating; it's only available in a few countries right now. Why is this? It's software, can't you deploy the feature everywhere at once?
- DaiPlusPlus 7y agoTrial-marketing. Twitter users generally tend to form relationship (follow/see/RT)-graphs stick within language boundaries (and to a lesser-extent, national identity boundaries) - by using language or region as a proxy for a "clean" subset of users you can get some experimental results that you won't get by using random user selection, for example. Also, users unaffected by this change will still be able to see other users' replies and could then share screenshots of said replies which would defeat the point of this exercise - by using language boundaries means it's less likely that such a thing would happen (e.g. if this was Sweden and Norway instead of US+Japan, would you really bother to go through Swedish tweets to find replies for other users?) In short: it sounds like they're uncertain about pushing this change through on everyone, and want to trial it first. Twitter has gone-back on ideas they've thrown around before - like when they said they would hide other users' tweets' Like +RT counts.
- aduitsis 7y agoWhat on Earth is wrong with techcrunch? I clicked the link of the story, read it, decided to go back to HN. I had to click the back button 4(!) times.
- nobodyshere 7y agoThe url changes a few times while scrolling.
- Bantros 7y agoI'm sure this feature isn't going to be abused
- entropea 7y agoIt will be used to hide legitimate criticisms of political tweets mainly. This is a win for capital protection, nothing more.
- Chazprime 7y agoI believe Jack Dorsey when he says he wants to improve the quality of discourse on the platform, but I'm not sure this step will help anything. If people are being harassed, Twitter should deal with harassment. Adding the ability to hide replies simply allows people to handwave away discussion or criticism that they don't like, which seems detrimental to rational and reasoned discourse.
- Grue3 7y agoRussian state propagandists are going to love this feature. Right know they're constantly fact checked and called out on their hypocrisy in the replies but soon they'll be able to peddle their "death to Navalny/Ukraine/Europe/America/homosexuals" rhetoric unchecked.
- cameronbrown 7y ago"Prepare for unforseen consequences."
- mikojan 7y agoALL propaganda agencies are going to love this. State or industry. Pepsi or Joe Biden.
- entropea 7y agoI don't see a single person in the top comments speak about this. This feature is going to allow people to hide legitimate non-trash responses that criticize the tweet, and it will be very convenient going into the 2020 elections. Dissenting voices WILL be silenced.
- linuxftw 7y agoPolitics about any specific country or group aside, this would be a win for Twitter. Extra engagement from both sides. People who write crazy things return to moderate comments. People that comment write more comments because old comments are hidden. After comments are hidden, someone will probably start their own tweet about how that other tweet is full of garbage. It's just more gasoline for twitter's business model: Drive engagement through flamewars.
- KoftaBob 7y agoIt seems like using an upvote/downvote system akin to Reddit and Hacker News would make more sense for this goal. Allow all viewers to determine the quality of a comment, not just the person who posted the original tweet. Everything we've observed the last few years shows that we should be democratizing discourse on social media, not further funneling the power of the conversation into fewer hands. Do you really want extremist twitter accounts to be able to hide all dissenting replies?
- dev_dull 7y agoI’d like a comprise feature that automatically paired back the annoying bots, such as only allow my followers and my follower’s followers reply. That way you get enough of a network effect to get interesting replies without the garbage.
- MisterTea 7y agoI dunno. Just dont use twitter? I never had an account and never saw the need. No instagram or snapchat. only thing is a mostly dead facebook page that rots. I'm doing just fine. I just don't get any of these social media is ruining my/our life when you are the one who opts in. It's like a person who complains the fire they stuck their hand into burns and then continue to keep said hand in the fire. Want to be social? Go find actual groups of humans who have similar interests. Shocking concept, I know.
- linuxftw 7y agoI've never been into twitter either. There's a lot of content there though, I'll visit the site from time to time if another site links to it, but that's pretty much it. Politics on twitter is just a shouting match. Most tech related things are just kind of link-sharing (sometimes people post lengthy bits of tech info, I can't understand why). Twitter does seem to be a decent venue for breaking sports news, but that news usually finds its way elsewhere quickly.
- xeromal 7y agoYou should hop off hackernews then and find some grey beards to hang with
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]