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I 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",
by tbabb 7y ago
I 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).
- akersten 7y ago> 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. If that's really what it is, let's disable it for accounts representing government entities and elected officials. Seem like a good compromise?
- tbabb 7y agoThere's legal precedent that public figures blocking constituents on social media amounts to a first amendment violation, so that idea may actually hold water. Naturally that only applies for government officials; the first amendment doesn't (and shouldn't) prohibit private entities from curating content. Although bad-faith dialogue disruption does happen with political and government officials too, and can be a problem (including potentially a free-speech problem, for those who are drowned out) for different reasons.
- markdown 7y ago> There's legal precedent that public figures blocking constituents on social media amounts to a first amendment violation That's US-only.
- crankylinuxuser 7y agoThere's also the 'Snowden Problem' which is contractors that act on behalf of the feds don't have the same requirements and protections as the feds. And around 95% (my assessment) of 'federal employees' are contractors.
- joncrane 7y agoDo you think it can be used as some sort of metric? Like ratio of followers:blocked replies? Or the number of accounts which block a person's replies?
- wyclif 7y agoOne thing I've noticed is that getting many Likes or Retweets on a single tweet rarely leads to increased follows.
- cm2187 7y agoGiven the number of steps required to hide a single response, if a tweet ends up with 50 abusive responses, whether genuine or bot generated, who is going to put the effort to hide them? That’s not going to stop twitter from being anything else than the dumpster fire that it is now.
- toyg 7y agoIf they are smart, twitter will make that option available in the API so that social-media managers can do it en-masse from some sort of 3rd-party power-user dashboard.
- 0xADEADBEE 7y agoI'm coming at this from the other side, but as you note, it'll be very interesting to see how it plays out. As a consumer, I don't care what the original poster thinks I should see - they may not even be someone I follow if I click a retweet for example, and if anything, seeing what someone wants to hide is much more interesting. It's a net negative from my end because now I have to click more to see the actual content but I am far to cynical to assume that's anything more than an attempt to drive engagement metrics!