5 ms·

> 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

by ggreer 7y ago

> 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. I find most new Twitter features to be worse than useless: • "Like" was turned into "algorithmic retweet". Now I can't like a tweet without some percentage of my followers seeing it. This is also a problem when I follow others. I can disable seeing their retweets but I can't disable seeing their likes. I've had several people tell me that they unfollowed me because of tweets I liked. I've done the same to others. • My timeline now shows tweets from people I don't follow. Above the tweet is something like, "Tim Urban and 8 others follow...", and then there will be a tweet by someone who I really don't want to follow (such as Ben Shapiro). There seems to be no way to disable this feature. • Quote retweet is a great way to encourage flamewars. Long ago, people could not retweet with a message. That meant that people were less likely to retweet something they found inflammatory because their followers might think they agreed with it. Quote retweet means they can preface it with, "Look at what this terrible person said." That's a great way to encourage the Toxoplasma of Rage[1]. Overall, the effect of these features has been to reduce my Twitter usage. Now I mostly go there for a couple of group DMs. 1. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...

joegahona 7y ago
I hate those first two a lot. It has definitely caused my Twitter usage to decrease. What metric could Twitter possibly be optimizing for, and why not at least give people the opportunity to disable them?
jrockway 7y ago
> "Like" was turned into "algorithmic retweet". Now I can't like a tweet without some percentage of my followers seeing it. This is also a problem when I follow others. I can disable seeing their retweets but I can't disable seeing their likes. I've had several people tell me that they unfollowed me because of tweets I liked. I've done the same to others. G+ had this too, and I also got threats of being unfollowed if I didn't stop liking things. (I could turn it off in my settings, though, but I liked to use reshares to add comments and +1 to reshare without comment.) Ultimately what the social networks never delivered on were the true concept of areas of interest. You should be able to follow someone's interest in a certain subject, and then like things in that context. That way if someone is following you for your programming content, they don't have to read the anime reviews that you like, or whatever. It never happened. I think social media is a dead thing now. You can use it to snipe at political figures and promote products for money. That's about it.
- Angostura 7y ago
  > You can use it to snipe at political figures and promote products for money. I think that's wrong - there are lots of communities of interest where people follow a crowd of others because of a common topic of interest.
- throwaway1777 7y ago
  FB Groups, subreddits, discords all fulfilling this purpose. The thing with these products is you seem to either get “social graph” focused or “interest” focused.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  I was going to mention the G+ usage. I really disliked this for numerous reasons: - It was an overloading of the +1 button. Now a "like" was also a "here's my plus-one, repost me, maybe?". - The behaviour wasn't obvious to the upvoting (and re-posting) user. - People will and do upvote stuff they'd never re-post. - It was seriously annoying. I would suggest people disable the feature, if I noted it, or I'd unfollow them. There was no way to restrict such reposts from my own stream, other than (as I eventually discovered) avoiding the home stream entirely and viewing entirely by Circles. I had a set of higher and lower-priority Circles I'd follow, which actually helped cull most of the crud. I strongly suspect the design decision was based on the fact that very few people actually post or repost material. They read on a consume-only mode, if at all. Google Plus's active user base was a small fraction of 1% of all profiles, and even within that set there was a phenomenal range of activity. The effect being that most of the platform was dead air. My read is that while the extent of this may have been more so at G+ than with other leading social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.), the general principles aren't. Power laws and Zipf functions are extraordinarily prevasive, and show up virtually everywhere. The problem is that there's a very narrow band of presence between "shut the heck up already" and "I thought you were dead". In the real world, distance and/or proximity mediate this. Online, where everyone is (very nearly) as digitally close to everyone, we need other means of damping the overexuberant and enticing the timid. The "areas of interest" concept finally, sort of, got fleshed out at G+ by way of Collections, though even that was pretty butchered. Topic/channel discussions (as with Reddit / Usenet) still seem hard to beat.
kuu 7y ago
> I can disable seeing their retweets but I can't disable seeing their likes. You can stop seeing "likes" (in general, not from a specific person) if from the official client you mark the tweet as "I don't want to see this" (I don't know the exact message in English) and after giving this negative feedback several times about likes, the client stops showing them.
- majewsky 7y ago
  I do this whenever I see those, but after two or three weeks, the app will again start shoving this garbage in your face. Rinse and repeat.
  - kovach 7y ago
    Use the "Latest Tweets" mode instead of Home, you can switch from the stars icon in the top right. Latest tweets doesn't show likes for me, ever. That, and also clicking "I don't like this" on a bunch of other algorithmic suggestion boxes, means I'm seeing just the regular old timeline of what people [re]tweeted...
    - kuu 7y ago
      Same here
iikoolpp 7y ago
For 1 and 2, simply set your timeline to "latest tweets". For 3, sometimes people simply need to be made fun of. The QRT is a great way of achieving this.
- joegahona 7y ago
  Setting my timeline to “Latest Tweets” works only for that session. So add that to the list of shitty “features” that the OP peeled off — the fact that I now have to take action to use Twitter as a chronilogical feed.
  - iikoolpp 7y ago
    I've had it be persistent ever since it was introduced.
- Spivak 7y ago
  Obviously 3 is effective at what it does but it's basically the definition of putting someone on blast in front of millions of people. It's bullying on a supermassive scale. - For every bad person that's had their terrible opinions aired in public there's a right wing talk-show host that users RTs to ruin the lives some small time LGBT podcaster or youtuber with their fanbase. - If the person is big enough to take the heat you've just given them an even bigger platform for their ideas. - In general I don't think anyone deserves this even if their views are shitty.
  - iikoolpp 7y ago
    > - For every bad person that's had their terrible opinions aired in public there's a right wing talk-show host that users RTs to ruin the lives some small time LGBT podcaster or youtuber with their fanbase. I agree with using it for the first, but disagree with using it for the second, and as such those people should be banned! A rather simple solution.
aquova 7y ago
Twitter is an interesting case where I feel that they found their ideal feature set by around 2011 or so. They had chronological tweets, likes and retweets worked logically, everything was great. Unfortunately, they never made any money this way and needed to increase "user engagement" to show us more ads. So they abandoned the chronological timeline for what they thought was best, they started randomly showing stranger's likes. At least they've finally given back the option to switch to "Latest Tweets", but it's pretty telling that the site 'forgets' that setting every month or so and tries to show you what they think you want again.

by ggreer 7y ago

joegahona 7y ago

I hate those first two a lot. It has definitely caused my Twitter usage to decrease. What metric could Twitter possibly be optimizing for, and why not at least give people the opportunity to disable them?

jrockway 7y ago

> "Like" was turned into "algorithmic retweet". Now I can't like a tweet without some percentage of my followers seeing it. This is also a problem when I follow others. I can disable seeing their retweets but I can't disable seeing their likes. I've had several people tell me that they unfollowed me because of tweets I liked. I've done the same to others. G+ had this too, and I also got threats of being unfollowed if I didn't stop liking things. (I could turn it off in my settings, though, but I liked to use reshares to add comments and +1 to reshare without comment.) Ultimately what the social networks never delivered on were the true concept of areas of interest. You should be able to follow someone's interest in a certain subject, and then like things in that context. That way if someone is following you for your programming content, they don't have to read the anime reviews that you like, or whatever. It never happened. I think social media is a dead thing now. You can use it to snipe at political figures and promote products for money. That's about it.

Angostura 7y ago
> You can use it to snipe at political figures and promote products for money. I think that's wrong - there are lots of communities of interest where people follow a crowd of others because of a common topic of interest.
throwaway1777 7y ago
FB Groups, subreddits, discords all fulfilling this purpose. The thing with these products is you seem to either get “social graph” focused or “interest” focused.
dredmorbius 7y ago
I was going to mention the G+ usage. I really disliked this for numerous reasons: - It was an overloading of the +1 button. Now a "like" was also a "here's my plus-one, repost me, maybe?". - The behaviour wasn't obvious to the upvoting (and re-posting) user. - People will and do upvote stuff they'd never re-post. - It was seriously annoying. I would suggest people disable the feature, if I noted it, or I'd unfollow them. There was no way to restrict such reposts from my own stream, other than (as I eventually discovered) avoiding the home stream entirely and viewing entirely by Circles. I had a set of higher and lower-priority Circles I'd follow, which actually helped cull most of the crud. I strongly suspect the design decision was based on the fact that very few people actually post or repost material. They read on a consume-only mode, if at all. Google Plus's active user base was a small fraction of 1% of all profiles, and even within that set there was a phenomenal range of activity. The effect being that most of the platform was dead air. My read is that while the extent of this may have been more so at G+ than with other leading social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.), the general principles aren't. Power laws and Zipf functions are extraordinarily prevasive, and show up virtually everywhere. The problem is that there's a very narrow band of presence between "shut the heck up already" and "I thought you were dead". In the real world, distance and/or proximity mediate this. Online, where everyone is (very nearly) as digitally close to everyone, we need other means of damping the overexuberant and enticing the timid. The "areas of interest" concept finally, sort of, got fleshed out at G+ by way of Collections, though even that was pretty butchered. Topic/channel discussions (as with Reddit / Usenet) still seem hard to beat.

kuu 7y ago

> I can disable seeing their retweets but I can't disable seeing their likes. You can stop seeing "likes" (in general, not from a specific person) if from the official client you mark the tweet as "I don't want to see this" (I don't know the exact message in English) and after giving this negative feedback several times about likes, the client stops showing them.

majewsky 7y ago
I do this whenever I see those, but after two or three weeks, the app will again start shoving this garbage in your face. Rinse and repeat.
- kovach 7y ago
  Use the "Latest Tweets" mode instead of Home, you can switch from the stars icon in the top right. Latest tweets doesn't show likes for me, ever. That, and also clicking "I don't like this" on a bunch of other algorithmic suggestion boxes, means I'm seeing just the regular old timeline of what people [re]tweeted...
  - kuu 7y ago
    Same here

iikoolpp 7y ago

For 1 and 2, simply set your timeline to "latest tweets". For 3, sometimes people simply need to be made fun of. The QRT is a great way of achieving this.

joegahona 7y ago
Setting my timeline to “Latest Tweets” works only for that session. So add that to the list of shitty “features” that the OP peeled off — the fact that I now have to take action to use Twitter as a chronilogical feed.
- iikoolpp 7y ago
  I've had it be persistent ever since it was introduced.
Spivak 7y ago
Obviously 3 is effective at what it does but it's basically the definition of putting someone on blast in front of millions of people. It's bullying on a supermassive scale. - For every bad person that's had their terrible opinions aired in public there's a right wing talk-show host that users RTs to ruin the lives some small time LGBT podcaster or youtuber with their fanbase. - If the person is big enough to take the heat you've just given them an even bigger platform for their ideas. - In general I don't think anyone deserves this even if their views are shitty.
- iikoolpp 7y ago
  > - For every bad person that's had their terrible opinions aired in public there's a right wing talk-show host that users RTs to ruin the lives some small time LGBT podcaster or youtuber with their fanbase. I agree with using it for the first, but disagree with using it for the second, and as such those people should be banned! A rather simple solution.

aquova 7y ago

Twitter is an interesting case where I feel that they found their ideal feature set by around 2011 or so. They had chronological tweets, likes and retweets worked logically, everything was great. Unfortunately, they never made any money this way and needed to increase "user engagement" to show us more ads. So they abandoned the chronological timeline for what they thought was best, they started randomly showing stranger's likes. At least they've finally given back the option to switch to "Latest Tweets", but it's pretty telling that the site 'forgets' that setting every month or so and tries to show you what they think you want again.