7 ms·

Facebook, when I used to use it, felt like a reasonably structured glut of content. Twitter on the other hand feels like a poorly structured glut of opinions. I

by osrec 6y ago

Facebook, when I used to use it, felt like a reasonably structured glut of content. Twitter on the other hand feels like a poorly structured glut of opinions. I sometimes can't even differentiate between the original tweet, the reply, and I find it hard to know how many replies there are. It feels like trying to have a coherent conversation in the middle of an old fashioned stock exchange - virtually impossible - I think twitter's UI is at least partly to blame for this.

debacle 6y ago
I think Twitter's problem is that there isn't enough feel good content. Facebook shows you the dark pattern engagement content, but they also have pictures of your family, kids selling girl scout cookies, 10 minute videos about how to turn ramen noodles into a combine harvester, etc. Twitter only has the dark pattern engagement content and it makes people sick after too long. Maybe they should buy a Flicker type platform just to try and tone down the outrage a bit.
- zo1 6y ago
  I think they should bring out personalized, customizable and curatable blocking/block-lists for both accounts and topics, and perhaps content sentiment as well. E.g. I want to follow Star Trek celebrity actors for their Star Trek/culture/movies/good content, but not for their incessant anti-Republican and Trump-bashing content. Yes, sometimes I'll miss stuff because AI/ML isn't perfect. But we don't want to "desensitize" people by forcing them to internalize beliefs not their own because they want "some" of the content posted by the people they follow. Ads and "engagement" have a huge negative externality that comes with all these online tools, which is why these platforms never go in the direction of enabling and giving tools to the users to drive their own experience.
  - blululu 6y ago
    I believe that you are asking for a more isolated filter bubble here. This is nice when it’s all positive but never engaging with opposing viewpoints is a serious problem. Polarization and atomization make it hard to cooperate as a society.
    - Stupulous 6y ago
      If you have a "no liberals" filter, you'll get a worse bubble. But if you implement it as a "no politics" filter, you can get all the benefits without directly affecting bubbles. "No politics" is a tricky problem, though. 'Politics' is less of a category and more of a spectrum. Is COVID politics? Climate change? Minimum wage research? BLM? But at least you could filter out the rhetoric and mindless other side bashing which are hardly politics anyway.
  - Jcowell 6y ago
    Why not just use the mute keywords feature which already does this ?
- munificent 6y ago
  > that there isn't enough feel good content. Any time I see people make sweeping claims about what the content on some social media site/app "is", I feel compelled to point out that your Twitter and my Twitter are likely much more different than you realize. Because the UI looks the same, people naturally assume the content is similar, but your experience is highly dependent on who you follow. My Twitter feed is 50% pixel artists sharing beautiful content, 30% programming language people having interesting discussions on language nerd stuff, 10% authors talking about fiction, and 10% politics and other stuff. I get a lot of feel good content. But that's because I chose to make my Twitter feed be that by who I follow. Reddit and YouTube are likewise highly nourishing to me. I do wish social media sites made it easier to curate like this, but I disagree with the notion that there is any singular view of what content on these sites is like.
  - tonyarkles 6y ago
    Heck, an individual's Twitter experience can be radically changed just by making some changes. A few years ago, I had pretty much abandoned Twitter. Like the GP says, it was a cesspool of negativity. And then I heard someone talk about the "cocktail party" strategy: "If you were at a cocktail party and ended up next to this person, would you hang out and chat? Or would you excuse yourself and go somewhere else?" I spent about a week making decisions like that as I saw tweets scroll by. Every time I saw one where I'd answer "ugh, no", I just unfollowed that person. Soon, my feed was much nicer, and I started to get recommendations for more people to follow that added to my experience!
    - osrec 6y ago
      It makes your tweets nicer, but also an echo chamber, which will unfortunately be exploited by those you follow at some point.
      - tonyarkles 6y ago
        Maybe, although I'm quite curious to see how people who mostly talk about old computers and crazy debugging stories are going to do that. Funny enough, as a Canadian, I do end up getting exposed to both some of the American left and right politics, as well as having a good idea of when crazy stuff goes down, but I don't get much exposure to crazy stuff happening in Canada via Twitter, and I'm generally ok with that! Facebook, however, is the complete opposite; that's a wild mix of folks widely distributed in the "masks are killing our children" to "the government should lock every person in their homes" Canadian politics, and it's exhausting.

by osrec 6y ago

debacle 6y ago

I think Twitter's problem is that there isn't enough feel good content. Facebook shows you the dark pattern engagement content, but they also have pictures of your family, kids selling girl scout cookies, 10 minute videos about how to turn ramen noodles into a combine harvester, etc. Twitter only has the dark pattern engagement content and it makes people sick after too long. Maybe they should buy a Flicker type platform just to try and tone down the outrage a bit.

zo1 6y ago
I think they should bring out personalized, customizable and curatable blocking/block-lists for both accounts and topics, and perhaps content sentiment as well. E.g. I want to follow Star Trek celebrity actors for their Star Trek/culture/movies/good content, but not for their incessant anti-Republican and Trump-bashing content. Yes, sometimes I'll miss stuff because AI/ML isn't perfect. But we don't want to "desensitize" people by forcing them to internalize beliefs not their own because they want "some" of the content posted by the people they follow. Ads and "engagement" have a huge negative externality that comes with all these online tools, which is why these platforms never go in the direction of enabling and giving tools to the users to drive their own experience.
- blululu 6y ago
  I believe that you are asking for a more isolated filter bubble here. This is nice when it’s all positive but never engaging with opposing viewpoints is a serious problem. Polarization and atomization make it hard to cooperate as a society.
  - Stupulous 6y ago
    If you have a "no liberals" filter, you'll get a worse bubble. But if you implement it as a "no politics" filter, you can get all the benefits without directly affecting bubbles. "No politics" is a tricky problem, though. 'Politics' is less of a category and more of a spectrum. Is COVID politics? Climate change? Minimum wage research? BLM? But at least you could filter out the rhetoric and mindless other side bashing which are hardly politics anyway.
- Jcowell 6y ago
  Why not just use the mute keywords feature which already does this ?
munificent 6y ago
> that there isn't enough feel good content. Any time I see people make sweeping claims about what the content on some social media site/app "is", I feel compelled to point out that your Twitter and my Twitter are likely much more different than you realize. Because the UI looks the same, people naturally assume the content is similar, but your experience is highly dependent on who you follow. My Twitter feed is 50% pixel artists sharing beautiful content, 30% programming language people having interesting discussions on language nerd stuff, 10% authors talking about fiction, and 10% politics and other stuff. I get a lot of feel good content. But that's because I chose to make my Twitter feed be that by who I follow. Reddit and YouTube are likewise highly nourishing to me. I do wish social media sites made it easier to curate like this, but I disagree with the notion that there is any singular view of what content on these sites is like.
- tonyarkles 6y ago
  Heck, an individual's Twitter experience can be radically changed just by making some changes. A few years ago, I had pretty much abandoned Twitter. Like the GP says, it was a cesspool of negativity. And then I heard someone talk about the "cocktail party" strategy: "If you were at a cocktail party and ended up next to this person, would you hang out and chat? Or would you excuse yourself and go somewhere else?" I spent about a week making decisions like that as I saw tweets scroll by. Every time I saw one where I'd answer "ugh, no", I just unfollowed that person. Soon, my feed was much nicer, and I started to get recommendations for more people to follow that added to my experience!
  - osrec 6y ago
    It makes your tweets nicer, but also an echo chamber, which will unfortunately be exploited by those you follow at some point.
    - tonyarkles 6y ago
      Maybe, although I'm quite curious to see how people who mostly talk about old computers and crazy debugging stories are going to do that. Funny enough, as a Canadian, I do end up getting exposed to both some of the American left and right politics, as well as having a good idea of when crazy stuff goes down, but I don't get much exposure to crazy stuff happening in Canada via Twitter, and I'm generally ok with that! Facebook, however, is the complete opposite; that's a wild mix of folks widely distributed in the "masks are killing our children" to "the government should lock every person in their homes" Canadian politics, and it's exhausting.