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I guess this is their admission that you cannot monetize engagement if your community is highly toxic and mostly just produces shitstorms, lynchmobs, perpetuall

I guess this is their admission that you cannot monetize engagement if your community is highly toxic and mostly just produces shitstorms, lynchmobs, perpetually enraged morally superior idiots and professional victims. I know that there's also good posts and good people on Twitter, but in my opinion it has been a net negative for society for quite a while now. What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day. Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying.

celticninja 5y ago
And it will likely prove that people will pay $2.99 to cause and get involved in shit storms and lynchmobs :-(
- fxtentacle 5y ago
  I believe in Rome, people where quite happy to pay handsomely to get a front row seat for watching gladiators get mutilated by lions. Maybe we have progressed less than we thought.
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    I never thought of the old liveleaks site as a type of roman colosseum but I think you're right
  - bambax 5y ago
    Do we know that? I think most games were free? (I'm not sure).
    - munk-a 5y ago
      I think that's beside the point - more relevant is that people were both willing to pay a good deal to organize the games and that the games were a central and import part of roman society. You can argue - almost certainly correctly - that there was a significant portion of society that found the game distasteful, but you can't argue that there was still an even larger slice of the population that considered them so important that they built the coliseum to host them.
  - forgetfulness 5y ago
    Gladiators were almost all of them slaves, but they were also entertainers who were expensive to train and keep, and often individually famous, much like WWE wrestlers. So it was rare that they would be made to fight to the death. Now, slaughtering prisoners in the arena happened just like you are imagining.
    - camjohnson26 5y ago
      They had a 1/5 chance of dying in every battle and an average age at death of around 25? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladiator https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladiator
meowface 5y ago
I don't disagree with the assessment, but I think it might be orthogonal to the issue. I think it's very hard to monetize engagement, period, even if it's all positive, constructive, and intellectual engagement. If your service's business strategy is "1) acquire hundreds of millions of users and charge them all $0.00 per year for many years, 2) acquire lots of expensive infrastructure and employees to support the service, 3) ???, 4) profit", it's not going to be easy.
- city41 5y ago
  And their stock shows that. Especially when compared to other big tech companies that started at about the same time.
- villasv 5y ago
  As evidenced by the struggle with StackOverflow too, who sits atop a trove of content
  - fxtentacle 5y ago
    StackOverflow should be cheap to operate and the value comes almost exclusively from the community. So I don't see any good reason why StackOverflow would need to earn much revenue. Probably an annual fundraiser like what Wikipedia does would be more than sufficient to cover the operating expenses.
  - PoignardAzur 5y ago
    The StackOverflow thing is a bit weird, because what the owners have and consider valuable is "a place where people feel comfortable coming and asking questions", but what the core community values is "high-quality curated content", and they're very willing to do aggressive gatekeeping, thus conflicting with value 1, to preserve value 2.
    - forgotpwd16 5y ago
      High-quality curated content has been SO's goal since day one. The question/answer format is a means to this end. That's why it has come that most people can easily find a solution to their problem. https://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/991082088689381376 https://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/991082088689381376
Siira 5y ago
It’s election time here in Iran, and this time, we have essentially a one-man election, which is sth rare here (there usually are at least two candidates who can possibly win, and even though both of them are inside people already vetted by the regime, they have some small differences. At least, they are supported by different demographics.). I went to see what people were saying about this on Twitter, and did some basic searches on an account that doesn’t follow almost anyone. The results were pretty much all (90%) pro-government, and pro-one-candidate-elections. Makes me wonder how much power these state actors have now that cancel culture is a thing. They can just whip up a mob and character-terror anyone they want, without being detected at all. PS: I am not even saying these are bots. They can just pay people some meager money to do this. It’s an easy job in a country with very high unemployment. Heck, even Amazon does this in a small scale.
ppod 5y ago
You can choose exactly who you follow, you get the twitter feed you deserve.
- cvwright 5y ago
  Well, you can try. In my experience they still show a lot of crap that I have zero interest in seeing, from people who I do not follow.
  - irishloop 5y ago
    Yeah they tend to show stuff that is "liked" by people you know. So it depends on what THEY like as well.
    - oneeyedpigeon 5y ago
      If I follow anyone who persistently likes stuff I object to that strongly, I'll just unfollow them.
- jjulius 5y ago
  "Choose" is an interesting word to use in regards to something designed to be addictive.
  - astine 5y ago
    Many drugs are addictive, but I can choose which drugs I get addicted to.
    - jjulius 5y ago
      No. You can choose which drugs you try, but you can't choose which ones are addictive to you.
- Spivak 5y ago
  That's not how it really works in practice though because you follow humans who are multi-faceted instead of (human, topic). It is hard to be someone in the public eye and stay out of Twitter drama without turning your account into a RSS feed where you don't engage at all with your followers.
EasyTiger_ 5y ago
You couldn’t pay me to use Twitter, the idea of paying them is absolutely hilarious
- cvwright 5y ago
  But would you consider paying to use Mastodon, or one of the other open source alternatives? Hopefully this makes it easier for them to support themselves.
  - offtop5 5y ago
    I'd pay for HN to be honest. But just talking about society on the internet isn't really worth while to me. More people should focus on themselves. I've long accepted no one cares about how I live my life. A friend of mine spends a ton of their good energy getting upset over the latest 'take' some influencer has. It's like getting upset over an episode of WWE Raw. In any case very very little of what other people do or believe has any direct affect on you.
- MajorBee 5y ago
  You wouldn't pay to use Twitter in its current form with its low-brow unmoderated discourse (and neither would I), but would you consider paying for an "improved" version of Twitter? Not saying Twitter Blue is that, but perhaps the promise of getting a Better Twitter can you give you pause for thought and a reach for your wallet? The experiment of directly paid social media is worth trying out, in my opinion. I know paying a few bucks a month won't necessarily get you out of the privacy/ad-tech spiderweb, but if it get us a more robust control over what our social feed looks like, I think that alone makes it worth it.
twobitshifter 5y ago
I had a brief foray into Twitter, but had to stop. I followed my senator and found that no matter the post, the replies were filled with obvious disinformation, flat out lies, and irrelevant accusations. I remember one person posting hand drawn graphs without a scale claiming global warming is just a cyclical process. Does it makes sense to report someone for bad science? They probably believe what they posted to be true, and others who read that unrefuted reply may begin to think the same. So I tried to teach critical thinking to random people on Twitter, but as you imagine this was a fools errand.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  > So I tried to teach critical thinking to random people on Twitter, but as you imagine this was a fools errand. It is so hard to imagine how they just cannot seem to understand why you are right, despite all your trying to teach them. But then you imagine that they must be thinking the same thing. I cannot imagine what must’ve gone wrong in their lives that so many lies could be built on one another.
  - javajosh 5y ago
    >But then you imagine that they must be thinking the same thing. I'm not so sure about that. There are some people who take seriously the fact that they could be wrong. They approach discussion with an open mind, listen to the other, look at evidence with a critical eye, and respond fairly. Others come to a "discussion" from a totally different headspace. They are bitter, angry, and, to be frank, not very smart. It's not discussion they are after, because they aren't open to the possibility they may be wrong. My theory is that this is the "rabble" that used to be led by the church, and then by mass media, and now by internet media. The internet is fractured into close-minded echo-chambers, and for many alive today, the classic error-modes of public online communication are new and exciting. The right is enamored with the brutal effectiveness of trolling. The left seems to prefer doxxing and blacklists. And internet companies care about metrics that don't capture any of the externalities of their platforms. Hopefully they'll all grow out of it.
    - 5y ago
airhead969 5y ago
Lmao. It's true. This is why I don't have identifiable social media and don't use it even anonymously except for limited purposes. Cyberdisinhibitionism is strongest when there are no repercussions to poor behavior, too much anonymity, flame/troll/instigators/touchy comments, and no manifestation of the person on the receiving-end. It's basically a sewer factory factory with a teaspoon of sugar sprinkled-in. I think it proves that either most people are disengaged and/or the most vocal people are the worst. (Proving your point). Maybe there should be a cost to post that increases proportional to increasing frequency too. The irony is, translating to IRL, I apparently discovered I have this semi-employed, "macho" no-shirt neighbor who accused me of being racist for asking if they had an entrance keyfob to prevent tailgating into an access-controlled apartment building. Then they talked about all the (nonexistent) "cameras" around, began recording me (for what, I don't know), using racist slurs, and tried to start a physical fight (they're half my weight, like a yappy chihuahua). I'm wondering if they're schizophrenic and narcissistic, in addition to appearing like a victim-mentality crybully crybaby. My point is perhaps people are taking their online behaviors into the real world. PS: You should've heard what Latinx gangbangers called me when I was a kid. I never got beaten-up because I was bigger than all of them, but I learned the finer points of swearing in Spanish. :) I understand the tall blade of grass gets clipped so I don't take any of it personally.
- slothtrop 5y ago
  Latino.
  - reaperducer 5y ago
    "Latinx" (pronounced "Latin-X", like "Malcom X") is a very common term among people who think they're better than other people, and Chicago politicians. It's supposed to be an all-encompassing term for "Laino" and "Latina," but only serves to divide people further. Like almost every other ethnic rebranding of the last ten years.
    - joshuaissac 5y ago
      A large majority of Latino people believe that "Latinx" should not be used to refer to them, according to Pew Research. https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in-four-u-s-hispanics-have-heard-of-latinx-but-just-3-use-it/ https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...
duxup 5y ago
Maybe it is more about just monetizing anything on the web? I kinda suspect the notion of most of these services just being free and not resorting to really unpleasant ad systems and dark patterns and such ... just not viable generally.
irishloop 5y ago
I don't know I see a lot of great stuff from comedians and stuff on twitter posting all kind of shit. I enjoy the silliness, but my feed is definitely highly curated and even then I end up seeing toxic takes because people "like" the takes that I follow. However, some of my absolute favorite twitter accounts post a lot. To each their own. I don't have to hit the button.
ASalazarMX 5y ago
> What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day. Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying. Too drastic IMO. Some of the best posts I've read on Twitter come in threads, a chain of consecutive tweets by the same author. I would propose instead an option to filter profanity, most of the low value, or plain harmful, tweets use offensive words. Maybe a warning that your tweet will get a drastically reduced audience for using X or Y words, so the poster can rephrase it before submitting?
spoonjim 5y ago
If you follow the right people then Twitter is amazing. But the out of the box experience is wretched. TikTok for example quickly finds out what you want to see. Twitter puts that burden on you.
arkadiyt 5y ago
> I guess this is their admission that you cannot monetize engagement if your community is highly toxic and mostly just produces shitstorms, lynchmobs, perpetually enraged morally superior idiots and professional victims. Twitter is already profitable today, even without this subscription service.
paulpauper 5y ago
twitter already makes a lot of $ with ads (which have a very high CPC and CPM for advertisers), but this is a way to make money on top of that,
hkmurakami 5y ago
Fwiw the small world of Japanese software engineering Twitterverse is quite a pleasant, funny (punny), and constructive place. I’ve actually made many RL friends through the medium.
agumonkey 5y ago
my curated twitter feed was sincerely (and i'm a jaded guy when it comes to internet) awesome.. creative coders, intelligent and fun people, some feud here and there but nothing spectacular it's a pity most of twitter seems to be a perpetual shitstorm of low effort brainless buzz ps: out of the whole internet debasement.. I kinda see something, is that talk has a purpose, if I talk to someone I'd rather have a nice moment, and the ability to debate endlessly with people I don't even (or bots even) is fruitless. a strange kind of lesson on using ones times correctly
- exporectomy 5y ago
  Use debate to learn, not to change somebody's mind. Then it's not fruitless, even if it's endless or with a bot. If you're using it to change somebody's mind, you'll be incapable of allowing yourself to think critically since that can only cause you to fail at your purpose.
  - xwolfi 5y ago
    Yeah: when you debate you never change someones mind, especially DURING the debate. The very first rule of debating is that you try to change the mind of the public reading it, not the debaters. Now what you learn is mostly to argue your way around your opinion better, not exactly to change it. But why would you: you change your opinion when looking for insight (reading a book), not when looking for a win (debating on an advertisement platform).
    - exporectomy 5y ago
      Debate for an audience is kind of awful. You have to sacrifice your honesty and ethics to score cheap points that don't actually show you're right but can fool the causal audience. What's the value of that though? You've convinced some strangers of a fact that you don't even know is true yourself. It's just creating fake knowledge pollution.
amelius 5y ago
> What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day. Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying. This is why Twitter should be an open protocol, and people should be able to write their own UserAgents. Users should be in control of the filtering, not the app or the company.
- dixego 5y ago
  But then how are we going to serve you ads
  - cvwright 5y ago
    Maybe you could pay $2.99/month to your Mastodon host, and the ads can go to hell.
  - Hamuko 5y ago
    But Twitter already permits third-party apps that have no ads. I use one daily.
- ultimape 5y ago
  I have been trying to transition to mastodon/pleroma. ActivityPub is an open protocol for this kind of thing. I use twitter as an external brain not that dissimilar to a a Xanadu inspired Memex intermixed with a Zettelkasten.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
swiley 5y ago
>What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day. Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying. I've always felt like HN should display the upvotes/comments ratio rather than raw karma. It would be like the accuracy number in xonotic's insta-gib mode: you shoot carefully and precisely rather than spraying and praying.
camjohnson26 5y ago
There are multiple sections of Twitter and some communities are extremely toxic, but it’s also the single best place to follow breaking events. If you follow the right people it can be extremely informative, and highlights how often news bloggers get basic facts wrong. One recent example, there was a news report that famous short seller Michael Burry had taken a $500 million dollar bet against Tesla. This number came from a basic misreading of Burry’s disclosure, but the news media ran with it and an article with this number showed up on the HN front page. If you followed the right people on Twitter you knew the number was wrong within minutes, while the news media has still not issued a correction. This situation happens all the time. https://www.fool.com/investing/2021/05/17/genius-behind-the-big-short-reveals-massive-bet-ag/ https://www.fool.com/investing/2021/05/17/genius-behind-the-... https://twitter.com/Keubiko/status/1394351225316028420?s=20 https://twitter.com/Keubiko/status/1394351225316028420?s=20
- mola 5y ago
  Why is that so important?
  - camjohnson26 5y ago
    Why is anything important? Investing is interesting to me and I want accurate information free from somebody else’s agenda. That’s not possible, but aggregating the opinions of many people I respect is the closest I’ve found.
  - an1sotropy 5y ago
    thank you. the addictive hit of having some latest up-to-the-second information is not actually a rational need.
- pbhjpbhj 5y ago
  I can't see why you'd think that was a mistake, the people promulgating the [false] news report almost certainly are investing against the information they're putting out. That's what "news" owners do, surely.
senthil_rajasek 5y ago
"Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying." Only if you are looking for deep thoughtful comments. Twitter need not be that place. It could be a place to amplify the voices of the oppressed some of which may sound like noise. This kind of voice has never been available through mainstream media like cable or T.V.
fullshark 5y ago
I don't think so, this is just trying to monetize their most hardcore users beyond the fact that they click more ads.
splistud 5y ago
Which part of 'highly toxic and mostly just produces shitstorms, lynchmobs, perpetually enraged morally superior idiots and professional victims' isn't perfect for monetization? Mostly kidding, but, well sadly it isn't a joke.
whywhywhywhy 5y ago
>Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying There is a good reason they hid the tweet count, because most of the biggest names on twitter actually have Tweet counts that if you divide them by hours since their join date it would be as high as 0.8 to 1.2 tweets an hour every hour 24 hours a day for 11 years+ Once you learn this it puts those users in a very different perspective and they no longer seem like people you should be listening to.
- lupire 5y ago
  1 tweet per hour is 3.5KB/day, or about 1.5 pages of text. It's not a lot of content. Tweets are small.
  - whywhywhywhy 5y ago
    you're ignoring the time required to find things to respond to and just how many times they're scrolling that timeline a day to hit numbers so high for 11+ years.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    I would say 1,5 pages of text each day of year is pretty respectable output. Or at least would be with most other mediums. Like if all that effort was used on something else it could be 1-2 books a year?
zozbot234 5y ago
>I guess this is their admission that you cannot monetize engagement if your community is highly toxic and mostly just produces shitstorms, lynchmobs, perpetually enraged morally superior idiots and professional victims. That's most "engagement" on the internet, lol. Twitter is bad but it's not like all the other social media platforms are that much better. It's just how some people behave socially (anonymous or not, it doesn't seem to matter), at least when they're not meaningfully focusing on some worthwhile goal or pursuit like most of us are here @ HN. And trying to stop it with heavy-handed authoritarian policies only makes it worse as people strive to abuse the policies themselves to troll and gain power over others.
alkonaut 5y ago
Hmm I try to stay on Twitter because it’s friendly and constructive rather than on Facebook. I guess it depends on who you follow. Unlike Facebook (where follows are social for better or worse) Twitter lets you set up a feed of interesting/friendly people and the (social) cost of unfollowing someone is usually zero.
- dorfsmay 5y ago
  I recently started to use Facebook to stay/get in touch with friends and family from previous lives. My rule when using it is that I only interract with personal photos/stories, or stuff posted publicly. I completely ignore postings that are not personal and to friend only (not public). Facebook has (or had?) huge potential for people to keep in touch but its bigger issue are private gardens where people can spin up opinions into silliness with no opportunity for anybody from outside their echo chamber to criticize and debunk.
0x142857 5y ago
> What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day. Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying. LMAO you're absolutely right! source: me
DSingularity 5y ago
I wish we can moderate this conclusion — it’s not fair to dismiss all these people as if they are all the same. I personally believe that most of this toxicity is induced. I don’t think most humans are toxic by nature. Can you blame victims of war for their tireless online activism? So what that they turn toxic, can you blame them when they are continuously facing mis/dis-information on a topic they are experiencing first hand? Yet this group can appear as toxic as any on Twitter. We can criticize but not to the point of unilaterally dismissing these groups as if they are equal. A climate-change denier is not equal to a Gazan teen “journalist but only through tweets”. Both may annoy you with their “perpetual beef” but it’s not really fair to abandon the one good thing this platform has done - give people a voice. We need to just learn to deal with it. I’m not sure what the impact of this will be, but I hope it won’t be the undermining of grass-roots activism. Even if that activism can border on toxic.
patcon 5y ago
> I guess this is their admission that you cannot monetize engagement if your community is highly toxic Heh funny I had the exact inverse assumption: that maybe they realized single-minded attempts to monetize only engagement exacerbates toxic human behaviour. I'm thinking the truth is probably somewhere between both. > What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day. +1 on this thinking! But more vibing with the idea of imposed scarcity, rather that the hyper-customized view of the world. Related: I personally feel that more elements of consensus reality should play a role in our digital spaces, not each getting our own view just because we can have it. Just because we can fine-tune our reality to our preferences, that doesn't mean that's good for a system for its actors to do so highly. Imho there's a reason human minds generally all evolved to be mostly on the same page in terms of perceived reality (except for a few subtle knobs on some generally minor axes). And the neurotypes that break theses consensus reality rules are generally perceived as maladapted and tend to be ostracized (e.g. schizophrenia, barring value judgements about their treatment in society). I do believe there's an evolutionary lens to place over that vague shared sensibility (ie. what underlying feature of network dynamics did evolution "learn" and tune into?) and imho this all informs how we might build tech :)
InvaderFizz 5y ago
My Twitter feed is pretty good, overall positive. Then again, I curate who I follow pretty closely and I have a long list of political buzzwords suppressed through the "Muted words" feature. I don't get notifications that contain those words, and tweets that include them don't show in my timeline.
okwubodu 5y ago
> highly toxic and mostly just produces shitstorms, lynchmobs, perpetually enraged morally superior idiots and professional victims. This is self inflicted. My Twitter feed feels like a really big friend group talking/joking about anime, tech, finance, etc. You are quite literally the company you keep on Twitter. > Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying. You won't get far taking the website this serious. (I should add that I'm black and so are most of the people I follow so it's possible I'm basing this off a group of people that already have some larger sense of community off the bat)
- 29_29 5y ago
  > This is self inflicted. Not totally accurate. I have a highly curated twitter made up of finance and tech yet the suggested trends are HORRIBLE. Wonderful topics such as "Nazis", "RacistSoAndSo", "JimCrow", "UncleTom" etc etc etc. Its a black hole, pile on of hate. I call it the trending two minutes of hate; and its built in with no way of turning it off.
  - oneeyedpigeon 5y ago
    It's much better if you train yourself to ignore that sidebar. I'm sure with the right plugin you could just hide it permanently via css if it's distracting.
  - okwubodu 5y ago
    That’s strange. My current suggested trends are “Future Hendrix” (rapper), “Kanye”, and “No Way Home” (the Spider-Man movie). If I had to guess I’d say it goes off what your following is interacting with/talking about at the moment. I notice they get more negative when my timeline is talking about something more controversial.
- version_five 5y ago
  I dont have twitter, but I click in twitter links here and there when they are posted on forums. Every time I scroll down from whatever tweet was linked, I seem to immediately end up seeing what I would consider partisan stuff about covid or other current events. Maybe on a personal feed it is different but it does seem set up to lure people into debate or disagreement.
notatoad 5y ago
>What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day. this isn't quite it, but it's a good way to filter out a lot of trash: https://megablock.xyz/ https://megablock.xyz/
Natsu 5y ago
> I know that there's also good posts and good people on Twitter, but in my opinion it has been a net negative for society for quite a while now. Ultimately, Twitter is a gossip site, so this should be no real surprise.
dorfsmay 5y ago
That button exists, it's blue and written "Following" and turns red with the label "Unfollow" when you hover. And yes, you can configure twitter + using tweetdeck to only see tweets in chronological order and only from people you follow.
dahjkol 5y ago
Wasn't the idea of Twitter just to be like an outlet of large organizations and popular celebs? It's kind of like a sweet metaphor for the eternal September.
pwm 5y ago
> What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day. I'm not a huge twitter user (~2-5 mins a day, read-only), but I tend to do this manually. If I notice that an account is taking up the majority of my wall space I tend to unfollow. After iterating a few times I ended up with a decently balanced wall.
BashiBazouk 5y ago
I think a major problem and source of toxicity with twitter is it has become an acceptable and cheap source for journalists to get quotes from celebrities and politicians that Facebook and other social media platforms have not yet gotten the same traction. On the flip side it is an easy way to get a quote out there without having to answer/dodge follow up questions. Trump's power was not his twitter followers, but that anything outrageous he tweeted became front page news.
screye 5y ago
It also has to do with Twitter's complete incompetence at leveraging the information they have to create something monetizable in general. Google and Facebook intrusively touch into every aspect of your life, to the extent that they can advertise things to you with pinpoint accuracy. They also operate at a scale of users that's at least 1-2 order of magnitude higher than twitter. Tiktok, Snapchat (weakest case) and YT integrate adverts in a way that forces you to look at the content. Thus increasing engagement even if their user-targeting isn't as exact. Reddit and twitch use an additional pseudo donation/commision system to keep money coming. Discord straight up charges for a premium package. The weakest but still relevant case is by Pinterest. People visit the website when they are looking to buy something, so well targeted ads can get high engagement and the form of media is also higher engagement (pictures). ______ Twitter does none of them. From a service standpoint, it has created zero user-flows that involve making advertisements effective or allowing any user-to-user monetary interaction in a way that they can be the middle-man. Theoretically, Twitter could massively expand its user base, but it has stagnated for 5 years, so I don't have much hope. Otherwise, they could finally release a product where the content natively produces income (subscriptions, paywalls) and get more revenue out of each user. It's bewildering that Twitter didn't release a substack like product 5 years ago. It was practically staring them in the face. Maybe a YT-subscriptions-like join button on which you can take some commission? They could've served as the front-page-of-world's-news and helped generate revenue for news agencies while taking a cut. There were so many places they could have gone, but they went nowhere. I dunno what the Product-Dev/PM role in twitter looks like, but I imagine it must be quite boring. Hiring a few competent PMs and giving them free reign for a bit, might not be bad idea for twitter. (as much as HN hates the average MBA PM, technical ones that also get business and product needs are hard to find) _______ Admittedly, the core product of twitter is not bad at all. I joined twitter in 2020 with a hyper curated list of sources, mostly politically unaffiliated individuals. I unfollow any account that tweets more than 5-times-a-day or opines of things beyond narrow topics. It is also amazing for getting the real first sources, that previously would have needed a intermediary media org to get their point through. It is amazing. But it took work to get there. It's like
uo21tp5hoyg 5y ago
The problem is fundamental to their design; Any time I've ever wanted to respond to a tweet I can't seem to fit what I'm trying to say within their character limit and by the time I've shortened what I'm trying to say enough to fit that limit I've condensed my viewpoint into nothing more than a soundbite and soundbite statements are always going to cause arguments no matter your intent.
deleted 5y ago
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shoto_io 5y ago
What I really dislike about Twitter it’s how different users play by different rules. Take the name for example. Any other platform has a clear written or unwritten rule. - HN: usernames - LinkedIn: real names - Twitter: a mix On Twitter, you clearly lose out if you put your real name out there. You suddenly get trolled by strange avatars hiding their identity and very little community control.
- xwolfi 5y ago
  That's a good observation. LinkedIn is so boring and chill, you can actually have difficult debates on there with everyone being polite and accepting lol What's strange is facebook. The fact it's more segregated by close circle make the discussion nastier than on linkedin when you have your company name on top of your mean troll.
- jpindar 5y ago
  I have my real name on Twitter, am reasonably active, and I never get trolled. But I pretty much only post on tech related subjects. Do you post on controversial subjects?
passivate 5y ago
>but in my opinion it has been a net negative for society for quite a while now. What is Twitter but a reflection of our own society? These people really exist and they really have these views. I don't like the idea of banning someone for simply holding a view, or forcing someone to align with an ideology of choice. "Platform X is awful" is actually "People are awful". >What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day. Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying. Why not just avoid Twitter ? In any transactional setting you need to give something to get something. Twitter as a commercial entity needs users frequenting their platform and as therefore most comments on any social media platform are low going to be low quality (including HN).
- mbesto 5y ago
  > What is Twitter but a reflection of our own society? A society in which the village idiot gets a megaphone and can cheat his/her way into amplifying that megaphone with no recourse? Or a terrorist disguised as a village idiot can do the same? Then sure yes Twitter is a great personification of our current society(ies).
  - passivate 5y ago
    >A society in which the village idiot gets a megaphone and can cheat his/her way into amplifying that megaphone with no recourse? That is not accurate. The reality is the opposite of what you said. The megaphone is actually due to people voluntarily gathering around the person to listen to what they say. People only interact with content/people they agree with and this is causing social media bubbles.
    - mbesto 5y ago
      > The megaphone is actually due to people voluntarily gathering around the person to listen to what they say. It's based on inflated numbers derived from false information. Tell me this - if you saw two adjacent town square forums and one person had 10 people listening and another one had 100 people listening to them, what are the odds the 111th person goes to listen to one over the other? The 100 people of course. This is effectively how twitter works, but can be gamed by fake "crowds" of bots. So, yes people are voluntarily listening to those with influence, but the gatherers are given inaccurate information to make that decision. The distinction is important.
ksec 5y ago
>What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day. Yes, that could also monetise it so it is only two free post per day and accumulate maximum of 10 before twitter charge them $ per tweet. And more RSS Reader like features. I could categorise people into different topics. Today I dont want to see any shit storm on politics, so I wont click on it. I only want to see tech and economics. Right now moving to list and making them working in harmony with the main feed is a bag of hurt.
zemo 5y ago
> you cannot monetize engagement if your community is highly toxic you're soooooooo close to getting it, but so far. monetizing engagement -creates- toxic communities, because toxicity is engaging.
bilater 5y ago
Very surprising that's your takeaway. Sure twitter has shitbags but it is probably the only social media platform I engage with. It is a treasure trove of information and insights by folks I normally would not know about. Twitter is a huge space and your experience comes down to what your bubble on Twitter is. The self development/Indie hacker/Tech/Devs/AI/Product/Life Lessons bubble, while still pretentious, at least is way better than the Celebrity/Cancel culture/Outrage bubble.
bigtones 5y ago
Facebook monetizes that type of engagement on their platform just fine.
throwaway894345 5y ago
I agree. I’ve also been curious if everyone gets far-left wing takes (and low quality ones at that) in their “what’s happening” section or if that’s an algorithm targeting me either because it thinks I’m very left-wing or else because it thinks low quality left-wing content will make me angry and thus engage?
at-fates-hands 5y ago
I used Twitter early on when a co-worker urged me to join. We had a group of co-workers who used it as an offline, corporate chat room. Once it blew up and became toxic AF, I unfollowed everybody, started following only specific people, blogs and sites related to my industry (software development) in order to stay up to date with the goings on around me. That was it, since then, its become another basic news feed. Kind of sad what its become to be honest.
coldtea 5y ago
>I guess this is their admission that you cannot monetize engagement if your community is highly toxic and mostly just produces shitstorms, lynchmobs, perpetually enraged morally superior idiots and professional victims. As long as those suckers and their audience still watch your ads, you can.
ryanSrich 5y ago
The mind boggling phenomena in tech is that Twitter is essentially required now...to get a job...this is not hyperbole. The number of threads I've seen where SV companies are hiring exclusively on Twitter, and looking for a very specific type of person (well described in your post) is alarming to say the least. EDIT: This mostly only applies to very specific positions (mostly design positions). I'm not insinuating that these companies are literally requiring Twitter. It's a bit more complex than that.
- pkdpic_y9k 5y ago
  Are you talking about any particular type of job here? I'm still pretty new to software engineering game and haven't heard about this yet.
- ewestern 5y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GM-e46xdcUo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GM-e46xdcUo
impulser_ 5y ago
I think you have been using Twitter the wrong way.
an_opabinia 5y ago
Sounds like what you’re really saying is you hate New York - DC journalist - political - activist culture. Which Twitter distills.
JI00912 5y ago
Sometimes the toxicity seems like a feature of twitter. Everything is built in order to facilitate those mobs supported by Twitter.
moolcool 5y ago
"I guess this is their admission that you cannot monetize engagement if your community is highly toxic and mostly just produces shitstorms, lynchmobs, perpetually enraged morally superior idiots and professional victims." Facebook seems to be doing just fine
- dylan604 5y ago
  Facebook has many more tentacles into the broader internet than just their app or website. I've paid 0 attention cycles to Twitter, so I am totally unware of them offering these other devices that give them the same insight that Facebook hoovers up. Do they offer SDKs to app devs at the same level as FB? Do they have nearly unavoidable tracking abilities across the internet? If they do, the internet seems to be much less vocal about them than the FB offerings.
olivierestsage 5y ago
Interesting how your comment so abruptly fell from the top of the thread!

celticninja 5y ago

And it will likely prove that people will pay $2.99 to cause and get involved in shit storms and lynchmobs :-(

fxtentacle 5y ago
I believe in Rome, people where quite happy to pay handsomely to get a front row seat for watching gladiators get mutilated by lions. Maybe we have progressed less than we thought.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  I never thought of the old liveleaks site as a type of roman colosseum but I think you're right
- bambax 5y ago
  Do we know that? I think most games were free? (I'm not sure).
  - munk-a 5y ago
    I think that's beside the point - more relevant is that people were both willing to pay a good deal to organize the games and that the games were a central and import part of roman society. You can argue - almost certainly correctly - that there was a significant portion of society that found the game distasteful, but you can't argue that there was still an even larger slice of the population that considered them so important that they built the coliseum to host them.
- forgetfulness 5y ago
  Gladiators were almost all of them slaves, but they were also entertainers who were expensive to train and keep, and often individually famous, much like WWE wrestlers. So it was rare that they would be made to fight to the death. Now, slaughtering prisoners in the arena happened just like you are imagining.
  - camjohnson26 5y ago
    They had a 1/5 chance of dying in every battle and an average age at death of around 25? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladiator https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladiator

meowface 5y ago

I don't disagree with the assessment, but I think it might be orthogonal to the issue. I think it's very hard to monetize engagement, period, even if it's all positive, constructive, and intellectual engagement. If your service's business strategy is "1) acquire hundreds of millions of users and charge them all $0.00 per year for many years, 2) acquire lots of expensive infrastructure and employees to support the service, 3) ???, 4) profit", it's not going to be easy.

city41 5y ago
And their stock shows that. Especially when compared to other big tech companies that started at about the same time.
villasv 5y ago
As evidenced by the struggle with StackOverflow too, who sits atop a trove of content
- fxtentacle 5y ago
  StackOverflow should be cheap to operate and the value comes almost exclusively from the community. So I don't see any good reason why StackOverflow would need to earn much revenue. Probably an annual fundraiser like what Wikipedia does would be more than sufficient to cover the operating expenses.
- PoignardAzur 5y ago
  The StackOverflow thing is a bit weird, because what the owners have and consider valuable is "a place where people feel comfortable coming and asking questions", but what the core community values is "high-quality curated content", and they're very willing to do aggressive gatekeeping, thus conflicting with value 1, to preserve value 2.
  - forgotpwd16 5y ago
    High-quality curated content has been SO's goal since day one. The question/answer format is a means to this end. That's why it has come that most people can easily find a solution to their problem. https://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/991082088689381376 https://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/991082088689381376

Siira 5y ago

It’s election time here in Iran, and this time, we have essentially a one-man election, which is sth rare here (there usually are at least two candidates who can possibly win, and even though both of them are inside people already vetted by the regime, they have some small differences. At least, they are supported by different demographics.). I went to see what people were saying about this on Twitter, and did some basic searches on an account that doesn’t follow almost anyone. The results were pretty much all (90%) pro-government, and pro-one-candidate-elections. Makes me wonder how much power these state actors have now that cancel culture is a thing. They can just whip up a mob and character-terror anyone they want, without being detected at all. PS: I am not even saying these are bots. They can just pay people some meager money to do this. It’s an easy job in a country with very high unemployment. Heck, even Amazon does this in a small scale.

ppod 5y ago

You can choose exactly who you follow, you get the twitter feed you deserve.

cvwright 5y ago
Well, you can try. In my experience they still show a lot of crap that I have zero interest in seeing, from people who I do not follow.
- irishloop 5y ago
  Yeah they tend to show stuff that is "liked" by people you know. So it depends on what THEY like as well.
  - oneeyedpigeon 5y ago
    If I follow anyone who persistently likes stuff I object to that strongly, I'll just unfollow them.
jjulius 5y ago
"Choose" is an interesting word to use in regards to something designed to be addictive.
- astine 5y ago
  Many drugs are addictive, but I can choose which drugs I get addicted to.
  - jjulius 5y ago
    No. You can choose which drugs you try, but you can't choose which ones are addictive to you.
Spivak 5y ago
That's not how it really works in practice though because you follow humans who are multi-faceted instead of (human, topic). It is hard to be someone in the public eye and stay out of Twitter drama without turning your account into a RSS feed where you don't engage at all with your followers.

EasyTiger_ 5y ago

You couldn’t pay me to use Twitter, the idea of paying them is absolutely hilarious

cvwright 5y ago
But would you consider paying to use Mastodon, or one of the other open source alternatives? Hopefully this makes it easier for them to support themselves.
- offtop5 5y ago
  I'd pay for HN to be honest. But just talking about society on the internet isn't really worth while to me. More people should focus on themselves. I've long accepted no one cares about how I live my life. A friend of mine spends a ton of their good energy getting upset over the latest 'take' some influencer has. It's like getting upset over an episode of WWE Raw. In any case very very little of what other people do or believe has any direct affect on you.
MajorBee 5y ago
You wouldn't pay to use Twitter in its current form with its low-brow unmoderated discourse (and neither would I), but would you consider paying for an "improved" version of Twitter? Not saying Twitter Blue is that, but perhaps the promise of getting a Better Twitter can you give you pause for thought and a reach for your wallet? The experiment of directly paid social media is worth trying out, in my opinion. I know paying a few bucks a month won't necessarily get you out of the privacy/ad-tech spiderweb, but if it get us a more robust control over what our social feed looks like, I think that alone makes it worth it.

twobitshifter 5y ago

I had a brief foray into Twitter, but had to stop. I followed my senator and found that no matter the post, the replies were filled with obvious disinformation, flat out lies, and irrelevant accusations. I remember one person posting hand drawn graphs without a scale claiming global warming is just a cyclical process. Does it makes sense to report someone for bad science? They probably believe what they posted to be true, and others who read that unrefuted reply may begin to think the same. So I tried to teach critical thinking to random people on Twitter, but as you imagine this was a fools errand.

Aeolun 5y ago
> So I tried to teach critical thinking to random people on Twitter, but as you imagine this was a fools errand. It is so hard to imagine how they just cannot seem to understand why you are right, despite all your trying to teach them. But then you imagine that they must be thinking the same thing. I cannot imagine what must’ve gone wrong in their lives that so many lies could be built on one another.
- javajosh 5y ago
  >But then you imagine that they must be thinking the same thing. I'm not so sure about that. There are some people who take seriously the fact that they could be wrong. They approach discussion with an open mind, listen to the other, look at evidence with a critical eye, and respond fairly. Others come to a "discussion" from a totally different headspace. They are bitter, angry, and, to be frank, not very smart. It's not discussion they are after, because they aren't open to the possibility they may be wrong. My theory is that this is the "rabble" that used to be led by the church, and then by mass media, and now by internet media. The internet is fractured into close-minded echo-chambers, and for many alive today, the classic error-modes of public online communication are new and exciting. The right is enamored with the brutal effectiveness of trolling. The left seems to prefer doxxing and blacklists. And internet companies care about metrics that don't capture any of the externalities of their platforms. Hopefully they'll all grow out of it.
  - 5y ago

airhead969 5y ago

Lmao. It's true. This is why I don't have identifiable social media and don't use it even anonymously except for limited purposes. Cyberdisinhibitionism is strongest when there are no repercussions to poor behavior, too much anonymity, flame/troll/instigators/touchy comments, and no manifestation of the person on the receiving-end. It's basically a sewer factory factory with a teaspoon of sugar sprinkled-in. I think it proves that either most people are disengaged and/or the most vocal people are the worst. (Proving your point). Maybe there should be a cost to post that increases proportional to increasing frequency too. The irony is, translating to IRL, I apparently discovered I have this semi-employed, "macho" no-shirt neighbor who accused me of being racist for asking if they had an entrance keyfob to prevent tailgating into an access-controlled apartment building. Then they talked about all the (nonexistent) "cameras" around, began recording me (for what, I don't know), using racist slurs, and tried to start a physical fight (they're half my weight, like a yappy chihuahua). I'm wondering if they're schizophrenic and narcissistic, in addition to appearing like a victim-mentality crybully crybaby. My point is perhaps people are taking their online behaviors into the real world. PS: You should've heard what Latinx gangbangers called me when I was a kid. I never got beaten-up because I was bigger than all of them, but I learned the finer points of swearing in Spanish. :) I understand the tall blade of grass gets clipped so I don't take any of it personally.

slothtrop 5y ago
Latino.
- reaperducer 5y ago
  "Latinx" (pronounced "Latin-X", like "Malcom X") is a very common term among people who think they're better than other people, and Chicago politicians. It's supposed to be an all-encompassing term for "Laino" and "Latina," but only serves to divide people further. Like almost every other ethnic rebranding of the last ten years.
  - joshuaissac 5y ago
    A large majority of Latino people believe that "Latinx" should not be used to refer to them, according to Pew Research. https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in-four-u-s-hispanics-have-heard-of-latinx-but-just-3-use-it/ https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...

duxup 5y ago

Maybe it is more about just monetizing anything on the web? I kinda suspect the notion of most of these services just being free and not resorting to really unpleasant ad systems and dark patterns and such ... just not viable generally.

irishloop 5y ago

I don't know I see a lot of great stuff from comedians and stuff on twitter posting all kind of shit. I enjoy the silliness, but my feed is definitely highly curated and even then I end up seeing toxic takes because people "like" the takes that I follow. However, some of my absolute favorite twitter accounts post a lot. To each their own. I don't have to hit the button.

ASalazarMX 5y ago

> What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day. Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying. Too drastic IMO. Some of the best posts I've read on Twitter come in threads, a chain of consecutive tweets by the same author. I would propose instead an option to filter profanity, most of the low value, or plain harmful, tweets use offensive words. Maybe a warning that your tweet will get a drastically reduced audience for using X or Y words, so the poster can rephrase it before submitting?

spoonjim 5y ago

If you follow the right people then Twitter is amazing. But the out of the box experience is wretched. TikTok for example quickly finds out what you want to see. Twitter puts that burden on you.

arkadiyt 5y ago

paulpauper 5y ago

twitter already makes a lot of $ with ads (which have a very high CPC and CPM for advertisers), but this is a way to make money on top of that,

hkmurakami 5y ago

Fwiw the small world of Japanese software engineering Twitterverse is quite a pleasant, funny (punny), and constructive place. I’ve actually made many RL friends through the medium.

agumonkey 5y ago

my curated twitter feed was sincerely (and i'm a jaded guy when it comes to internet) awesome.. creative coders, intelligent and fun people, some feud here and there but nothing spectacular it's a pity most of twitter seems to be a perpetual shitstorm of low effort brainless buzz ps: out of the whole internet debasement.. I kinda see something, is that talk has a purpose, if I talk to someone I'd rather have a nice moment, and the ability to debate endlessly with people I don't even (or bots even) is fruitless. a strange kind of lesson on using ones times correctly

exporectomy 5y ago
Use debate to learn, not to change somebody's mind. Then it's not fruitless, even if it's endless or with a bot. If you're using it to change somebody's mind, you'll be incapable of allowing yourself to think critically since that can only cause you to fail at your purpose.
- xwolfi 5y ago
  Yeah: when you debate you never change someones mind, especially DURING the debate. The very first rule of debating is that you try to change the mind of the public reading it, not the debaters. Now what you learn is mostly to argue your way around your opinion better, not exactly to change it. But why would you: you change your opinion when looking for insight (reading a book), not when looking for a win (debating on an advertisement platform).
  - exporectomy 5y ago
    Debate for an audience is kind of awful. You have to sacrifice your honesty and ethics to score cheap points that don't actually show you're right but can fool the causal audience. What's the value of that though? You've convinced some strangers of a fact that you don't even know is true yourself. It's just creating fake knowledge pollution.

amelius 5y ago

> What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day. Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying. This is why Twitter should be an open protocol, and people should be able to write their own UserAgents. Users should be in control of the filtering, not the app or the company.

dixego 5y ago
But then how are we going to serve you ads
- cvwright 5y ago
  Maybe you could pay $2.99/month to your Mastodon host, and the ads can go to hell.
- Hamuko 5y ago
  But Twitter already permits third-party apps that have no ads. I use one daily.
ultimape 5y ago
I have been trying to transition to mastodon/pleroma. ActivityPub is an open protocol for this kind of thing. I use twitter as an external brain not that dissimilar to a a Xanadu inspired Memex intermixed with a Zettelkasten.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

swiley 5y ago

>What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day. Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying. I've always felt like HN should display the upvotes/comments ratio rather than raw karma. It would be like the accuracy number in xonotic's insta-gib mode: you shoot carefully and precisely rather than spraying and praying.

camjohnson26 5y ago

There are multiple sections of Twitter and some communities are extremely toxic, but it’s also the single best place to follow breaking events. If you follow the right people it can be extremely informative, and highlights how often news bloggers get basic facts wrong. One recent example, there was a news report that famous short seller Michael Burry had taken a $500 million dollar bet against Tesla. This number came from a basic misreading of Burry’s disclosure, but the news media ran with it and an article with this number showed up on the HN front page. If you followed the right people on Twitter you knew the number was wrong within minutes, while the news media has still not issued a correction. This situation happens all the time. https://www.fool.com/investing/2021/05/17/genius-behind-the-big-short-reveals-massive-bet-ag/ https://www.fool.com/investing/2021/05/17/genius-behind-the-... https://twitter.com/Keubiko/status/1394351225316028420?s=20 https://twitter.com/Keubiko/status/1394351225316028420?s=20

mola 5y ago
Why is that so important?
- camjohnson26 5y ago
  Why is anything important? Investing is interesting to me and I want accurate information free from somebody else’s agenda. That’s not possible, but aggregating the opinions of many people I respect is the closest I’ve found.
- an1sotropy 5y ago
  thank you. the addictive hit of having some latest up-to-the-second information is not actually a rational need.
pbhjpbhj 5y ago
I can't see why you'd think that was a mistake, the people promulgating the [false] news report almost certainly are investing against the information they're putting out. That's what "news" owners do, surely.

senthil_rajasek 5y ago

"Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying." Only if you are looking for deep thoughtful comments. Twitter need not be that place. It could be a place to amplify the voices of the oppressed some of which may sound like noise. This kind of voice has never been available through mainstream media like cable or T.V.

fullshark 5y ago

I don't think so, this is just trying to monetize their most hardcore users beyond the fact that they click more ads.

splistud 5y ago

Which part of 'highly toxic and mostly just produces shitstorms, lynchmobs, perpetually enraged morally superior idiots and professional victims' isn't perfect for monetization? Mostly kidding, but, well sadly it isn't a joke.

whywhywhywhy 5y ago

>Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying There is a good reason they hid the tweet count, because most of the biggest names on twitter actually have Tweet counts that if you divide them by hours since their join date it would be as high as 0.8 to 1.2 tweets an hour every hour 24 hours a day for 11 years+ Once you learn this it puts those users in a very different perspective and they no longer seem like people you should be listening to.

lupire 5y ago
1 tweet per hour is 3.5KB/day, or about 1.5 pages of text. It's not a lot of content. Tweets are small.
- whywhywhywhy 5y ago
  you're ignoring the time required to find things to respond to and just how many times they're scrolling that timeline a day to hit numbers so high for 11+ years.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  I would say 1,5 pages of text each day of year is pretty respectable output. Or at least would be with most other mediums. Like if all that effort was used on something else it could be 1-2 books a year?

zozbot234 5y ago

>I guess this is their admission that you cannot monetize engagement if your community is highly toxic and mostly just produces shitstorms, lynchmobs, perpetually enraged morally superior idiots and professional victims. That's most "engagement" on the internet, lol. Twitter is bad but it's not like all the other social media platforms are that much better. It's just how some people behave socially (anonymous or not, it doesn't seem to matter), at least when they're not meaningfully focusing on some worthwhile goal or pursuit like most of us are here @ HN. And trying to stop it with heavy-handed authoritarian policies only makes it worse as people strive to abuse the policies themselves to troll and gain power over others.

alkonaut 5y ago

Hmm I try to stay on Twitter because it’s friendly and constructive rather than on Facebook. I guess it depends on who you follow. Unlike Facebook (where follows are social for better or worse) Twitter lets you set up a feed of interesting/friendly people and the (social) cost of unfollowing someone is usually zero.

dorfsmay 5y ago
I recently started to use Facebook to stay/get in touch with friends and family from previous lives. My rule when using it is that I only interract with personal photos/stories, or stuff posted publicly. I completely ignore postings that are not personal and to friend only (not public). Facebook has (or had?) huge potential for people to keep in touch but its bigger issue are private gardens where people can spin up opinions into silliness with no opportunity for anybody from outside their echo chamber to criticize and debunk.

0x142857 5y ago

DSingularity 5y ago

I wish we can moderate this conclusion — it’s not fair to dismiss all these people as if they are all the same. I personally believe that most of this toxicity is induced. I don’t think most humans are toxic by nature. Can you blame victims of war for their tireless online activism? So what that they turn toxic, can you blame them when they are continuously facing mis/dis-information on a topic they are experiencing first hand? Yet this group can appear as toxic as any on Twitter. We can criticize but not to the point of unilaterally dismissing these groups as if they are equal. A climate-change denier is not equal to a Gazan teen “journalist but only through tweets”. Both may annoy you with their “perpetual beef” but it’s not really fair to abandon the one good thing this platform has done - give people a voice. We need to just learn to deal with it. I’m not sure what the impact of this will be, but I hope it won’t be the undermining of grass-roots activism. Even if that activism can border on toxic.

patcon 5y ago

> I guess this is their admission that you cannot monetize engagement if your community is highly toxic Heh funny I had the exact inverse assumption: that maybe they realized single-minded attempts to monetize only engagement exacerbates toxic human behaviour. I'm thinking the truth is probably somewhere between both. > What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day. +1 on this thinking! But more vibing with the idea of imposed scarcity, rather that the hyper-customized view of the world. Related: I personally feel that more elements of consensus reality should play a role in our digital spaces, not each getting our own view just because we can have it. Just because we can fine-tune our reality to our preferences, that doesn't mean that's good for a system for its actors to do so highly. Imho there's a reason human minds generally all evolved to be mostly on the same page in terms of perceived reality (except for a few subtle knobs on some generally minor axes). And the neurotypes that break theses consensus reality rules are generally perceived as maladapted and tend to be ostracized (e.g. schizophrenia, barring value judgements about their treatment in society). I do believe there's an evolutionary lens to place over that vague shared sensibility (ie. what underlying feature of network dynamics did evolution "learn" and tune into?) and imho this all informs how we might build tech :)

InvaderFizz 5y ago

My Twitter feed is pretty good, overall positive. Then again, I curate who I follow pretty closely and I have a long list of political buzzwords suppressed through the "Muted words" feature. I don't get notifications that contain those words, and tweets that include them don't show in my timeline.

okwubodu 5y ago

> highly toxic and mostly just produces shitstorms, lynchmobs, perpetually enraged morally superior idiots and professional victims. This is self inflicted. My Twitter feed feels like a really big friend group talking/joking about anime, tech, finance, etc. You are quite literally the company you keep on Twitter. > Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying. You won't get far taking the website this serious. (I should add that I'm black and so are most of the people I follow so it's possible I'm basing this off a group of people that already have some larger sense of community off the bat)

29_29 5y ago
> This is self inflicted. Not totally accurate. I have a highly curated twitter made up of finance and tech yet the suggested trends are HORRIBLE. Wonderful topics such as "Nazis", "RacistSoAndSo", "JimCrow", "UncleTom" etc etc etc. Its a black hole, pile on of hate. I call it the trending two minutes of hate; and its built in with no way of turning it off.
- oneeyedpigeon 5y ago
  It's much better if you train yourself to ignore that sidebar. I'm sure with the right plugin you could just hide it permanently via css if it's distracting.
- okwubodu 5y ago
  That’s strange. My current suggested trends are “Future Hendrix” (rapper), “Kanye”, and “No Way Home” (the Spider-Man movie). If I had to guess I’d say it goes off what your following is interacting with/talking about at the moment. I notice they get more negative when my timeline is talking about something more controversial.
version_five 5y ago
I dont have twitter, but I click in twitter links here and there when they are posted on forums. Every time I scroll down from whatever tweet was linked, I seem to immediately end up seeing what I would consider partisan stuff about covid or other current events. Maybe on a personal feed it is different but it does seem set up to lure people into debate or disagreement.

notatoad 5y ago

>What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day. this isn't quite it, but it's a good way to filter out a lot of trash: https://megablock.xyz/ https://megablock.xyz/

Natsu 5y ago

> I know that there's also good posts and good people on Twitter, but in my opinion it has been a net negative for society for quite a while now. Ultimately, Twitter is a gossip site, so this should be no real surprise.

dorfsmay 5y ago

That button exists, it's blue and written "Following" and turns red with the label "Unfollow" when you hover. And yes, you can configure twitter + using tweetdeck to only see tweets in chronological order and only from people you follow.

dahjkol 5y ago

Wasn't the idea of Twitter just to be like an outlet of large organizations and popular celebs? It's kind of like a sweet metaphor for the eternal September.

pwm 5y ago

> What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day. I'm not a huge twitter user (~2-5 mins a day, read-only), but I tend to do this manually. If I notice that an account is taking up the majority of my wall space I tend to unfollow. After iterating a few times I ended up with a decently balanced wall.

BashiBazouk 5y ago

I think a major problem and source of toxicity with twitter is it has become an acceptable and cheap source for journalists to get quotes from celebrities and politicians that Facebook and other social media platforms have not yet gotten the same traction. On the flip side it is an easy way to get a quote out there without having to answer/dodge follow up questions. Trump's power was not his twitter followers, but that anything outrageous he tweeted became front page news.

screye 5y ago

It also has to do with Twitter's complete incompetence at leveraging the information they have to create something monetizable in general. Google and Facebook intrusively touch into every aspect of your life, to the extent that they can advertise things to you with pinpoint accuracy. They also operate at a scale of users that's at least 1-2 order of magnitude higher than twitter. Tiktok, Snapchat (weakest case) and YT integrate adverts in a way that forces you to look at the content. Thus increasing engagement even if their user-targeting isn't as exact. Reddit and twitch use an additional pseudo donation/commision system to keep money coming. Discord straight up charges for a premium package. The weakest but still relevant case is by Pinterest. People visit the website when they are looking to buy something, so well targeted ads can get high engagement and the form of media is also higher engagement (pictures). ______ Twitter does none of them. From a service standpoint, it has created zero user-flows that involve making advertisements effective or allowing any user-to-user monetary interaction in a way that they can be the middle-man. Theoretically, Twitter could massively expand its user base, but it has stagnated for 5 years, so I don't have much hope. Otherwise, they could finally release a product where the content natively produces income (subscriptions, paywalls) and get more revenue out of each user. It's bewildering that Twitter didn't release a substack like product 5 years ago. It was practically staring them in the face. Maybe a YT-subscriptions-like join button on which you can take some commission? They could've served as the front-page-of-world's-news and helped generate revenue for news agencies while taking a cut. There were so many places they could have gone, but they went nowhere. I dunno what the Product-Dev/PM role in twitter looks like, but I imagine it must be quite boring. Hiring a few competent PMs and giving them free reign for a bit, might not be bad idea for twitter. (as much as HN hates the average MBA PM, technical ones that also get business and product needs are hard to find) _______ Admittedly, the core product of twitter is not bad at all. I joined twitter in 2020 with a hyper curated list of sources, mostly politically unaffiliated individuals. I unfollow any account that tweets more than 5-times-a-day or opines of things beyond narrow topics. It is also amazing for getting the real first sources, that previously would have needed a intermediary media org to get their point through. It is amazing. But it took work to get there. It's like

uo21tp5hoyg 5y ago

The problem is fundamental to their design; Any time I've ever wanted to respond to a tweet I can't seem to fit what I'm trying to say within their character limit and by the time I've shortened what I'm trying to say enough to fit that limit I've condensed my viewpoint into nothing more than a soundbite and soundbite statements are always going to cause arguments no matter your intent.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

shoto_io 5y ago

What I really dislike about Twitter it’s how different users play by different rules. Take the name for example. Any other platform has a clear written or unwritten rule. - HN: usernames - LinkedIn: real names - Twitter: a mix On Twitter, you clearly lose out if you put your real name out there. You suddenly get trolled by strange avatars hiding their identity and very little community control.

xwolfi 5y ago
That's a good observation. LinkedIn is so boring and chill, you can actually have difficult debates on there with everyone being polite and accepting lol What's strange is facebook. The fact it's more segregated by close circle make the discussion nastier than on linkedin when you have your company name on top of your mean troll.
jpindar 5y ago
I have my real name on Twitter, am reasonably active, and I never get trolled. But I pretty much only post on tech related subjects. Do you post on controversial subjects?

passivate 5y ago

>but in my opinion it has been a net negative for society for quite a while now. What is Twitter but a reflection of our own society? These people really exist and they really have these views. I don't like the idea of banning someone for simply holding a view, or forcing someone to align with an ideology of choice. "Platform X is awful" is actually "People are awful". >What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day. Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying. Why not just avoid Twitter ? In any transactional setting you need to give something to get something. Twitter as a commercial entity needs users frequenting their platform and as therefore most comments on any social media platform are low going to be low quality (including HN).

mbesto 5y ago
> What is Twitter but a reflection of our own society? A society in which the village idiot gets a megaphone and can cheat his/her way into amplifying that megaphone with no recourse? Or a terrorist disguised as a village idiot can do the same? Then sure yes Twitter is a great personification of our current society(ies).
- passivate 5y ago
  >A society in which the village idiot gets a megaphone and can cheat his/her way into amplifying that megaphone with no recourse? That is not accurate. The reality is the opposite of what you said. The megaphone is actually due to people voluntarily gathering around the person to listen to what they say. People only interact with content/people they agree with and this is causing social media bubbles.
  - mbesto 5y ago
    > The megaphone is actually due to people voluntarily gathering around the person to listen to what they say. It's based on inflated numbers derived from false information. Tell me this - if you saw two adjacent town square forums and one person had 10 people listening and another one had 100 people listening to them, what are the odds the 111th person goes to listen to one over the other? The 100 people of course. This is effectively how twitter works, but can be gamed by fake "crowds" of bots. So, yes people are voluntarily listening to those with influence, but the gatherers are given inaccurate information to make that decision. The distinction is important.

ksec 5y ago

>What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day. Yes, that could also monetise it so it is only two free post per day and accumulate maximum of 10 before twitter charge them $ per tweet. And more RSS Reader like features. I could categorise people into different topics. Today I dont want to see any shit storm on politics, so I wont click on it. I only want to see tech and economics. Right now moving to list and making them working in harmony with the main feed is a bag of hurt.

zemo 5y ago

> you cannot monetize engagement if your community is highly toxic you're soooooooo close to getting it, but so far. monetizing engagement -creates- toxic communities, because toxicity is engaging.

bilater 5y ago

Very surprising that's your takeaway. Sure twitter has shitbags but it is probably the only social media platform I engage with. It is a treasure trove of information and insights by folks I normally would not know about. Twitter is a huge space and your experience comes down to what your bubble on Twitter is. The self development/Indie hacker/Tech/Devs/AI/Product/Life Lessons bubble, while still pretentious, at least is way better than the Celebrity/Cancel culture/Outrage bubble.

bigtones 5y ago

Facebook monetizes that type of engagement on their platform just fine.

throwaway894345 5y ago

I agree. I’ve also been curious if everyone gets far-left wing takes (and low quality ones at that) in their “what’s happening” section or if that’s an algorithm targeting me either because it thinks I’m very left-wing or else because it thinks low quality left-wing content will make me angry and thus engage?

at-fates-hands 5y ago

I used Twitter early on when a co-worker urged me to join. We had a group of co-workers who used it as an offline, corporate chat room. Once it blew up and became toxic AF, I unfollowed everybody, started following only specific people, blogs and sites related to my industry (software development) in order to stay up to date with the goings on around me. That was it, since then, its become another basic news feed. Kind of sad what its become to be honest.

coldtea 5y ago

ryanSrich 5y ago

The mind boggling phenomena in tech is that Twitter is essentially required now...to get a job...this is not hyperbole. The number of threads I've seen where SV companies are hiring exclusively on Twitter, and looking for a very specific type of person (well described in your post) is alarming to say the least. EDIT: This mostly only applies to very specific positions (mostly design positions). I'm not insinuating that these companies are literally requiring Twitter. It's a bit more complex than that.

pkdpic_y9k 5y ago
Are you talking about any particular type of job here? I'm still pretty new to software engineering game and haven't heard about this yet.
ewestern 5y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GM-e46xdcUo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GM-e46xdcUo

impulser_ 5y ago

I think you have been using Twitter the wrong way.

an_opabinia 5y ago

Sounds like what you’re really saying is you hate New York - DC journalist - political - activist culture. Which Twitter distills.

JI00912 5y ago

Sometimes the toxicity seems like a feature of twitter. Everything is built in order to facilitate those mobs supported by Twitter.

moolcool 5y ago

"I guess this is their admission that you cannot monetize engagement if your community is highly toxic and mostly just produces shitstorms, lynchmobs, perpetually enraged morally superior idiots and professional victims." Facebook seems to be doing just fine

dylan604 5y ago
Facebook has many more tentacles into the broader internet than just their app or website. I've paid 0 attention cycles to Twitter, so I am totally unware of them offering these other devices that give them the same insight that Facebook hoovers up. Do they offer SDKs to app devs at the same level as FB? Do they have nearly unavoidable tracking abilities across the internet? If they do, the internet seems to be much less vocal about them than the FB offerings.

olivierestsage 5y ago

Interesting how your comment so abruptly fell from the top of the thread!