30 ms·

I think the biggest problem with Twitter is that we can’t determine a denominator. Twitter knows, but we don’t know. 100 people tweeting about how this guy is

I think the biggest problem with Twitter is that we can’t determine a denominator. Twitter knows, but we don’t know. 100 people tweeting about how this guy is bad might be indicative of a general consensus or might just be 100 people out of a billion Twitter users. People then interpret it as general consensus and pile on. We know the numerator but since we don’t know the denominator of people who didn’t comment, or disagree, or never saw, or don’t care. So we can’t figure out a ratio and many people assume the denominator is the numerator and the ratio is 1. “The world won’t do business with this guy, I better fire him” doesn’t make sense if it’s just a very small ratio as who cares if 100 people are upset and 1,000,000 customers don’t care. I wish Twitter had some ratio of who viewed vs who acted. Or had downvotes or something. Currently, people assuming that a few commenters is everyone is doing bad things. This coupled with there’s always someone or a small group who holds an opinion so putting too much weight into a few commenters is not smart. Yet frequently done.

threeboy 5y ago
"Three men make a tiger"
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  Especially if you can make a tiger by simply clicking a share button. It would be much harder to build a critical mass using more traditional methods of communication, even e-mail. As a result, people would spare their energy for serious incidents only. But we have a variant of the tragedy of commons here: societal ostracism, an important but dangerous tool, is no longer used rationally, but milked to exhaustion. It has become too easy to get the ball of outrage rolling. Too many people are treated as if they commanded a genocidal death squad, when their transgression is often verbal only (not the case of this particular artist, I know). As a result, we have a virtual Salem trial every day. I wonder when the inevitable reaction happens and people start ignoring the social networks altogether. This is not a stable, persistent state of things. Too unhinged.
- robocat 5y ago
  “””Another great Chinese expression is "calling a deer a horse" (指鹿為馬; zhǐlù-wéimǎ) which is based on the story of Zhao Gao which goes as follows: Zhao Gao was contemplating treason but was afraid the other officials would not heed his commands, so he decided to test them first. He brought a deer and presented it to the Second Emperor but called it a horse. The Second Emperor laughed and said, "Is the chancellor perhaps mistaken, calling a deer a horse?" Then the emperor questioned those around him. Some remained silent, while some, hoping to ingratiate themselves with Zhao Gao, said it was a horse, and others said it was a deer. Zhao Gao secretly arranged for all those who said it was a deer to be brought before the law and had them executed instantly.””” Seems even more appropriate - quoted from https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/e1diq2/three_men_make_a_tiger_chinese_三人成虎_pinyin_sān/ https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/e1diq2/three_men...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
MattGaiser 5y ago
A lot of it is that journalists will amplify it as well if they are one of the 100 who sees it. Seen journalist job postings where checking Twitter for stories is part of it.
- steveBK123 5y ago
  Journalists participate in Twitter at a rate probably 10-100x the overall population. Most people don't ever log into Twitter, most journalists do daily. I think you can look at it this way: * For normal people, Twitter is not real life. * For journalists, Twitter is real life. Journalists then become the vector by which BS Twitter drama becomes mainstreamed.
  - joemi 5y ago
    My anecdotal observations do not match yours. A large percentage of the younger people (under 30) that I know are on twitter several/many times a day every single day. These are not tech workers, nor are they journalists, they're just college students, graduate students, and adjacent.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    Incidentally, I deleted my Twitter today. 4600 followers in hell, which is quite a lot for a Czech language community (10 million speakers only), but I can no longer tolerate the toxicity. Yes, journalists are overrepresented there and yes, their journalism often degenerates into "we are covering what happened on Twitter". But the worst offenders in terms of toxicity aren't journos. They are ... well, tormented human beings who love to dish out some misery to everyone around. Usually under a superficial veneer of a respectable goal. So long and thanks for all the tweets, but I am not coming back. After leaving Facebook in July 2019, I felt almost liberated; I expect the same to happen now.
    - mcosta 5y ago
      Journos are the new clerics. The western moral compass
PaulKeeble 5y ago
All that happens if you voice your opinion in the opposite direction of an internet mob is you get piled on too. Anyone who has been on the internet must have experienced this more than once. Introducing some facts or measure (which is hard with twitters very tiny character limit that squashes nuance and debate) in a response is just the same thing. The internet mob is a mob and acts like a mob and its best to get out of the way. Alas we don't have any riot police so they get to just rip up peoples lives however they want.
- hindsightbias 5y ago
  An internet mob is the perfect model for what a Direct Democracy would look like.
  - Supermancho 5y ago
    That IS what direct democracy is. Those who are the most motivated are a mix of earnest intellectuals and furious emotional reactionaries. The rest stay uninformed and apathetic, voting with the most outspoken they identify with or not at all.
  - username90 5y ago
    Switzerland is the perfect model for what a direct democracy actually looks like and it is nothing like a twitter mob.
    - temp8964 5y ago
      What? This is a totally nonsensical response. Everybody read history knows current Switzerland is a very unique outlier.
      - username90 5y ago
        Why couldn't other countries just implement the same system? Is there something magical about Swiss people that makes them handle direct democracy responsibly that other populations doesn't have? If you talk about their finances, sure that wont replicate, but there is nothing preventing their model of democracy from working.
shadowgovt 5y ago
Worth noting: Twitter's trending algorithm doesn't appear to have a concept of a denominator either. A relatively small collection of people talking about one subject can trigger the trending analysis even though that group represents a fraction of a fraction of Twitter users. Once that happens, the topic becomes publicized to everyone using Twitter's UI.
heroHACK17 5y ago
We actually do know what, or who, the denominator is. A large majority of tweets come from a small minority of tweeters: roughly 10% of tweeters account for roughly 80% of all tweets on the platform [1]. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-twitter-users/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-tw...
- koheripbal 5y ago
  I bet if you look specifically at "cancelling" mob type activity, the % is much much more concentrated. There are disproportionately loud participants on Twitter that push a toxic narrative.
- prepend 5y ago
  What I meant is denominator of responses. If I have 10,000 followers and post something with 100 likes, that might mean 100 people saw it and everyone liked it. It might mean 10,000 saw it and 9,900 hated it. It might mean 500 saw it, 100 liked, 100 hated, 300 didn’t care. Etc etc. This would help understand if it’s just a few loud people or indicative of all the people.
firebaze 5y ago
I got triggered by "Twitter knows". It doesn't. It's just a bunch of mostly toxic wannabe-in-group imbeciles. There are lots of exceptions, sure. But still. I lost count by orders of magnitude where the twitter mob-opinion was simply totally wrong (be it "masks are not useful" or whatever you name it). Thanks to the collective Alzheimer's, despite archive.org etc., this somehow doesn't hurt the mob mentality at all.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  I think he means Twitter, the corporation, knows how many total users they have. Although having worked with analytics groups for a long time, I'm not sure that's necessarily true either.
  - firebaze 5y ago
    I'm convinced we should simply stop lending folks using twitter to voice their opinion any credibility at all. It was cool, trendy and thoughtful to limit a response to a certain amount of characters, to compress your message. But by now, this got hijacked. There is no reflection, no compression of intelligent thought, nothing but voicing your (mostly biased and unsourced) opinion left, to just create a toxic cesspit.
- LeifCarrotson 5y ago
  Twitter as in the company/software platform, not the group of people who respond to a particular tweet. Twitter's database could show how many people were shown the tweet. It could guess at how many of their users would react in this way. And you could do some surveys to find out what fraction of our cultural spectrum/Overton window Twitter users occupy.
  - firebaze 5y ago
    How can you separate Twitter the company from Twitter the results? Serious question without any snark. I don't get this argument. Oh gal, just leave a message if you downvote. I love to learn when I'm wrong, and I guess others as well.
overgard 5y ago
That may be a problem, but fixing it is just giving a credit score to rumor mongering. I think believing every accusation before any evidence is given is the main cultural problem.
tester756 5y ago
Indeed. Nowadays small groups of coordinated people can cause a lot of chaos in internet.
- filoeleven 5y ago
  Is it possible that this is a reaction to extremely small groups of coordinated people causing a lot of chaos in everything outside the internet? https://www.businessinsider.com/americas-top-01-households-hold-same-amount-of-wealth-as-bottom-90-2017-10?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/americas-top-01-households-h...
bigbillheck 5y ago
> but we don’t know In this case, he admitted to being a sexual predator.
saul_goodman 5y ago
False. Twitter has become a sporting arena for the game of virtue signaling. That's the purpose of Twitter now, doesn't matter who is right or what Twitter itself knows about who drives these cycles. Remember that this is how the Mao cultural revolution began, silence is violence. If you're not virtue signaling hard enough the spiral collapses in on you and you yourself will be destroyed. It wasn't just some top-down systemic action that did so much damage, it took everyone working together to cause so much death and destruction. We saw this happen in Stalins regime too, everyone has to prove their loyalty to the party/ideal or risk being canceled. Eventually no one left standing is pure enough. From Bidens commencement ceremony by Amanda Goreman, first paragraph: “When day comes we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade? The loss we carry, a sea we must wade. We’ve braved the belly of the beast. We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace.” Quiet isn't always peace. Let that sink in. America's cultural revolution has already begun. Cancel culture is going to burn this country to the ground, those who don't speak truth to it let the mob win. But those who stand against this will be also be burned at the stake just like those who stood against the cultural revolutions in China and Russia.
- newobj 5y ago
  Your entire post is a virtue signal
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't post ideological flamewar comments to HN. This thread is mostly, though not entirely, managing to stay on the substantive side. Jumping straight into the flames is not a good idea and is destructive, if not outright vandalism. HN isn't for this so please don't do it here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
agumonkey 5y ago
social network lack of structure is their main issue .. it's freeing until you start to see all the work to ensure sanity then you start to miss the slower / hierarchical layers that used to exist.. the natural brakes.
beprogrammed 5y ago
Absolutely. It's all about context, and these platforms do a terrible job of allowing one to see the big picture. Think how many platforms don't even give a path for negative feedback, or merge the positive and negative feedback into one and present it as if that was a consensus.
nazgulnarsil 5y ago
Twitter polls are anonymous. Anytime you see a toxic thread you can throw in a poll asking bystanders whether they think the thread is going in a helpful direction. It's helpful to remind people that the polls are anonymous.
- mfksksis 5y ago
  the sample is still limited to logged in Twitter users sane people dont have Twitter accounts enjoy polling insane people
  - nazgulnarsil 5y ago
    I'm not speaking theoretically I've seen this improve threads.
jollybean 5y ago
Likes and shares give us a reference for that. The problem with twitter is that it's 240 characters of 'whatever' and that's not enough to arrive at any truth. It's usually an emotional loaded de-contextualized statement and that's that.
- prepend 5y ago
  It doesn’t give us a reference for who dislikes. Or who is ambivalent. It just lets us know who liked and shared.

threeboy 5y ago

"Three men make a tiger"

inglor_cz 5y ago
Especially if you can make a tiger by simply clicking a share button. It would be much harder to build a critical mass using more traditional methods of communication, even e-mail. As a result, people would spare their energy for serious incidents only. But we have a variant of the tragedy of commons here: societal ostracism, an important but dangerous tool, is no longer used rationally, but milked to exhaustion. It has become too easy to get the ball of outrage rolling. Too many people are treated as if they commanded a genocidal death squad, when their transgression is often verbal only (not the case of this particular artist, I know). As a result, we have a virtual Salem trial every day. I wonder when the inevitable reaction happens and people start ignoring the social networks altogether. This is not a stable, persistent state of things. Too unhinged.
robocat 5y ago
“””Another great Chinese expression is "calling a deer a horse" (指鹿為馬; zhǐlù-wéimǎ) which is based on the story of Zhao Gao which goes as follows: Zhao Gao was contemplating treason but was afraid the other officials would not heed his commands, so he decided to test them first. He brought a deer and presented it to the Second Emperor but called it a horse. The Second Emperor laughed and said, "Is the chancellor perhaps mistaken, calling a deer a horse?" Then the emperor questioned those around him. Some remained silent, while some, hoping to ingratiate themselves with Zhao Gao, said it was a horse, and others said it was a deer. Zhao Gao secretly arranged for all those who said it was a deer to be brought before the law and had them executed instantly.””” Seems even more appropriate - quoted from https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/e1diq2/three_men_make_a_tiger_chinese_三人成虎_pinyin_sān/ https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/e1diq2/three_men...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

MattGaiser 5y ago

A lot of it is that journalists will amplify it as well if they are one of the 100 who sees it. Seen journalist job postings where checking Twitter for stories is part of it.

steveBK123 5y ago
Journalists participate in Twitter at a rate probably 10-100x the overall population. Most people don't ever log into Twitter, most journalists do daily. I think you can look at it this way: * For normal people, Twitter is not real life. * For journalists, Twitter is real life. Journalists then become the vector by which BS Twitter drama becomes mainstreamed.
- joemi 5y ago
  My anecdotal observations do not match yours. A large percentage of the younger people (under 30) that I know are on twitter several/many times a day every single day. These are not tech workers, nor are they journalists, they're just college students, graduate students, and adjacent.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  Incidentally, I deleted my Twitter today. 4600 followers in hell, which is quite a lot for a Czech language community (10 million speakers only), but I can no longer tolerate the toxicity. Yes, journalists are overrepresented there and yes, their journalism often degenerates into "we are covering what happened on Twitter". But the worst offenders in terms of toxicity aren't journos. They are ... well, tormented human beings who love to dish out some misery to everyone around. Usually under a superficial veneer of a respectable goal. So long and thanks for all the tweets, but I am not coming back. After leaving Facebook in July 2019, I felt almost liberated; I expect the same to happen now.
  - mcosta 5y ago
    Journos are the new clerics. The western moral compass

PaulKeeble 5y ago

All that happens if you voice your opinion in the opposite direction of an internet mob is you get piled on too. Anyone who has been on the internet must have experienced this more than once. Introducing some facts or measure (which is hard with twitters very tiny character limit that squashes nuance and debate) in a response is just the same thing. The internet mob is a mob and acts like a mob and its best to get out of the way. Alas we don't have any riot police so they get to just rip up peoples lives however they want.

hindsightbias 5y ago
An internet mob is the perfect model for what a Direct Democracy would look like.
- Supermancho 5y ago
  That IS what direct democracy is. Those who are the most motivated are a mix of earnest intellectuals and furious emotional reactionaries. The rest stay uninformed and apathetic, voting with the most outspoken they identify with or not at all.
- username90 5y ago
  Switzerland is the perfect model for what a direct democracy actually looks like and it is nothing like a twitter mob.
  - temp8964 5y ago
    What? This is a totally nonsensical response. Everybody read history knows current Switzerland is a very unique outlier.
    - username90 5y ago
      Why couldn't other countries just implement the same system? Is there something magical about Swiss people that makes them handle direct democracy responsibly that other populations doesn't have? If you talk about their finances, sure that wont replicate, but there is nothing preventing their model of democracy from working.

shadowgovt 5y ago

Worth noting: Twitter's trending algorithm doesn't appear to have a concept of a denominator either. A relatively small collection of people talking about one subject can trigger the trending analysis even though that group represents a fraction of a fraction of Twitter users. Once that happens, the topic becomes publicized to everyone using Twitter's UI.

heroHACK17 5y ago

We actually do know what, or who, the denominator is. A large majority of tweets come from a small minority of tweeters: roughly 10% of tweeters account for roughly 80% of all tweets on the platform [1]. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-twitter-users/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-tw...

koheripbal 5y ago
I bet if you look specifically at "cancelling" mob type activity, the % is much much more concentrated. There are disproportionately loud participants on Twitter that push a toxic narrative.
prepend 5y ago
What I meant is denominator of responses. If I have 10,000 followers and post something with 100 likes, that might mean 100 people saw it and everyone liked it. It might mean 10,000 saw it and 9,900 hated it. It might mean 500 saw it, 100 liked, 100 hated, 300 didn’t care. Etc etc. This would help understand if it’s just a few loud people or indicative of all the people.

firebaze 5y ago

I got triggered by "Twitter knows". It doesn't. It's just a bunch of mostly toxic wannabe-in-group imbeciles. There are lots of exceptions, sure. But still. I lost count by orders of magnitude where the twitter mob-opinion was simply totally wrong (be it "masks are not useful" or whatever you name it). Thanks to the collective Alzheimer's, despite archive.org etc., this somehow doesn't hurt the mob mentality at all.

commandlinefan 5y ago
I think he means Twitter, the corporation, knows how many total users they have. Although having worked with analytics groups for a long time, I'm not sure that's necessarily true either.
- firebaze 5y ago
  I'm convinced we should simply stop lending folks using twitter to voice their opinion any credibility at all. It was cool, trendy and thoughtful to limit a response to a certain amount of characters, to compress your message. But by now, this got hijacked. There is no reflection, no compression of intelligent thought, nothing but voicing your (mostly biased and unsourced) opinion left, to just create a toxic cesspit.
LeifCarrotson 5y ago
Twitter as in the company/software platform, not the group of people who respond to a particular tweet. Twitter's database could show how many people were shown the tweet. It could guess at how many of their users would react in this way. And you could do some surveys to find out what fraction of our cultural spectrum/Overton window Twitter users occupy.
- firebaze 5y ago
  How can you separate Twitter the company from Twitter the results? Serious question without any snark. I don't get this argument. Oh gal, just leave a message if you downvote. I love to learn when I'm wrong, and I guess others as well.

overgard 5y ago

That may be a problem, but fixing it is just giving a credit score to rumor mongering. I think believing every accusation before any evidence is given is the main cultural problem.

tester756 5y ago

Indeed. Nowadays small groups of coordinated people can cause a lot of chaos in internet.

filoeleven 5y ago
Is it possible that this is a reaction to extremely small groups of coordinated people causing a lot of chaos in everything outside the internet? https://www.businessinsider.com/americas-top-01-households-hold-same-amount-of-wealth-as-bottom-90-2017-10?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/americas-top-01-households-h...

bigbillheck 5y ago

> but we don’t know In this case, he admitted to being a sexual predator.

saul_goodman 5y ago

False. Twitter has become a sporting arena for the game of virtue signaling. That's the purpose of Twitter now, doesn't matter who is right or what Twitter itself knows about who drives these cycles. Remember that this is how the Mao cultural revolution began, silence is violence. If you're not virtue signaling hard enough the spiral collapses in on you and you yourself will be destroyed. It wasn't just some top-down systemic action that did so much damage, it took everyone working together to cause so much death and destruction. We saw this happen in Stalins regime too, everyone has to prove their loyalty to the party/ideal or risk being canceled. Eventually no one left standing is pure enough. From Bidens commencement ceremony by Amanda Goreman, first paragraph: “When day comes we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade? The loss we carry, a sea we must wade. We’ve braved the belly of the beast. We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace.” Quiet isn't always peace. Let that sink in. America's cultural revolution has already begun. Cancel culture is going to burn this country to the ground, those who don't speak truth to it let the mob win. But those who stand against this will be also be burned at the stake just like those who stood against the cultural revolutions in China and Russia.

newobj 5y ago
Your entire post is a virtue signal
dang 5y ago
Please don't post ideological flamewar comments to HN. This thread is mostly, though not entirely, managing to stay on the substantive side. Jumping straight into the flames is not a good idea and is destructive, if not outright vandalism. HN isn't for this so please don't do it here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

agumonkey 5y ago

social network lack of structure is their main issue .. it's freeing until you start to see all the work to ensure sanity then you start to miss the slower / hierarchical layers that used to exist.. the natural brakes.

beprogrammed 5y ago

Absolutely. It's all about context, and these platforms do a terrible job of allowing one to see the big picture. Think how many platforms don't even give a path for negative feedback, or merge the positive and negative feedback into one and present it as if that was a consensus.

nazgulnarsil 5y ago

Twitter polls are anonymous. Anytime you see a toxic thread you can throw in a poll asking bystanders whether they think the thread is going in a helpful direction. It's helpful to remind people that the polls are anonymous.

mfksksis 5y ago
the sample is still limited to logged in Twitter users sane people dont have Twitter accounts enjoy polling insane people
- nazgulnarsil 5y ago
  I'm not speaking theoretically I've seen this improve threads.

jollybean 5y ago

Likes and shares give us a reference for that. The problem with twitter is that it's 240 characters of 'whatever' and that's not enough to arrive at any truth. It's usually an emotional loaded de-contextualized statement and that's that.

prepend 5y ago
It doesn’t give us a reference for who dislikes. Or who is ambivalent. It just lets us know who liked and shared.