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Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve

210 points by anthropodie 4y ago

I am seeing so many posts here about Twitter and it's possible alternatives. People are going on and on about - What could be the next big thing - What they want from new platform - What tech stack they would use and so on It's like there's fire in the house and all of us are discussing how to improve fire extinguisher design. The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve. No amount of algorithms can improve human behavior on any platform. It's good that we at least see the issues that have surfaced because of Twitter and other platforms. We now know people - can have extremely polarized views - feel the need to defend their polarized but flawed viewpoint at any cost - are virtue signaling others but refuse to take any accountability whatsoever - have less and less attention span - only consume the content that aligns with their views I can list another dozen issues but you get the point. Instead of trying to fix Twitter we need to look into why these things are happening. It does not seem like a technical problem that the HN crowd wants to solve. It's more of a personal, interpersonal and a social problem which needs extensive research, surveys to find the "why" and how we might be able to fix it or avoid it from happening again.

BeefWellington 4y ago
What I want is pretty simple (and isn't for everyone): I just want a spot I can keep tabs on the broader goings on of other people in infosec.
- helsinkiandrew 4y ago
  > I just want a spot I can keep tabs on the broader goings on of other people in infosec. I think this is the problem Twitter/Musk has - Twitter isn't one product but a million. Just about every user has their own way of using Twitter - from finding out about what's goings on in some niche (work, sport, hobby), seeing what celebrities are doing, asking their community questions, discussing politics, finding out news, promoting their newsletter, podcast, crypto scam or product, or growing their twitter followers. Anything that makes the way people use twitter less optimal is going to piss off substantial numbers of users.
  - BeefWellington 4y ago
    The other problem is that the majority of advertisers don't want to spend their ad dollars on a platform full of people spamming various racial slurs. If that's what happens as a result of Twitter's changes in policies, and there's a flight of advertisers, I'm not sure what end result there is for Twitter except hemorrhaging money for Musk until he shuts it down.
    - mariodiana 4y ago
      I don't see people "spamming" racial slurs. The most inflammatory thing I see is videos of young groups of African-Americans behaving badly. In the replies, I see comments like "usual suspects," or various memes that are admittedly racial slurs: for example, Jane Goodall with a pair of binoculars and the caption "Interesting behavior." I'm not saying that's nice. That's bad. But it's the most easily avoided thing. If you see a video posted like that, what do you expect to see? Thoughtful social commentary about marginalized peoples of our urban ghettoes? Twitter is so much more than the above. To me it, seems like the charge of "racial slurs" is itself a kind of defamation. There have always been dark corners of the Internet. Twitter's dark corners are so easily avoided, and a fraction of the traffic on the platform, as far as I can tell. Is there actually any data allowing people to make sense of it all, as opposed to allowing them to make a biased argument?
      - BeefWellington 4y ago
        I mean, your post reads like an apology for the behaviour. My point mainly was that Twitter's success going forwards depends on ad revenue and there was apparently a huge uptick in slurs of all kinds right after the deal closed and he became owner.[1] Maybe there's some untapped reservoir of people willing to shell out to have the Twitter blue checkmark, given it used to have some cachet and they will successfully pivot their funding model to a subscription one, but I doubt that will actually account for the difference. [1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/shaunharper/2022/10/31/elon-musk-twitter-takeover-leads-to-n-word-and-hate-speech-increase-lebron-james-calls-for-action/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/shaunharper/2022/10/31/elon-mus...
- nunez 4y ago
  yes, this. i tried to use twitter for news and devops/sre related stuff, but you have to drink the firehose to find content or use your network to find people to follow. absolutely does not help that many of the more active personalities also engage in creating FUD. i use nitter now.
  - seti0Cha 4y ago
    Yeah, that's what breaks it for me. I try to follow people for technical content, but so many people periodically inject their political opinions that keeping it purely technical is difficult. That'd be ok, except that people who do drive-by political posting almost never post anything interesting or original. It's usually smug attacks on strawman positions or repeating their political tribe's concern of the day. I'm perfectly happy to see original or carefully thought out political views, but I find this low quality stuff hard to ignore because it triggers both my contrarian and pedantic instincts.
tmaly 4y ago
You could probably say the same thing about how people react to professional sports. Everybody has an opinion.
rrwo 4y ago
I'm really sympathetic with this. I don't think another "improved" social media or blogging platform is the answer. Even if you have a perfect way to fix the social problems with social media, it's still a massive time and productivity sink. I don't have enough time in the day to read every interesting article and blog post, let along engage in debate or add a meaningful comment. Nor to I have enough time top write thoughtful articles about things that I am thinking about, let along ready any comments people might have. This reminds me that I should be disengaging from even more websites (this one included).
jklinger410 4y ago
In a tangentially related note. The value in a social media network is the viral momentum, not the cool engineering tricks or fundamental features. Virality, like any success, involves being in the right place at the right time. This is largely unpredictable. The problems that social media networks have need to be sorted out on the platforms themselves. The graveyard of dead projects is full of clones of popular softwares with slightly different features. I'm sure many of them were fantastic ideas.
hackyhacky 4y ago
Hacker News has a great community, features informative discourse, and doesn't suffer from the ailments that you list (or suffers from them much less than Twitter). Therefore we should invite all Twitter users to join our healthy community. Everybody wins. Edit: I hoped it would be obvious, but the second sentence of this comment was supposed to be sarcastic.
- verdverm 4y ago
  HN is still viable because it hasn't reached the masses. The self policing works well currently, but I'm not sure it would with the general populace
  - runarberg 4y ago
    HN is industry specific. It very much has reach the masses, but only within a specific trait. It functions more like a trade union’s social media. I actually don’t think the self policing here is working at all, rather the excellent moderation by dang is doing the bulk of the work, keeping HN amazing.
- awb 4y ago
  HN has a heavy moderation policy. Things like gossip and rants are removed. It works for a small, niche network, but not for a global one.
- pjc50 4y ago
  .. because it doesn't allow pictures, has aggressive downvotes, and a very careful moderator (dang) with the power to ban people. The problem is that dang doesn't scale.
  - rsync 4y ago
    I think the absence of pictures and avatars is a very significant aspect of the HN success.
- latexr 4y ago
  > Therefore we should invite all Twitter users to join our healthy community. See the Eternal September as a cautionary tale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
edude03 4y ago
> only consume the content that aligns with their views And for this reason I believe social media is fundamentally harmful to society.
- lambic 4y ago
  I think this might be partly a generational thing. My son and my younger friends follow a wider variety of people and aren't so easily sucked into the echo chambers. The networks are also partly to blame with their recommendation systems.
  - goatlover 4y ago
    Then again Reddit skews younger and the main subs are echo chambers.
- mikkergp 4y ago
  Say more about this, I’ve sort of come to the opposite conclusion, especially in social media. Generally speaking, the _way_ people express their views in social media has distancing effect for me. In real life? With people talking about their life stories, sure, I may learn more about people and open my mind, but I think better echo chambers in “hot take” spaces online would open my mind and make me more tolerant of opposing views.
Swizec 4y ago
> surveys to find the "why" and how we might be able to fix it or avoid it from happening again A 2-party system will always create polarization and lead to black/white thinking in all aspects of life I think. As a European moving to USA, the part I miss most about back home is the willingness to think of all issues as “Well there’s 5+ sides to this, let’s discuss”. I think that outlook stems directly from our multiparty system where you usually have more than 5 parties in power who need to debate and come to a conclusion. In Europe, even the fringiest of movements (like the pirate party) often get at least 1 seat in parliament. This may be more symbolic than practical, but it does lead to there being at least someone, somewhere, who says “Yo, this has an impact on fair use! We should discuss” edit: To expand on why I think this is the why, I’ve found that non-US Twitter is a lot less polarized. There’s the occasional hot button issue that a politician brings up to start a fight, yes, but on US twitter everything gets polarized. edit2: Perhaps the easiest solution is to ban politicians from Twitter. They’re the ones usually starting shit and trolling for a ruckus.
- pjc50 4y ago
  Certain parts of non-US twitter were "polarized" enough to start the Arab Spring, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine (leading to its current situation), and it seems that through social media of some sort Iran is currently undergoing a revolt against its own morality police. A huge part of Twitter's popularity and success is linked to its role in coordinating anti-authoritarian action.
  - jen20 4y ago
    > Orange Revolution in Ukraine (leading to its current situation) A gross mischaracterization of which you should be utterly ashamed. Responsibility for the current situation in Ukraine lies at the feet of one man, Putin, and those who continue to enable him.
    - pjc50 4y ago
      I meant the current situation as in everything from the deposing of Yanukovich onwards; the ability of the Ukranians to force a freer, fairer state that isn't entirely a Russian puppet state is their agency and it's down to the Orange Revolution / Euromaidan etc. This is a good thing.
youssef_ib1 4y ago
account roblox
wayne-li2 4y ago
All the problems you listed can be solved though. In fact, HN is a good demonstration of it. Its policy decisions have largely led to one of the last bastions on the internet that still seem sane. The issue is how a social media product can solve the problems above and be a growing, profitable company. HN does not have a direct profit motive nor does it need to grow exponentially to satisfy investors. Personally I don’t believe it’s possible because as long as engagement is optimized, extremity will always be preferred.
edent 4y ago
I disagree. Your points aren't necessarily wrong, but they ignore one big factor. Twitter chooses what content to promote to people. I could use Twitter quite happily not knowing about the latest "scandal" in, say, the knitting world. But Twitter actively promotes that content to me - either with the "trending" sidebar or by showing me content that it thinks will increase my engagement. That is a technical problem. How do you surface engaging content without also surfacing harmful / polarising / abusive content? If a specific Tweet got a million likes, a "neutral" algorithm might choose to promote it. But unless that algorithm knows that the Tweet is deliberately inflammatory, it can't choose to de-prioritise it. So, yes, there is a problem with human nature. But it is being exacerbated by deliberate technical and policy choices.
- csours 4y ago
  > How do you surface engaging content without also surfacing harmful / polarising / abusive content? But the most engaging content is also the most harmful / polarizing / abusive! "The algorithm" is mostly humans clicking buttons.
  - runeks 4y ago
    I guess a solution is for the algorithm to stop showing me tweets because other people like them. Ie. allowing me to tick a box so that my recommendations are based only on my own engagement, and not that of the average Twitterer.
  - boplicity 4y ago
    > "The algorithm" is mostly humans clicking buttons. Actually, the algorithm is not the button clicks, but the code that interprets those button clicks. I don't think many people notice this, but HN gives a bonus to longer posts, in terms of keeping them at the top. It's not just the upvotes that determine which votes surface to the top. There are probably other signals that are inputted into the algorithm, as well, with different weights attached to them. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if certain inflammatory words or phrases subtracted points from a post on HN. For the forum I run, I auto-generate a list of the top posts for the week. It is based on the number of likes, but also on the length of the post. This is then filtered manually, removing inflammatory posts. HN, with its effective moderation, doesn't seem to have much of a different process. 1. You can design an algorithm that optimizes for engagement and attempts to surface non-inflammatory posts. 2. You can design another algorithm that actively penalizes inflammatory posts. 3. You can further add a human element (a moderator) to penalize or decrease the visibility of inflammatory posts. These are things that actually happen in online communities. However, they also don't always happen to the degree that would be beneficial to society as a whole. Hence, the problem. Like other industries (oil extraction), there are negative externalities that can and should be accounted for.
mFixman 4y ago
I used to agree with you until I created a new Twitter account from scratch. I'm not American and I specifically put non-political things in my interests. Yet, the second I signed up I got the following: 1. A notification about a smug reply a rando made to a Republican Congressman. 2. Posts from a meme page with a Pepe the frog avatar showing homeless people fighting in San Francisco. 3. Somebody I don't follow accusing another person I don't follow of being a nazi. The problem with Twitter is that it needs high engagement, so it strongly recommends posts that are low on quality but high on emotion. This gets people to post the most smug and controversial takes they can handle. I recommend everyone creating a new social media account every once in a while to see what the rest of the world see. It's as enlightening as browsing the internet with Adblock disabled.
- kyleyeats 4y ago
  That seems like a pretty good cross-section of the discourse the week before election day. Not sure if it's worth extrapolating.
  - mFixman 4y ago
    This happened in May. It's probably even worse now.
    - kyleyeats 4y ago
      Oh, then yeah that's just annoying. I was annoyed off of it not too long ago as a long-time user, and it was for political stuff for me as well. We won't have a good picture of post-Elon Twitter until the 9th, but I'm cautiously optimistic.
  - christkv 4y ago
    I think the problem is why does he a non American get pushed shit from American political fringes at all.
    - tpurves 4y ago
manholio 4y ago
> No amount of algorithms can improve human behavior on any platform Humans aren't yet computers, so algorithms are (obviously) not directly relevant to them. But in the general sense, that clam is wrong. Human behavior is amenable to rules, incentives and social pressure, and technical tools have found a role in shaping that since the dawn of civilization. From simple technology such as voting down to the most oppressive algorithmic surveillance state, algorithms can be used to influence and control human behavior or enforce rules.
fullshark 4y ago
Subreddits solve I think the big problem of twitter, namely political flamebait leaking everywhere. Compartmentalize and quarantine that stuff and maybe you can get a healthy message board going, but I think people will never be as open and naive as they were in the early days of twitter / FB again.
- airstrike 4y ago
  Subreddits are the definition of echo chambers. The only subreddits that work are the ones with heavy moderation to keep things (a) sane and (b) on topic
  - fullshark 4y ago
    Echo chambers seem to be the inevitable end state of any of message board. People with contrarian positions eventually get tired and leave except those who get off on that and people love having their views affirmed. Algorithmic feeds amplify this phenomenon big time but you can see it on even traditional message boards.
- PM_me_your_math 4y ago
  In the early days, Reddit was touted as a free speech platform (sound familiar?) yet it was always designed to be an echo chamber, and changes to the product up to this point have only ever served that end. The mechanics of upvote/downvote, in collaboration with activist admins & moderators, ensures that comments which oppose the current group think are hidden, while comments that re-enforce the group-think (even if it is plainly false) are elevated and treated as canon. The result is that opposing view points are drowned out and then stop all together when those with opposing view points realize the futility. To the outside observer, it would appear that the group think is the real world, when in reality, it is not. This is by design and it is not accidental. Given the politics of reddit staff (which closely match twitter staff) one can see the common thread among these companies and why so many people believe the gaming is by design (because it is.) Reddit is an unmitigated cesspool of mostly 20-somethings who have accomplished very little, but seemingly know everything. It is one giant cluster-** of propaganda save for a handful of subreddits that are actually sane places with great ideas and content.
nico 4y ago
> It's more of a personal, interpersonal and a social problem which needs extensive research, surveys to find the "why" and how we might be able to fix it or avoid it from happening again. You are right about it not being a technology problem, but what you are describing there is how you approach a technical problem. You are never going to solve it that way. In fact it might never be solved, because the issue is politics, it’s people intentionally wanting to game the systems to influence masses and get their way. No amount of research and surveys to “find the why” will allow you to “fix” it or “avoid it from happening again”.
amadeuspagel 4y ago
There's no fire in the house. It's completely natural for people on HN to discuss what the next big thing might be, what we want from a new platform. Surveys? If you want to do surveys, sure, easy to do with MTurk. But if discussing the next big thing is like discussing how to improve fire extinguisher design while there's a fire in the house, then what is doing surveys like?
dcist 4y ago
I don't know that Twitter actually needs to be fixed. It's very good for what it is - a microblogging platform that provides instant, timely updates on news and current topics. I think Twitter could, however, capitalize on its platform and offer additional, successful features. Twitter could offer Patreon and Substack-esque features where users could subscribe to additional, richer, and more in-depth content from content creators. Twitter could also re-explore a live broadcast feature with associated live chat (similar to YouTube and Facebook live broadcasts). Twitter is a huge platform and has plenty of opportunity, but I don't think it suffers from inherent problems like Facebook (which has an aging userbase, users abandoning the platform, and a big spam problem).
- mikkergp 4y ago
  I don’t think “I don’t think it suffers from inherent problems” is a universal opinion: https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-where-did-tweeters-go-twitter-is-losing-its-most-active-users-internal-2022-10-25/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-where-did-tweet... Also, people talk about the bot problem like non-stop, including the new owner.
  - dcist 4y ago
    Oh yeah, definitely not a universal opinion. Just my 100% subjective viewpoint.
  - lanstin 4y ago
    Only people that follow a lot of crypto people have not problems. And mostly. If you aren’t reading real time, but like an hour old, the bots will have been hidden.
staunch 4y ago
> It's like there's fire in the house and all of us are discussing how to improve fire extinguisher design. It's more like there's a problem with a new technology and people are discussing how to improve the technology. Twitter is just a technology product that some few people created a few years ago. It's not a discovery like fire where we have to learn to adapt to its nature. We can change its nature radically. Of course there are social problems that won't be resolved by technology but there's no reason to believe this is one of them. Twitter is a technology that created and exacerbated specific social problems. It's entirely plausible that it can be improved to eliminate and mitigate these same problems.
photochemsyn 4y ago
I just set up a Twitter account for the first time, to see what the Musk era is like. One immediate issue I notice is that the recommendation algorithm immediately starts siloing you into a roomfull of mirrors. Based on who you follow, it recommends similar people to follow (based apparently on who your followees follow plus maybe other data), so you quickly end up in an echo chamber. That's not the whole story, Twitter also tries to push-recommend 'noted celebrities' to follow, who can be summed up as the type of people who make the rounds of corporate media weekend talk shows. There doesn't seem to be any way to opt out of these recommendations. So far it's not a very illuminating experience. I notice that many people get around the character limit by posting images of text, which is an interesting work-around. Really, I think you'd need multiple Twitter accounts to get around this siloing effect. For example, on political issues, you could set up, say. 'socialist-communist-left', 'libertarian-capitalist', 'state-corporate-authoritarian', and 'alt-right MAGAs', 'politicians and media talking heads', etc. in order to get representative samples of the various competing US political views and actors. All in all I think it's kind of a waste of time, there are better information sources. [edit as others note, no real changes from pre-Musk era have taken place, so I'll just look at it once a week for a while]
- jen20 4y ago
  > Based on who you follow, it recommends similar people to follow I would actually be rather happy if this were the case beyond the trivial examples. For example, if I were to create an account and follow someone from the Linux kernel or open-source licensing space, and I got recommendations of other people working in that are, that would be _great_. Instead, I got Joe Rogan and AOC forced into my timeline because that is what maximizes rage and thus engagement. I'm out.
  - mnw21cam 4y ago
    It seems like a hard problem to solve: I want to be siloed into subject interest groups, like to do with the various hobbies and work that I'm interested in. But I don't want to be shoved into an echo-chamber for politics. How does the algorithm distinguish between subject interest and politics? The difference is that for subject interest I'm looking for information specific to my subject, but the algorithm optimises instead for groups that agree with my opinion. I'd be quite happy to get information about my subject interest even if I don't agree with it. Then also the algorithm optimises for high drama, but that's a separate problem.
onion2k 4y ago
No amount of algorithms can improve human behavior on any platform. You can definitely make human behavior worse using an algorithm just by pushing content that provokes negative reactions in as many people as possible. I don't see why the opposite wouldn't be true. If the algorithm pushed uncontroversial content into people's timelines and didn't reward hateful crap they might get happier. Maybe Elon will give that a try!
- paulusthe 4y ago
  They wouldn't use it as much. The profitability of the site would suffer and it would cease to exist. It's not like Twitter set out trying to create an outrage machine. Their algorithms learned what people respond to - because responses, interaction, and time on the site is Twitter's goal - and gave them what they want. People don't want happy, good news. They don't want uncontroversial content. That's the problem, not Twitter, or its algos
- bckr 4y ago
  With utmost curiosity, how can making people happy get money for investors and SWE salaries?
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    It can't, the whole ecosystem needs to collapse and then maybe some of those SWEs can go do something productive with their time.
  - abeppu 4y ago
    You get content which makes people happy and optimistic about something which they now want to buy OR you gather information on what actually makes people happy (or at least engaged in something other than arguing), and sell that information. Less culture wars, more aspirational/fitness/self-care/nature-travel/interior design/organic subscription box/hygge content.
    - pjc50 4y ago
      Instagram already exists for the latter.
iinnPP 4y ago
I ran an official fan site once, for an EA title of all things. Doing this I learned some neat tricks to limit the amount of administration required. One thing that stuck was that there is a huge benefit to maintaining a specific section for garbage posts. Sticky threads existed titled: Potentially offensive/spam? Post it here. Everyone used it and followed the very few rules of the spam board. I rarely had to move anything. People would even use links to their rants as replies to regular threads, clearly identified so that people could avoid it if they wanted. I also did the same for another hobby forum I ran in highschool. With 3 mods and one other admin we were able to keep a forum completely clean for years with ~2 million monthly unique visitors. I do believe Twitter is about to do something similar.
- xiphias2 4y ago
  It looks cool, but right now there are 2 sides of the same coin. Maybe one would need a ,,victim / possibly being offended'' section as well.
  - jabroni_salad 4y ago
    If being an AO3 regular has taught me anything it's that some people are just incapable of watching out for themselves. You can put all the warnings and tags on your writing and other people can configure their profile to automatically hide anything with warnings and tags that they dont like. You can tag yourself as 'dead dove do not eat' to specially indicate that none of the abhorrent shit in your tags is there ironically. You can make your post privileged so only registered members (and the site has a waiting period) can even see your fic exists, filtering out bystanders. Readers will STILL complain that you 'subjected them' to a noncon cannibalism fic as if they somehow did not have a clear roadsign at the top.
  - iinnPP 4y ago
    You don't let people be offended by it. There's no "offensive" reporting, only illegal content reporting. The people who want to post edgy things will go there. The immediate result is that every other area of discussion becomes less "violent and offensive." People who are offended in the garbage pile get told not to go to the garbage pile. The offenders however, get told to keep their garbage in the pile. Nobody gets censored. Nobody gets offended (without ignoring the warnings.) The entire planet cools down. I have no idea if it would work at Twitter's scale though.
Herbstluft 4y ago
Until not that long ago I was a pretty happy Twitter user. I curated my follows (keeping them between 150 and 200), only followed people posting interesting, creative, or scientific things. When anyone started tweeting or retweeting low quality material, I simply unfollowed. Unfortunately, the devs at Twitter hate the way I use it. Nowadays ever 5th post or so on my timeline is from someone I do not follow, either "people you follow follow this" or "might be interesting to you" crap. It's almost always drama, politics, provocations, people screaming at each other, or a mix of those things. I can vividly imagine what the timelines of casuals users look like...and it becomes obvious why social media are such hubs for hatred and perpetual drama. There is little "to solve", because the biggest problems of social media are explicitly created by social media companies. Or as someone would call it whose business it is to manipulate you and to make you miserable (like the devs at Twitter and Facebook): "creating engagement". Allow users to properly curate their timelines. Then we can at least take the claim that social media companies actually want anything to improve serious.
- lanstin 4y ago
  Do you use the time based fed or the default timeline feed? I use only the time based feed, and I read on my tablet zoomed into the middle third of the screen so I don’t really see trending or whatever. I do follow a lot more people than you, but I agree when that is all you see, it is like a allow listed Reddit, pretty easy to make an interest and entertaining content feed.
  - passwordoops 4y ago
    I use time based feed and the recommended crap is massively reduced compared to "Home" but they manage to sneak in recommendations once in a while
  - cma 4y ago
    Use Firefox and you can install ublock origin, then zap the trending section with the element picker.
    - 4y ago
dathinab 4y ago
It's true that a lot of this things are not technical problems. But you can create systems which amplify such behaviour and systems which avoid such behaviour in many ways. Similar you can design systems which enable fraud, especially social-engineering based ones and you can build systems which makes fraud harder. And one thing which anyone having run any kind of discussion platform weather in the internet or physically knows is you need proper and strict moderation or things will go down hill. Twitter always had been doing a soso job. And as far as I can tell things will get worse, not better with how Musks is approaching things as he seem to either not understand the problems or doesn't care.
newbieuser 4y ago
i think the biggest problem of twitter is that it always highlights the tweets that get a lot of likes, even if you have nothing to do with them. in this way, it becomes very easy for fake news and nonsense content to spread virally. eg elon musk tweets lol
pessimizer 4y ago
> - can have extremely polarized views > - feel the need to defend their polarized but flawed viewpoint at any cost > - are virtue signaling others but refuse to take any accountability whatsoever > - have less and less attention span > - only consume the content that aligns with their views This is a bit of a weird diagnosis. The first four aren't problems with twitter, and the last one is simply false. The most politically polarized people are constantly hate-reading content from the other side. The only sure issue that twitter has is its cozy relationship with the US government, and the personal issue that I have with it is the enormous amount of harassment it allows while at the same time heavily moderating content for its politics/worldview. Every other issue I have with twitter is technical, like its horrible web design, its lack of interop, the disorganized nature of "verification." > It's like there's fire in the house It's not. It's like people are trying to convince us there's fire in the house, and that this fire entirely consists of people's speech about their honestly held and very common beliefs.
dfxm12 4y ago
These problems existed before Twitter and they'll exist after whatever changes current management brings. Some things can't be solved, and tbh, Twitter is mostly a bunch of random nobodies yelling into the abyss. That's just gonna happen. Who cares? What can you do? However, I do think the real problem is when accounts that have high status (like a blue check? posts that appear on trending tab? posts that are sponsored?) engage Twitter dishonestly. If there's a technical solution to this, that's where you start. It's hard to prove dishonesty at first blush, but when there's a pattern of behavior similar to what you're describing, it becomes more clear.
phailhaus 4y ago
Agreed. The problem with Twitter is in its design. It's in what it allows you to do, and what it doesn't. I'll repeat what I raised in the other post: 1. People are high-variance, and yet we're only allowed to follow individual accounts. That's a problem, especially because network effects mean that one person's voice gets amplified exponentially with the number of followers they have. Consider the six degrees of separation: applied to Twitter, we realize that it only takes 6 retweets to reach basically everyone. Following "Topics" is close but not good enough, because you cannot voluntarily opt into topics or really understand why a given tweet is within a topic; Twitter uses its Computer Magic to categorize tweets and makes all the decisions in a black box. 2. The only negative feedback is unfollowing. This is a problem because it means that practically all forms of engagement are treated equally. Oh, this tweet is getting a lot of comments, let's boost it so more people see it! Whoops, it was about space lasers. We are stuck repeatedly fighting Bad Takes because they have to be argued against every time, always gain nonzero traction. They are never put to rest. There is very little negative incentive against being a garbage human on Twitter, especially if you're anonymous. We're never going to change core human behavior, but the design of a platform can guide that behavior. For example, the HN and Reddit model of posting means that your previous karma has no impact on your post's reach. That has serious implications for the kind of conversations that become popular on the platform. Another example: Facebook's commenting model is not nested and therefore doesn't allow you to have conversations with other people. So what do you get? Everyone screaming into the void, vaguely in the direction of other people. Everyone talks about "changing the system", and yet all the suggestions are mostly cosmetic like charging for accounts. That doesn't change the fact that every time Elon tweets, it's automatically shunted to a million people no matter how bonkers it is.
- renonn 4y ago
  - phailhaus 4y ago
    That's not constructive feedback, and contributes nothing to the conversation.
- 4y ago
ck2 4y ago
Twitter only has one problem. How to pay $1 BILLION per year in financing. It's not actually possible, no user is going to put up with the fees or advertising required for that level of revenue.
- nunez 4y ago
  say what you will about Musk and his team, but if they can get people like myself to gladly fork over $7000 and (soon) $12,000 for what basically amounts to a feature toggle, I think they can figure this one out too.
spion 4y ago
No, the issues are quite technical too, but they cannot be fixed just by changing the feed selection algorithm - they are core to twitter's design. Twitter is essentially a marketing machine / popularity contest hybrid. There are no barriers to publishing something on twitter: - you don't have to be correct. - you don't have to ellaborate your claims (In fact, you specifically cant - the space is limited enough to disallow it) - you don't have to provide any references to your claims, and you can easily post screenshots or images from other sources without referencing and frame them in whatever light you wish. There are even fewer limits to boosting something by retweeting it. You don't even have to read it, and "want to read the article first" sounds like a joke precisely because the rest of the platform never really cared about that. By themselves, the above properties would not be that big of a deal. However, the retweet mechanic essentially creates an evolutionary environment for ideas. Tweets essentially become brain viruses. Their goal is to replicate by retweeting i.e. by causing a human to click the retweet button on them. The environment formed by twitter itself as a platform, as well as its users, essentially "decides" which "viruses" are more fit to replicate and which ones aren't. Now the question is how much of this is twitter's fault and how much is the environment? Sure, humans can take some of the blame. Humans are faulty and fragile and prone to biases / getting triggered / reacting emotionally. But that's precisely why we build things - to compensate for our faults. You could easily imagine alternative systems which instead of being optimized for marketing (often an exercise in bending the truth as much as possible in a way that benefits someone), are optimized for something else: - retweeting something could require you to check the references and ensure things are correct - the character limit is inverted i.e. humans will need to write - every post is peer reviewed; some basics are automatically checked (e.g. the presence of references) Or, we could simply get rid of the exponential aspect. Reddit suffers from some of the same flaws, for example, but they're less pronounced - because its more of a linear rather than an exponential environment where best voted things surface to similar number of people (followers of the subreddit). Its this extreme environment with exponential properties (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aap9559 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aap9559) which makes us feel like "all of twitter" sucks and people suck. It doesn't really, but we don't get to see the parts that don't, because they have orders of magnitude less spread - the environment is extremely harsh to things not optimized for it. I actually have many examples of scientists posting throughly checked studies posting one "interesting" (but poorly done) study involving animals which they didn't think much of, and that study getting 2-3 orders of magnitude more tweets than the rest of their material (because it looks novel), thereby defining most people's perception of them. Some find it embarassing, others that are after the attention more than they're after the science decide to go the dark path or get surrounded by followers that feed their delusion. Humans are flawed, yes... but we could do so much better.
paulusthe 4y ago
I agree fully. The problem is that Twitter is designed with revenue in mind. Revenue requires the user use the product, ideally as much as possible, and the best way to do that is turn Twitter into a perpetual outrage machine where the loudest, most ridiculous voices get the attention because they inspire the most reaction. This is why Michael Tracey is so popular there. Nobody actually likes him; he exists to cause outrage and gets promoted by the Twitter algo precisely because of that. Outrage is attention, and attention is what Twitter wants, for revenue.
- paulusthe 4y ago
  The solution to this is to end the whole thing, because the profit motivation and the public square function are incompatible. A middle ground is extensive moderation, but that of course becomes political (and rightly so) which undermines the intent of moderation. Twitter is a cesspool and will always be so
csours 4y ago
Twitter's value prop is a flat audience of "the whole world". More and more, I see value in smaller groups in social media. The only good part of Facebook is Groups and Events. People talk about information or social bubbles, but on Twitter you still have bubbles. Any social group will form bubbles as soon as they start fighting about something. Having a flat view of the entire social graph does not prevent bubbles.
jalapenos 4y ago
Wouldn't this be fixed by grouping & filtering though? IRL we don't listen to such people, because we associate with people we like. Perhaps the problems would be resolved by improved ability to filter out undesirables? E.g. in the same way you can tell YouTube to not recommend whole channels, you could tell Twitter not to show any tweets grouped as political, or a sub-type of political.
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
The entire world wasn't meant to share a single town square with anonymity sprinkled in.
deleted 4y ago
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dave333 4y ago
AI can surely be trained to promote quality content and hide political snark and misinformation. How hard can it be?
aantix 4y ago
Absolutely disagree. The social issues are exasperated by their recommendations (inflammatory topics) and constraints (short tweets). In a town square, you can theoretically walk away from a screaming mob. On Twitter, this is nearly impossible with today's tools. It would be like wack-a-mole, for every one harassing user, two more would show up. So there has to be a way individually, to mass silence certain topics. E.g. Use a regular expression to block any topic AND/OR user that tweets about topic Y containing X word patterns.
3np 4y ago
It may not be a technical problem, but a way forward may require or be facilitated by not-yet mainstream or novel technical architectures and implementations, including new algorithms. (inb4 no, I'm not referring to tacking DOGE and USDC payments onto Birdsite)
scarface74 4y ago
Everything I know about Twitter’s technical history, it was a shit show when they first went public and now it’s considered pretty good and is actually referenced a lot in Designing Data Intensive Applications - the book you are always told to read to help pas a system design interview.
dqpb 4y ago
I think your looking at the problem wrong. It's not Twitter's job to fix people. It's Twitters job to connect people in a communications graph. This is absolutely a technical problem, as there are many possible configurations, operations, and filters one could apply.
nunez 4y ago
reddit's default home page has similar problems. a brand new account landing on /r/popular will see: - a post about kanye - cute photos - more politics - entertainment news this isn't so bad, but when you descend into the comments, it's all short, low-quality content. i agree that more research into how we got here could be interesting.
dreen 4y ago
I quit Twitter years ago not due to any of these problems (they are endemic to the whole of internet), but because I was addicted to the scrolling. It was a lot easier than I thought to quit and I can't even imagine anymore what I thought I would be missing. While this could be changed with code, it's highly unlikely to make me come back.
analog31 4y ago
I would add an item, which is that there are large, well funded, propaganda machines that end up with substantial control over any popular platform.
ThereIsNoWorry 4y ago
> It's more of a personal, interpersonal and a social problem which needs extensive research, surveys to find the "why" and how we might be able to fix it or avoid it from happening again. Changing human behavioural patterns that emerged after millions of years of evolution? This seems incredibly naive to me. We can build our technology around the fact that we humans as a species are as we are. Limit this kind of toxic behaviour by various means, e.g. moderation and developing algorithms that detect such emergent patterns and then change recommendation types. Things like these. But changing how we biologically work goes into a direction that is filled with moral and ethical landmines.
protomyth 4y ago
I just want to see the tweets of people I follow and stuff they retweet. I like the ability to turn off retweets from people I follow. I can even live with ads. I absolutely do not want to see what people like, trends, or tweets from randos that I don't follow. If I haven't indicated I feel it warrants my attention then leave me alone. My idea of celebrities is different than Twitters. Discovery is for search. I am less engaged with all the engagement added.
raldi 4y ago
The posts about replicating Twitter strike me like someone in 1995 talking about how best to create a CompuServe clone.
abeppu 4y ago
I think the palette of social media products today shows us that Twitter has options, but it needs to decide what it wants to be. - LinkedIn shows us that if you're going to be seen by people you know in real life, and whose opinion of you may eventually be important, people will be try to gain status and show off, but not in a hostile way. Is that "good"? Possibly only if you have another revenue stream (recruiters) because the content is boring. - Instagram shows us that if you want to get influencers who can inspire a purchasing intent, you need not just photos and asymmetric follow relationships, but comments should live as a second-class citizen, and posts shouldn't have reply-to structures. - TikTok shows us that you can get high engagement without much vitriolic disagreement, but only by giving a lot of control to the algorithm, which seeks engagement, and by heavy-handed curatorial bias towards fluffy content. You don't have to suspend or shadow-ban accounts if you can just suppress them forever. Twitter's big choices in this lens are: - asymmetric follower relationships - reply structure among posts, all of which are retweetable - mostly text posts, with low energy barrier to respond It structurally favors bickering, retweeting / quoting someone's post to rally a response, etc, even before you consider stuff that gets recommended into your timeline. What no one's demonstrated is a platform which hosts people discussing potentially contentious issues in a consistently civil and constructive way. I don't know if people can do that, but if you wanted to try: - lean on NLP heavily to group posts, and highlight the ones that are contributing something new rather than repeating any party line - multi-dimensional feedback on posts. Not just 'like' or 'retweet', but 'this is insightful', 'this is funny', 'this is cute', 'this makes me uncomfortable', etc - time-out / forced wait to reply to a post, to kill rapid back and forth
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Dracophoenix 4y ago
If you want my opinion, you're not going to "solve" people, especially in the manner you desire. No has, no one is, and no one ever will. There are no philosopher-kings. Twitter is simply today's canvas for social and parasocial interaction. It is no different than the printing press, the landline, the radio, or the television was during their heydays. Throughout the history of the aforementioned mediums, there has been propaganda, polarizing politics, rumormongering, scandals, censorship, public feuds, self-righteous moralizing, pandering, and a bevy of other controversies. Twitter as a "public square" will solve itself. It may become the greatest thing since the Athenian Agora. It may become another Usenet, WELL [1], or AOL/Compuserve. Or it might join thousands of other no-name services as it barrels into the trash-heap of social media history with its only distinction being a louder thud than all the others as it reaches its final resting place. In the future I expect the social media or morality wars of the VR/AR era, should the Metaverse become real, to play out in a similar fashion, that is if seeds haven't already been sown on VRChat. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL
nickdothutton 4y ago
Yet during the golden era of USENET you had communities with polar opposite views existing within the same system _within their own groups/enclaves_. The difference is that the entire platform was not predicated on engagement.
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laurex 4y ago
The problem with any global platform where anyone can see anyone else's post and interact with it will be the same. We are humans, with different norms, cultural contexts, lived experiences, senses of humour, etc. When we try to solve this from any lens, whether it's "we should have egalitarian values" or "free speech" or "safety," we end up compounding this problem. While I think there are some things that are terrible and objectionable, there are other people who clearly feel differently. Does that make them "right?" and thus I need to be subjected to it? No. Does that make me then get to decide what is right? When we put people with such different views into the same space, we incentivise those who get attention from creating a rise or reaction from the people who are different, so it's not as simple as 'just don't look at or follow what you don't like.' There isn't a way to magic OR tech our way out of this. To me, an optimistic view of the future internet is one in which we find small communities, and spend our time in them, even if other people think they are terrible. There's a paradox when it comes to how 'echo chambers' work. It turns our that when we feel seen, when we have an actual sense of belonging from knowing others (not one from aligning with this or that "side") we simply become less prone to polarization and anti-social behaviour. What has caused the current problems isn't people hanging out and agreeing, it's putting people in contexts where they feel like they need to signal disagreement or agreement to people who they don't align with (to be 'acceptable to ones they do align with), even to the point where they are agreeing or disagreeing with things that make literally no sense. So if you are thinking about re-building a global platform, please reconsider and imagine what it might look like if you spent the time you do now on Twitter actually talking to someone or extending a welcoming space.
ddingus 4y ago
I disagree, though not entirely. You are right about it not being a tech problem at the core. However, tech can easily enable and augment and make the human solutions possible. Technically, users could be using better tools to manage their interactions. In a human sense, there is something often overlooked, and that is our current norms do very little to educate people about their options when it comes to speech they don't like. By far the number one response is righteous indignation and that is by far the most likely wrong thing to do. People can ignore, mute, block, and potentially use other tools to be created. One handy tool would be to pause for period of time, say an hour, day, week, month, etc... there are others. A core realization many have yet to have is conversations go bad when we let them go bad! To that end, people can respond with humor, questions, redirect to topic at hand and more! The power to do that comes by weighing speech. Consider getting called an ass by a clown. Who cares? They are a clown and that exchange is as laughable as it is useless! So that is the first thing. We need to weigh speech and gain strength from that. No need to respond from a wounded or harmed point of view. Just how harmful can drivel from someone we don't really know be? Answer is none. We just do not have to take the bait. When we take ownership of our interactions instead of assuming an entity like Twitter being able to take on that role (it can't)[0], great things happen! One of those is understanding others better. Another is people talking to or with, not AT or PAST one another. [0] No entity can take that role and leave us with realistic speech in most cases. What happens is people do not want to be offended, and they expect the entity to handle that for them. Result? Disneyland, highly regulated, near useless and insulting[1] speech for everyone. Not good. [1] Insulting to anyone able to manage their conversations! Tools that encourage and empower people to do that would transform discourse. Twitter is in a prime position to make a big change in this area and have it stick. Contact me for more on this. I am dead serious and have many years experience applying these ideas online as well as in the workplace with good results. I cannot say it loudly enough! Each of us needs to own how we respond to others and weigh incoming speech appropriately. So far, we have taken the lazy way and look at the mess! Time to level up. Improve discourse and then talk to one another and reduce the polarization. Most of that is a direct artifact of seriously harmful tools in a "sick" body politic.
ComplexSystems 4y ago
There is no "human behavior" problem. There is a coordinated effort to ruin the platform by various groups, from Super PACs to foreign governments and everything in between, by turning it into an information warfare battlefield. An enormous amount of Twitter is made up of people simply not posting their honest opinion at all.
insane_dreamer 4y ago
I wish Elon would have the guts to break away from the ad-based model, which is the root of many of social media's problems. Charge users $2/month. This will: - reduce bots / spam accounts (even if someone is willing to pay it'll be difficult to set up a credit card for each account) - reduce all the effort that goes into trying to maximize time spent on the platform (which drives ad revenue) - the focus becomes more on content rather than clicks - focus the platform on what users want rather than what advertisers want It won't solve the polarization issues, but it will help.
rjsw 4y ago
One technical solution could be to have a platform that lets people think they have posted controversial stuff that can be seen by others but not actually make it visible. People who have been shadowbanned here still waste their time posting.
endorphine 4y ago
Related discussion on Lex Fridman's podcast, where social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues about the negative effects of social media. For example, he argues kids shouldn't be allowed on Twitter and Facebook until 16 or 18. https://youtu.be/f0un-l1L8Zw https://youtu.be/f0un-l1L8Zw Pretty interesting discussion.
UIUC_06 4y ago
It takes awhile, but one can already create the personalized Twitter experience Elon cited in his letter to advertisers. You just Block everyone who disagrees with you, even slightly, as well as any nut job you see. It takes a while, but eventually, the only wrong or insane tweets on your TL are someone you Follow, "X", trashing someone of the wrong persuasion, "Y". So you Block Y. It does get a little boring, but still, you're aware of what the morons on the other side are saying. You can't avoid it. It's similar to watching MSNBC but not Fox, or vice versa.
zepppotemkin 4y ago
IMO twitter has always been for losers
standardUser 4y ago
I'm sure the tiny cross-section of people who are active Twitter users will always find a place to fight online. But the rest of us might want to stop amplifying their idiotic whining because withput that amplification, it's
standardUser 4y ago
I'm sure the tiny cross-section of people who are active Twitter users will always find a place to fight online. But the rest of us might want to stop amplifying their idiotic whining because without that amplification, it's just another internet forum cesspool. A YouTube comment section with the occasional celebrity.
TheRealPomax 4y ago
This feels a bit like there's fire in the house and instead of discussing how to improve fire extinguisher design, now we're talking about how catching fire is innate to the materials the house is made of and that we should focus on how we can build a house to take into account how fires start based on human behaviour. In both analogies, the house is still on fire.
nathias 4y ago
It is definitely a technical problem to solve, they foster this kind of behavior because of algo design to optimize add sales. Even just not having add sales would make internet a better place. Also, you can avoid all of the problems of OP on twitter by just unfollowing these kinds of people and consume content that's actually interesting not just a reaction to US local politics.
secondcoming 4y ago
Twitter has always been a shitshow. I genuinely don't understand why some people are getting so upset by what's going on with it at the moment. It's just a company that made some people very wealthy at the expense of everyone else.
stormbrew 4y ago
All I really want is to get off the "the user is the product" rollercoaster. It's been nothing but a disaster for everyone and I don't think it's necessary. "One big social network to rule them all" is an induced need. When you let go of the idea that everyone needs to be in the same room screaming at the top of their lungs to be heard you can let go of a lot of other toxic bullshit we've all let ourselves get accustomed to.
tkk23 4y ago
>we need to look into why these things are happening. It does not seem like a technical problem [...]. It's more of a personal, interpersonal and a social problem Should society adapt to the social networks or should the social networks adapt to society? Social networks make the problems of society visible. Does this mean that all social problems have to be resolved? Social networks can also be designed in a way that society can continue as it is. Even if it is necessary to resolve the personal and social problems, how could they be resolved without technology? There are no new problems, they are just more visible. If researchers haven't resolved them until now, chances are that they won't resolve them soon without game-changing new technology.
jojosbuddy 4y ago
"can have extremely polarized views" usually results when people want [extreme] attention in a sea of chatter. "feel the need to defend their polarized but flawed viewpoint at any cost" usually results when people want [extreme] attention in a sea of chatter. "are virtue signaling others but refuse to take any accountability whatsoever" a tactic typically used when people want [extreme] attention in a sea of chatter. "have less and less attention span" Time is money, and it's better to waste your time reading/bickering about your tweet for ads that wasting time writing a meaningful tweet that'll be obsolete in 10min. "only consume the content that aligns with their views" usually results when people want [extreme] attention and creates an echo chamber. Conclusion: we got a lot of narcissistic people on twitter. The ultimate digital soapbox.
jedberg 4y ago
There is no fix, it's human nature. Most people are rational and balanced and willing to hear the opinions of others. And until recently the only way to have an interactive conversion was in person, or one on one remotely. Only very recently has the public square moved online. And being online gives people protection to say what they really think without fear of repercussions from others. The only way to fix it is to move discussion of heated topics to being in person only. But this will never happen. But Twitter could easily fix this with technology -- all they have to do is go back to your feed being a chronological list of the tweets from people you follow. Or create two feeds -- one that is heavily moderated and has advertising, and one that is unmoderated with no ads. Of course they won't do either one, because it lowers engagement with advertising, which is how they make money. And that makes sense, they are a for profit company. They are optimizing for their customers, the advertisers.
pengo 4y ago
Call me a freeloader if you wish; I'd welcome the moniker. I use Twitter lists and Tweetdeck's filters to enjoy a firehose-free Twitter experience. I follow accounts from around the world representing a broad range of interests and views, and almost none of the problems listed by the originator of this thread. Therefore I have to conclude that "the issues of Twitter" experienced by most users are intentional. I also have to say that should Twitter make the mechanisms I rely on unavailable (definitely a possibility given the new CEO's track record), I will have no option but to leave Twitter. I'm not willing to subject myself to sort of user experience described by the originator of this thread.
g42gregory 4y ago
Here is what would make Twitter much better for me: 1. Lower the temperature of the discussion: simple, published rules like “you can use more than X(low number) expletives per Y(high number) words of text” and “you can not have ANY calls for violence” and 2. No censorship of the topics. I think, this would restore public trust in the platform (but I am sure there are other, possibly equally good solutions that Twitter can come up with).
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
1) Changing human nature is a much more difficult task than fixing some Twitter algorithms. 2) Modern technical means can affect human behavior on a large scale. For example, a certain northern country managed to influence elections in a certain rich country with a very modest investment in social media trolling. Or look at a certain very populous country. Everyone's views on social media are very harmonically aligned.
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btbuildem 4y ago
I my mind, the main issue with twitter (and the rest of "social") is that they're funded by advertisers. It's a fundamentally broken model, because it makes "engagement" the main metric of success, and this in turn drives all kinds of dark patterns, gradually turning any online space into a cesspool of rage and mediocrity. I believe that is the primary issue, and most of the issues identified by OP are consequences of this.
bartimus 4y ago
It's an interpersonal/social problem between people who are not being a person. There's numerous things you can (algorithmically) do with regard to people who choose to be real persons on the platform. Especially when payment/business comes into play.
jwarden 4y ago
It’s a socio-technical problem. But technology definitely contributes to the problem: the algorithms determine what kind of behaviors receive attention and this determines the kind of behaviors dominate the platform. I have written more about this idea here: https://deliberati.io/the-law-of-attention/ https://deliberati.io/the-law-of-attention/
Rury 4y ago
Agreed, the problem isn't technical, it's political. Sometimes I wonder if people actually understand what "politics" actually means or ultimately entails. Politics is the result of wants. Person or group A wants things one way, Person or group B wants things another way, and these two sets of wants directly conflict in someway. How do you remedy who gets to have what they want in such a situation? That striving for getting what you want, is the literal definition of politics. At extremes, it means fighting one another to the death to resolve the matter (war/violence). Often times though, it's remedied by a bipartisan solution (which explains most things you see passed by governments and outcomes involving multiple parties), but such a solution only ensues when all parties involved are willing to have such a solution. If one party doesn't want such an outcome, and is still willing to fight to the death over such a matter, then that's sort of what happens... Anyhow, with that said and by no offense, I find your post a bit ironic. Particularly that you imply it's an issue needing to be fixed, that people on twitter: - can have extremely polarized views and - only consume the content that aligns with their views These two are related, do you not see? Reducing polarized views, entails reducing the possible content that people could view on the platform, and thus is essentially restricting the platform to an aligned view or set of approved views (even if slightly - which means doing so would be polarizing in its own way). Basically, outside your post (imo correctly) stating that this isn't a technical issue, your post to me is like saying: "Twitter isn't the media I want to consume, as there exists viewpoints on issues on the platform (held by other people) - extreme polar opposite views which I don't like, and I only want to consume media that I like." Which would make you guilty of: - wanting to only consume content that aligns with your views

210 points by anthropodie 4y ago

BeefWellington 4y ago

What I want is pretty simple (and isn't for everyone): I just want a spot I can keep tabs on the broader goings on of other people in infosec.

helsinkiandrew 4y ago
> I just want a spot I can keep tabs on the broader goings on of other people in infosec. I think this is the problem Twitter/Musk has - Twitter isn't one product but a million. Just about every user has their own way of using Twitter - from finding out about what's goings on in some niche (work, sport, hobby), seeing what celebrities are doing, asking their community questions, discussing politics, finding out news, promoting their newsletter, podcast, crypto scam or product, or growing their twitter followers. Anything that makes the way people use twitter less optimal is going to piss off substantial numbers of users.
- BeefWellington 4y ago
  The other problem is that the majority of advertisers don't want to spend their ad dollars on a platform full of people spamming various racial slurs. If that's what happens as a result of Twitter's changes in policies, and there's a flight of advertisers, I'm not sure what end result there is for Twitter except hemorrhaging money for Musk until he shuts it down.
  - mariodiana 4y ago
    I don't see people "spamming" racial slurs. The most inflammatory thing I see is videos of young groups of African-Americans behaving badly. In the replies, I see comments like "usual suspects," or various memes that are admittedly racial slurs: for example, Jane Goodall with a pair of binoculars and the caption "Interesting behavior." I'm not saying that's nice. That's bad. But it's the most easily avoided thing. If you see a video posted like that, what do you expect to see? Thoughtful social commentary about marginalized peoples of our urban ghettoes? Twitter is so much more than the above. To me it, seems like the charge of "racial slurs" is itself a kind of defamation. There have always been dark corners of the Internet. Twitter's dark corners are so easily avoided, and a fraction of the traffic on the platform, as far as I can tell. Is there actually any data allowing people to make sense of it all, as opposed to allowing them to make a biased argument?
    - BeefWellington 4y ago
      I mean, your post reads like an apology for the behaviour. My point mainly was that Twitter's success going forwards depends on ad revenue and there was apparently a huge uptick in slurs of all kinds right after the deal closed and he became owner.[1] Maybe there's some untapped reservoir of people willing to shell out to have the Twitter blue checkmark, given it used to have some cachet and they will successfully pivot their funding model to a subscription one, but I doubt that will actually account for the difference. [1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/shaunharper/2022/10/31/elon-musk-twitter-takeover-leads-to-n-word-and-hate-speech-increase-lebron-james-calls-for-action/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/shaunharper/2022/10/31/elon-mus...
nunez 4y ago
yes, this. i tried to use twitter for news and devops/sre related stuff, but you have to drink the firehose to find content or use your network to find people to follow. absolutely does not help that many of the more active personalities also engage in creating FUD. i use nitter now.
- seti0Cha 4y ago
  Yeah, that's what breaks it for me. I try to follow people for technical content, but so many people periodically inject their political opinions that keeping it purely technical is difficult. That'd be ok, except that people who do drive-by political posting almost never post anything interesting or original. It's usually smug attacks on strawman positions or repeating their political tribe's concern of the day. I'm perfectly happy to see original or carefully thought out political views, but I find this low quality stuff hard to ignore because it triggers both my contrarian and pedantic instincts.

tmaly 4y ago

You could probably say the same thing about how people react to professional sports. Everybody has an opinion.

rrwo 4y ago

I'm really sympathetic with this. I don't think another "improved" social media or blogging platform is the answer. Even if you have a perfect way to fix the social problems with social media, it's still a massive time and productivity sink. I don't have enough time in the day to read every interesting article and blog post, let along engage in debate or add a meaningful comment. Nor to I have enough time top write thoughtful articles about things that I am thinking about, let along ready any comments people might have. This reminds me that I should be disengaging from even more websites (this one included).

jklinger410 4y ago

In a tangentially related note. The value in a social media network is the viral momentum, not the cool engineering tricks or fundamental features. Virality, like any success, involves being in the right place at the right time. This is largely unpredictable. The problems that social media networks have need to be sorted out on the platforms themselves. The graveyard of dead projects is full of clones of popular softwares with slightly different features. I'm sure many of them were fantastic ideas.

hackyhacky 4y ago

Hacker News has a great community, features informative discourse, and doesn't suffer from the ailments that you list (or suffers from them much less than Twitter). Therefore we should invite all Twitter users to join our healthy community. Everybody wins. Edit: I hoped it would be obvious, but the second sentence of this comment was supposed to be sarcastic.

verdverm 4y ago
HN is still viable because it hasn't reached the masses. The self policing works well currently, but I'm not sure it would with the general populace
- runarberg 4y ago
  HN is industry specific. It very much has reach the masses, but only within a specific trait. It functions more like a trade union’s social media. I actually don’t think the self policing here is working at all, rather the excellent moderation by dang is doing the bulk of the work, keeping HN amazing.
awb 4y ago
HN has a heavy moderation policy. Things like gossip and rants are removed. It works for a small, niche network, but not for a global one.
pjc50 4y ago
.. because it doesn't allow pictures, has aggressive downvotes, and a very careful moderator (dang) with the power to ban people. The problem is that dang doesn't scale.
- rsync 4y ago
  I think the absence of pictures and avatars is a very significant aspect of the HN success.
latexr 4y ago
> Therefore we should invite all Twitter users to join our healthy community. See the Eternal September as a cautionary tale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

edude03 4y ago

> only consume the content that aligns with their views And for this reason I believe social media is fundamentally harmful to society.

lambic 4y ago
I think this might be partly a generational thing. My son and my younger friends follow a wider variety of people and aren't so easily sucked into the echo chambers. The networks are also partly to blame with their recommendation systems.
- goatlover 4y ago
  Then again Reddit skews younger and the main subs are echo chambers.
mikkergp 4y ago
Say more about this, I’ve sort of come to the opposite conclusion, especially in social media. Generally speaking, the _way_ people express their views in social media has distancing effect for me. In real life? With people talking about their life stories, sure, I may learn more about people and open my mind, but I think better echo chambers in “hot take” spaces online would open my mind and make me more tolerant of opposing views.

Swizec 4y ago

> surveys to find the "why" and how we might be able to fix it or avoid it from happening again A 2-party system will always create polarization and lead to black/white thinking in all aspects of life I think. As a European moving to USA, the part I miss most about back home is the willingness to think of all issues as “Well there’s 5+ sides to this, let’s discuss”. I think that outlook stems directly from our multiparty system where you usually have more than 5 parties in power who need to debate and come to a conclusion. In Europe, even the fringiest of movements (like the pirate party) often get at least 1 seat in parliament. This may be more symbolic than practical, but it does lead to there being at least someone, somewhere, who says “Yo, this has an impact on fair use! We should discuss” edit: To expand on why I think this is the why, I’ve found that non-US Twitter is a lot less polarized. There’s the occasional hot button issue that a politician brings up to start a fight, yes, but on US twitter everything gets polarized. edit2: Perhaps the easiest solution is to ban politicians from Twitter. They’re the ones usually starting shit and trolling for a ruckus.

pjc50 4y ago
Certain parts of non-US twitter were "polarized" enough to start the Arab Spring, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine (leading to its current situation), and it seems that through social media of some sort Iran is currently undergoing a revolt against its own morality police. A huge part of Twitter's popularity and success is linked to its role in coordinating anti-authoritarian action.
- jen20 4y ago
  > Orange Revolution in Ukraine (leading to its current situation) A gross mischaracterization of which you should be utterly ashamed. Responsibility for the current situation in Ukraine lies at the feet of one man, Putin, and those who continue to enable him.
  - pjc50 4y ago
    I meant the current situation as in everything from the deposing of Yanukovich onwards; the ability of the Ukranians to force a freer, fairer state that isn't entirely a Russian puppet state is their agency and it's down to the Orange Revolution / Euromaidan etc. This is a good thing.

youssef_ib1 4y ago

account roblox

wayne-li2 4y ago

All the problems you listed can be solved though. In fact, HN is a good demonstration of it. Its policy decisions have largely led to one of the last bastions on the internet that still seem sane. The issue is how a social media product can solve the problems above and be a growing, profitable company. HN does not have a direct profit motive nor does it need to grow exponentially to satisfy investors. Personally I don’t believe it’s possible because as long as engagement is optimized, extremity will always be preferred.

edent 4y ago

I disagree. Your points aren't necessarily wrong, but they ignore one big factor. Twitter chooses what content to promote to people. I could use Twitter quite happily not knowing about the latest "scandal" in, say, the knitting world. But Twitter actively promotes that content to me - either with the "trending" sidebar or by showing me content that it thinks will increase my engagement. That is a technical problem. How do you surface engaging content without also surfacing harmful / polarising / abusive content? If a specific Tweet got a million likes, a "neutral" algorithm might choose to promote it. But unless that algorithm knows that the Tweet is deliberately inflammatory, it can't choose to de-prioritise it. So, yes, there is a problem with human nature. But it is being exacerbated by deliberate technical and policy choices.

csours 4y ago
> How do you surface engaging content without also surfacing harmful / polarising / abusive content? But the most engaging content is also the most harmful / polarizing / abusive! "The algorithm" is mostly humans clicking buttons.
- runeks 4y ago
  I guess a solution is for the algorithm to stop showing me tweets because other people like them. Ie. allowing me to tick a box so that my recommendations are based only on my own engagement, and not that of the average Twitterer.
- boplicity 4y ago
  > "The algorithm" is mostly humans clicking buttons. Actually, the algorithm is not the button clicks, but the code that interprets those button clicks. I don't think many people notice this, but HN gives a bonus to longer posts, in terms of keeping them at the top. It's not just the upvotes that determine which votes surface to the top. There are probably other signals that are inputted into the algorithm, as well, with different weights attached to them. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if certain inflammatory words or phrases subtracted points from a post on HN. For the forum I run, I auto-generate a list of the top posts for the week. It is based on the number of likes, but also on the length of the post. This is then filtered manually, removing inflammatory posts. HN, with its effective moderation, doesn't seem to have much of a different process. 1. You can design an algorithm that optimizes for engagement and attempts to surface non-inflammatory posts. 2. You can design another algorithm that actively penalizes inflammatory posts. 3. You can further add a human element (a moderator) to penalize or decrease the visibility of inflammatory posts. These are things that actually happen in online communities. However, they also don't always happen to the degree that would be beneficial to society as a whole. Hence, the problem. Like other industries (oil extraction), there are negative externalities that can and should be accounted for.

mFixman 4y ago

I used to agree with you until I created a new Twitter account from scratch. I'm not American and I specifically put non-political things in my interests. Yet, the second I signed up I got the following: 1. A notification about a smug reply a rando made to a Republican Congressman. 2. Posts from a meme page with a Pepe the frog avatar showing homeless people fighting in San Francisco. 3. Somebody I don't follow accusing another person I don't follow of being a nazi. The problem with Twitter is that it needs high engagement, so it strongly recommends posts that are low on quality but high on emotion. This gets people to post the most smug and controversial takes they can handle. I recommend everyone creating a new social media account every once in a while to see what the rest of the world see. It's as enlightening as browsing the internet with Adblock disabled.

kyleyeats 4y ago
That seems like a pretty good cross-section of the discourse the week before election day. Not sure if it's worth extrapolating.
- mFixman 4y ago
  This happened in May. It's probably even worse now.
  - kyleyeats 4y ago
    Oh, then yeah that's just annoying. I was annoyed off of it not too long ago as a long-time user, and it was for political stuff for me as well. We won't have a good picture of post-Elon Twitter until the 9th, but I'm cautiously optimistic.
- christkv 4y ago
  I think the problem is why does he a non American get pushed shit from American political fringes at all.
  - tpurves 4y ago

manholio 4y ago

> No amount of algorithms can improve human behavior on any platform Humans aren't yet computers, so algorithms are (obviously) not directly relevant to them. But in the general sense, that clam is wrong. Human behavior is amenable to rules, incentives and social pressure, and technical tools have found a role in shaping that since the dawn of civilization. From simple technology such as voting down to the most oppressive algorithmic surveillance state, algorithms can be used to influence and control human behavior or enforce rules.

fullshark 4y ago

Subreddits solve I think the big problem of twitter, namely political flamebait leaking everywhere. Compartmentalize and quarantine that stuff and maybe you can get a healthy message board going, but I think people will never be as open and naive as they were in the early days of twitter / FB again.

airstrike 4y ago
Subreddits are the definition of echo chambers. The only subreddits that work are the ones with heavy moderation to keep things (a) sane and (b) on topic
- fullshark 4y ago
  Echo chambers seem to be the inevitable end state of any of message board. People with contrarian positions eventually get tired and leave except those who get off on that and people love having their views affirmed. Algorithmic feeds amplify this phenomenon big time but you can see it on even traditional message boards.
PM_me_your_math 4y ago
In the early days, Reddit was touted as a free speech platform (sound familiar?) yet it was always designed to be an echo chamber, and changes to the product up to this point have only ever served that end. The mechanics of upvote/downvote, in collaboration with activist admins & moderators, ensures that comments which oppose the current group think are hidden, while comments that re-enforce the group-think (even if it is plainly false) are elevated and treated as canon. The result is that opposing view points are drowned out and then stop all together when those with opposing view points realize the futility. To the outside observer, it would appear that the group think is the real world, when in reality, it is not. This is by design and it is not accidental. Given the politics of reddit staff (which closely match twitter staff) one can see the common thread among these companies and why so many people believe the gaming is by design (because it is.) Reddit is an unmitigated cesspool of mostly 20-somethings who have accomplished very little, but seemingly know everything. It is one giant cluster-** of propaganda save for a handful of subreddits that are actually sane places with great ideas and content.

nico 4y ago

> It's more of a personal, interpersonal and a social problem which needs extensive research, surveys to find the "why" and how we might be able to fix it or avoid it from happening again. You are right about it not being a technology problem, but what you are describing there is how you approach a technical problem. You are never going to solve it that way. In fact it might never be solved, because the issue is politics, it’s people intentionally wanting to game the systems to influence masses and get their way. No amount of research and surveys to “find the why” will allow you to “fix” it or “avoid it from happening again”.

amadeuspagel 4y ago

There's no fire in the house. It's completely natural for people on HN to discuss what the next big thing might be, what we want from a new platform. Surveys? If you want to do surveys, sure, easy to do with MTurk. But if discussing the next big thing is like discussing how to improve fire extinguisher design while there's a fire in the house, then what is doing surveys like?

dcist 4y ago

I don't know that Twitter actually needs to be fixed. It's very good for what it is - a microblogging platform that provides instant, timely updates on news and current topics. I think Twitter could, however, capitalize on its platform and offer additional, successful features. Twitter could offer Patreon and Substack-esque features where users could subscribe to additional, richer, and more in-depth content from content creators. Twitter could also re-explore a live broadcast feature with associated live chat (similar to YouTube and Facebook live broadcasts). Twitter is a huge platform and has plenty of opportunity, but I don't think it suffers from inherent problems like Facebook (which has an aging userbase, users abandoning the platform, and a big spam problem).

mikkergp 4y ago
I don’t think “I don’t think it suffers from inherent problems” is a universal opinion: https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-where-did-tweeters-go-twitter-is-losing-its-most-active-users-internal-2022-10-25/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-where-did-tweet... Also, people talk about the bot problem like non-stop, including the new owner.
- dcist 4y ago
  Oh yeah, definitely not a universal opinion. Just my 100% subjective viewpoint.
- lanstin 4y ago
  Only people that follow a lot of crypto people have not problems. And mostly. If you aren’t reading real time, but like an hour old, the bots will have been hidden.

staunch 4y ago

> It's like there's fire in the house and all of us are discussing how to improve fire extinguisher design. It's more like there's a problem with a new technology and people are discussing how to improve the technology. Twitter is just a technology product that some few people created a few years ago. It's not a discovery like fire where we have to learn to adapt to its nature. We can change its nature radically. Of course there are social problems that won't be resolved by technology but there's no reason to believe this is one of them. Twitter is a technology that created and exacerbated specific social problems. It's entirely plausible that it can be improved to eliminate and mitigate these same problems.

photochemsyn 4y ago

I just set up a Twitter account for the first time, to see what the Musk era is like. One immediate issue I notice is that the recommendation algorithm immediately starts siloing you into a roomfull of mirrors. Based on who you follow, it recommends similar people to follow (based apparently on who your followees follow plus maybe other data), so you quickly end up in an echo chamber. That's not the whole story, Twitter also tries to push-recommend 'noted celebrities' to follow, who can be summed up as the type of people who make the rounds of corporate media weekend talk shows. There doesn't seem to be any way to opt out of these recommendations. So far it's not a very illuminating experience. I notice that many people get around the character limit by posting images of text, which is an interesting work-around. Really, I think you'd need multiple Twitter accounts to get around this siloing effect. For example, on political issues, you could set up, say. 'socialist-communist-left', 'libertarian-capitalist', 'state-corporate-authoritarian', and 'alt-right MAGAs', 'politicians and media talking heads', etc. in order to get representative samples of the various competing US political views and actors. All in all I think it's kind of a waste of time, there are better information sources. [edit as others note, no real changes from pre-Musk era have taken place, so I'll just look at it once a week for a while]

jen20 4y ago
> Based on who you follow, it recommends similar people to follow I would actually be rather happy if this were the case beyond the trivial examples. For example, if I were to create an account and follow someone from the Linux kernel or open-source licensing space, and I got recommendations of other people working in that are, that would be _great_. Instead, I got Joe Rogan and AOC forced into my timeline because that is what maximizes rage and thus engagement. I'm out.
- mnw21cam 4y ago
  It seems like a hard problem to solve: I want to be siloed into subject interest groups, like to do with the various hobbies and work that I'm interested in. But I don't want to be shoved into an echo-chamber for politics. How does the algorithm distinguish between subject interest and politics? The difference is that for subject interest I'm looking for information specific to my subject, but the algorithm optimises instead for groups that agree with my opinion. I'd be quite happy to get information about my subject interest even if I don't agree with it. Then also the algorithm optimises for high drama, but that's a separate problem.

onion2k 4y ago

No amount of algorithms can improve human behavior on any platform. You can definitely make human behavior worse using an algorithm just by pushing content that provokes negative reactions in as many people as possible. I don't see why the opposite wouldn't be true. If the algorithm pushed uncontroversial content into people's timelines and didn't reward hateful crap they might get happier. Maybe Elon will give that a try!

paulusthe 4y ago
They wouldn't use it as much. The profitability of the site would suffer and it would cease to exist. It's not like Twitter set out trying to create an outrage machine. Their algorithms learned what people respond to - because responses, interaction, and time on the site is Twitter's goal - and gave them what they want. People don't want happy, good news. They don't want uncontroversial content. That's the problem, not Twitter, or its algos
bckr 4y ago
With utmost curiosity, how can making people happy get money for investors and SWE salaries?
- bee_rider 4y ago
  It can't, the whole ecosystem needs to collapse and then maybe some of those SWEs can go do something productive with their time.
- abeppu 4y ago
  You get content which makes people happy and optimistic about something which they now want to buy OR you gather information on what actually makes people happy (or at least engaged in something other than arguing), and sell that information. Less culture wars, more aspirational/fitness/self-care/nature-travel/interior design/organic subscription box/hygge content.
  - pjc50 4y ago
    Instagram already exists for the latter.

iinnPP 4y ago

I ran an official fan site once, for an EA title of all things. Doing this I learned some neat tricks to limit the amount of administration required. One thing that stuck was that there is a huge benefit to maintaining a specific section for garbage posts. Sticky threads existed titled: Potentially offensive/spam? Post it here. Everyone used it and followed the very few rules of the spam board. I rarely had to move anything. People would even use links to their rants as replies to regular threads, clearly identified so that people could avoid it if they wanted. I also did the same for another hobby forum I ran in highschool. With 3 mods and one other admin we were able to keep a forum completely clean for years with ~2 million monthly unique visitors. I do believe Twitter is about to do something similar.

xiphias2 4y ago
It looks cool, but right now there are 2 sides of the same coin. Maybe one would need a ,,victim / possibly being offended'' section as well.
- jabroni_salad 4y ago
  If being an AO3 regular has taught me anything it's that some people are just incapable of watching out for themselves. You can put all the warnings and tags on your writing and other people can configure their profile to automatically hide anything with warnings and tags that they dont like. You can tag yourself as 'dead dove do not eat' to specially indicate that none of the abhorrent shit in your tags is there ironically. You can make your post privileged so only registered members (and the site has a waiting period) can even see your fic exists, filtering out bystanders. Readers will STILL complain that you 'subjected them' to a noncon cannibalism fic as if they somehow did not have a clear roadsign at the top.
- iinnPP 4y ago
  You don't let people be offended by it. There's no "offensive" reporting, only illegal content reporting. The people who want to post edgy things will go there. The immediate result is that every other area of discussion becomes less "violent and offensive." People who are offended in the garbage pile get told not to go to the garbage pile. The offenders however, get told to keep their garbage in the pile. Nobody gets censored. Nobody gets offended (without ignoring the warnings.) The entire planet cools down. I have no idea if it would work at Twitter's scale though.

Herbstluft 4y ago

Until not that long ago I was a pretty happy Twitter user. I curated my follows (keeping them between 150 and 200), only followed people posting interesting, creative, or scientific things. When anyone started tweeting or retweeting low quality material, I simply unfollowed. Unfortunately, the devs at Twitter hate the way I use it. Nowadays ever 5th post or so on my timeline is from someone I do not follow, either "people you follow follow this" or "might be interesting to you" crap. It's almost always drama, politics, provocations, people screaming at each other, or a mix of those things. I can vividly imagine what the timelines of casuals users look like...and it becomes obvious why social media are such hubs for hatred and perpetual drama. There is little "to solve", because the biggest problems of social media are explicitly created by social media companies. Or as someone would call it whose business it is to manipulate you and to make you miserable (like the devs at Twitter and Facebook): "creating engagement". Allow users to properly curate their timelines. Then we can at least take the claim that social media companies actually want anything to improve serious.

lanstin 4y ago
Do you use the time based fed or the default timeline feed? I use only the time based feed, and I read on my tablet zoomed into the middle third of the screen so I don’t really see trending or whatever. I do follow a lot more people than you, but I agree when that is all you see, it is like a allow listed Reddit, pretty easy to make an interest and entertaining content feed.
- passwordoops 4y ago
  I use time based feed and the recommended crap is massively reduced compared to "Home" but they manage to sneak in recommendations once in a while
- cma 4y ago
  Use Firefox and you can install ublock origin, then zap the trending section with the element picker.
  - 4y ago

dathinab 4y ago

It's true that a lot of this things are not technical problems. But you can create systems which amplify such behaviour and systems which avoid such behaviour in many ways. Similar you can design systems which enable fraud, especially social-engineering based ones and you can build systems which makes fraud harder. And one thing which anyone having run any kind of discussion platform weather in the internet or physically knows is you need proper and strict moderation or things will go down hill. Twitter always had been doing a soso job. And as far as I can tell things will get worse, not better with how Musks is approaching things as he seem to either not understand the problems or doesn't care.

newbieuser 4y ago

i think the biggest problem of twitter is that it always highlights the tweets that get a lot of likes, even if you have nothing to do with them. in this way, it becomes very easy for fake news and nonsense content to spread virally. eg elon musk tweets lol

pessimizer 4y ago

> - can have extremely polarized views > - feel the need to defend their polarized but flawed viewpoint at any cost > - are virtue signaling others but refuse to take any accountability whatsoever > - have less and less attention span > - only consume the content that aligns with their views This is a bit of a weird diagnosis. The first four aren't problems with twitter, and the last one is simply false. The most politically polarized people are constantly hate-reading content from the other side. The only sure issue that twitter has is its cozy relationship with the US government, and the personal issue that I have with it is the enormous amount of harassment it allows while at the same time heavily moderating content for its politics/worldview. Every other issue I have with twitter is technical, like its horrible web design, its lack of interop, the disorganized nature of "verification." > It's like there's fire in the house It's not. It's like people are trying to convince us there's fire in the house, and that this fire entirely consists of people's speech about their honestly held and very common beliefs.

dfxm12 4y ago

These problems existed before Twitter and they'll exist after whatever changes current management brings. Some things can't be solved, and tbh, Twitter is mostly a bunch of random nobodies yelling into the abyss. That's just gonna happen. Who cares? What can you do? However, I do think the real problem is when accounts that have high status (like a blue check? posts that appear on trending tab? posts that are sponsored?) engage Twitter dishonestly. If there's a technical solution to this, that's where you start. It's hard to prove dishonesty at first blush, but when there's a pattern of behavior similar to what you're describing, it becomes more clear.

phailhaus 4y ago

Agreed. The problem with Twitter is in its design. It's in what it allows you to do, and what it doesn't. I'll repeat what I raised in the other post: 1. People are high-variance, and yet we're only allowed to follow individual accounts. That's a problem, especially because network effects mean that one person's voice gets amplified exponentially with the number of followers they have. Consider the six degrees of separation: applied to Twitter, we realize that it only takes 6 retweets to reach basically everyone. Following "Topics" is close but not good enough, because you cannot voluntarily opt into topics or really understand why a given tweet is within a topic; Twitter uses its Computer Magic to categorize tweets and makes all the decisions in a black box. 2. The only negative feedback is unfollowing. This is a problem because it means that practically all forms of engagement are treated equally. Oh, this tweet is getting a lot of comments, let's boost it so more people see it! Whoops, it was about space lasers. We are stuck repeatedly fighting Bad Takes because they have to be argued against every time, always gain nonzero traction. They are never put to rest. There is very little negative incentive against being a garbage human on Twitter, especially if you're anonymous. We're never going to change core human behavior, but the design of a platform can guide that behavior. For example, the HN and Reddit model of posting means that your previous karma has no impact on your post's reach. That has serious implications for the kind of conversations that become popular on the platform. Another example: Facebook's commenting model is not nested and therefore doesn't allow you to have conversations with other people. So what do you get? Everyone screaming into the void, vaguely in the direction of other people. Everyone talks about "changing the system", and yet all the suggestions are mostly cosmetic like charging for accounts. That doesn't change the fact that every time Elon tweets, it's automatically shunted to a million people no matter how bonkers it is.

renonn 4y ago
- phailhaus 4y ago
  That's not constructive feedback, and contributes nothing to the conversation.
4y ago

ck2 4y ago

Twitter only has one problem. How to pay $1 BILLION per year in financing. It's not actually possible, no user is going to put up with the fees or advertising required for that level of revenue.

nunez 4y ago
say what you will about Musk and his team, but if they can get people like myself to gladly fork over $7000 and (soon) $12,000 for what basically amounts to a feature toggle, I think they can figure this one out too.

spion 4y ago

No, the issues are quite technical too, but they cannot be fixed just by changing the feed selection algorithm - they are core to twitter's design. Twitter is essentially a marketing machine / popularity contest hybrid. There are no barriers to publishing something on twitter: - you don't have to be correct. - you don't have to ellaborate your claims (In fact, you specifically cant - the space is limited enough to disallow it) - you don't have to provide any references to your claims, and you can easily post screenshots or images from other sources without referencing and frame them in whatever light you wish. There are even fewer limits to boosting something by retweeting it. You don't even have to read it, and "want to read the article first" sounds like a joke precisely because the rest of the platform never really cared about that. By themselves, the above properties would not be that big of a deal. However, the retweet mechanic essentially creates an evolutionary environment for ideas. Tweets essentially become brain viruses. Their goal is to replicate by retweeting i.e. by causing a human to click the retweet button on them. The environment formed by twitter itself as a platform, as well as its users, essentially "decides" which "viruses" are more fit to replicate and which ones aren't. Now the question is how much of this is twitter's fault and how much is the environment? Sure, humans can take some of the blame. Humans are faulty and fragile and prone to biases / getting triggered / reacting emotionally. But that's precisely why we build things - to compensate for our faults. You could easily imagine alternative systems which instead of being optimized for marketing (often an exercise in bending the truth as much as possible in a way that benefits someone), are optimized for something else: - retweeting something could require you to check the references and ensure things are correct - the character limit is inverted i.e. humans will need to write - every post is peer reviewed; some basics are automatically checked (e.g. the presence of references) Or, we could simply get rid of the exponential aspect. Reddit suffers from some of the same flaws, for example, but they're less pronounced - because its more of a linear rather than an exponential environment where best voted things surface to similar number of people (followers of the subreddit). Its this extreme environment with exponential properties (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aap9559 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aap9559) which makes us feel like "all of twitter" sucks and people suck. It doesn't really, but we don't get to see the parts that don't, because they have orders of magnitude less spread - the environment is extremely harsh to things not optimized for it. I actually have many examples of scientists posting throughly checked studies posting one "interesting" (but poorly done) study involving animals which they didn't think much of, and that study getting 2-3 orders of magnitude more tweets than the rest of their material (because it looks novel), thereby defining most people's perception of them. Some find it embarassing, others that are after the attention more than they're after the science decide to go the dark path or get surrounded by followers that feed their delusion. Humans are flawed, yes... but we could do so much better.

paulusthe 4y ago

I agree fully. The problem is that Twitter is designed with revenue in mind. Revenue requires the user use the product, ideally as much as possible, and the best way to do that is turn Twitter into a perpetual outrage machine where the loudest, most ridiculous voices get the attention because they inspire the most reaction. This is why Michael Tracey is so popular there. Nobody actually likes him; he exists to cause outrage and gets promoted by the Twitter algo precisely because of that. Outrage is attention, and attention is what Twitter wants, for revenue.

paulusthe 4y ago
The solution to this is to end the whole thing, because the profit motivation and the public square function are incompatible. A middle ground is extensive moderation, but that of course becomes political (and rightly so) which undermines the intent of moderation. Twitter is a cesspool and will always be so

csours 4y ago

Twitter's value prop is a flat audience of "the whole world". More and more, I see value in smaller groups in social media. The only good part of Facebook is Groups and Events. People talk about information or social bubbles, but on Twitter you still have bubbles. Any social group will form bubbles as soon as they start fighting about something. Having a flat view of the entire social graph does not prevent bubbles.

jalapenos 4y ago

Wouldn't this be fixed by grouping & filtering though? IRL we don't listen to such people, because we associate with people we like. Perhaps the problems would be resolved by improved ability to filter out undesirables? E.g. in the same way you can tell YouTube to not recommend whole channels, you could tell Twitter not to show any tweets grouped as political, or a sub-type of political.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

The entire world wasn't meant to share a single town square with anonymity sprinkled in.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

dave333 4y ago

AI can surely be trained to promote quality content and hide political snark and misinformation. How hard can it be?

aantix 4y ago

Absolutely disagree. The social issues are exasperated by their recommendations (inflammatory topics) and constraints (short tweets). In a town square, you can theoretically walk away from a screaming mob. On Twitter, this is nearly impossible with today's tools. It would be like wack-a-mole, for every one harassing user, two more would show up. So there has to be a way individually, to mass silence certain topics. E.g. Use a regular expression to block any topic AND/OR user that tweets about topic Y containing X word patterns.

3np 4y ago

It may not be a technical problem, but a way forward may require or be facilitated by not-yet mainstream or novel technical architectures and implementations, including new algorithms. (inb4 no, I'm not referring to tacking DOGE and USDC payments onto Birdsite)

scarface74 4y ago

Everything I know about Twitter’s technical history, it was a shit show when they first went public and now it’s considered pretty good and is actually referenced a lot in Designing Data Intensive Applications - the book you are always told to read to help pas a system design interview.

dqpb 4y ago

I think your looking at the problem wrong. It's not Twitter's job to fix people. It's Twitters job to connect people in a communications graph. This is absolutely a technical problem, as there are many possible configurations, operations, and filters one could apply.

nunez 4y ago

reddit's default home page has similar problems. a brand new account landing on /r/popular will see: - a post about kanye - cute photos - more politics - entertainment news this isn't so bad, but when you descend into the comments, it's all short, low-quality content. i agree that more research into how we got here could be interesting.

dreen 4y ago

I quit Twitter years ago not due to any of these problems (they are endemic to the whole of internet), but because I was addicted to the scrolling. It was a lot easier than I thought to quit and I can't even imagine anymore what I thought I would be missing. While this could be changed with code, it's highly unlikely to make me come back.

analog31 4y ago

I would add an item, which is that there are large, well funded, propaganda machines that end up with substantial control over any popular platform.

ThereIsNoWorry 4y ago

> It's more of a personal, interpersonal and a social problem which needs extensive research, surveys to find the "why" and how we might be able to fix it or avoid it from happening again. Changing human behavioural patterns that emerged after millions of years of evolution? This seems incredibly naive to me. We can build our technology around the fact that we humans as a species are as we are. Limit this kind of toxic behaviour by various means, e.g. moderation and developing algorithms that detect such emergent patterns and then change recommendation types. Things like these. But changing how we biologically work goes into a direction that is filled with moral and ethical landmines.

protomyth 4y ago

I just want to see the tweets of people I follow and stuff they retweet. I like the ability to turn off retweets from people I follow. I can even live with ads. I absolutely do not want to see what people like, trends, or tweets from randos that I don't follow. If I haven't indicated I feel it warrants my attention then leave me alone. My idea of celebrities is different than Twitters. Discovery is for search. I am less engaged with all the engagement added.

raldi 4y ago

The posts about replicating Twitter strike me like someone in 1995 talking about how best to create a CompuServe clone.

abeppu 4y ago

I think the palette of social media products today shows us that Twitter has options, but it needs to decide what it wants to be. - LinkedIn shows us that if you're going to be seen by people you know in real life, and whose opinion of you may eventually be important, people will be try to gain status and show off, but not in a hostile way. Is that "good"? Possibly only if you have another revenue stream (recruiters) because the content is boring. - Instagram shows us that if you want to get influencers who can inspire a purchasing intent, you need not just photos and asymmetric follow relationships, but comments should live as a second-class citizen, and posts shouldn't have reply-to structures. - TikTok shows us that you can get high engagement without much vitriolic disagreement, but only by giving a lot of control to the algorithm, which seeks engagement, and by heavy-handed curatorial bias towards fluffy content. You don't have to suspend or shadow-ban accounts if you can just suppress them forever. Twitter's big choices in this lens are: - asymmetric follower relationships - reply structure among posts, all of which are retweetable - mostly text posts, with low energy barrier to respond It structurally favors bickering, retweeting / quoting someone's post to rally a response, etc, even before you consider stuff that gets recommended into your timeline. What no one's demonstrated is a platform which hosts people discussing potentially contentious issues in a consistently civil and constructive way. I don't know if people can do that, but if you wanted to try: - lean on NLP heavily to group posts, and highlight the ones that are contributing something new rather than repeating any party line - multi-dimensional feedback on posts. Not just 'like' or 'retweet', but 'this is insightful', 'this is funny', 'this is cute', 'this makes me uncomfortable', etc - time-out / forced wait to reply to a post, to kill rapid back and forth

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Dracophoenix 4y ago

If you want my opinion, you're not going to "solve" people, especially in the manner you desire. No has, no one is, and no one ever will. There are no philosopher-kings. Twitter is simply today's canvas for social and parasocial interaction. It is no different than the printing press, the landline, the radio, or the television was during their heydays. Throughout the history of the aforementioned mediums, there has been propaganda, polarizing politics, rumormongering, scandals, censorship, public feuds, self-righteous moralizing, pandering, and a bevy of other controversies. Twitter as a "public square" will solve itself. It may become the greatest thing since the Athenian Agora. It may become another Usenet, WELL [1], or AOL/Compuserve. Or it might join thousands of other no-name services as it barrels into the trash-heap of social media history with its only distinction being a louder thud than all the others as it reaches its final resting place. In the future I expect the social media or morality wars of the VR/AR era, should the Metaverse become real, to play out in a similar fashion, that is if seeds haven't already been sown on VRChat. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL

nickdothutton 4y ago

Yet during the golden era of USENET you had communities with polar opposite views existing within the same system _within their own groups/enclaves_. The difference is that the entire platform was not predicated on engagement.

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laurex 4y ago

The problem with any global platform where anyone can see anyone else's post and interact with it will be the same. We are humans, with different norms, cultural contexts, lived experiences, senses of humour, etc. When we try to solve this from any lens, whether it's "we should have egalitarian values" or "free speech" or "safety," we end up compounding this problem. While I think there are some things that are terrible and objectionable, there are other people who clearly feel differently. Does that make them "right?" and thus I need to be subjected to it? No. Does that make me then get to decide what is right? When we put people with such different views into the same space, we incentivise those who get attention from creating a rise or reaction from the people who are different, so it's not as simple as 'just don't look at or follow what you don't like.' There isn't a way to magic OR tech our way out of this. To me, an optimistic view of the future internet is one in which we find small communities, and spend our time in them, even if other people think they are terrible. There's a paradox when it comes to how 'echo chambers' work. It turns our that when we feel seen, when we have an actual sense of belonging from knowing others (not one from aligning with this or that "side") we simply become less prone to polarization and anti-social behaviour. What has caused the current problems isn't people hanging out and agreeing, it's putting people in contexts where they feel like they need to signal disagreement or agreement to people who they don't align with (to be 'acceptable to ones they do align with), even to the point where they are agreeing or disagreeing with things that make literally no sense. So if you are thinking about re-building a global platform, please reconsider and imagine what it might look like if you spent the time you do now on Twitter actually talking to someone or extending a welcoming space.

ddingus 4y ago

I disagree, though not entirely. You are right about it not being a tech problem at the core. However, tech can easily enable and augment and make the human solutions possible. Technically, users could be using better tools to manage their interactions. In a human sense, there is something often overlooked, and that is our current norms do very little to educate people about their options when it comes to speech they don't like. By far the number one response is righteous indignation and that is by far the most likely wrong thing to do. People can ignore, mute, block, and potentially use other tools to be created. One handy tool would be to pause for period of time, say an hour, day, week, month, etc... there are others. A core realization many have yet to have is conversations go bad when we let them go bad! To that end, people can respond with humor, questions, redirect to topic at hand and more! The power to do that comes by weighing speech. Consider getting called an ass by a clown. Who cares? They are a clown and that exchange is as laughable as it is useless! So that is the first thing. We need to weigh speech and gain strength from that. No need to respond from a wounded or harmed point of view. Just how harmful can drivel from someone we don't really know be? Answer is none. We just do not have to take the bait. When we take ownership of our interactions instead of assuming an entity like Twitter being able to take on that role (it can't)[0], great things happen! One of those is understanding others better. Another is people talking to or with, not AT or PAST one another. [0] No entity can take that role and leave us with realistic speech in most cases. What happens is people do not want to be offended, and they expect the entity to handle that for them. Result? Disneyland, highly regulated, near useless and insulting[1] speech for everyone. Not good. [1] Insulting to anyone able to manage their conversations! Tools that encourage and empower people to do that would transform discourse. Twitter is in a prime position to make a big change in this area and have it stick. Contact me for more on this. I am dead serious and have many years experience applying these ideas online as well as in the workplace with good results. I cannot say it loudly enough! Each of us needs to own how we respond to others and weigh incoming speech appropriately. So far, we have taken the lazy way and look at the mess! Time to level up. Improve discourse and then talk to one another and reduce the polarization. Most of that is a direct artifact of seriously harmful tools in a "sick" body politic.

ComplexSystems 4y ago

There is no "human behavior" problem. There is a coordinated effort to ruin the platform by various groups, from Super PACs to foreign governments and everything in between, by turning it into an information warfare battlefield. An enormous amount of Twitter is made up of people simply not posting their honest opinion at all.

insane_dreamer 4y ago

I wish Elon would have the guts to break away from the ad-based model, which is the root of many of social media's problems. Charge users $2/month. This will: - reduce bots / spam accounts (even if someone is willing to pay it'll be difficult to set up a credit card for each account) - reduce all the effort that goes into trying to maximize time spent on the platform (which drives ad revenue) - the focus becomes more on content rather than clicks - focus the platform on what users want rather than what advertisers want It won't solve the polarization issues, but it will help.

rjsw 4y ago

One technical solution could be to have a platform that lets people think they have posted controversial stuff that can be seen by others but not actually make it visible. People who have been shadowbanned here still waste their time posting.

endorphine 4y ago

Related discussion on Lex Fridman's podcast, where social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues about the negative effects of social media. For example, he argues kids shouldn't be allowed on Twitter and Facebook until 16 or 18. https://youtu.be/f0un-l1L8Zw https://youtu.be/f0un-l1L8Zw Pretty interesting discussion.

UIUC_06 4y ago

It takes awhile, but one can already create the personalized Twitter experience Elon cited in his letter to advertisers. You just Block everyone who disagrees with you, even slightly, as well as any nut job you see. It takes a while, but eventually, the only wrong or insane tweets on your TL are someone you Follow, "X", trashing someone of the wrong persuasion, "Y". So you Block Y. It does get a little boring, but still, you're aware of what the morons on the other side are saying. You can't avoid it. It's similar to watching MSNBC but not Fox, or vice versa.

zepppotemkin 4y ago

IMO twitter has always been for losers

standardUser 4y ago

I'm sure the tiny cross-section of people who are active Twitter users will always find a place to fight online. But the rest of us might want to stop amplifying their idiotic whining because withput that amplification, it's

standardUser 4y ago

TheRealPomax 4y ago

This feels a bit like there's fire in the house and instead of discussing how to improve fire extinguisher design, now we're talking about how catching fire is innate to the materials the house is made of and that we should focus on how we can build a house to take into account how fires start based on human behaviour. In both analogies, the house is still on fire.

nathias 4y ago

It is definitely a technical problem to solve, they foster this kind of behavior because of algo design to optimize add sales. Even just not having add sales would make internet a better place. Also, you can avoid all of the problems of OP on twitter by just unfollowing these kinds of people and consume content that's actually interesting not just a reaction to US local politics.

secondcoming 4y ago

Twitter has always been a shitshow. I genuinely don't understand why some people are getting so upset by what's going on with it at the moment. It's just a company that made some people very wealthy at the expense of everyone else.

stormbrew 4y ago

All I really want is to get off the "the user is the product" rollercoaster. It's been nothing but a disaster for everyone and I don't think it's necessary. "One big social network to rule them all" is an induced need. When you let go of the idea that everyone needs to be in the same room screaming at the top of their lungs to be heard you can let go of a lot of other toxic bullshit we've all let ourselves get accustomed to.

tkk23 4y ago

>we need to look into why these things are happening. It does not seem like a technical problem [...]. It's more of a personal, interpersonal and a social problem Should society adapt to the social networks or should the social networks adapt to society? Social networks make the problems of society visible. Does this mean that all social problems have to be resolved? Social networks can also be designed in a way that society can continue as it is. Even if it is necessary to resolve the personal and social problems, how could they be resolved without technology? There are no new problems, they are just more visible. If researchers haven't resolved them until now, chances are that they won't resolve them soon without game-changing new technology.

jojosbuddy 4y ago

"can have extremely polarized views" usually results when people want [extreme] attention in a sea of chatter. "feel the need to defend their polarized but flawed viewpoint at any cost" usually results when people want [extreme] attention in a sea of chatter. "are virtue signaling others but refuse to take any accountability whatsoever" a tactic typically used when people want [extreme] attention in a sea of chatter. "have less and less attention span" Time is money, and it's better to waste your time reading/bickering about your tweet for ads that wasting time writing a meaningful tweet that'll be obsolete in 10min. "only consume the content that aligns with their views" usually results when people want [extreme] attention and creates an echo chamber. Conclusion: we got a lot of narcissistic people on twitter. The ultimate digital soapbox.

jedberg 4y ago

There is no fix, it's human nature. Most people are rational and balanced and willing to hear the opinions of others. And until recently the only way to have an interactive conversion was in person, or one on one remotely. Only very recently has the public square moved online. And being online gives people protection to say what they really think without fear of repercussions from others. The only way to fix it is to move discussion of heated topics to being in person only. But this will never happen. But Twitter could easily fix this with technology -- all they have to do is go back to your feed being a chronological list of the tweets from people you follow. Or create two feeds -- one that is heavily moderated and has advertising, and one that is unmoderated with no ads. Of course they won't do either one, because it lowers engagement with advertising, which is how they make money. And that makes sense, they are a for profit company. They are optimizing for their customers, the advertisers.

pengo 4y ago

Call me a freeloader if you wish; I'd welcome the moniker. I use Twitter lists and Tweetdeck's filters to enjoy a firehose-free Twitter experience. I follow accounts from around the world representing a broad range of interests and views, and almost none of the problems listed by the originator of this thread. Therefore I have to conclude that "the issues of Twitter" experienced by most users are intentional. I also have to say that should Twitter make the mechanisms I rely on unavailable (definitely a possibility given the new CEO's track record), I will have no option but to leave Twitter. I'm not willing to subject myself to sort of user experience described by the originator of this thread.

g42gregory 4y ago

Here is what would make Twitter much better for me: 1. Lower the temperature of the discussion: simple, published rules like “you can use more than X(low number) expletives per Y(high number) words of text” and “you can not have ANY calls for violence” and 2. No censorship of the topics. I think, this would restore public trust in the platform (but I am sure there are other, possibly equally good solutions that Twitter can come up with).

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago

1) Changing human nature is a much more difficult task than fixing some Twitter algorithms. 2) Modern technical means can affect human behavior on a large scale. For example, a certain northern country managed to influence elections in a certain rich country with a very modest investment in social media trolling. Or look at a certain very populous country. Everyone's views on social media are very harmonically aligned.

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btbuildem 4y ago

I my mind, the main issue with twitter (and the rest of "social") is that they're funded by advertisers. It's a fundamentally broken model, because it makes "engagement" the main metric of success, and this in turn drives all kinds of dark patterns, gradually turning any online space into a cesspool of rage and mediocrity. I believe that is the primary issue, and most of the issues identified by OP are consequences of this.

bartimus 4y ago

It's an interpersonal/social problem between people who are not being a person. There's numerous things you can (algorithmically) do with regard to people who choose to be real persons on the platform. Especially when payment/business comes into play.

jwarden 4y ago

It’s a socio-technical problem. But technology definitely contributes to the problem: the algorithms determine what kind of behaviors receive attention and this determines the kind of behaviors dominate the platform. I have written more about this idea here: https://deliberati.io/the-law-of-attention/ https://deliberati.io/the-law-of-attention/

Rury 4y ago

Agreed, the problem isn't technical, it's political. Sometimes I wonder if people actually understand what "politics" actually means or ultimately entails. Politics is the result of wants. Person or group A wants things one way, Person or group B wants things another way, and these two sets of wants directly conflict in someway. How do you remedy who gets to have what they want in such a situation? That striving for getting what you want, is the literal definition of politics. At extremes, it means fighting one another to the death to resolve the matter (war/violence). Often times though, it's remedied by a bipartisan solution (which explains most things you see passed by governments and outcomes involving multiple parties), but such a solution only ensues when all parties involved are willing to have such a solution. If one party doesn't want such an outcome, and is still willing to fight to the death over such a matter, then that's sort of what happens... Anyhow, with that said and by no offense, I find your post a bit ironic. Particularly that you imply it's an issue needing to be fixed, that people on twitter: - can have extremely polarized views and - only consume the content that aligns with their views These two are related, do you not see? Reducing polarized views, entails reducing the possible content that people could view on the platform, and thus is essentially restricting the platform to an aligned view or set of approved views (even if slightly - which means doing so would be polarizing in its own way). Basically, outside your post (imo correctly) stating that this isn't a technical issue, your post to me is like saying: "Twitter isn't the media I want to consume, as there exists viewpoints on issues on the platform (held by other people) - extreme polar opposite views which I don't like, and I only want to consume media that I like." Which would make you guilty of: - wanting to only consume content that aligns with your views