11 ms·

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,

• 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
      The problem is that nobody needs this shit. And we need a social network that doesn't have incentives to promote and create an environment conducive to toxic content. Compare to HN. (I think) We all enjoy HN, mostly because it's quite effectively moderated and the site admins don't have the same OKRs as twitter/FB etc. do.
      • christkv 4y ago
        I don't want the network to decide what speech I want or not. Just provide me with easy to use moderation tools and I'll moderate my own feed. How about give me access to the feed itself so third parties can produce alternative moderation tools on top as well.
• uptown 4y ago
  My interface to Twitter is through Tweetbot. So I’m not subjected to the algorithmic nonsense that Twitter thinks I should see. However I am obviously influenced by the echo chamber of the accounts I’ve chosen to follow. I think the experience of users who view Twitter’s view of what to see is vastly different from users that use 3rd party clients. If Twitter wants to increase engagement they’d probably be best to kill off the 3rd party clients.
• pj_mukh 4y ago
  Here's the uncomfortable question though, can a social media platform achieve sufficient scale, so its more useful for discoverability than your group chats, without optimizing for engagement? Discord is a happy medium (just, really large group chats).
  • semi-extrinsic 4y ago
    TikTok, for all its woes, seems to somehow do this significantly better than Twitter and Facebook? Or is that just my filter bubble?
    • bee_rider 4y ago
      TikTok's algorithm sounds to just be generally less transparent than Twitter's. I wonder if they've gone out of their way to just reduce the reach of political content on there in general. Or, if Twitter just acts as the grease trap for this kind of content.
    • duskwuff 4y ago
      Not just you. TikTok's signature feature is its excellent recommendations.
    • pj_mukh 4y ago
      Is there a conversation to be had? I guess stitched videos?
  • mFixman 4y ago
    Discord is actually a good example: I think I got 0 notifications about groups I don't follow, so isn't as big of an incentive to aggressively smugpost as in Twitter.
    • mox1 4y ago
      Join any server remotely related to crypto or finance, the spam messages will start rolling in. I get on average about 1 a day, something about "pumps" (whatever that is)
• hunter2_ 4y ago
  > see what the rest of the world see If using a new account is so atypical that people need to be prompted to try it, then is it really what the rest of the world sees? I'd assume the vast majority of the rest of the world highly curates their accounts by utilizing the Follow feature; the effect of moving beyond the randomness should be similar regardless of whether they are a relatively new user following only a few accounts or a seasoned user following thousands.
• legitster 4y ago
  > 3. Somebody I don't follow accusing another person I don't follow of being a nazi. I cannot believe how much of Twitter is exactly this.
  • hbn 4y ago
    Left-wing twitter is calling everyone nazis and right-wing twitter is calling everyone pedophiles. Enjoy the nuanced discussion.
    • azinman2 4y ago
      Godwin’s law is alive and well. But apparently updated for the current GOP with pedophiles!
      • Volundr 4y ago
        Well sometimes they call them Nazi pedophiles, so maybe it's already covered with no update needed?
    • jl6 4y ago
      Twitter has conversational snap-to-grid.
    • danaris 4y ago
      [flagged]
      • freedomben 4y ago
        > a significant proportion of the American right wing is, by any meaningful, objective definition, substantially aligned with the Nazi party, fully on board with authoritarian fascism, and ready and willing to murder people for opposing them. Are you being serious or missing a /s?
        • danaris 4y ago
          If you think that this needs a /s, you have not been paying attention to the news in recent months. ETA: Just as a for instance, the inept assassination attempt on Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi the other day that sent her husband to the hospital.
• dawnerd 4y ago
  I’ve tried this the other day and besides an insanely difficult captcha that made me add up faces on dice, I had the same result as you. Overnight got spammed with low quality notifications from troll political accounts.
  • vkou 4y ago
    Trolls and sockpuppets (bots) are the end-game of any unmoderated speech, and they can always shout louder than people speaking in good faith.
  • oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
    I wonder if there's a minimum number of accounts you need to follow to avoid that. I follow a reasonable number, but even straight after signing up, I don't think I've ever had an unsolicited notification.
• tootie 4y ago
  I signed up out of necessity because I work for a media site that gets a lot of traffic from Twitter. Loads of media orgs (good and bad) spread news via Twitter. A lot of really good journalists have very positive presences. A lot of independent journalists are probably heavily reliant on it.
• zozbot234 4y ago
  Maybe you're just getting a random sample from all possibly relevant tweets.
• tobyjsullivan 4y ago
  "Welcome to Twitter. We'd like to introduce you to the 'vibe' here with a few select tweets..."
• rgrieselhuber 4y ago
  It is also related to the social engineering that has occurred over the last few decades. If the people running the show can get the plebes to focus on hating each other, they get to keep running the show.
• paulusthe 4y ago
  That's definitely the problem, but the answer isn't to change Twitter's algorithms. We must ask why Twitter's algorithms ended up where they did, and the answer is that it's more profitable to do what Twitter does than the alternative. It's not like Twitter's creators maliciously set out to become the flaming hellscape it is now. It responded to market forces and user behavior. Neither of those factors have changed, so why would we expect any for-profit public square to do it any differently?
  • nullcipher 4y ago
    > It's not like Twitter's creators maliciously set out to become the flaming hellscape it is now. It responded to market forces and user behavior. "I didn't tear down the rainforest, the markforces made me" "I didn't cause global warming, I was merely responding to market forces" Please. They wanted profits and made the world a worse place. Don't condone such behavior.
  • 1shooner 4y ago
    >for-profit public square This is an oxymoron, and distills the dysfunction very well.
  • mFixman 4y ago
    Back in 2007 Hotmail was so big that it was profitable for them to have accounts that deleted themselves if you didn't log in in a couple of months and not pay too much attention to spam filtering. Then Gmail came along and ate their lunch. TikTok is winning the race for zoomers' attention by doing better content filtering. I'm sure that a well-ran Twitter competitor can take all of their market.
    • freedomben 4y ago
      This is a great observation and link to hotmail. I suspect there's some serious valuable lessons to be learned by brainstorming on the similarities/differences there.
  • mikkergp 4y ago
    In direct conflict to your assertion is that the other _more successful_ social networks don't do this, they put people in their bubbles. Tik Tok is fun to use because it shows me content I want, not the flamewar topics. Jack Dorsey specifically had this vision for Twitter and it has served to make it less monetizeable and mediocrely successful (compared to the other SN's) My biggest issue with Twitter is not even really that the content is inflammatory or controversial, it's that seeing "a person I don't know calling another person I don't know a Nazi" is irrelevant to my life.
• noxer 4y ago
  Everyone takes shortcuts these days so by Godwin's law directly calling the other person on the internet with which you disagree a nazi is peak optimization /s On a serious note I think the problem is actually the heavy moderation and algorithmic bubble creation. Then you had certain famous and controversial people who operated above all bubbles and the different bubble started clashing. The only way I see to fix this is if the "middle" is one bubble. And no, that's not a middle ground fallacy, I dont think the middle position is the correct one but rather that a strong middle bubble is required to separate the majority from extremist bubbles. Unfortunately a middle bubble required people to be tolerant. But many people lost the concept of disagreeing but supporting that someone should be able voice their opinion anyway. Musk actually understand this so I'm not overly optimistic but I'm curious to see what he will do.
  • pjc50 4y ago
    > disagreeing but supporting that someone should be able voice their opinion anyway It's not just "disagreement" but the death threats, slurs, allegations of "grooming", racism, libel, and simple fraud (especially involving cryptocurrency). Heck, Musk himself posted (and deleted shortly afterwards) libel about Pete Pelosi.
    • noxer 4y ago
      If it isn't a crime or spam then it is in fact disagreement. There is no inherent different from calling someone a "racist" or "nazi" to calling someone a "groomer". On Twitter these "slurs" are used by different sides (bubbles) but other than that there is no difference. It might be a baseless allegation or there could be more to it but either way it is clearly an opinion and disagreeing is fine no need to prevent anyone from voicing it. >Musk himself posted (and deleted shortly afterwards) libel about Pete Pelosi. I would assume he was being sarcastic by posting an obvious "whack source" with a silly rather obvious made up story. But it went over peoples head so he removed it. (But that is just my interpretation) But whatever it was, why does it bother you? What exactly is so horrible about posting something "wrong" and deleting it? What is so hard about the concept of allowing people to be wrong about things? Where does the "entitlement" to demand people to get everything right come from? You don't apply this standard to yourself don't you? And if you are wrong about something would you rather want people to tell you/debunk your claim or would you want your "wrong think" to just be removed? I've yet to see that horrible combination of letters that is too dangerous to face the scrutiny of people and calling it out. Lame slurs certainly dont pose any threat to a stable individual and I dont think we should adapt to the unstable that just make everyone more and more intolerant.
• PM_me_your_math 4y ago
  Give it time. There is a lot of backend trash that needs to be taken out by new management.
• enos_feedler 4y ago
  Agreed everyone should do this. I created a burner facebook account just so I could sell things on Marketplace and the feed of clickbait I see is pretty awful. Its eye opening to see what kind of shit the platform shoves on you when they have no data to go. However I bet even small bits of info would be enough to strongly change things for the first few bits. Haven’t tried though! Giving em nothing
• amatecha 4y ago
  Conversely I signed up for Mastodon and saw a ton of awesome technical content, geeky chatter and exactly zero hostility or toxicity. Has been that way for the past few years. (Though, a smaller instance, not mastodon.social)
  • oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
    Mastodon really, really needs to work on its PR. Every time I see someone talking about it on twitter, they're trying to work out what the significance of choosing a particular server is. Even a message as simple as "Like email, but social" might help alleviate this.
    • amatecha 4y ago
      Eh, I don't think it matters. It's not a business, and it doesn't specifically need more people to join. Over time it propagates anyways. I've personally brought tons of people to the fediverse, people who I care about and I think would benefit from it. So far, so good!
• layer8 4y ago
  And the main motivation for maximizing engagement is selling ad space. It seems that ads have become a major net negative to society.
  • andrew_ 4y ago
    Not to mention the people who have built their careers, personality, and livelihoods on that engagement. "Thought leaders" and "engagement grifters" are a very new (in the digital sense) and very real thing. And we can't forget the professional advocates whose job consists only of shaming, berating, and victimhood. It's a tough pill to reconcile; make money at the expense of toxicity or find a revenue model that's benevolent. It'll be interesting to see if Twitter changes.
• Brakenshire 4y ago
  The AT protocol I was looking at the other day has a concept of choosing your own algorithm to aggregate content. I think that’s an important option in order for a dominant platform to be useful to society. I think the submission is exactly wrong, the culture of an online space is heavily linked to the technology of the platform, interlinked with its business model.
  • the_other 4y ago
    > the culture of an online space is heavily linked to the technology of the platform, interlinked with its business model. This is really nicely phrased. Rather than thinking the OP is wrong, I think this should be another bullet point within their post.
  • runlevel1 4y ago
    I'd like to think making the platform a more positive, constructive place would improve engagement and therefore be compatible with their business model. However, I confess I'm leaning towards the more cynical outcome.
• andrew_ 4y ago
  If you haven't checked out Farcaster (farcaster.xyz) I highly recommend it. There is none of that nonsense, and it's a twitter-like community for builders that reminds me of Twitter ala 2010.
• cmh89 4y ago
  When I first joined Instagram in ~2014, after a little bit I started getting tons of incel/RW suggestions in explorer and I couldn't for the life of me figure out why. I mostly followed my IRL friends, some environmental groups, and a couple of musicians. One day I was messing around and learned you can apparently favorite/save (I can't remember anymore what they call it), and I had saved a post praising Vladimir Putin. I couldn't remember ever seeing it much more favoriting it, but as soon as I got rid of it, the algorithm slowly stopped suggesting far-right content. The actual technology plays a major role in creating polarization
• tmaly 4y ago
  have you looked at the home page for YouTube recently? Tons of stuff trying to drive a emotional response.
• OJFord 4y ago
  And why is it that whenever curiosity gets the better of me and I actually do click on one of the 'Trending now in the UK' 'hashtags' wondering what it's about... it's about absolutely nothing? Seemingly everyone's using it to talk about something completely different, none of which is 'trending' at all. Just a naive algorithm not delivering anything useful at all. Just random crap in various languages, nothing to keep me on the platform and 'interacting' at all. (Of course I can't remember many examples, but earlier it was '#confirmed'.)
• matchagaucho 4y ago
  It's unfortunate that Twitter primarily only has 280 characters of text to infer intent and sentiment. AI has overfit engagement around hate and polarizing text. TikTok, and really any video-content feed, noe has deep AI signals to infer a person's true hobbies and interests.
• mbesto 4y ago
  > The problem with Twitter is that it needs high engagement, so it strongly recommends posts that are low on quality but high on emotion. Which is not a technical problem and is exactly the OP's point.
  • mFixman 4y ago
    Twitter gets bad content because Twitter promotes bad content, and that happens because Twitter's work culture prioritises engagement metrics over meaningful interactions. The underlying problem is a problem of Twitter-the-company, the actual problem of Twitter-the-product is technical and can be solved by going easier on engagement-based recommendations.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• graycat 4y ago
  > so it strongly recommends posts that are low on quality but high on emotion. Yup. In the 1930s movie "Meet John Doe", see how a newspaper can try to increase circulation by (a) publishing something, a continuing narrative, emotional (in the movie, a poor person frustrated with the economy and politics and writing a FAKE letter to the newspaper on their decision to commit suicide), (b) creating controversy, (c) encouraging arguments to start, should he or should he not, etc. The continuing narrative idea was to encourage the controversy to run for some months. The idea of such a narrative was formulated by E. Bernays, as I recall, also in the 1930s. Later Bernays was an ad executive in the US. Sooo, an old, 1930s or before, idea to create strong emotions, headaches, stomach aches, upchucks, anger, frustration, stress, depression, various individual psychological problems, various political and societal problems, was for the media to create long running, continuing controversy. Net, whenever start to feel emotions from what see in the media, guess that 90+% of the time you have just been fooled, manipulated, exploited, jerked around by the media looking for eyeballs for ad revenue. Recall the old characterization of media values, "If it bleeds, it leads." My old description has been the media just wants to grab you, by the heart, the gut, below the belt, always below the shoulders, never between the ears. Objective, credible, important information? Nearly never. Brainless, groundless, manipulative emotionalism? Nearly always. Sooo, I deeply, profoundly, bitterly hate and despise the MSM (mainstream media) -- they want to deceive me, steal my time and energy. So, for some years, I've flatly refused to pay any attention to the MSM. Solution for the MSM and the old techniques of journalism? Easy. People just ignore the MSM. That will cut off their supply of eyeballs and ad revenue and they will go out of business. I posted more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33417798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33417798
• Scea91 4y ago
  When I first registered on Twitter I didn't understand how anyone finds it useful and left my account idle for ± 3 years. It only became useful when I copied a highly curated follower list from a coworker. Since then I have onboarded several people to Twitter this way. They start by copying my follows to get it to a useful state. Its quite clear there is lots of improvement space here.