
Rewrite Twitter to Improve Discourse - caminmccluskey
The general sentiment of discourse on Twitter seems to be at an all time low. It&#x27;s an actively depressing place to spend any amount of time browsing. My question is, if Twitter could rewrite overnight, what fundamental changes should they make to the platform to make it a more pleasant place to exchange thoughts and ideas? Furthermore, what changes could be made to make the platform more open to civilised debate across a range of (potentially sensitive) topics?<p>I realise that hate is good for engagement, ideally any changes they made wouldn&#x27;t affect this (else they wouldn&#x27;t make them). I also realise that the average level of &quot;pleasant&quot; isn&#x27;t a metric you can directly measure - so we could assume average positive sentiment per tweet.<p>On the second question let&#x27;s assume you can measure ad hominem (somewhat possible: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aclweb.org&#x2F;anthology&#x2F;P19-2028.pdf) and changes which minimise this are desirable.
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caminmccluskey
Some questions I had - which might spurn ideas. Obviously some may have
undesirable side effects, some are technically challenging etc.

Q: if emojis didnt count towards character count, would the discourse on
twitter be any better? Q: What if tweets has a minimum character count,
instead of a maximum? Q: What if you could just detect Ad Hominem -
[https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P19-2028.pdf](https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P19-2028.pdf)
Q: What if Twitter had moderators? Q: What if you had a reputation on Twitter
- and your reputation determined your reach? Q: What if you subscribed to
topics and ideas - not to people? Q: What if Twitter fact checked every post?
Q: What if there is no concept likes? OR what if there were downvotes as well
as up? Q: What if it were easier to mark something as harmful? Q: What if the
community was always kept small?

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valand
> OR what if there were downvotes as well as up?

Downvotes can be abused for undermining people's thought you disagree on.

Instead, provide a way to "counter-argument", which if upvoted, will count as
downvote to the parent argument.

This will enable people to "rob" votes of swing voters from the parent
argument to the counter-argument

Also, hint: you might want to separate those questions above d with double
line endings

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caminmccluskey
Really like this idea, and thanks for the tip!

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auganov
The way it works right now, a ton of random people can write nasty defamatory
things about you and before the reporting system kicks in you can't really do
much. And even then they won't take most stuff down. For example most profane
insults are perfectly fine to Twitter.

Blocking doesn't help much as it only blocks future replies from a given
person.

You'd probably want to try solving this problem without being too censorious.

90% of accounts I've been harassed by looked like they've been made
exclusively for that purpose so I imagine just being tougher on fake accounts
would solve most of the problem.

Twitter is a niche social network with poor growth and a strong political
slant so not buying the argument that it's so great for engagement. It just
has a lot of mindshare in some circles. Could easily double the userbase.

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slightwinder
You can't fix social problems with technical solutions.

Twitter is by design a melting pot of opinions because of it's global access
to anything, which is good and bad in it's own ways. Until this design
changes, there is not much you can improve on fundamental levels. And any
fundamental change would mean for twitter to stop being twitter. Then you
could also just switch to your personal forum, blog, discord or whatever
controlled safespace you prefer for your content.

Thouhg, this was with twitter always the case, it's nothing really new. Maybe
it's your perception which changed, or your bubble which has moved? Maybe you
are at the point of being "to old for this shit" now?

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caminmccluskey
Thanks for your thoughts, Twitter is a melting pot, and that's a fantastic
thing. I would probably agree that fundamental social problems can't be
"fixed" by technical solutions. However Twitter (in particular) seems to
exacerbate out of group bias

~~~
slightwinder
It's not Twitter in particular. The same happens on reddit, facebook, youtube
and any other place where enough peoplle gather to voice their opinions.
Before twitter the same happend in usenet and smaller webforums. After twitter
the same will happen in whatever global space will be envogue then.

The only real way to fix it is to not give people any space at all, otherwise
hate will always find it's way. Anything else is just patching details and
managing tradeoffs between advantages and disadvantages.

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tmaly
If you do not need global reach, private forums are great for discourse.
Everyone one a private forum is there for a reason. The theme/topic of the
forum is very focused.

For example, I belong to a karaoke forum. I used it to learn how to build my
own karaoke system.

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manx
Try to avoid the positive feedback loops in the system. Everything gets
distorted by that.

Retweets get more views and in turn more retweets. And so on. Everyone tries
to game this system to harvest these feedback loops. HN, Reddit, Facebook all
have the same problem.

I'm preparing a blog article about this topic with an analysis and some
solution approaches.

If you're interested, please contact me, I'm happy to discuss this very
important topic.

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suyula
Add a captcha per post/retweet.

This would trash all the engagement metrics, but I feel like making bots do
more work and making humans think twice about their actions on the site would
make the platform better overall.

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caminmccluskey
I had been thinking about a sort of human prompt, like a time window to take
back a tweet with a prompt to consider if it’s kind/necessary. Won’t do
anything about bots, since I imagine it would just be a tick box or something,
or no action means you’re happy for the tweet to send

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thekashifmalik
Removing replies would be one way to differentiate themselves further from
something like a facebook post.

Maybe also retweets without added context.

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caminmccluskey
Just to clarify - don't allow retweets with a reply? I like this idea to get
around the sort of "dunk tweet" culture (assuming I'm understanding your point
correctly)

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thekashifmalik
Yeah exactly.

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joshribakoff
Up and down votes with a karma system

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caminmccluskey
I really like the Karma system. I think Karma as a way to decide user
permissions is interesting (as is the case on hacker news). I also wonder if
karma should decide the “reach” of a tweet, that way more respected users get
to amplify their ideas and trolls do not. Downvotes is a contentious one, as
we want to foster active debate. The issue I see with downvotes is that their
ambiguous - you might downvote because you disagree with the statement OR
because you don’t like the tweet.

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alexmingoia
Is it Twitter or who you choose to follow?

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caminmccluskey
This is a good question - I found recently that I was following more political
accounts and maybe if I used it just to keep up with my industry/hobbies I
might have a nicer experience. Does anyone find twitter is a
pleasant/supportive place though? (Genuine question)

~~~
caminmccluskey
Although with that said, I don’t notice political views seem to enter most
discussion regardless of topic

