
Twitter to remove ‘like’ tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate - liketweets
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2018/10/28/twitter-remove-like-tool-bid-improve-quality-debate/
======
dang
There's some doubt about this:

[https://twitter.com/TwitterComms/status/1056913093471670273](https://twitter.com/TwitterComms/status/1056913093471670273)

[http://fortune.com/2018/10/29/twitter-like-button-
staying/](http://fortune.com/2018/10/29/twitter-like-button-staying/)

~~~
danso
Yeah, there's no reason to believe that the Telegraph would have the exclusive
scoop on this. Even in the few sentences shown in the paywall preview, it's
clear how thin the sourcing is:

> _Founder Jack Dorsey last week admitted at a Twitter event that he was not a
> fan of the heart-shaped button and that it would be getting rid of it
> “soon”._

That's the only news or "fact" in the lede -- the content that immediately
follows is boilerplate:

> _The feature was introduced in 2015 to replace “favourites”, a star-shaped
> button that allowed people to bookmark tweets to read later. Similar buttons
> to “like” or show appreciation of people’s status updates, pictures and
> videos have become a central function of every popular social media service
> since Facebook introduced them._

> _But psychologists have suggested that they may be causing social media
> addiction._

------
pornel
I don't think quality of "debate" on Twitter can be salvaged. Everything was
designed for "engagement" and turned out to be rage-inducing machine.

Quote-retweet is used to send followers to harass the person responsible for
the awful tweet. RT is choir-preaching (you're a monster if you don't RT that
kicking babies is bad), and replies to twitter-celebrities' tweets give
everyone their 15 minutes of fame to post the most idiotic meme.

And the only time when someone tries to make a coherent argument, it's a
"Tread (1/50)" with a total mess, and every single sentence has buttons for
taking it out of context.

They've optimized for engagement, and they're getting a _lot_ of enragement.

~~~
bitL
Due to debate getting worse and worse I left both Twitter and Facebook (they
both became completely useless and just a waste of time); now it looks like
most of low-quality "I am here too doing trivial things, applaud me!" posts
moved over to LinkedIn, so I put my account to "passive" state there as well
and am considering removing it altogether.

Are there still some places left on Internet for high-quality discussions?
Reddit recently ramped up "moderation" and now feels like a mob mentality
everywhere with prolific ban give-aways if one's opinion doesn't align 100%
with the one of moderators (who sometimes fight with each other); alternatives
are full of extreme content that got banned on the mainstream ones, and *chan
was always a stable full of manure with some pearls hidden very very deeply
for one to waste time finding them.

~~~
gambler
_> Are there still some places left on Internet for high-quality discussions?_

Web forums. There are good ones. They are independent of one another. Most
forums I visit are centered around some subject, so people are bonded enough
to be reasonably civil even if they disagree. Most aren't big enough to
require much moderation. The best one have zero rules and very little
trolling, but those are usually completely devoid of political stuff, since no
one wants to spoil the good thing.

I think web forums are the best discussion medium developed so far. They
support long-format content. They support hypermedia. They allow for offline
conversations that don't get "dated" in 2 hours. They don't put thread authors
on pedestal, unlike blogs.

I've heard there are mail/news groups out there too. Haven't used one aside
from newsgroup for D Programming Language, though.

~~~
mrhappyunhappy
I’ve always found forums to be really helpful when searching for a topic but
these days when compared to a voting system, forums feel dead or slow to
update. I get that the voting system of get to the top is toxic and typically
produces poor content but it does seem to work to an extent (for example HN).

I guess maybe forums feel a bit too heavy duty with all of the additional user
stuff built into the stream of replies instead of having to click them.

What if HN didn’t show a number of votes and all the topics ranked based on
invisible votes? I wonder if a system that’s more simple like that would carry
over to forums to make them feel more modern but true to their roots?

~~~
gambler
_> I’ve always found forums to be really helpful when searching for a topic
but these days when compared to a voting system, forums feel dead or slow to
update._

Voting systems create a lot of bad incentives. They encourage groupthink and
filter bubbles. They discourage long-running conversations. I haven't felt
that boards are "slow" if there is reasonable amount of new threads and posts
per day.

The usual trouble with forums is that a lot of admins don't understand how to
split one up into boards. They either create way too many, and those sit
empty, or not enough, and then it's hard to keep track of conversations.

Maintaining the optimal number of boards and optimal average thread size are
keys towards a healthy forum that doesn't seem empty, or overwhelming.

------
jobigoud
They should do like HN: keep the button but remove the counter visibility. I
would like to see this generalized to all social networks actually. You still
get to do an appreciation gesture but without entering the popularity contest.
Maybe the author of the post could still see the total.

YouTube "dislike" button on comments also works like this, you can dislike but
it's not counted. In this case it's a bit stupid since the likes are counted,
but I feel it's still an improvement.

~~~
donatj
I’ve often thought only being able to down vote with a comment would be a
positive. There have been times where I have had posts down voted to hell, and
legitimately have no idea why.

I think having to tell someone why you were down voting would be an
improvement.

Maybe even work at so down vote comment doesn’t count if it it self has
negative karma.

~~~
avip
That's a very interesting idea. Force constructive feedback.

~~~
weberc2
To downvote, please tell us what you don't like about this comment >
asdfasdfasdf

~~~
mrhappyunhappy
Make it multiple choice not free text. Limit to a few basic reasons. Make that
thing pop up for every downvote and watch downvotes reduce over time. Also,
maybe assign weights to how often one downvotes. So say you are someone who
disagrees often, your downvotes become less and less potent the longer you are
in session.

~~~
weberc2
Honestly my post was mostly a joke, but I don't think mandating a rationale is
a good idea, and I give a rationale for ~85% of my downvotes. Probably a third
of those don't deserve rationale--I'm responding to someone who is pretty
overtly trolling or otherwise trying to incent a flamewar. Beyond that, I will
occassionally not leave an explanation because

1\. I don't have time to type out an appropriately nuanced comment, and an un-
nuanced comment is hardly better qualified than a driveby downvote.

2\. No matter the quality of my explanatory comment, it will only be a target
for partisan downvoters. I don't care much for my karma, but I do care for my
time and I don't want to waste it so trolls can give my view an air of
illegitimacy.

Besides, while it is annoying to be downvoted anonymously, no one owes me an
explanation. It's a courtesy at best, and any attempt to regulate it will be
defeated by insincere feedback.

------
Ptyx
Reminds me that Kierkegaard seems to have written about social media:

"Man, this shrewd being, ponders day and night how he can invent new means to
amplify the noise and how he can spread the sound and the empty talk as
hastily as possible everywhere. What one achieves in such a way is probably
soon the opposite: the message is soon brought to its lowest level of fullness
of meaning, and at the same time, conversely, the means of communication in
the direction of hasty and all-flooding distribution have probably reached
their maximum, for what is more hastily circulated than gossip?"

~~~
hugh4life
I'm guessing this was about newspapers/journalists which probably isn't the
message people around here would like.

"The lowest depth to which people can sink before God is defined by the word
'journalist'. If I were a father and had a daughter who was seduced I should
despair over her; I would hope for her salvation. But if I had a son who
became a journalist and continued to be one for five years, I would give him
up." \- Soren Kierkegaard

~~~
malvosenior
Given the extreme anti-tech sentiment and inaccurate reporting pervasive in
among journalists. I think many here would totally agree with this statement.

------
donatj
This seems like a massive mistake to me.

I have 300ish followers. I’ll spend 5 minutes or so crafting a Tweet. If it
gets one or two likes, that’s positive reinforcement, it feels worth my time.

It’s rare I’ll get replies unless I said something someone else vehemently
disagrees with. So you’re leaving all my reasons not to use the platform,
while removing my reasons to use it.

So now best case scenario is a retweet? Meh. This feels like a huge miss-step
from a company that doesn’t understand why people use their platform.
Honestly, this seems like how you kill a platform.

~~~
fabricexpert
Why bother with only 300 followers? It feels like twitter is only useful if
you have several thousand followers, otherwise there's so much noise that
you're just talking to empty room.

~~~
webninja
Everyone with several thousand followers had 300 once.

~~~
3pt14159
Yeah. Plus once you get over 700 followers things kinda tip and it's MUCH
easier to get to 1000 followers than from 400 to 700. Each follower is a
potential retweeter. It's the nature of the platform.

------
wafflesraccoon
I use Twitter a lot (90k Tweets, 2.1k followers, my account is 8 years old),
the best thing about the like is being able to end a conversation without
saying anything. Liking a reply to is a great way to say "I've acknowledged
your tweet with a positive connotation". I think Twitter forgets that the vast
majority of content on the site isn't heated political debates but instead
small communities of people who treat the website as a microblog.

------
Chazprime
If Twitter genuinely wants to improve the quality of debate online, perhaps
they should consider shutting it down.

~~~
gambler
Pretty much. Their design isn't just bad, it's _perfectly_ bad.

No content structure. No context. No sense of "discussion spaces". No way to
post longer, more nuanced messages. Encourages garbage in messages. (Tags,
emojis, @something should be external. The more stuff like that you put in
message, the less they look like actual statements made by people. This
dehumanizes authors in subtle but extremely important ways.)

People always underestimate the extent to which UI design and content
structure drive communication tone. Sure, just because some website is messy
doesn't mean it will immediate make everyone a jerk, but this stuff has
cumulative effect. As a way of example: try to write a long paper letter to
someone by hand. You will immediately see how that changes the way you think.

Also, people should check out Jaron Lanier's talks on why everyone should
delete their social media accounts. He doesn't talk about UI, but he makes
some great points about economic incentives, behaviorism and emergent
properties of ad-driven online economies.

~~~
danso
I think Twitter's move to 280 characters led to a massive improvement in
overall quality -- I rarely find myself bumping into the limit, and I find
that threaded tweets can read as well as short articles. A good use of the
format can be found in the BBC's "Anatomy of a Killing" investigation into a
military killing in Cameroon:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18060709](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18060709)

I enjoy and have learned more from the discussions on HN than on any other
platform. But what Twitter lacks in quality it more than makes up for in
diversity and quantity. There's no where else I can get into a
discussion/argument with anyone from Elon Musk to randos in Indiana and India
all in the same thread. As crappy as the discussions can get, I have a hard
time imagining how much better any such service could be without making
tradeoffs on audience and ease of engagement. Mastodon, for example, seems to
have limited scope and scale inextricable in its design. Which is not to say
that that makes it a worser service -- just one that is inherently different
from Twitter's model.

~~~
gambler
_> I think Twitter's move to 280 characters led to a massive improvement in
overall quality_

280 is a far more reasonable limit than 140, but it's too little, to late. The
Twitter "mindset" has already settled and it's not pretty.

 _> There's no where else I can get into a discussion/argument with anyone
from Elon Musk_

In most cases it's an illusion of a discussion. You think you're being heard,
but for a person with as many followers as Musk you're just an ant in an
anthill.

If you think Twitter has discussions, you haven't seen actual discussions
online.

I've visited some message boards where the same core group of people
participated for years. We did elaborate projects together. The discussions of
some subjects there fundamentally changed my outlook on things. Some of those
people became my actual friends I keep in touch with. "Social" media has
almost none of this. People can cite counter-examples, but those are one in a
hundred thousand and could be easily replicated without social media anyway.

~~~
danso
To be clear, I agree I and everyone else is just an ant in Musk's anthill of
followers, but there's no disputing that he has directly replied to and argued
with me, as he has with dozens/hundreds of other random users. Of course, Musk
is an outlier in that respect. Twitter's more day-to-day benefits is the
serendipity of finding others interested in the same topics as I am. Most of
my personal network is not on HN nor Reddit (or working in tech, for that
matter), but more than a few are on Twitter, even as just lurker accounts.

You're mistaking tweets as being the only form of discussion on Twitter. What
starts as tweets can go into a private discussion or email. My biggest project
came from me tweeting about a data-scraping exercise I did -- turned out
someone at a major news org was doing an investigation into the topic, and we
ended up collaborating instead of competing with each other. I can't think of
any other way we would've found each other, because I was only tweeting to
show off something I did, and news orgs don't talk about investigations in-
progress.

The other form of content on Twitter is the non-discussion -- i.e. when
someone goes on a long tweet thread, and isn't particularly interested in
debating with every reply. This is very similar to an old-fashioned blog post
-- but the engagement experience is much different. Random people from all
walks of life may publicly respond with personal stories to a trending topic
(e.g. mental health), in a way that feels much more natural and frictionless
than creating a blog post, if you even had a blog to begin with.

~~~
gambler
Most of the benefits you ascribe to Twitter aren't exclusive, are far more
likely to take place on other media and are, in fact, slowly being eroded by
the global and noisy nature of Twitter/Facebook.

On the other hand, Twitter created a new set of serious problems that didn't
exist before. Heck, Musk was in court and lost a portion of his control over
Tesla because he was on Twitter.

~~~
danso
I agree Twitter's low-friction nature has led to reckless and/or inappropriate
usage -- Musk isn't even the most egregious case by far, compared to President
Trump using Twitter (instead of the traditional longform mediums) to
disseminate his thoughts, or colossal mistakes by people like Rep. Anthony
Weiner.

But Twitter's benefits do not have to be exclusive to it for Twitter to be a
unique service, just as Google and Facebook were not the first or only in
their respective categories.

------
ctdonath
"Like" was ruined when Twitter made it republish tweets, making it practically
identical to retweet. It had been useful to mark posts for later review.
Without it at all, there will be no way to "save" a tweet.

~~~
conscion
There's an option to bookmark tweets. They then show up in your bookmarks
section.

[https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/product/2018/...](https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/product/2018/an-
easier-way-to-save-and-share-tweets.html)

~~~
ihuman
Wasn't "Like" originally bookmark? Have we gone full circle?

Edit: I was thinking of favorites. I used favorites as bookmarks, so I got it
mixed up.

~~~
SyneRyder
You were essentially correct - the Favorite button in third party apps got
rewired to the Like heart button. Favorites were previously only visible to
yourself, the person whose tweet you favorite, or anyone who specifically went
looking for your list of Favorite tweets.

(I think making Favorites/Likes act like retweets was a terrible idea -
thankfully I never saw them in third-party apps, but it made the website a
horrible experience when you see what the people you follow were liking.)

------
mxstbr
That's a radical departure from their 2015 stance[0]: “The heart is more
expressive, enabling you to convey a range of emotions and easily connect with
people. And in our tests, we found that people loved it.”

I wonder when they're going to start testing this and what the results are. I
hope they share what they learn, this could be an interesting experiment given
how core a part of Twitter the like/favorite button has always been!

[0]: [https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2015/hearts-on-
twi...](https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2015/hearts-on-twitter.html)

~~~
jobigoud
But removing a feature doesn't have the same weight as adding a new one. Most
probably the people that got accustomed to it will be very vocal about the
removal, while nobody ever cries over a new feature they don't like, they just
not use it.

------
dorfsmay
Twitter doesn't work if you want to know what's hot out there, because lack of
threading, awkward interface, no possibility to organise by subject. Finally
the need and concept of "following" people, but by default you don't follow
them since you only see a subset of their tweets, only the ones that are
popular. If this is what you are looking for, use reddit.

Twitter works fine for it's original purpose, follow a few people and wanting
to know what they post. You have to tweak a few settings:

    
    
      • Disable "Timeline: Show the best Tweets first" (in "Account")
    
      • disable "Quality filter" (in "Notifications")
    
      • "Turn off retweets" for people you follow who tweet interesting stuff but retweet garbage
    
      • stop following people who tweet more than a few times a week (nobody has that much interesting stuff to say!)

------
josefresco
Not sure about likes but Twitter without retweets is a much better place. The
people I follow rarely say something with their own voice, and I was tired of
the "outrage" tweets for every new social issue. my feed is not much quieter,
and when my Tweeps _do_ say something, I pay attention.

~~~
Phee7the
When you're following artists reetweets can be useful to discover their fellow
artists. Not all of twitter is about debating current political events.

~~~
josefresco
True. It's why I'm happy they allow it per-user. Some users retweet great
stuff, it's the political/social outrage of the day I'd rather not have rammed
down my throat every day (I'm perfectly happy with _pulling_ my doom and
gloom)

------
adrianN
How can debate on Twitter be good when they limit the length of the arguments
that you can make to two or three sentences?

~~~
blhack
It can't. Twitter makes people unnecessarily simplify arguments.

Unnecessarily simple arguments -> People get upset because you're
misrepresenting them -> essentially screaming at each other instead of
discussing.

The fundamental nature of the platform is bad. It's basically arguing in
clickbait form.

~~~
hliyan
Speaking of which, I've found this particular platform the best for rational
debate: [https://www.kialo.com](https://www.kialo.com)

We once actually used it to have an internal debate about development
processes and effort estimation techniques.

~~~
andrepd
I don't like that it encourages short "bullet points" rather than more
involved discussion.

~~~
BaronSamedi
If it required you to make arguments in the form of First Order Logic
statements and then did automated validation of them, then I would use it.
I'll grant this is probably a niche use case. With the power of modern
automated reasoning, and maybe automated fallacy detection, it seems a shame
not to use that. Computer assisted argumentation would be a great forum
feature.

~~~
andrepd
That makes no sense in practice. The reasoning you employ on a day to day
basis is completely outside the realm of what you propose. Realistic everyday
reasoning is too complex; it is not satisfactorily represented by first-order
logic.

Also, even mathematical proofs are cumbersome to state in a purely formal way.
Moreover, many of our arguments hinge more on things like accuracy of
assumptions, informal inferences, disagreement on "axioms" and goals, etc, not
on formal validity of arguments.

------
yahnusername
I wrote a firefox plugin that removes likes/follows/upvotes/hearts style
vanity counters from a bunch of websites. It absolutely makes them better to
use. This is a good change.

I had a middle-of-the-road idea in this area too, which is to replace the
number with the magnitude. So you still get the feedback from the vanity
metric, but it happens with logarithmic decay.

A more detailed write-up (and repo for the plugin) for those interested:
[https://github.com/a13o/disengaged/wiki#replace-vanity-
count...](https://github.com/a13o/disengaged/wiki#replace-vanity-counters-
with-their-magnitude)

------
brilee
Twitter suffers one simple problem: it conflates engagement with quality, and
rewards people who create "engaging" content, rather than people who create
"quality" content. So the problem isn't in what the users do; it's how Twitter
filters the algorithmic feed to bring quality content to the top.

~~~
TangoTrotFox
Unfortunately in the ad age this is the same for everything. It's the reason
you see posts like "Have scientists discovered proof of an alien
megastructure?" instead of "Light dimming from distant star system defies
conventional explanation." even though I think the later headline is also
still quite enthralling.

Things that get people clicking and active is what makes the money and so it's
what gets optimized for.

------
4684499
IMO, "Like" is just one of the ways for users to express themselves, you
remove this tool, they'll find other ways, e.g., flood with one-word replies.

Account with huge number of followers that can block counter accounts could
create an echo chamber, which is rather poisonous to a healthy debate.

That being said, I don't think twitter should be used as an debate platform,
and there are some online tools trying to solve the problem already, like
Kialo. They perhaps are not good enough, but still better than twitter.

------
dcre
This story is not true.

[https://twitter.com/TwitterComms/status/1056913093471670273](https://twitter.com/TwitterComms/status/1056913093471670273)

~~~
strictnein
Where does that say it isn't true?

> "As we've been saying for a while, we are rethinking everything about the
> service to ensure we are incentivizing healthy conversation, that includes
> the like button. We are in the early stages of the work and have no plans to
> share right now."

~~~
dcre
They are not removing the like button.

~~~
strictnein
Typically when one makes an assertion and has a link following it, one assumes
that link backs up that assertion. But in this case, I guess you'll just
repeat your original assertion?

------
awkward
Isn't there a documented phenomenon that attaching praise or compensation
(likes) to a behavior people would do anyway (tweeting) will essentially grind
that behavior to a halt if the compensation is removed?

Intuitively I can't imagine twitter's numbers are going to fare well if
they're handing out a third of the dopamine hits that they were previously.

------
zapnuk
1\. You cannot argue faithfully with 140 characters. 2\. Isn't a "like"/upvote
tool necessary for debates? There isn't a formal judge to rate
comments/arguments. Who "wins" is decided by the (very) biased community. This
is obviously a bad idea as most communities aren't open to unpopular ideas.
However, if you trust the community as a whole you can expect general
consensus about sensitive topics such as gay rights, immigration etc.

If you would throw out any evaluation tool then extremist options have the
same visibility as any other comment. Meaningful rejection would then be only
possibly by 'spamming' a similar counter argument.

I think it's pretty much impossible to create a meaningful rating system
because of the said biased 'judges' \- removing the like functionality doesn't
seem like an improvement though.

~~~
empath75
> You cannot argue faithfully with 140 characters.

Most people couldn’t make a coherent argument even if you gave them 100,000
words.

------
dorfsmay
> The feature was introduced in 2015 to replace “favourites”, a star-shaped
> button that allowed people to bookmark tweets to read later.

I have been using "favourite"/"like", like a bookmark, so am I going to lose
all those now?

------
joering2
Imagine how better Twitter would be have they had a "downvote" button like
Hacker News!

I mean how many times getting downvotes taught you how to behave on HN?

Long time ago I once posted a joke; it was good and funny joke even somewhat
related to subject. I got downvoted into oblivion. I scratched my head for a
while but then realized I do the same thing - even if I chuckle at someones
good joke, I cast my vote of thumb down to remind them in order to keep
quality engagement on HN, don't post jokes! I eventually figured out it was a
venue thing. You may be the funniest guy in the word, but if you go to church
people expect you to remain in silence and/or pray, not make jokes.

Twitter used to be really great and then few months ago I just gave up on it.
I follow few people that spew hate rhetoric. I watched them posting their
stuff about Clinton's emails over and over again. Sometimes getting stupid
answers, sometimes being ignored and sometimes actually seeing people putting
time and effort to answer and explain. These individuals were not interested
in your response! They were there just to post their rhetoric like a contest
who scream louder in empty echo chamber! I know that HN downvote button would
help cleanse Twitter because with few thousands posts per second, obviously
nobody will decide manually how valuable the tweet is.

Being downvoted on Twitter would mean first your posting frequency goes down.
Then it could mean your post is sliced to 210 char (half of original 420).
Finally you could be jailed automatically for 3/7/14/31 days. I mean there is
so many ideas to get folks post quality content or GTFO that its surprise
management allowed Twitter to slide this low. I am sure I am not the only one
who gave up on Twitter, or perhaps to Twitter bottom line (ad $), it doesn't
even matter.

------
lazugod
Everyone is just accepting the article's weird premise that the purpose of
Twitter is to argue and have debates?

~~~
craftyguy
Top comments here don't accept that, so I'm not sure who you mean by
'everyone'.

------
mcintyre1994
I've seen some interesting uses of this where eg. liking a specific Westworld
tweet would have them message you about new episodes, and liking an Apple
event ad will have them message you when it's about to start. I wonder whether
they'll have a replacement for that sort of use case.

------
mwill
I don't think likes are the problem, I think twitter surfacing tweets based on
likes is the problem. Replace them with a bookmark button that doesn't effect
timelines at all, and imo that's a real improvement right off the bat.

------
ianamartin
The idea that you _can_ have a quality debate in 250 chars or less is
fundamentally what's wrong with the quality of debate.

The format itself encourages people to gloss over nuance, ignore complexity,
and simply declare a position which anyone who disagrees is at least wrong and
very possibly evil, depending on the topic.

Twitter is a great platform for shooting the shit, rapidly conveying breaking
news, and snappy one-liners. It's actively bad for any kind of in-depth
analysis. Twitter should focus on improving the patform's natural strengths,
not trying to make it into something it can only ever fail at.

------
rchaud
Honestly, I can't think of any suggestion coming from Twitter execs that would
actually solve its usability issues, because they are still approaching it
from the POV that Twitter is "bringing humanity closer" or serving some other
kind of higher purpose.

When all you have to do is spend 10 minutes on Twitter to realize it's full of
political bots, crypto scam bots, humans with short fuses, and celebrities
shilling their snake oil products.

------
mayankkaizen
I never used 'like' button in the sense of upvote or 'like' in Facebook. I
always used it for 'bookmarking' purposes.

Though Twitter added bookmarking feature, it is somehow useless for me as I
can't undo this bookmarking operation for individual tweet but I can simply
unlike a tweet.

Personally I think Twitter is just not suitable for debating. I mean you can't
articulate your view in 280 charscters. Facebook is better suited for this.

------
thrower123
So I guess I'll have to retweet things now to bookmark them.

It'd be nice if Twitter could reconcile it's shitty RSS replacement and crazy-
drunken-uncle-shouting-into-the-void halves into something coherent.

~~~
caw
There’s actually a “bookmark this tweet” option under the more options menu
for the tweet.

~~~
tenryuu
I don't have this option on tweetdeck, only a add to collections, gives me a
popup with no content. Nice.

~~~
caw
It’s on the official site, I’m not sure of 3rd party app support. To view your
bookmarks,
[https://mobile.twitter.com/i/bookmarks](https://mobile.twitter.com/i/bookmarks)

~~~
jdck1326
I only see it on the mobile site.

It's found to the right of the heart button.

------
tombert
Yeah, removing a "like" button will really improve the "communicate-by-
fortune-cookie" quality of academic discourse on Twitter.

I'm not a huge fan of Twitter, so I'll admit bias, but 140/280 characters
really isn't enough to construct a proper argument, but it's the exact space
to come up with some some witty truism. I seriously doubt that the "likes"
were the problem.

------
partiallypro
Jack constantly and consistently proves how out of touch he is with his own
company and has listens to the worst advice from those activists he meets.

------
shady-lady
Good.

Please remove retweet count as well.

Maybe Twitter can become a social network without herd mentality.

And then facebook(incl. instagram) can also remove their 'reaction emojis'

~~~
fiblye
If that happens, then the herd will just move on.

~~~
mattdeboard
And nothing of any value is lost

~~~
fabricexpert
except millions of $$$$ of revenue

------
nickik
Twitter is just not a platform for discussion. It was (and is) useful as a
smart link finder because interesting people post about stuff.

------
bedhead
Twitter is like a free lifetime supply of the alcohol of your choosing. Yeah,
some people can handle it just fine and not turn into full-blown alcoholics,
but for many people there's just no way to not give in and have their lives
ruined. People are really the problem more than Twitter, but man Twitter sure
does enable mental dysfunction awfully efficiently.

------
TekMol
I always thought that the dismal number of likes tweets usually get is a sign
that nobody actually reads tweets.

On Twitter, I regularely see accounts with tens of thousands of followers. Yet
their tweets get less then 10 likes. So a like to follower ratio of 0.1% or
so.

On Instagram the situation is pretty different. Like to Follower ratio is more
in the 1% range.

What is the reason for this difference?

------
village-idiot
Honestly, I gave up on twitter. Changed my password to something random and
long and locked myself out.

At this point I have 0 faith that Twitter can or wants to clean up the mess
they’ve made. It’s been obvious for years that Twitter is trending in a dark
way, yet it seems like corporate likes to pretend that they’re back in the
happy early days.

------
tomatotomato37
Does a platform originally developed to post every random witty thought you
come up with on the loo really need to improve the quality of debate? I feel
like it would be better to acknowledge the fundamental design is incompatible
with serious debate and try to steer it back towards the place for frivolous
shitposting

------
accnumnplus1
I use 'like' as a sort of bookmark, rather than to tell someone I like their
tweet. For that reason it's rare that I 'like' a tweet. I can review my likes
as a refined timeline, greatest hits. Guess I'll have to use the bookmarks.

------
dorkwood
That’s a shame, because I use it as a “save for later” function.

I’ve got hundreds of links to side projects, tips, advice, and inspiration
stored in there. Hopefully they give us some warning before it happens so I
can scrape them all.

------
acoye
So if you want to interact, you have to formulate a thought in an elegant
message? Most wont pass the barrier of having to think hard about something.
(ie. thinking fast and slow / switching from system 1 to system 2 is _hard_)

------
sodosopa
I use the “like” button a lot but mainly because Twitter doesn’t have a read
later or save function. I don’t necessarily like because I enjoy the content,
I like because I want to digest it at a different time

~~~
andrepd
It's a tweet. How long can it take to read that you have to save it for later?

~~~
sodosopa
If you think it’s only a tweet, you’re naive. It’s the discussion and mainly
it’s also links to the content. Just because it’s 140ish characters doesn’t
mean it takes an instant to read and move on.

------
VBprogrammer
+1

------
aranw
Awesome hopefully stop seeing random "liked" tweets in my feed. Now if only
they fix tweets resurfacing when replied or retweeted then I might actually
enjoy standard Twitter apps

------
IB885588
Seems like they should add a visible toggle switch that allows user to decide
if they want the timeline algo to weight likes or not.

Hey Twitter, it's not bad to give users a little choice.

------
rad_gruchalski
What does that actually mean. I use likes for kind of a reading list. Will I
have to use an external tool now to manage that? Without likes, twitter is
useless to me.

/edit spelling

~~~
rad_gruchalski
Ah, I see the bookmarks now. But it’s two taps instead of one :(

~~~
strictnein
I had no idea it existed until this HN discussion, and I have a feeling a lot
of other people are in the same boat.

------
cujo
People love to rail on twitter, but where's the movement to leave? It's hardly
a necessity for life in 99% of use cases, They're a company with arguably
questionable morals, and their current resurgence is predicated almost
entirely on Trump (make of that what you will).

Just quit it already.

------
mrhappyunhappy
As a person who never uses twitter, I tried using it one time and found all of
the functions very confusing. Do people really find twitter useful?

------
dharma1
It's curious such a simple thing (a heart or like button) causes addiction.
Social acceptance must be deeply wired in to our reward system

------
tenryuu
is that all twitter is now? a debate site? Starring items has been a stample
of both bookmarking content, as well as showing appreciation for anything on
the platform.

But as well as when they started merging liked posts into the content feed on
the main apps, it did remove the critical thing if it being an option for
feedback to a post, without sharing the content to your own timeline (a
retweet).

I don't understand any logic behind this change at all, and if there is,
there's a paywall. But twitter is for everything, not just politics. If you're
using politics to drive your platform, it's a shitshow for anyone else that
uses the platform for more recreational purposes

~~~
k__
I think it's a good thing if they get rid of it and not just replace it with
another symbol as they did with the favorites.

Either people like your stuff and want to share it, or they don't.

~~~
dev_north_east
> Either people like your stuff and want to share it, or they don't.

Eh not really. Consider my use case. I don't tweet, retweet or anything. My
profile is set to private. I mainly use Twitter for updates on the local
public transport (and sport scores). Last week for instance the metro system
had a really bad failure. At the end of the day, their Twitter account posted
a big apology and you could see whoever was manning it had played a blinder by
helping as many people as they could. So I "liked" it as a form of
appreciation. I do that a lot.

I don't think I'm alone on this either. I know lots of people who use Twitter
for practical things (traffic updates etc.), I honestly can't think of anyone
who actually tweets though.

If like goes, I'll just use retweet as a replacement to show the same emotion.
Except I'll be retweeting to an empty audience deliberately.

~~~
k__
If there are no likes, then shares are the new likes.

If you share to an empty audience, it will still be added to the share count.

------
kamaal
I've been using the 'like'(heart symbol) to bookmark tweets and tweet threads.

Sigh, I would be losing a lot of my book marks.

------
yogthos
I'm pretty sure the 240 character limit and the way Twitter handles threads
precludes any quality of debate.

------
rawTruthHurts
Not that one can have much of a "quality debate" in 280 character bites,
anyway.

------
kumarvvr
What 'debate' are they talking about? It's a free for all shouting match.

------
clarkmoody
There is no way to have a meaningful debate, much less a quality one, in a
completely public forum. Half the time, participants don't even agree on the
definition of words. Think "privilege" and "rights" for easy examples.

Then quality goes out the window when anybody from the mob can jump into your
thread at any point, quibbling with words, accusing you of being Hitler, etc.

To have meaningful debate, you also need people who are seeking truth and are
open to having their minds changed. Twitter (or modern politics in general)
does not incentivize changing your mind, since anyone can screenshot some old
Tweet, and now you're a flip-flopper. As if you're expected to emerge onto
social media with a fully-formed worldview.

But it's not like politics has ever been a thoughtful, measured process. There
are no good ol' days. The ballot box is a proxy for the musket and bayonet.
When you vote, you are literally making an attempt to force the other half of
society to do what you want. Life, liberty, and property are on the line, so
politics will never be anything but conflict.

------
2sk21
I simply use Twitter as a news feed now and mostly ignore any replies to
posts.

------
mherrmann
Whether this is good or bad, I think it's cool that Twitter are still willing
to make profound changes to their service. The last was switching from 140 to
280 chars. Kudos!

------
koolhead17
Sigh... It was my bookmarking tool. :(

------
Finnucane
When we get to 'Twitter to remove "Twitter" in a bid to improve quality of
debate' then we might get some progress.

------
jamiethompson
It would be interesting to see how well upvote/downvote would work.

~~~
orasis
Just like here, it would quell community taboo opinions.

If you want to be downvoted to oblivion on HN, just try pointing out potential
moral issues with a new technology.

~~~
orasis
...and the above was instantly downvoted. Communities that use downvotes
become blind to self-criticism.

~~~
bonaldi
Watch people here flock approvingly around a PG thinkpiece about the value of
"unsayable opinions", though. It's like grappling smoke.

------
pmlnr
There must be a non-paywalled version of this announcement on some other site.

------
Jenz
I think it’s a great idea, but maybe not for Twitter.

------
sayrer
they could add some filters to prevent randos from appearing in your replies

------
pjc50
Reposted every time it's relevant:
[https://twitter.com/actioncookbook/status/684515262712967170...](https://twitter.com/actioncookbook/status/684515262712967170?lang=en)

"USERS: we love twitter but it has problems

TWITTER: great we'll fix them

USERS: do you want to know what they are

TWITTER: absolutely not

USERS: you're alienating the people who actually use your product

TWITTER: likes are now florps

USERS: what

TWITTER: timeline goes sideways"

(The irony is that likes _used_ to have a clear, simple use: bookmark
something for your own reference while also telling the poster that you liked
it. Twitter ruined this by injecting "liked" tweets by people you follow into
your timeline, collapsing the distinction between like and RT.

Retweet is actually a user-originated function, people used to manually
retweet by pasting and putting "RT" at the front.)

~~~
nothis
Here's what I'm thinking when companies remove votes or scores or whatever:
They're just _hiding_ the problem. Like, people _still_ like the stuff, it's
just no longer tracked. They sure as hell won't stop tracking views or
whatever. Which are likely (heh) just a factor removed from "likes".

The problem is that you're giving fake news the power to dominate million's of
people's twitter feeds if you're just ruthless enough.

~~~
noxToken
This isn't a sarcastic question nor an attempt at snark: have you ever
moderated a message board, forum, subreddit, facebook group, etc. with decent
post traffic? It's tough. Even something that has a hyperfocused topic (e.g. a
subreddit for dogs with sunglasses riding skateboards) will have naysayers of
what should and shouldn't be allowed. Someone posts a pic of a dog. It doesn't
have sunglasses, but it does have on yellow-tinted glasses for reducing eye-
strain on monitor. Oh and it's not riding a skateboard. This dog is on a self-
balancing scooter.

Most of your users won't care. They'll enjoy the content. Someone chimes in
that the sub or forum is no longer pure. The content is similar, but it's off-
topic. The board is going to devolve into just pics of dogs (which is a
legitimate concern). Other people defend that the board needs content, and
that computer glasses and a scooter is similar enough to be inclusive. So
where do you plant you flag? Will there be a zero-tolerance policy for
anything that isn't a dog wearing sunglasses riding a skateboard (OMG mods are
literally Nazis!!!), do you allow users to flag posts for review on a case-by-
case basis (need more mods), or do you relax the content restriction (this
board is trash since it lost its focus!)?

Twitter has no focused topic. The platform is for anyone to communicate
whatever they want within reason. With disparate cultures than span every
corner of the globe, how do you stop the problem from existing in the first
place? Not everyone has the tolerance for scathing, brutal honesty. How do you
draw the line between that and bullying? How do you differentiate between
well-intended people who are misinformed and people spouting propaganda? I
don't have the answer, but my time moderating forums about topics that have no
impact on society has taught me that it's pretty much impossible to create a
perfect platform that appeases everyone.

~~~
nothis
>This isn't a sarcastic question nor an attempt at snark: have you ever
moderated a message board, forum, subreddit, facebook group, etc. with decent
post traffic?

I actually have! I definitely don't think there's currently a good solution to
this problem. But removing likes is ridiculous, too!

------
nurino
The fav button was a useful tool back when it meant "fav" as in "bookmark" and
not "like". Maybe they should go back to that? I know they've recently added a
"bookmark" button as well, but I hope they don't keep it hidden the way it is
now.

On the other hand: Twitter does not have to be a debate site. You can surely
debate using it, but it's just a website where you can post short messages and
follow your friends. They shouldn't screw it just to cater to a certain part
of their user base.

~~~
p2detar
I've always been confused about this change. I was using the "fav" exactly to
bookmark tweets rather than approve their content.

~~~
mato
+1. I've since switched (grudgingly) to sending myself DM's of Tweets that I
want to "save for later". A poor substitute, but easy to reach for from the
UI.

------
miki123211
Paywalled. If HN had downvotes I would give one.

~~~
federicoponzi
I was wondering why the throw-away account, this could be a reason

------
andrew-dc
I was going to suggest that anyone interested in quality of debate unplug from
Twitter entirely and go meet up with some folks for coffee. Or Tacos. Or go on
a hike together. Or have them over for board games. Bonus if these are folks
you don't entirely agree with on everything.

~~~
heartbreak
That doesn't scale at all.

~~~
andrew-dc
Tough sell for investors.

