
Twitter’s Plan to Get People to Stop Yelling at Each Other - minimaxir
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolenguyen/behind-twitters-plan-to-get-people-to-stop-yelling-at-each
======
skymt
> Over several days this spring, BuzzFeed News met with Twitter’s leadership
> and watched as twttr’s team worked on its first big push: helping people
> better understand what’s being said in often chaotic conversations. The team
> thinks that if people took more time to read entire conversations, that
> would help improve their comprehension of them.

I had assumed that Twitter was aware of the implications of its design for
conversation and had decided that the controversy boost to engagement numbers
was worth creating a toxic environment. For real, consider these two basic
elements of Twitter's design. First, any given post has a low maximum length,
so any time you want to say more than a sentence or two it needs to be spread
over multiple posts (a "tweetstorm"). Second, Twitter has two separate
features that let anyone pull any part of a series of posts out of its
original context: retweeting and quote-tweeting.

~~~
carriers
Yeah, I don't get this at all. I think it's even deeper than designing for
controversy. I'm "older" (40s), though I work on products used by younger
people, so I don't think this is just me being old, but I can't follow a
conversation on twitter at all. When there's a link from HackerNews to
Twitter, I click on it and sometimes see the thing mentioned in the HN title,
and sometimes don't. Then there's a bunch of stuff below it, some of which is
definitely replies to the original post, and some of which appears to be part
of a completely different conversation. Some threads of conversations get cut
off for no apparent reason and you have to click something to see more of
them. Nothing is indented, so it's really hard to tell who's replying to whom.

I basically can't understand a thread on Twitter, so I've never signed up
because who the hell wants to be part of that? I usually also don't go to
Twitter to read stuff other people link to because I'm not going to be able to
follow it. Forget boosting controversial stuff, I bet a lot of users post the
way they do because they also don't understand what they're looking at.

~~~
theoh
Some people used to feel this way about IRC.

I'm afraid the reality is probably that you just don't have the motivation to
figure it out, for whatever reason. No mass-market product like Twitter could
succeed if it was as confusing as you say it is.

There's also the fact that a subset of computer programmer types have low
tolerance for all sorts of "noisy" things that the average person doesn't have
a problem with.

~~~
fjsolwmv
IRC is also terrible for conversations.

~~~
fivre
IRC is fine for conversations, though it's a different model of conversation
than many mediums. All comments from different threads of conversation are
intermixed, and you must separate them out mentally.

This is very different from threaded models, but it's something that can be
adapted to easily enough, same as how most people can talk within a group in a
noisy bar, where there are multiple surrounding intelligible conversations.
Like in a bar, it's easy to jump into another adjacent conversation
spontaneously.

~~~
Twisell
More important IRC don’t enable to browse history as far as I known.

Meanwhile tweet can persist enabling asynchronous conversation, so it’s more
like a very lightweight forum than IRC.

Edit: But the tree structure for reply is actually more similar to a HN thread
with a less visible structure.

------
skybrian
Simpler: stop showing tweets just because other people liked them. That's not
a reshare, so it shouldn't be treated that way.

More generally, discourage large conversations and encourage fragmentation.

~~~
keerthiko
That's why someone bought this domain [0] which redirects to a search
excluding tweets [1] not authored by the people you follow. It's way sparser
for me (I follow roughly 200 people) than the regular twitter feed so I also
waste way less time whether procrastinating or looking for tweets by people I
actually follow. I deleted "twitter.com" from my browser history and always
start at realtwitter.com now.

[0] [http://realtwitter.com](http://realtwitter.com)

[1]
[https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=filter%3Afollows](https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=filter%3Afollows)
-filter%3Areplies&src=typd

~~~
marquis-chacha
Wow I just actually enjoyed using twitter for the first time ever. I'll keep
that link in mind.

------
nullc
The product has "twit" right in the name. Twitter is where you go to read
twits or become one. Why is anyone surprised?

From its tiny size limits to its byzantine threading and inability to follow
all of one person without creating an account (which they often instantly ban,
even if it does nothing but read)... Twitter is a communications medium
constructed in a way that maximizes the ability ferment outrage and minimizes
the ability to inform. Twitter is a platform for twits to be twits as an
amusement to other twits.

Fortunately, you don't have to use it and a great majority of people largely
don't. For some reason it gets fetishized by the media -- probably because
twittishness is good for business -- and spun as if it were important.

~~~
bubblewrap
Except you can follow all sorts of experts and famous people om there. Not all
of them are twits. Even Paul Graham drops the occasional tweet:
[https://twitter.com/paulg](https://twitter.com/paulg)

~~~
asdff
That's dependent on your interests though. In my field people are too busy
writing manuscripts to write a tweet.

~~~
bubblewrap
What field is that?

------
duxup
Twitter by design encourages trite / curt posts that have to be outlandish to
get any attention. Nuance and understanding are not encouraged ... just based
on how the whole thing works.

The medium is the message.

~~~
baud147258
Well, your comment fits in a tweet...

~~~
duxup
A tweet can be true, in fact many are, but the medium can still be dumb /
encourage dumb things.

~~~
baud147258
I agree, it was just some sarcasm on the 'trite / curt' part of your comment.

~~~
duxup
Noted, you weren't wrong.

------
alexandercrohde
I used blame twitter for creating at outrage culture.

But then I realized I had it backwards. There have always been people who find
it fun to vent outrage, moral indignity, and condescension. They just got it
from TV blowhards before.

~~~
fullshark
Agreed. News junkies aren’t after the truth / meaningful debate. They are
after confirmation bias and seeing people they hate get rekt.

~~~
asdff
Headline junkies more like. Nearly every linked article reddit thread has a
comment along the lines of "No one read the article." Twitter is even worse
about this.

------
lalos
Why not add an ability for the author of the parent tweet to censor the tweets
they please and other users can tap on 'show tweets hidden by author under
this tweet'. End of story, people who are into the crazy discussions can see
it, authors can control and censor as they please and Twitter washes it's
hands by saying that the censoring is done on the personal level.

------
chrisbrandow
I think human conversations at scale with strangers is inherently difficult to
solve. We are prone to quick, context-life reactions.

Threading management only gets you so far…

~~~
aloisdg
HN, Reddit and most newsgroups are not so bad.

~~~
onion2k
HN has an appalling reputation outside of HN. People refer to it as "the evil
orange website".

EDIT: It's "angry orange website", not "evil orange website". Not so bad after
all.

~~~
oblio
Honest question: which people? HN is too US/California/Bay Area centric for my
tastes (most people here are probably from there), it talks a bit too much
about money and jobs, but it's still a decent resource.

~~~
onion2k
I was wrong about the name. It's "the angry orange website".
[https://twitter.com/search?q="angry%20orange%20website"](https://twitter.com/search?q="angry%20orange%20website")
\- that's just a sample of HN's 'haters'. HN has its share of people who are
awful and post horrible opinions (see the discussion about any article on
JavaScript, health care, wealth, etc). I believe HN has _some_ value left
which is why I still post here, but I can absolutely see why people have
abandoned it, and I certainly don't talk about HN with people in real life.

~~~
kprjo
I wonder why they call it that. After all you get banned here if you post
right-wing opinions. It's practically a safe space for them.

~~~
astrange
HN has a pretty cynical viewpoint on everything. A comment doesn't really feel
like a contribution when you're writing it unless you disagree with the parent
(like so).

People will find all sorts of reasons to think the article is wrong based on
"mid-brow dismissal" or will say any public figure or company is lying about
any statement they make.

Plus there's no emojis.

------
josefresco
> Twitter, predictably, immediately dysregulated in response.

This a rant, but I hate this trend of taking what a couple/few people say and
calling it "Twitter" or "everyone is saying" or "people are calling for" or
"the Internet hates". Reference the actual person who said the comment and
don't lump millions of users in with the comments of a few. Whenever I dig
into an issue like this, I find maybe a handful of comments when the topic
itself is seen by thousands/millions.

~~~
yourduskquibble
HN'ers all agree ;) that modern day journalism is filled with hyperbole and
unsubstantiated information.

~~~
tyfon
This started a long time ago, I remember during the Bush/Gore election the
media using "some people say" as a intro to a topic, as if those words
validated the entire thing and had to be responded to. Might have started
earlier as well but I didn't watch much US news before that.

~~~
fredsanford
1926 would like to introduce you to the National Enquirer. [0]

Not the first, but the first that came to my mind...

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Enquirer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Enquirer)

------
forgottenpass
>The entire episode was a microcosm of Twitter’s larger problems [...]
everyone yelling, and no one talking

This isn't meant as a dig at Twitter, but humans simply have limits to how
many active participants a conversation can have at any one time. If people
start talking on twitter instead of yelling, engagement metrics are going to
drop through the floor.

In your experience, how many people can be in a room and all participate in
one conversation before they split into more than one group, or an
audience/panel dynamic forms? Twitter's design is such that there are so many
silent participants to every interaction, that any conversation is stressed to
the breaking point if even a tiny percent of them choose to say anything.

I don't understand what jornos think twitter is and/or could be. As far as I
can tell, they want themselves and celebrities to post self-promotion and
overton-window-approved nonsense care-free, and then have the crowd act as a
mass of sycophantic yes-men.

------
Traster
Arguments happen on twitter because you have lots of different communities
that frequently accidentally collide. It's fascinating. Basically as it turns
out communities on the internet work calmly when they're homogenous - this is
the beauty of reddit. When communities interact you get chaos, because
suddenly you're confronted with thousands of people you disagree with. On
reddit that's called brigading and can get you banned, but on twitter it's
built into the platform.

The result is that on reddit you get isolated communities - some of which are
thoroughly toxic and churn out some of the worst of humanity. Twitter doesn't
create that isolated groupthink environment but instead it is just a constant
warfare between communities.

What I don't understand thouhg, is why twitter thinks its a good idea to give
away the one thing that makes their platform differentiated.

~~~
rusk
_> why twitter thinks its a good idea to give away the one thing that makes
their platform differentiated._

They've been doing this for a while in fairness, cut-by-cut:

\- algorithmic timeline (that can't be disabled!)

\- 240 character messages

\- "Threads"

\- "verified" users (that get different treatment)

All in a vain effort to take what was a beautifully simple peer-to-peer
microblogging platform and create something more like snapfacestergrameddit.

And still no "edit" button.

------
Itaxpica
Unfortunately, I don’t think this is really an issue that can be fixed
technically. People go to Twitter to yell at each other; that’s basically the
point of the platform. A Twitter where people don’t yell at each other is
basically Mastodon, which is a lovely network that basically nobody uses.

~~~
derefr
There really is a sub-network within Twitter of people who only ever have
nice, productive conversations with one-another.

This sub-network seems to have a lot of overlap with the set of people who use
their Twitter handle as a substitute for an email address—i.e. the people who
want you to tweet at them if you want to collaborate with them on something.
Which itself is vaguely overlapping the set of people who are "famous", but
not celebrities—i.e. people who are well-known names in their own industries
or hobbies.

~~~
kashprime
Very true, especially in the emergency medicine and critical care world where
entire conferences and movements are organized around hashtags (like #foamed
or #medtwitter). It's too bad Twitter doesn't give it's users tools to screen
out bad actors and accentuate the positive.

------
_bxg1
Get rid of retweets.

Make like counts invisible.

These will mitigate but not totally solve the problem. I don't think anything
more can be done.

------
chx
1\. Reenable the API.

2\. Done.

Seriously, people have been pretty good at this before. Build a bot that
autoblocks anyone engaging me if they have <N followers or the account is less
than N days old. And so on.

------
LargeWu
Twitter mostly proves that a lot of people are not happy unless they're
outraged.

~~~
derefr
I feel like there's a mental illness the entire world is seemingly ignoring,
whose symptom is constant, floating _disgust_ and _contempt_ and _despise_.
The ability to be offended by anything, because it's not the stimulus that
offended you; you were _already offended_ as an equilibrium state.

Let me attempt to describe this mentality as a recipe (because I don't have a
good name for it, but I'm sure you can recognize it): start by imagining
clinical depression. Keep the "everything in the world sucks" part, but remove
the part where you consider "everything" to include you. (This isn't
narcissism; you don't think you're all that great. You just aren't down on
yourself. You think of yourself in a normal, healthy way.) Then, take the
parts of depression where you have no energy and don't experience _any_
emotional affect, and replace those with a sliding scale from "neutral" to
"panicked shouting." (Which isn't real panic, per se; it's just a very loud
_simulated_ fight-or-flight response, without any real fear or traumatic
recall behind it.)

An increasing number of people are like this. Nobody notices these people as
unusual at all. This used to be rare enough to caricature; it was the "I want
to speak to your manager" mom. But _everyone_ is like that now. Every age
group has these people in equal numbers. What... happened?

~~~
asdff
Outrage culture is nothing new. Orwell wrote about it, in 1984 outrage culture
in Oceana was boiled down to a daily 'two minutes of hate.' It's just moved to
twitter rather than the dinner table or the work cafeteria or other meeting
places, where you might see the same circular outrage opinions although
perhaps with more restraint. The trope of 'racist grandpa' goes back a while,
for example.

That said, when everyone you know or follow is echoing the same thing, there's
a sense of entitlement that builds. That you are entitled to outrage, and now
with social media you have a platform to echo like minded opinions from the
hilltop. It's easy to forget that you inhabit an echo chamber on the internet
(1), and all too tempting to equate it into a worldwide crusade. You used to
have to earn a platform through persuasive arguments or hard earned authority
and expertise.

1\. [https://www.pewinternet.org/2019/04/24/sizing-up-twitter-
use...](https://www.pewinternet.org/2019/04/24/sizing-up-twitter-users/)

~~~
derefr
I’m not sure this is the entirety of the explanation. It seems that being
default-disgusted has passed some sort of threshold of social acceptability,
where it’s no longer something you are friends with someone _despite_ , and
become something that you befriend people _because of_.

I see people voicing their opinions on the things they _hate_ on blogs, social
networks, _dating sites_ —and successfully connecting with others who hate the
same things! This _was not a thing_ even ten years ago. Making your “about
you” on any social system a list of things you hate would have been seen, as
recently as 2010, as an uncouth mistake by someone who has no emotional
intelligence. (Even if you’re also someone who hates the same things, you’d
understand that doing this is a sign of a general willingness to violate
social norms, and so feel vaguely put off by the person.) But, these days,
it’s not a mistake to present yourself this way; there’s no penalty to doing
it, only benefits.

I think what this _might_ be, is the final death within Western “Christian-
descended atheist/agnostic” culture of the social mores that were inherited
from religion, e.g. the idea that wrath is a sin that you should feel bad for
embodying, and at least shouldn’t _advertise_ in public as a positive aspect
of yourself. (I say this because I _suspect_ —though I’m not sure—that this
change isn’t nearly as pronounced in Western religious communities.)

------
RickJWagner
Haha, good luck with that.

Internet trashtalking is the biggest thing since beer muscles. It's an
aggression-enabler.

------
dfischer
Solution: people pay to use twitter. Kill advertising as the main model.

Either Twitter will do this or the future decentralized apps will do this
naturally through micropayments of having to pay for compute through the
network.

I see a distributed p2p database that costs money to interact with and anyone
can build a client for it. Go ahead, build a client - maybe it's free, maybe
it costs money because it uses the protocol really well and people like it the
UX. Hell, maybe even the client has advertisements in it. Either way
interacting with the actual content costs money and that will naturally bring
in a balance of information. Right now we have information asymmetry exploited
by advertising.

~~~
bradleyankrom
This gets suggested as the solution to privacy/junk content/etc for every
social platform - why have none of them (that I am aware of) adopted this
model?

~~~
derefr
If you look at it a certain way, this is what email was before ISPs and
bigcorps gave away email addresses; everyone who had an email address was
paying their sysadmin for the privilege of having one (through their tuition
at a university that has email services, or through the cost-center of the
company they work for.) In either of those cases, people were more careful
with email, because postmasters were easily angered (and this was, in turn,
because causing trouble could actually get _your system_ kicked off the
network!)

In modern times, people pay to use Slack. It'd be interesting to study the
sociology of paid Slack groups (as compared to free Slack groups, or as
compared to any other free-for-everyone group chat platform.)

I've always thought it'd be a cool idea to have a group chat platform where,
rather than some admin owning the group and maybe paying, the group has a tip-
jar and anyone/everyone in the group can contribute. (Twitch sort of works
like this, but you're really donating to _the channel owner_ , not to the
group itself. In my hypothetical model, there is no channel owner; the group
persists because at least some of the user-base want it to, and so pay for it
to.)

~~~
asdff
>rather than some admin owning the group and maybe paying, the group has a
tip-jar and anyone/everyone in the group can contribute.

There are plenty of forums and private servers (for video games) that are
donation supported by the regulars. It's a struggle though.

------
thrower123
Twitter is one of the last gasps of the anonymous shit-posting that pervaded
internet communities before everything got all Web 2.0 and your grandmother
got a Facebook page.

Now everything is so serious.

------
slater
Does it involve banning nazis?

~~~
toephu2
Why do you have nazis in your timeline in the first place?

I never understood the people that always complain about nazis on twitter.
Like seriously what are you clicking 'Like' on that your twitter is fully of
nazis?

~~~
enraged_camel
It’s not my Twitter that is full of Nazis. It’s Twitter in general. And their
tweets make it into my life because non-Nazis respond to them, and those
responses then become popular and are shared.

~~~
asdff
Unfollow people who are sharing these easy jabs at hateful people all day.

------
Funes-
Personally, I would let users decide for themselves if they want to see
metrics at all, as well as favorites, retweets, and replies from other
accounts. That way, they wouldn't be forced to come across content from people
they've never intended to see. Just get new users through a quick tour in
which all these options are showcased and be transparent in regards to what
they do.

------
floatingatoll
My takeaway is “Twitter’s plan is to stop showing integer counts to users, no
matter what they say they want”. Good.

------
FeloniousHam
"People don't go to Twitter to feel good about themselves. People go to
Twitter to fight."

------
shambolicfroli
To see where new behavior (by the platform) is needed, they should look at
what breaks incipient good discussions, and how to prevent that. (I'll also
note that the HN conversation on this post seems quite different in tone from
the usual HN.)

------
ahakki
They really need to remove autothreading and replace it with a dedicated media
type for long form text. People already use Apple Notes screenshots for that
purpose.

------
lone_haxx0r
In other news: Mcdonalds' plan to get people to stop eating junk food.

------
JaimeThompson
I can't even get someone banned who directly threatened to murder me in direct
messages so I say they hVe a long way to go.

------
samirillian
Reads like such a puff piece.

------
beepboopbeep
Just add a damn dislike button. Don't let obnoxious ideas go without
punishment.

~~~
ihuman
Why not just unfollow/block the person if you dislike their tweets?

~~~
beepboopbeep
According to that logic I should follow every single person I agree with as
well. Which is silly, and I should not be encouraged to block every person I
disagree with.

The like button exists for a reason. It's a simple interactive button to
register my positive feeling towards a given statement. That exists unto it
self. Why should a dislike button not exist as well? With no way of showing
disagreement with a statement, people take to words and that's why they're
yelling at each other. There's no other outlet.

The reason they're not putting in a dislike button is because negativity feeds
tweet activity.

~~~
ihuman
I never said anything about agreeing or disagreeing. I suggested
unfollowing/blocking someone if you _dislike_ their tweets. Your timeline only
has posts written by or endorsed by people you choose to follow. If you don't
like what they are writing or endorsing, you don't have to keep them on your
timeline. There's no rule that says you have to listen to "people tak[ing] to
words and... yelling at each other"; you have the option to stop listening.
You are in control of your timeline.

Also, if you want to get rid of posts people you follow liked, most (if not
all) 3rd-party apps don't show them. Some apps like Tweetbot and Twitteriffic
even allow you to remove tweets with specific words from your timeline, or
filter retweets.

~~~
beepboopbeep
Or I could just click a dislike button and move on with my life, as is
happening with my own posts

~~~
ihuman
On HN there is a downvote button, but no block button, so its not a great
comparison. If you just dislike someone on twitter, you would still see the
user's new posts. If you dislike what they are saying in the present, do you
still want to see what they're saying in the future?

~~~
beepboopbeep
There definitely is a down vote button. It's the negative sign next to the
[username]|[time]

You're thinking of this in too black or white. What if an author I follow
posts something dumb? Do I then unfollow them? Why is it too much to ask to
simply click dislike just like I would for something I like?

~~~
ihuman
> There definitely is a down vote button. It's the negative sign next to the
> [username]|[time]

I said the opposite: "On HN there is a downvote button, but no block button"

> What if an author I follow posts something dumb? Do I then unfollow them?

If they keep posting posting content you don't like, then yes. Your timeline
isn't going to change unless you change it.

> Why is it too much to ask to simply click dislike just like I would for
> something I like?

Because it won't do anything. A dislike would just be another number on a post
next to the like and retweet counters, which are (supposedly) a major cause of
the toxicity on Twitter.

------
rchaud
> "....learn about how not having [likes and retweets] could potentially
> change how people read things,” How does that change the way you interact in
> a conversation? That’s super interesting.”

So basically, a bunch of tiny iterative UX changes that won't move the needle
one bit. This is the company where moving from from 140 to 280 chars happened
over the course of a decade.

I feel for the product people, they are working with one hand tied behind
their backs. Twitter is tailor-made for drama and outrage; nobody would be on
the platform if it wasn't primarily a promotional channel; otherwise it'd just
be you sending your thoughts into the void.

The way Twitter currently is is because that's the balance they struck between
a microblogging platform and something you can actually make money with/on.
Lowest-common-denominator content is the only thing that can generate enough
eyeballs to pique the interest of fly-by-night T-shirt companies and diet pill
peddlers who buy ads on it.

~~~
gipp
I'm not super optimistic about the changes, but getting rid of like/rt counts
is not even close to a "tiny iterative ux change". Those counts are absolutely
central to the way users interact with and understand conversation on the
site. Getting rid of them completely is a massive sea change in the
conversational dynamics.

~~~
scott_s
It was a big change for HN.

~~~
smacktoward
And for Slashdot when it did so as well.

Seriously, we have nearly 20 years of evidence at this point showing that, if
you associate something with users’ online identities that looks like a score,
they will treat it as such and start looking for ways to outscore everyone
else.

------
435rafwweeww
Dorsey (from the article) : “I also don’t feel good about how Twitter tends to
incentivize outrage, fast takes, short term thinking, echo chambers, and
fragmented conversation and consideration.”

But what has he done to fix the problem, besides tiny UX tweaks that go
nowhere, and the occasional ban of a highly visible jerk? Twitter is on fire,
and he just plods along.

Dorsey, in this article, is about as believable as Mark Zuckerberg saying "we
have to get serious about privacy."

The prototype that the article mentions exemplifies this attitude. Twitter
needs to reinvent itself, but the prototype offers tiny fixes - threaded
replies and helpful profile cards. These are needed, but does anyone really
think they are going to solve outrage on twitter?

The outrage problem is the product of twitter's core design. It combines 2-way
conversations with a context-free public soapbox and rewards comments that
make people nod in agreement. Solving this would mean redefining what twitter
is.

Dorsey won't do that, and so he's not serious about the problem. Maybe he
can't be serious because it would hurt their profits. The best we can do is
delete our accounts, disinvest, and hope twitter burns to the ground.

~~~
metalliqaz
He doesn't feel good about it, but he also has to watch the bottom line. The
only group he really fears are those to whom he owes a profit.

It's better if we don't make CEOs responsible for fixing our social problems.
We have to do that ourselves. They will follow along ("give the people what
they want")

~~~
CharlesColeman
> It's better if we don't make CEOs responsible for fixing our social
> problems. We have to do that ourselves. They will follow along ("give the
> people what they want")

CEOs are a subset of "we," and are in positions where their decisions have
impact disproportional to their numbers.

------
kprjo
All the problems I read about Twitter are basically PEBCAK.

"people say outrageous things!" okay so don't go ahead and read them. As an
example, replies to Trump are always a shitfest. Don't read them.

"there are evil nazis!" okay so don't follow them.

"even if I don't do these two, other people I follow retweet those and I get
to see them!" okay so mute, unfollow, or block that person.

"even if I don't do these two, other people I don't know say outrageous things
or follow evil nazis" that's none of your business.

Twitter served me well for a long time, if you've tried to "figure it out" and
couldn't (when it's the simplest shit ever) then just don't use it. Why should
all services be catered to the lowest common denominator? The only thing I
agree with is that they shouldn't show tweets other people liked in your
timeline. But the rest is simply bullshit. It's like some people want Twitter
to become something it's not and it's never been.

------
lcnmrn
Twitter becoming [https://sub.cafe](https://sub.cafe) any day now.

------
otakucode
Megan Phelps-Roper grew up in the Westboro Baptist "Church", that cult that
protests with offensive homophobic signs outside soldier funerals and such.
She went on Twitter. She got yelled at on Twitter. She started thinking that
maybe what she'd been taught was wrong. She grew in understanding of the
impact she was having on the world and she left the 'church', taking her
sister with her.

If Twitter had gotten people to stop yelling at each other earlier, there
would be 2 more protestors outside soldier funerals chanting hateful and
homophobic mantras. Keep that in mind while supporting an end to the yelling.

