
A proposal to improve Twitter and perhaps the world - shaki-dora
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/04/the-case-against-retweets/554078/?single_page=true
======
russellbeattie
I read Twitter almost exclusively via my custom personal news reader that I
developed like 5 years ago. It allows me to do a variety of things to increase
the signal/noise ratio of tweets. For example, it aggregates tweets by person
in chronological order [1] - making the daily aggregate of a person's tweets
into a single post akin to David Winer's original blog. What I also did is
stop following non-humans except for rare instances. Both helped me cut
through the noise by quite a lot.

Then recently, I excluded all retweets. It's quite amazing how little actual
new thoughts and opinions are shared on Twitter - getting rid of retweets cut
out easily 80% of the tweets I'd see. And I'm OK with that - I think too many
people retweet reflexively, without real thought and it ends up being a waste
of time.

1\.
[https://photos.app.goo.gl/kdQyqzWXDIvV0VfR2](https://photos.app.goo.gl/kdQyqzWXDIvV0VfR2)

~~~
rahul003
How bad of a job the UX people at Twitter are doing, that we have to come up
with apps like this to read the feed!

This looks really cool. I wish they were flexible about organizing our feed.

~~~
Skunkleton
Twitter's goal with their UX is probably to maximize "engagement" rather than
"usefulness".

------
token_throwaway
"But I follow thousands of people"

I was wondering why someone would feel this way until I got to that line! Why
would you follow thousands of people if "noise" bothers you? I think most
people like their social media a bit more curated than that to start with,
could be wrong though.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
I follow a couple thousand people on Twitter. It's a mix of infosec folks,
developers, startup friends, comic book artists, news people, comedians, a
variety.

It's less I'm trying to follow individual people and more that I'm trying to
find interesting thoughts or articles or art that they're creating or sharing.

Even so, there is still "noise" in that you'll see the same article surface
multiple times or the same news story be bandied about (for the last 24 hours
it's been pretty Sam Nunberg).

~~~
andrei_says_
How is it humanly possible to ingest the daily feeds from a couple of thousand
of people?

I follow about a hundred or so and I get 300-400 items per day. I use lists
for different topics but following one of the lists takes too much time.

In addition to this, nobody stays on topic. The political climate is so
intense that the reactions to it permeate everything.

The signal to noise ratio is becoming unacceptable and I’m not aware of any
tools to improve it.

~~~
petercooper
_How is it humanly possible to ingest the daily feeds from a couple of
thousand of people?_

I know a few hundred people in real life but I don't feel a need to call them
all up every single day. Ditto for Twitter. I can follow a wide range of
people and dip in and out of it, enjoy the variety, and move on. I'd want to
read everyone's _every_ tweet as little as I'd want to know every one of my
acquaintance's thoughts every day..

~~~
betenoire
but... but you get choose who you call, so you only make one call. But you
can't unread tweets to find the one you want to read. So are these just
snapshots of a moment in time you look at? Which is nothing like calling
someone on the phone.

------
AHTERIX5000
I don't have problems with retweets, I usually just stop following people who
retweet non-interesting noise.

Twitter however now also displays tweets people I follow have liked and that
has been the worst change for me. People seem to use retweets more sparingly
(and may even think if followers are interested before retweeting) than likes.
So now my feed is full of cat pictures and memes users have liked instead of
just the content I really subscribed for.

~~~
dorfsmay
Agreed. You can configure twitter to not add retweets from particular accounts
you follow, and that's great, but unfortunately, you cannot prevent it from
adding tweets that have been liked.

At this point what is the difference between "like" and "retweet"?

~~~
mnx
likes don't always show. re-tweets do.

------
montrose
I would not be surprised if Twitter is one day regarded as a poster child for
the dangers of blindly optimizing for engagement. I'm sure all their features
do increase engagement, at least in the short term. They wouldn't release them
otherwise. But it is a sort of engagement that burns out users and ultimately
sends them away.

~~~
runeb
Seems like most social media is going that way now. Facebook in particular. I
thought Snapchat would be a break from this since the content is temporary,
but I've read news articles from my home country about kids having to get
"Snapchat-sitters" to maintain their streaks while they are offline for more
than a day. So they post random images to each other to keep their streak
number increasing, which is total nonsense with regards to both engagement and
content.

~~~
dEnigma
Yes, I have seen this Snapchat streak phenomenon with my little brother and
his friends. They constantly send completely random pictures to each other,
i.e. they open the camera app, take a picture of the ground, of the seat in
front of them in the car, etc. and then immediately send it to a number of
their Snapchat friends. When I had Snapchat installed for a short while he
started sending me those pictures too, which in the end led to me blocking
him. From what my brother said there is a lot of competition around who can
keep their numbers the highest. Quite a strange thing to watch as an outsider.

~~~
imron
> Quite a strange thing to watch as an outsider.

And working just as the cognitive scientists designed.

~~~
dEnigma
Indeed. At times it is scary what level of trickery and manipulation is used
to drive addiction (or engagement as some like to call it) in social media.
Especially when you consider that these methods are also indiscriminately used
on young kids, as soon as they get their first smartphone and start installing
apps like Snapchat (which can be pretty early nowadays).

------
la_oveja
I don't know if the author uses Twitter as much as I do, but I love RTs and
Quotes, and serve a central point on what Twitter is, a sharing network of
short messages.

Making people copy & paste is an 90's mindset. If you think too much noise is
being published, ask the author or stop following him. Or make add him/her to
a list so you can watch his/she's messages without RTs.

I want to know news, and I want them FAST. Twitter does an amazing job on this
field, because when something is really important a lot of people are gonna
share it. RTs are also is very important for Trending Topics!

imho not wanting RTs on Twitter is not fully understanding Twitter.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting copy+pasting as an alternative to
retweeting.

~~~
paulgb
Funny enough, the word "retweet" used to refer doing exactly that. Twitter
only added retweet functionality in 2009, before then the convention was to
write "RT" followed by the handle and then paste the tweet.

~~~
danso
As a trivia point, one of the tweets that got Quinn Norton fired from her NYT
editorial gig was a manual retweet she did of a John Perry Barlow tweet that
contained the n-word:

Her explanation:
[https://twitter.com/quinnnorton/status/963594118747361281](https://twitter.com/quinnnorton/status/963594118747361281)

The original tweet:
[https://twitter.com/JPBarlow/status/3760544030](https://twitter.com/JPBarlow/status/3760544030)

There was plenty else that Norton tweeted that was problematic (including
another time that she used the n-word in a debate to rhetorically quip that
"terrorist" was an equally stupid word), but I was struck at how easy it was
to misread those pre-official-RT tweets as actual original tweets from the
retweeter. And many of the people dragging Norton over that tweet may not have
been around back in 2009.

------
Y_Y
This article irritatingly mixes up the ß (eszett, or ss ligature), the italic
version of the same ligature and the greek letter beta (or it's math-unicode
alternative).

[edit: Originally I falsely accused the author of doing this, but the equation
was actually originally written in terms of eszett. This is silly.]

Also I imagine if everyone started blocking real retweets like this people
would just go back to the oldskool copy-paste method.

~~~
draugadrotten
> Also I imagine if everyone started blocking real retweets like this people
> would just go back to the oldskool copy-paste method.

Yet, other networks where retweeting (reposting) requires copy-paste has a
much lower percentage of this. Anecdotally, almost nobody in my instagram feed
are reposting other people's photos or text. There are applications to do so,
or one could just copy-paste a screenshot. Yet, most people post only their
own photos. On twitter, almost half of the posts I see on the first page are
reposted retweets. How does it look for you?

Also, Raising the bar very little would make a huge impact due to the
amplification of the network effect.

~~~
rythie
I agree with this, on Twitter and Facebook I will very often repost stuff, but
on Instagram I never do. However, I do think it's hard to get noticed on
Instagram (if that's what you want), due to the lack of native sharing, likes
are on someone else's feed and often don't even get a follow from a popular
share.

~~~
kitd
It may be related to the target platform for Instagram and Snapchat being
mobile devices. Copy-pasting on mobile tends to be more cumbersome, and the
slightest impediment to the UX can have a significant effect on how many times
it occurs.

------
insin
I use a userscript [1] to toggle display of retweets and likes which Twitter's
algorithm decides should act like retweets, to make their extra "engagement"
opt-in.

It also highlights these tweets when displayed, so it's a bit more obvious
when your timeline consists of someone else's retweet spree or Twitter's
algorithm.

[1] [https://github.com/insin/greasemonkey#twitter-engagement-
min...](https://github.com/insin/greasemonkey#twitter-engagement-minus)

------
padobson
The author praises Snapchat and Instagram and makes a compelling point for
their anti-shareable features.

I myself have begun to think that a higher standard of friendship is needed in
social media. Something like Twitter, where you can follow anyone unless they
actively block you, makes more sense where engagement is limited, like how
selecting a TV channel to watch is largely a one-way experience.

I would love to see a social network demand a higher standard of friendship
from a user before other users are allowed in their network - based on
something more than reciprocal button pushing, so kind folks don't feel
compelled to accept a friend request out of politeness. Snapchat may be on to
something here, as you actually have to know the person exists before you can
add them.

I don't know exactly what the answer is - ask compatibility questions, quiz
the user about their history, analyze their current social networks for
positive engagement - but I'm extremely curious about the possibility of a
social network that purposely limits its own network effects.

~~~
ckocagil
>I would love to see a social network demand a higher standard of friendship
from a user before other users are allowed in their network - based on
something more than reciprocal button pushing, so kind folks don't feel
compelled to accept a friend request out of politeness.

Like Facebook?

There is no one type of "social network" out there.

The solution is for people to learn how to use various social networks
effectively. Facebook is for keeping some sort of connection with people you
know or once knew. Twitter is for content, be it about activism or
entertainment. Instagram is for people to boost each other's self esteem so
they collectively feel better, at least for some time.

For personal connections, what we really need are small, immutable communities
like a small town or a school class. People who talk to each other on a daily
basis. This is the only way humans are accustomed to live and judge their own
worth and the progress they make.

This effect can best be observed on Instagram. By wiring very carefully
curated moments of a top percentage of millions of people to our brains, we're
only making ourselves feel worthless and put ourselves under enormous mental
stress.

------
jvns
> my office mate, who happens to be a skilled programmer, wrote a script for
> me that turned off retweets from everybody

if you also want to do this, here's a small hacky tool I made that uses the
Twitter API to turn of retweets for people you follow. [http://turn-off-
retweets.glitch.me](http://turn-off-retweets.glitch.me)

------
pjc50
As a Twitter reader, you need to (given the very limited tools) control what
comes into your feed. Yes, there's a lot of retweet-based outrage, but a bit
of selective removal of people or their retweet ability helps with that. Or
muting certain outrage keywords.

Whereas on the other end, the various sorts of Funny Twitter and Weird Twitter
and Artist Twitter live off retweets, they're an essential and beneficial part
of the experience.

What Twitter have done badly though is collapsed the disctinction between
"like" and "retweet" by causing things that you like to appear in the
timelines of others. Where they can then also like and retweet it, keeping it
alive.

It's often amazing how bad twitter understand how their site is used by its
communities. I suppose they focus on the paid "brand engagement" area, which
is a social desert.

------
dEnigma
I don't think retweets are trash _in general_. They are one of the main ways
for me to find new, interesting accounts on Twitter. I follow people because I
like the things they tweet, i.e. find them interesting. Chances are they are
going to retweet content that I appreciate too. If someone starts retweeting
random, uninteresting content I just unfollow (or disable retweets for them,
like the author mentioned). Problem solved. Maybe I don't have the same
problems with noise because I follow fewer than a hundred accounts, since I
treat Twitter as a source of information first, and a social network second.

------
draugadrotten
What is HN if not a stream of "retweeted" links. The author of the article
seems to think the act of Retweeting is bad, yet xir touches on the real
problem - the one of amplifying simple emotions rather than promoting
thoughtful content. On HN, most links, like the one in this post, are intended
to amplify our _thinking_ . However on Twitter, Instagram and many other
social media, almost every post is intended to evoke an emotional response.

~~~
na85
What is the intent of using "xir" against the author's wishes if not to
provoke an emotional response, then? The author is very clearly identified as
"he". I can only conclude that you are trying to start a flame war.

I'd report your comment to the moderators but I don't know how.

~~~
acheron
To answer your question about reporting, click on the time stamp of the post
and then there should be a “flag” link. There might be a small karma threshold
for it to be available.

~~~
grzm
There’s also the Contact link in the footer which has no karma requirement.

------
elcapitan
Wouldn't an easy solution be to allow making "retweets off" as default for
following other users? I do that manually for many accounts that I follow.

------
anotheryou
Retweets are essential for discovery of new people to follow. As such they are
too valuable to dismiss, even with today's popularity of twitter.

The empty-state is a big problem for the onboarding of new users on social
platforms, especially less personal ones.

~~~
TACIXAT
Personally, I do not want to find new people to follow, because the majority
of the time they will not follow me. This system leads to an awful feeling of
asymmetry, where anything I post gets almost no interaction while I am
constantly seeing a few hyper popular accounts. I think I just don't like the
consumption model of social media, I want interaction with peers, not the
latest hot take from a celebrity account.

I don't think my Twitter account will make it to the end of 2018.

~~~
anotheryou
I personally find the self determined curation the one good thing about
twitter and don't write posts myself at all... (just replies every now and
than)

For your purposes twitter might be truly unfit...

------
dobin
I would like the opposite - hide all uninformative and boring nonsense some
people tweet (but not often enough to unfollow), and just get the retweets.
These usually have high information and are of relevance (i'm only using
twitter for itsec news).

------
platetone
I wrote a little web app a while back to do this if anyone is interested:
[http://www.nathanbeach.com/deretweetme/](http://www.nathanbeach.com/deretweetme/)

------
paladin314159
> But social-media platforms don’t have to be organized around shareability.
> Instagram, for instance, doesn’t allow links, except a single one in each
> user’s profile. This dampens self-promotion and slows down the spread of
> information from the rest of the internet on the platform. It doesn’t have
> native reposting tools, either. And it is, by pretty much all accounts, a
> nicer place to spend time online.

While it may have that going for it, wasn't Instagram recently considered the
worst social media app for mental health?
[https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/19/health/instagram-worst-
social...](https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/19/health/instagram-worst-social-
network-app-young-people-mental-health/index.html)

I'm not convinced that dampening self-promotion and discouraging reposting are
sufficient conditions for considering one platform to be better than the
other.

------
douglaswlance
What I like about retweets is that they simulate the behavior of neurons to
some extent. Neurons trigger each other to fire and transmit information from
one node to another. The closer we can get to a giant hive-mind with millions
of linked up human brains working together, the sooner we can solve the
problems that plague society.

------
dingaling
I don't have a Twitter account but occasionally arrive on that site through a
link.

I concur with the author that retweets are lazy noise. And quite often they
reveal aspects of a person's character that I'd rather not know.

Maybe Twitter would be better if it had a technical means of enforcing only
original thought. Perhaps some day in the AI future...

------
Peroni
Readme App has made a huge difference the quality of stuff I see on twitter.
No retweets, no random reply chains, literally just the tweets from the people
you follow. It doesn't even allow you to tweet or reply. -
[https://readmeapp.stream/](https://readmeapp.stream/)

~~~
Veen
I use Nuzzel so I can see what's being shared by the people I follow without
having to deal with all the other nonsense on Twitter.

------
flafla2
> This article appears in the April 2018 print edition with the headline “The
> Case Against Retweets.”

So the title was changed from "The Case Against Retweets" to "Retweets are
Trash". Seems that the editor took the author's advice on creating sharable
content - this is a pretty clear-cut appeal to emotion.

------
Arubis
I fully expected that this title was a reference to the more-famed A Modest
Proposal:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal)

Rather surprised that The Atlantic wouldn't have been self-aware re: the
title.

~~~
mc32
I'm sure they are aware. It's highly unlikely any writer for the Atlantic
would be ignorant of that _proposal_. They probably just wanted to go forth
with the plain meaning.

~~~
marshray
That we continually over-use this old gag is one of my favorite things about
the English speaking world. :-)

------
ValleyOfTheMtns
Here's my modest proposal to improve Twitter and perhaps the world. Don't use
Twitter.

------
oferzelig
The article didn't even touch the phenomenon of robots.

Take Trump's Twitter account for example. A second after he tweets, there are
other of retweets. How come? it's robot that do it automatically.

Now, if I (for some obscure reason) follow that robot, I'd see all of Trump's
tweets. But hang on, if that's what I want to do, I'd just follow
@realDonaldTrump, right? why should I get all his tweets from a robot?

Another option is that the goal of these robots is to create artificial
virality to Trump's tweets: "Oh, there are 5,023,482 retweets - this tweet (or
this person) must be clever!" \- which is the premise of this article.
Retweets are trash.

------
splitbrain
I experienced the same. Not showing retweets in my Twitter app of choice made
Twitter enjoyable again. I can highly recommend it.

------
noobermin
Dumb HN-tier nitpick, but when people use the words "modest proposal" do they
know where it comes from? The original modest proposal was satire and it's a
little bit of cognitive dissonance for me to see it used seriously in a title.

Regardless, I find the amplification part of twitter to be the best part,
although I don't really feel like I see more outrage than joy or just humor. I
think it has a lot to do with who you choose to follow.

~~~
hnal943
Agree. Before I read the article I assumed that this would be a tongue-in-
cheek series of suggestions that would destroy twitter.

