
Twitter launches its ‘Hide Replies’ feature in the US and Japan - antibland
https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/19/twitter-launches-its-controversial-hide-replies-feature-in-the-u-s-and-japan/
======
danso
This is to me seems like a very counterintuitive “feature” — at least on
paper. Hiding tweets seems akin to telling the whole world, “here are tweets
from my critics I dislike so much I’m going out of my way to suppress them”.
At least when you report, block, or mute someone, no one else knows that you
were bothered (or, as trolls like to say, “triggered”).

It’s not the same like being downvoted on HN or reddit, where the vote to
suppress is a community/crowd decision. If Taylor Swift hides a tweet, you are
inherently curious to know what rando’s tweet managed to hurt or anger Swift
(or her social media minder).

That said, while Twitter seems to be incredibly slow at introducing new
features, the trade off is that what they _do_ push out often ends up being a
good thing. The survey evidence cited in the article seems flimsy, but I give
Twitter some benefit of the doubt that they wouldn’t push an obviously
destructive feature.

~~~
ggreer
> That said, while Twitter seems to be incredibly slow at introducing new
> features, the trade off is that what they _do_ push out often ends up being
> a good thing.

I find most new Twitter features to be worse than useless:

• "Like" was turned into "algorithmic retweet". Now I can't like a tweet
without some percentage of my followers seeing it. This is also a problem when
I follow others. I can disable seeing their retweets but I can't disable
seeing their likes. I've had several people tell me that they unfollowed me
because of tweets I liked. I've done the same to others.

• My timeline now shows tweets from people I don't follow. Above the tweet is
something like, "Tim Urban and 8 others follow...", and then there will be a
tweet by someone who I really don't want to follow (such as Ben Shapiro).
There seems to be no way to disable this feature.

• Quote retweet is a great way to encourage flamewars. Long ago, people could
not retweet with a message. That meant that people were less likely to retweet
something they found inflammatory because their followers might think they
agreed with it. Quote retweet means they can preface it with, "Look at what
this terrible person said." That's a great way to encourage the Toxoplasma of
Rage[1].

Overall, the effect of these features has been to reduce my Twitter usage. Now
I mostly go there for a couple of group DMs.

1\. [https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-
rage...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/)

~~~
jrockway
> "Like" was turned into "algorithmic retweet". Now I can't like a tweet
> without some percentage of my followers seeing it. This is also a problem
> when I follow others. I can disable seeing their retweets but I can't
> disable seeing their likes. I've had several people tell me that they
> unfollowed me because of tweets I liked. I've done the same to others.

G+ had this too, and I also got threats of being unfollowed if I didn't stop
liking things. (I could turn it off in my settings, though, but I liked to use
reshares to add comments and +1 to reshare without comment.)

Ultimately what the social networks never delivered on were the true concept
of areas of interest. You should be able to follow someone's interest in a
certain subject, and then like things in that context. That way if someone is
following you for your programming content, they don't have to read the anime
reviews that you like, or whatever.

It never happened. I think social media is a dead thing now. You can use it to
snipe at political figures and promote products for money. That's about it.

~~~
dredmorbius
I was going to mention the G+ usage.

I really disliked this for numerous reasons:

\- It was an overloading of the +1 button. Now a "like" was also a "here's my
plus-one, repost me, maybe?".

\- The behaviour wasn't obvious to the upvoting (and re-posting) user.

\- People will and do upvote stuff they'd never re-post.

\- It was seriously annoying.

I would suggest people disable the feature, if I noted it, or I'd unfollow
them. There was no way to restrict such reposts from my _own_ stream, other
than (as I eventually discovered) avoiding the home stream entirely and
viewing entirely by Circles. I had a set of higher and lower-priority Circles
I'd follow, which actually helped cull most of the crud.

I strongly suspect the design decision was based on the fact that very few
people actually post _or_ repost material. They read on a consume-only mode,
if at all. Google Plus's active user base was a small fraction of 1% of all
profiles, and even within _that_ set there was a phenomenal range of activity.
The effect being that most of the platform was dead air.

My read is that while the extent of this may have been more so at G+ than with
other leading social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.), the general
principles aren't. Power laws and Zipf functions are extraordinarily
prevasive, and show up virtually everywhere. The problem is that there's a
very narrow band of presence between "shut the heck up already" and "I thought
you were dead". In the real world, distance and/or proximity mediate this.
Online, where everyone is (very nearly) as digitally close to everyone, we
need other means of damping the overexuberant and enticing the timid.

The "areas of interest" concept finally, sort of, got fleshed out at G+ by way
of Collections, though even that was pretty butchered. Topic/channel
discussions (as with Reddit / Usenet) still seem hard to beat.

------
keyle
Seems like a good move. Better than deleting.

First thing I do when I see "more replies" is click on it, knowing this is
where the juicy stuff or counter argument is.

Like in HN, when it says [dead], I have to read it, to see whether I agree
with it being [dead] or not ;-)

So there is certainly psychology there, at least to me, that makes me dig
further. By hiding stuff behind a click you actually make me want to read it
more!

~~~
bscphil
> First thing I do when I see "more replies" is click on it, knowing this is
> where the juicy stuff or counter argument is.

Exactly, which is why I don't understand this feature. If you can't _really_
hide replies, only instead call attention to the replies you've "hidden", what
is the point of it?

~~~
cwkoss
Already seeing people screenshot hidden replies and tweeting with "gee I
wonder why this person hid this reply lol" type messages.

I'm skeptical this will have the civilizing effect they hoped for.

~~~
epistasis
Same thing happens with blocks!

But the way the feature works is to fork the conversation. Now, both
ideologies can continue their threads of discussion without necessarily
disrupting the other one.

I always think of kuro5hin when these types of containment features are
brought up. It's kind of like "your freedom to swing your fist stops right
before my nose" type of protection.

------
zabhi
This might go down the wrong way in India. We see a lot of misinformation,
propaganda and often messages inciting mob violence floating as tweets.
Reporting these tweets does not do anything immediately, if ever it does
anything at all.

We used to post a reply linking an article with correct facts and some
context. See [https://www.altnews.in/](https://www.altnews.in/)

This feature would make this fight a lot harder.

~~~
derefr
What about when the misinformation/propaganda/etc. is in a reply instead of in
an original tweet? Two-sided sword, as they say.

------
reustle
The first time I saw this in the wild, the author had hidden a single tweet
mentioning that they had received 50k retweets on a stolen video.

------
Grue3
Russian state propagandists are going to love this feature. Right know they're
constantly fact checked and called out on their hypocrisy in the replies but
soon they'll be able to peddle their "death to
Navalny/Ukraine/Europe/America/homosexuals" rhetoric unchecked.

~~~
mikojan
ALL propaganda agencies are going to love this. State or industry. Pepsi or
Joe Biden.

~~~
entropea
I don't see a single person in the top comments speak about this. This feature
is going to allow people to hide legitimate non-trash responses that criticize
the tweet, and it will be very convenient going into the 2020 elections.
Dissenting voices WILL be silenced.

------
spangry
Won't this just make Twitter even more of an echo chamber?

------
epistasis
I can't imagine why anybody would consider this controversial in the least. Id
we are living in an attention economy where anybody is allowed to make a small
debit from your account at will. Giving people more tools to manage those
debits should be lauded.

~~~
raxxorrax
Kinda like a website that is limited to 160 characters. Never fell in love
with Twitter and looking at the top trends I often feel like wasting time on
that platform.

But I agree that Twitter is basically an attention distributor. I get the
impression that Twitter focuses its ambition to pander to self-expression and
many topics that could have been interesting degrade to something that feels
even worse than cheap PR.

Sadly, however that happened, Twitter became a platform to advertise political
positions. That is probably why so many people see such features with mixed
feelings.

I disagree that people make debits by replying, even if it is done in bad
faith. If you put something out there, you are likely doing that yourself and
nobody takes anything away. By hiding something you take something away from
readers.

#iAmAgainstEverythingThatHappensOnTwitter

~~~
epistasis
What would you think of spam? Isn't that clearly an attention debit? I would
say that all replies, wanted and unwanted, take at least a small amount of
attention. And if the fraction of useful to not useful replies decreases,
that's the SNR going to crap.

------
situational87
Oh dear, where will I look now to see the same seven reaction gifs forced into
bad jokes every single day on every single post?

~~~
bradleyankrom
When people started using emoji to express themselves, I thought it couldn't
get any worse... then came the reaction gif.

------
jchw
Seems like a reasonable response to the criticisms, but also, I dislike how
Twitter just gradually gets closer to Facebook every year. I don’t like much
social media in general, but I kind of liked the old, very limited Twitter. It
had a zen-like property to it, in some sense.

------
Chazprime
I believe Jack Dorsey when he says he wants to improve the quality of
discourse on the platform, but I'm not sure this step will help anything. If
people are being harassed, Twitter should deal with harassment. Adding the
ability to hide replies simply allows people to handwave away discussion or
criticism that they don't like, which seems detrimental to rational and
reasoned discourse.

------
werber
I read this as hide reptiles and got very excited. I would love to have a way
to not see photographs of reptiles, especially snakes on the internet

~~~
linuxlizard
As a lizard, I find that offensive! ;-)

~~~
werber
At least you're not a snake!

------
nsonha
twiiter is going into history as the utmost failure of human communication.
How such a crippled way of communication (limited characters and structure)
combined with such childish disregard to discourse (blocking and shadow
banning) could form a platform for "discussions" of important topics like
social change and politics, I'll never know.

~~~
rchaud
The reason Twitter became big was coincidental more than anything else. It
became the defacto tool used in the Iranian protests against Ahmedinejad in
summer 2009 (and again in 2011 during the ME-wide uprisings) as the regime had
blocked Facebook to keep a lid on international awareness. The use of Twitter
gathered a ton of foreign media attention as there was no other source of
primary information.

And almost overnight, Twitter went from an obscure "microblog" (nobody's used
that term in years) to "the pulse of what's happening now".

The cable news media (and digital media startups a few years later) were a
willing partner in its rise. Embedding people's tweets in their stories gave
them the ability to generate "news" to fill their 24-hour programming at a
fraction of the cost of doing investigative journalism. The latter is by its
nature lengthy, wrapped in secrecy and doesn't always result in a scoop.
Basically all the things that a ratings and ad-driven industry couldn't care
less about.

------
MisterTea
I dunno. Just dont use twitter? I never had an account and never saw the need.
No instagram or snapchat. only thing is a mostly dead facebook page that rots.
I'm doing just fine.

I just don't get any of these social media is ruining my/our life when you are
the one who opts in. It's like a person who complains the fire they stuck
their hand into burns and then continue to keep said hand in the fire.

Want to be social? Go find actual groups of humans who have similar interests.
Shocking concept, I know.

~~~
linuxftw
I've never been into twitter either. There's a lot of content there though,
I'll visit the site from time to time if another site links to it, but that's
pretty much it.

Politics on twitter is just a shouting match. Most tech related things are
just kind of link-sharing (sometimes people post lengthy bits of tech info, I
can't understand why). Twitter does seem to be a decent venue for breaking
sports news, but that news usually finds its way elsewhere quickly.

------
collyw
Hmmm. One of the reasons I have a Twitter account is to call out shitty
companies (such as my phone company) when they basically ignore my complaints
via email or phone call. A bit of public shaming seems to work wonders in
these cases.

Now I am going to have this option taken away?

~~~
entropea
If you comment on their tweets, yes. If you just tweet something out, Comcast
can't hide it (yet).

------
impalallama
Reading the name I thought it be a way you could directly reply to a tweet
without it being such a public matter, and also gunking up my timelinem but it
seems to be a way to self-moderate your own posts which is... interesting.

------
KoftaBob
It seems like using an upvote/downvote system akin to Reddit and Hacker News
would make more sense for this goal. Allow _all_ viewers to determine the
quality of a comment, not just the person who posted the original tweet.

Everything we've observed the last few years shows that we should be
democratizing discourse on social media, not further funneling the power of
the conversation into fewer hands. Do you really want extremist twitter
accounts to be able to hide all dissenting replies?

------
aduitsis
What on Earth is wrong with techcrunch? I clicked the link of the story, read
it, decided to go back to HN. I had to click the back button 4(!) times.

~~~
nobodyshere
The url changes a few times while scrolling.

------
dev_dull
I’d like a comprise feature that automatically paired back the annoying bots,
such as only allow my followers and my follower’s followers reply. That way
you get enough of a network effect to get interesting replies without the
garbage.

------
topherPedersen
Yasssss. This is the future, no replies. Don't @ me.

EDIT: After reading more about this, it looks like people can still reply?
Would be nice if they just added a straight up "Don't @ Me" feature where you
can disable comments completely.

~~~
derefr
Would be semi-impossible given that half the comments shown on a Twitter
“thread” aren’t really comment-objects, but rather just their own tweets
sitting on someone else’s timeline that have @ed you in them and twitter
figured out which thread to attach them to by heuristic. Sure, in theory, you
could turn off the _heuristic_ —but you’d still see them just fine if you did
a global search for your @handle.

Or are you suggesting disallowing what is essentially “allowing people to
refer to you on their own blogs”?

------
ancarda
>in the US and Japan

Why only these countries? I also see this with Facebook Dating; it's only
available in a few countries right now. Why is this? It's _software_ , can't
you deploy the feature everywhere at once?

~~~
DaiPlusPlus
Trial-marketing. Twitter users generally tend to form relationship
(follow/see/RT)-graphs stick within language boundaries (and to a lesser-
extent, national identity boundaries) - by using language or region as a proxy
for a "clean" subset of users you can get some experimental results that you
won't get by using random user selection, for example. Also, users unaffected
by this change will still be able to see other users' replies and could then
share screenshots of said replies which would defeat the point of this
exercise - by using language boundaries means it's less likely that such a
thing would happen (e.g. if this was Sweden and Norway instead of US+Japan,
would you really bother to go through Swedish tweets to find replies for other
users?)

In short: it sounds like they're uncertain about pushing this change through
on everyone, and want to trial it first.

Twitter has gone-back on ideas they've thrown around before - like when they
said they would hide other users' tweets' Like +RT counts.

------
caspervonb
Actually makes it easier to see outside the echo chamber of a thread

------
Bantros
I'm sure this feature isn't going to be abused

~~~
entropea
It will be used to hide legitimate criticisms of political tweets mainly. This
is a win for capital protection, nothing more.

------
zem
wonder if they'll add a feature to autoblock someone who has hidden a reply of
yours

~~~
caspervonb
Bot time.

------
joering2
This feature in many ways reminds me of shadowvoting on HN

------
simplify
Will politicians be able to use this feature?

~~~
gnicholas
I would imagine so. As long as you don't block people (so they can't see your
stuff when logged in, or reply under that handle), I don't think there are any
potential legal issues. They can say anything they want, and anyone else can
see anything anyone said (if they click through to see it). So it's a minor
inconvenience, but I don't think this presents the same issue as blocking
others.

------
xxxpupugo
Much needed to detoxicate Twitter itself.

------
shiado
So will a court have to rule that Trump cannot use this?

------
smitty1e
I usually make it a point to retweet my trolls, a technique due to Andrew
Breitbart.

Another great technique is to ask simple, intelligent questions.

My trolls seem to lack stamina.

ADDED:

The other extreme thing I like to do on social media when people are trying to
troll me is offer sincere forgiveness.

