
Jack Dorsey says it’s time to rethink the fundamental dynamics of Twitter - pseudolus
https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/16/jack-dorsey-ted/
======
jsnell
> He suggested that the service works best as an “interest-based network,”
> where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who
> posted it

Yeah, no thanks. Has anybody ever been happy with Twitter's attempts to force
content from non-followed users into the feed? A couple of times a year
they'll opt everybody back into whatever crappy experiment they're running
("hey, we'll put some posts to your feed based on likes") and it'll take ages
to remember just how to turn it off.

~~~
baggy_trough
Algorithmic feeds are, in all cases, Satan's handiwork. What I want is to see
posts from the individuals I have selected, interleaved in chronological
order, with no tampering.

~~~
cycrutchfield
If that maximized user engagement, then that is the UI they would present. The
fact that they don't do that should tell you that their tests have shown
algorithmic feeds are more engaging for users.

~~~
teraflop
"User engagement" is not a single, well-defined, easily measurable thing.

For one thing, it's easy for A/B tests to show something that looks good in
the short term, but has longer-term negative effects. If your goal is to
iterate quickly and stop your test as soon as you think it shows a positive
result, you'll never see that.

But more to the point, there's no guarantee that the "user engagement" metrics
Twitter cares about are actually a proxy for what users really want. If it
takes me more time and more clicks to find the information I want -- enough to
be annoying, but not quite enough to drive me away from the site -- that
probably gets counted as "engagement".

~~~
cycrutchfield
I guarantee Twitter’s data scientists are using more than just “amount the
user is clicking” to decide whether a UI or ranking change is beneficial.

~~~
doktrin
it's hilarious that your main defense of twitter's design decisions is an
appeal to twitter's own authority.

"twitter is doing these things for a reason and surely these reasons are good,
otherwise they wouldn't be doing them!"

case closed my circular dude

~~~
cycrutchfield
It's hilarious that you think Twitter has not tested chronologically-ordered
UIs.

~~~
doktrin
You could apply this reasoning to literally anything, because every
organisation / nation state / what have you has at some point and in some form
considered the consequences of their actions. History shows that internal
evaluation is an imperfect science. I suspect you know this and only reserve
this extremely circular reasoning for cases which you already agree with. It
would be easier to admit you've already formed an opinion and don't care to
change it under any circumstance, rather than weakly appeal to Twitter's own
authority to justify their actions.

~~~
cycrutchfield
It is not just an appeal to Twitter’s authority. It’s an informed opinion
based off working in a similar field and conversing with others in this field.
So unless you can come up with some concrete data supporting your points,
instead of just attacking mine, you are unlikely to change my opinion.

------
gfodor
Dorsey to me has it half right. Twitter should just follow with what we
typically do in real life: "follow" people, but masked by interests we trust
those people about. I want to read about politics from the political analysts
I follow, but don't care about their cooking adventures on the weekend. I want
to read about tech from the software folks I follow, but don't want to hear
about their politics. I sure as heck don't want to see "liked" tweets by
people I follow in areas outside of the interests of theirs I care about.

Beyond that, I'm generally disappointed that we never hear about features that
try to get users to act better, _by their own volition_ , vs reactively
shutting them down. Social media tools should help us understand the potential
impact of our words and actions _before_ hitting "Send". Only if you assume
people are incapable of improvement, or that people are not fundamentally
good, would it be fair to ignore the potential for sites like Twitter to
design things so users will _act better on their own_ vs having to be slapped
down when they do something terrible.

~~~
Hayvok
> I want to read about politics from the political analysts I follow, but
> don't care about their cooking adventures on the weekend. I want to read
> about tech from the software folks I follow, but don't want to hear about
> their politics.

This is the biggest reason I end up unfollowing people.

Say I follow a person because they post interesting technical articles. Over
time (as their follower count increases, usually...) they drift toward making
80% political posts and only 20% technical. I'd still like to see their
technical posts w/o having to sift through all the political posts. Usually I
just end up unfollowing, depending on how bad it gets, but I wish I could
still see and participate in their topics I care about.

This is true even in real-life relationships. There are some people you just
don't discuss certain topics with.

I don't discuss politics or medicine with my in-laws. I don't discuss religion
anymore with my cousin. Or history with my grandfather. I avoid talking about
money with my brother. Why? Because over time I've realized there's nothing to
be gained from participating in a conversation with them on that particular
topic.

~~~
mjrbrennan
I found the same thing happening to me all the time. I follow software devs,
writers, etc. because I am interested in what they do not whatever politics
they go on about like everyone else. What I found helped a lot was twitter's
mute words functionality, so I just muted words like Trump etc. and it cleaned
up my feed a LOT. Much more enjoyable experience now.

------
whatever_dude
> I don’t think I would create ‘likes’ in the first place.

_You didn't_. It was called "Favorites", and you later renamed it to "likes".

Jack can introspect as much as he wants, but it doesn't change the fact that
they keep making the platform _worse_, not better.

Another indication is that the official web/client is a cesspool of unrelated
content I don't want to see, and somehow they now think they need to double
down on that effort - oh, sorry, "make it a interest-based network" \- instead
of take a look at whether that's users want.

Twitter is a prime example of A/B testing gone wrong.

~~~
code_duck
Twitter is a great example of fairly talentless people with large egos somehow
finding success, and mistakenly thinking it is due to their merits. If Dorsey
was going to make a good social network, it would have happened 5-8 years ago.
It’s a lot like Etsy - someone had drive, funding and concepts to make a
project at the right time. However, they were not actually good at running a
business and had no idea what the hell they were doing socially or societally.

~~~
darawk
You know that Jack Dorsey also founded another successful company in Square,
right? Pretty hard to argue that he lucked into both of those things.

~~~
rorykoehler
Not really. Once he had VCs attention he could do what he wanted as he wasn't
exactly starting from zero.

~~~
darawk
Let me get this straight: You think that the hard part of creating a billion
dollar company is getting attention from VCs?

~~~
code_duck
Yes, that’s right. Personal faith from funders is a significant contributor to
getting funding, which is important for success.

~~~
darawk
It's a contributor to funding sure, but that's not what I asked.

The issue is, would a random person off the street be able to take VC seed
money and turn it into a billion dollar business? The answer is _obviously_
no. And they _definitely_ wouldn't be able to do it twice.

~~~
code_duck
A random person of the street? No. Somebody who did it once already and has
all the experience and contacts? Far more likely. I would say the first time
is a lot harder.

But that’s not the point... apparently you’re saying he deserves his success
by merit. My opinion is that there are plenty of people of equal merits who
didn’t start one of the top 3 social networks. I would attribute much of the
success of Twitter and Facebook to chance.

~~~
darawk
> But that’s not the point... apparently you’re saying he deserves his success
> by merit. My opinion is that there are plenty of people of equal merits who
> didn’t start one of the top 3 social networks. I would attribute much of the
> success of Twitter and Facebook to chance.

How do you know? What evidence do you have of these imaginary other's merit?

------
sytelus
Abuse and misinformation are certainly the big issues but even more bigger and
rather meta-issue is the strong hub-and-spoke model that Twitter promotes.
Here's an example: You could tweet some of the most informative and useful
tweets relevant to, say, robotics enthusiasts for day after day and years
after year, and you might still end up with absymal engagement in terms of
likes, retweets and followers. Meanwhile, folks who happened to become
celebrity by pure random exposure can tweet how they sneezed that morning and
they might end up with dozens of likes on their sneeze tweet. The bottom line
is that Twitter's ranking algorithms are strongly dependent on existing social
engagement creating virtuous cycle of virality of irrelevant content as well
as chicken-and-egg problem for not popular people. The end result is that
Twitter is mostly a medium for _information broadcast_ , as opposed to
_information exchange_. This has fundamentally limited the participation as
well as usefulness of Twitter and is the one thing they should strive to
change.

~~~
bubblewrap
That's not an issue of Twitter, but of human nature. I don't think technology
can do anything about it. That is just wishful thinking about "future people"
who spend their time learning and improving their skills 24/7, instead of
slacking and having fun. Unrealistic - presumably people simply need time
outs.

You could argue that Twitter actually does well with that problem: after all,
if you follow a robotics enthusiast, you WILL see some tweets about robotics
among all the sneezing.

~~~
sytelus
It's most definitely issue of how Twitter ranks and promotes the content. To
make content more visible, you must be popular in first place. To be popular,
you must have your content more visible. It's a virtuous cycle 99.9% users
cannot possibly break without winning random virality lotteries. I agree
Pareto's law and exponential distribution applies in all social networks but
for Twitter this is not only skewed by at least an order of magnitude but its
current design and algorithms _actively_ promotes this phenomenon instead of
resisting it.

A thought experiment: Imagine Twitter was the _only_ way to distribute
information. How would that world look like? Everyone who doesn't have
followers would almost have no chance of having followers and therefore their
content will keep disappearing in Twitter blackhole regardless of how useful
it might have been (given how bad their search is). Twitter algorithms takes
rich-gets-richer phenomenon to whole new level. At times, it feels their
algorithms wants to re-establish ancient model of nobility vs plebs. The whole
notion of "follower" has negative connotations with implied power-play top-
down relationship. I have seen people with mid-range follower count not
following others even when they find them interesting because they don't want
to ruin their followers/followee ratio. The notion of _follower_ as opposed to
_friend_ or _contact_ firmly puts in place one-way power structure, the
_information broadcast_ instead of _information exchange_ model. Many folks
have resorted to always following back any followers in protest of this model
while many others resist following anyone who they don't consider their peers
in power structure created by Twitter Universe.

A minimal fix Twitter can do is to identify good tweets from followers and
occasionally show it to followees to at least have a shot at 2-way
relationships. The current scheme of "likes" doesn't cut it because first one
wins and everyone else gets buried deep. When people ask why Twitter is not so
successful with larger population, not so much growing and still relatively
quite small (after subtracting bots), I often get surprised they don't see
above as the most fundamental issues with their model of social relationships
itself.

~~~
bubblewrap
Granted, it can be an issue of Twitter ranking content. After all, they could
just decide to not ever show any robotics content at all, and only show
celebrity sneezes.

What I mean by human nature is that humans will always follow celebrity
sneezes, and seek to slack off.

I don't think Twitter could invent a ranking that would give the robotics
enthusiast a following of 10 million people and weed out the celebrity person.
They could do that - but people would stop using the service and switch over
to Instagram.

One major issue, once social networks introduce ranking, is the question who
they rank for. If the algorithm tries to maximize engagement, it will happily
promote the celebrity sneezes. Of course algorithms could optimize for other
things (personal development or whatever), limited by people actually keeping
to use the service.

In the early days afaik Twitter had no ranking and filtering at all.

------
veryworried
Excuse my outburst, but I'm wondering when these social network algorithms are
going to realize: I don't follow "interests", I follow _PEOPLE_.

If you want to show users random news and gossip, then make a fucking news
website already.

It's like if you build a chatroom, except instead of simply showing things
that people in the current room are saying as they say it, it mostly pulls in
vaguely similar stuff that people in _other_ rooms are saying, and then sorts
all messages in order of whoever is the most popular or says the most relevant
keywords.

~~~
Gene_Parmesan
By making it more of an interest-based network, they further increase the
interest-based siloing of users, making interest-based advertising more
effective and more expensive. Like David Auerbach wrote about in Bitwise, the
modern technology economy has now become about labeling users. The more labels
you can apply, the more ads you can sell.

Having said that, I do agree with another comment I saw here in that, if I am
following someone in the software architecture space, I care 0% about their
political tweets, and if I follow someone in the Formula 1/motorsports space,
I really don't need to see their thoughts on golf.

Facebook worked initially because you were 'following' people you knew in real
life, but having users siloed into very small groups according to real-life
personal connections makes it hard to sell targeted ads. Hence all the
expansions we've seen there (not to mention, of course, the tracking they do
extra-facebook). Twitter meanwhile has always been in sort of a weird spot.
You end up "following" people you have zero real-world connection to, based
solely on their knowledge on a certain topic. But you end up also having to
wade through everything they post -- what they eat, their bad memes, their
product endorsements, whatever.

It works great for celebrity fetishism, okay for news and reporters (who tend
to mostly stay out of non-job-related posts on official accounts), and fair to
poor for everything else in my opinion. It's definitely the social network
whose appeal I understand least. It just feels like a warehouse of people all
talking very loudly at each other about random topics.

~~~
byuu
> Having said that, I do agree with another comment I saw here in that, if I
> am following someone in the software architecture space, I care 0% about
> their political tweets, and if I follow someone in the Formula 1/motorsports
> space, I really don't need to see their thoughts on golf.

Absolutely, we need tags, and the ability to make them opt-in or opt-out for
followers. So I can file ^food as an opt-in, and people who don't care about
that can ignore them and just get the ^programming ones. Right now, followers
and friends are all lumped together and so while friends follow you for life
updates, followers generally only care about what you can do for them, eg your
work. It's draining to try and manage multiple accounts. Some followers may
find the side stuff cool, too.

------
ordinaryperson
I don't understand why Twitter hasn't implemented some kind of reputation
gradient that would allow users to filter by levels.

Yes, I realize they are tricky to implement and subject to abuse but imagine
you got points for using your real name, real photo, demerits for insults etc,
then users could filter out hordes of trolls and gutter nonsense and instead
focus on the meaningful conversations that do actually occur there -- the
verified checkmark is a proto-version of this.

Instead they rely solely on blacklisting, which is a never-ending game of
whack-a-mole. Even HN has a more sophisticated system, where users can be
shadow banned or have their comments appear lower than normal.

Not sure how useful this macro-scale philosophizing by Dorsey on Twitter
itself is for delivering new, useful features to users. Serious question: has
Twitter released any new, major features in the last 2-3 years?

~~~
claudiawerner
Personally I don't consider real name or real photo to be much of an asset of
any of the circles I was in on Twitter. In fact, in my experience the ones
with real name/real photo (or what seemed that way) were generally the least
interesting posters. They were never willing to put out their own opinion,
especially on controversial topics. In fact, in the kind of groups I was in
(let's say political activism), having your real details on there is anything
but an asset.

Not having a real name on Twitter isn't even a good heuristic for anything.

~~~
duskwuff
In a lot of circles, a Twitter profile with a "real photo" as the profile
picture usually means you're looking at a spambot with a profile picture
scraped from either Facebook or a dating site.

------
pavel_lishin
> _He suggested that the service works best as an “interest-based network,”
> where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who
> posted it — rather than a network where everyone feels like they need to
> follow a bunch of other accounts_

This is probably true for the majority of Twitter's users, but this is
completely the opposite of what I want. Even with aggressively pruning the
list of people I follow, I still feel the need to maintain topical lists with
few people on them. (One of them is literally called "interesting" \- it's for
people who don't post often, but whose tweets I'm very interested in seeing,
in chronological order, and don't want to lose in the shuffle and retweets and
random shit twitter tries to inject into my stream.)

I want to curate my own content.

~~~
dman
Networks are trying to move away from long tail content since it is so
expensive to moderate. I think in next 10 years expect social networks and
video playing websites to become much like network television. Ie there will
be a vetted list of large creators, and everyone else will be a consumer. To
do that you need to take away peoples ability to control exactly whom they
follow / subscribe to.

~~~
bediger4000
I understand the economic and legal pressure for this to happen, but how would
that make social networks anything other than mass market gatekeepers, like
newspapers and TV networks once were?

Wasn't the attraction that you could follow someone who matched your
interests, like "antique model steam engine refurbishment", or whatever niche
interest an individual might have? If twitter had a vetted list of large
creators, they'd be right back in the "all of this network content is lowest-
common-denominator dreck" situation that ABC/CBS/NBC were in circa 1985. Which
may not be a bad thing for society as a whole (we can have an agreed-upon set
of facts again! No alternate facts!), but why did we go through 30 years of
media upheavals and the loss of the good things about newspapers and TV (equal
time doctrine) to get back there? Was this all just about creating a different
set of media moguls?

~~~
jrumbut
I think the "antique model steam engine refurbishment" is where we go off the
tracks with social media.

If you are single mindedly contented with some obscure niche you have so many
wonderful options today because nothing is easier to advertise to than groups
with really specific interests that require buying things.

What's lacking is well rounded, pleasant experiences. I'm not a collection of
discrete interests and I definitely don't want to become one nor am I
interested in meeting one.

------
grey-area
It's time to rethink twitter and launch another service.

Readers want to see the content they select, in the order they select, from
people/posters they find interesting. Have conversations and maybe connect
with people they follow.

Posters want to control their feed and who sees it, control the conversation a
bit more, perhaps pay for better tools to curate replies, get rid of
spam/trolls etc, have their complaints about stalking/nazis/trolls taken
seriously by someone who cares.

Advertising is at the root of the problems of Twitter because _advertisers are
their only customer_ \- they are forced by their bottom line to find ever more
inventive ways to boost impressions (the overwhelming notifications, the
dystopian 'home' view which shows you content selected by twitter, showing
likes, plays for engagement/eyeballs rather than quality, and now this new
'interest-based network' idea which lets twitter select content). Facebook
suffers from the same disease - they must own your feed and your attention,
any user control hits their bottom line.

The solution is of course the radical option of removing advertising entirely.

Readers should always be free as they donate their time and attention.

Posters with thousands of followers (whether businesses or individuals) would
happily _pay_ for better tools to manage their readers, manage the feed,
manage responses to posts etc. Some of them would pay quite a lot for more
control/access.

Journalists, traders, businesses, developers would pay for access to a
firehose of data and ways of working with that data (public data with user
permission of course).

I'd pay to broadcast on a version of twitter without ads, nazis and trolls,
wouldn't you?

~~~
panarky
_> Advertising is at the root of the problems of Twitter_

This is true, but it's not only advertising. Replace ads with any revenue
generator large enough to sustain the service and you'll find that (1) the
audience disappears or (2) big compromises in user experience or privacy.

Maybe some services just can't be delivered by profit-maximizing corporations
at all.

A big reason for the wildly improbable success of Wikipedia and Craigslist is
that they are non-commercial. No ads, no subscriptions, no selling firehose
data, no paying for more access, no "freemium".

We need an alternative asymmetrical social media service that is free for
readers, free for posters, fosters deeper discussions than Reddit, and
ruthlessly purges scammers, haters and trolls.

Maybe the only way to accomplish that is with a community-driven collective
effort, not a commercially-driven corporate service.

~~~
chillacy
Woah wait a minute, Craigslist is definitely commercial, they charge to make
posts about certain subjects like employment and housing in certain cities.
Now granted it's not super high growth but consider this:

> Last year, Craigslist took in upwards of $690 million in revenue, most of
> which is net profit, according to an estimate by the AIM Group, an Altamonte
> Springs, Florida-based research firm. Based on valuations of comparable
> publicly traded companies including eBay EBAY +0%, Forbes conservatively
> estimates that Craigslist is worth at least $3 billion. That makes Newmark,
> 64, who owns at least 42% of the company, worth at least $1.3 billion.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2017/05/03/how-does-
cra...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2017/05/03/how-does-craigslist-
make-money/#48fb1f6a27b1)

------
michaelhoffman
Translation: he doesn't think allowing you to decide who you follow will make
Twitter as much money as he wants.

~~~
wesammikhail
A common theme really. Just look at youtube´s "notification bell" and forced
un-subbing. These social networks are going out of their way to be classified
as publishers rather than platform providers. It´s going to bite them and us
all in the ass so freaking hard and Jack, Mark and Susan will deserve
everything that is to come their way both from regulators as well as users
that will _eventually_ be fed up with these shady practices.

~~~
stevehawk
It's really weird to me how I was listening to the Joe Rogan podcast interview
of Ben Shapiro and he made that same comment and I found myself agreeing
with.. Ben Shapiro. But if the social media magnates are going to try and
become publishers and not platforms, which they are by curating what is
printed on their sites as much as any editor of any newspaper, then I don't
think they realize what they have coming.

Or possibly worse, we don't realize that it's exactly what the government
wants.

------
skybrian
"Interest-based" is basically what Reddit does well. If you're reading the
accordion subreddit and some users there are also interested in politics or
crypto or whatever, you're not going to see their other stuff. (On the other
hand, you also don't learn about their other interests.)

On Twitter, I follow people who post good stuff sometimes, but they also post
other stuff that's irrelevant. Worse, I see stuff they "like" which is often
inflamatory.

~~~
username3
They need to combine interest and people. I want to follow or hide hashtags by
people.

I want to follow science person’s science tweets and hide science person’s
politics tweets.

You can force people to tag their tweets by letting us only follow their tags.

Science person’s profile can show top followed tags of Science person.

#science followed by 100

#politics followed by 5

------
smacktoward
_Dorsey recalled that when the team was first building the service, it decided
to make follower count “big and bold,” which naturally made people focus on
it._

 _“Was that the right decision at the time? Probably not,” he said. “If I had
to start the service again, I would not emphasize the follower count as much …
I don’t think I would create ‘likes’ in the first place.”_

If you put something in front of people that looks like a score, they will
start thinking of it as a score. And then they will inevitably start
recognizing and incorporating behaviors that tend to increase their personal
score. Which leads to competition among them as to who can rack up the highest
score, and that competition drives them into a spiral of increasingly extreme
behavior in order to stay ahead of the pack.

If Twitter was smart they would just stop displaying follower, like and
retweet counts altogether, or at least hide them away someplace deep within a
pile of submenus and dialog boxes. Displaying this information prominently is
what created the feedback loop that made Twitter into the cesspool it is
today.

------
username3
Jack, we want to follow hashtags, not lists. We want to follow people and
filter out their political tweets. Force them to tag their tweets for
visibility. Show follower counts of a person’s hashtags.

Don’t ban accounts. Let us choose our moderators. You can hide accounts from
the mainstream with your moderation. We want to see all accounts. You already
do it for porn and countries.

Social Media Moderation without Banning.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19466490](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19466490)

------
CptFribble
Shifting to interest-based feeds entirely misses the problem, and would
actually make it worse.

Trusting information isn't only about trusting the source, it's also about
whether that piece of information fits into your established frame of
reference for how the world works. It also depends on how many different
emotional buttons the information presses, fear being the strongest.

Shifting to an interest-based delivery system would only reinforce filter
bubbles. And what's the alternative? Forcing people to see things you know
they'd _disagree_ with? Somewhere in the middle?

I worry a lot more about the rise of advertorials and product placements
replacing traditional advertising, than I do about the visibility or
importance of follower counts.

------
bettrsocial
The "one size fits all" approach to Twitter can't make everyone happy, maybe
not even most people. Reddit really took off when they introduced subreddits
so that there could be different interests, different rules, and different
moderation.

So now the shameless plug: we built Bettr.social from the ground up to support
groups for just this very reason. Users want the option of joining and/or
creating their own groups that have control over content and behavior. It's
sort of like a "Twitter with groups". You can also follow hashtags so you can
follow topics, and not get someone's personal political views mixed in with
their sports analysis or whatever. Not sure why Twitter has never allowed
following hashtags. Weibo does.

Dorsey also mentioned the "Like." Facebook did well adding more reactions that
just "like." People may like a post for different reasons, and people may
react to a post in other ways than a "like." If there's no other reaction
available, then they'll write something, often something nasty, and then the
discussion can continue to go nasty and perpetuate. At Bettr.social we have
several reactions like skeptical, troll, wow, and others (even Fake News). We
think this helps reduce the snide remarks and drive-by one-time insults.

I don't think Twitter has innovated much in user experience in the past
several years. They've change algorithms, and AI detection of abuse, but the
features haven't really changed in awhile. And although not all change is
good, it seems like there should have been some changes for the better in the
UX.

------
jelling
> He suggested that the service works best as an “interest-based network,”
> where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who
> posted it

So reddit.

If you stick to smaller, interested based subs, reddit is a far superior
product because it has human moderators and threading. The "breaking news"
aspect of Twitter is extremely oversold imo, but people post things just as
quickly on reddit.

~~~
riffic
I always tell people if they sign up for reddit, to immediately unsubscribe
from the defaults and to specifically search for and subscribe to communities
they may be interested in such as a subreddit for the city/state they live in
or for any career interest or hobbies they have.

------
esilver
I’m not certain Twitter can be fixed.

I’ve opted-out by deleting my account and choosing not to visit the Twitter
site. I’ve done the same with Facebook following the same principle. I won’t
suggest that my decision had no costs; I miss out on conversations I could
learn from and have to be more intentional about reaching out to people in my
network. But the costs are far outweighed by the benefits: less frustration,
less anxiety, less FOMO.

I highly recommend opting-out to anyone who’s become fed up with the
platforms, their conduct or policies, or the way they are made to feel using
their products.

------
floatingatoll
Removing counts is the only viable cure for social media that’s left.

Not removing the problems, but removing the addictiveness. Once we reduce the
problem space of inputs to people who aren’t addicted, the results should be a
lot less difficult to parse.

Visibility into why a post is top of page should not be granted through an
integer mapped on a scale of 0 to infinity at any level of precision.

Not for upvotes, downvotes, replies, reposts. Not for unsolicited messages, or
“X hours ago” (yes, time durations are 0..+/-inf integers, loophole denied).

High score chasing will be the madness of us all. If I could write a web
extension to filter every page’s counts away I would, but I cannot figure it
out in my spare time.

Map onto decaying average percentiles of traffic over X days, so that high-
traffic posts are super bold and low traffic ones aren’t, or use 2-D colormaps
(not Jet) and up/down arrows centered around 50th percentile. Relative
comparison is absolutely invaluable and is a perk print newspapers don’t have.

I hope HN tests this someday.

~~~
floatingatoll
Instagram is: [https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/18/instagram-no-like-
counter/](https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/18/instagram-no-like-counter/)

But the screenshots indicate that they’re still showing the count to the user
who posted, which is the only user that must not see them. Nice try, but it
won’t be sufficient.

------
dsalzman
I just want a "Muffle" or "Volume Down" button for accounts. Some people are
such prolific tweeters that they take over your feed. For some people, I just
want the highlights.

------
abalone
Zero specifics. Are we not catching on to Dorsey’s modus operandi yet? We
should stop giving him a platform to speak in vague platitudes about
“learning” and “rethinking” that make him sound deep. If there are no specific
concrete answers, ignore him.

------
ragebol
I use [https://twitterfall.com/](https://twitterfall.com/) as my main
interface for Twitter It just streams downward from the top, no need to
refresh. It's not pretty but I like it.

Also, I don't recognize the issues lots of people have with Twitter, because I
mostly only see the original tweets and only follow mostly sensible people
that post interesting stuff (scientists, AI & robotics folks, tech
journalists, some space exploration accounts).

~~~
jalada
Always nice to hear from people who still use Twitterfall!

------
mrfusion
I just want to see every tweet from one user and not miss anything. This
doesn’t really seem possible anymore. At least as a non signed in user.

And they’ve been bugging me so much to sign in I feel like I can’t give in if
I’ve come this far.

~~~
leviathant
realtwitter.com

...is a shortcut for activating the following filters: filter:follows
-filter:replies

However, to your point, it still requires you to be signed in to work.

------
umeshunni
Reposting from Eugene Wei's take on Twitter from a couple of years ago:

I believe the core experience of Twitter has reached most everyone in the
world who likes it. [...]

Sometimes, the product-market fit with early adopters is only that. The
product won't go mainstream because other people don't want or need that
product. In these cases, the key to unlocking growth is usually customer
segmentation, creating different products for different users. ... The problem
is that for those who don't use Twitter, almost all of its ideal attributes
among the early adopter cohort are those which other people find bewildering
and unattractive. ... It's not surprising to me that Twitter is populated
heavily by journalists and a certain cohort of techies and intellectuals who
all, to me, are part of a broader species of infovore.

source: [https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2018/5/21/invisible-
asymptote...](https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2018/5/21/invisible-asymptotes)

------
MR4D
Jack Dorsey has a tough problem - he has to figure out how to change Twitter
from being an "echo chamber of hate" into a useful tool.

There are some cool things on the platform, but the signal to noise ratio is
horrible.

My gut feel is that a global public soapbox is not a workable idea. I'd love
to be proven wrong, but I just can't see how it can be done.

------
martin1975
Twitter has to decide what's more important to them... liberty , 1st Amendment
rights of free (legal) expression which includes unpopular speech... or being
liked, famous, etc.

------
pg_bot
Please stop showing me other people's likes! That's what retweets are for.
This is the only thing twitter needs to fix.

------
riffic
Organizations will eventually realize they can stand up their own social
infrastructure (see ActivityPub).

It'll be interesting to see how Jack Dorsey reacts to that.

Edit: if anyone happening to read this works for Twitter or has the capability
to pass a message to @jack, here's a free idea for a pivot to your business
model:

Offer hosted ActivityPub federation utilizing your existing Twitter platform.
In other words, become the "Google Apps for Your Domain/G Suite" for hosted
ActivityPub instances. Media organizations, governments, and celebs should be
paying a premium for the content hosting you provide today for free.

~~~
bhl
ActivityPub doesn’t seem that mature as a framework yet. I myself got lost in
the documentation.

~~~
riffic
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) considers ActivityPub mature enough to be
a "Recommendation" in its standardization process:

[https://www.w3.org/standards/faq#std](https://www.w3.org/standards/faq#std)

[https://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/6785](https://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/6785)

------
naveen99
Yeah, just let the users follow hashtags or keywords in addition to users...

~~~
username3
That’s discord.

------
groby_b
Look - Jack makes money of pushing upsetting content into everybody's feeds.
It pushes up the enragement numbers.

Let's be clear here, he's not going to change it. He's going to continue to
waffle around and pretend he wants to change, and it's not going to happen.

Can we stop giving air to these excuse publications?

------
dalbasal
To his credit, Dorsey seems to at least acknowledge the things at stake. It's
a big contrast to zuck.

I dated a girl who worked on a moderation team at FB 2-3 yrs ago, as the fake
news problem started getting traction. They had a serious smokescreen of
corporate sounding names for the teams, roles and tasks. The tasks were very
obviously editing, fact checking, and such... Much of it politically oriented.
Meanwhile, they seemed to be in knots trying to make their obviously
journalistic job seem like subcategories of spam or abusive IM related jobs.
They didn't hire journalists (even though they are cheap and plentiful).

Twitter at least recognizes that they're the news, they're journalism, they're
political.

That doesn't/won't necessarily/probably lead to anything useful, but there's
an honesty in it that I respect.

------
dmode
I recently closed my Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit accounts. A week has passed
since then and I have noticed that I have been really happy and optimistic.
Probably the happiest in the last 5 years. I am still tempted to take a glance
at Reddit or Twitter. It is almost a drug like addiction. These platforms are
designed to provoke, agitate, and make you mad. It was immensely bad for my
mental health and I am sure for countless others. I was time and again drawn
to all the negativity and it had a slow pervasive effect in changing my mood.
I sincerely hope as a society we move away from these toxic social platforms
and go back to the days when we used to have civil in person conversations

~~~
avip
But can you close your HN account? That's the ultimate challenge.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Shouldn't only unhealthy social media accounts be closed? If anything, HN
makes me a more thoughtful person because polite discourse is encouraged while
poor discourse is reprimanded through mod actions (warnings and then bans).

------
Zelphyr
> He suggested that the service works best as an “interest-based network,”
> where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who
> posted it

Sounds like Twitter is taking a page from Google and not knowing when to leave
well enough alone.

------
partiallypro
I'm always baffled how Jack doesn't understand how own product. Twitter is
arguably the most powerful social media platform in terms of raw data for
individuals... But be just doesn't get it

------
basetop
How about just letting the users have control over their own social media
accounts/etc?

Why did social media go from a simple platform where people followed other
people or interests to a place where they have to manage everything? How did
it change from a platform where people can express whatever they wanted with
whomever they wanted to a platform where social media has to say what people
can or cannot say?

Seems like overnight social media turned from a place of user expression to a
place of user control.

------
ianstallings
This seems to be a problem in general across all social media. They create a
platform people like, people join up because they enjoy the format, then they
tweak it until it's no longer recognizable. Twitter is a great example of
this. No real UI improvements in years, just graphing gone wild. FB is the
same.

The social media market seems ripe for a disruption, imho. It sounds crazy, to
try and topple these current networks. But it's happened before.

------
OscarTheGrinch
Its almost impossible to de-dumb-ass-afy any social network or comment
section. How can you prevent the lowest common denominator on public forums
from posting heinous content / ignorant opinions? Moderators checking every
post doesn't scale and AI may never understand nuance.

One direction would be Hacker News' model of a more restrictive approach where
new users must grind up their trust score in order to receive full
citizenship.

------
Causality1
Twitter was built as a way to follow the lives of and content created by
people you're interested in. Trying to turn it into a content aggregator
service is a vision incompatible with the foundation of Twitter and its user
base. People don't go to Twitter to find good recipes and learn about
dinosaurs; they go to Twitter to see what their favorite author is up to and
watch celebrities make fools of themselves.

------
powera
What I want are separate feeds for "firehose" and "friends".

My friends have better things to do than to post to Twitter 20 times per day.
A bunch of firehose feeds (NYTimes news updates, for example) or Twitter
celebrities (Nicole Cliffe) will make it impossible to see the signal.

A simple UI change (a "I don't plan to make any more tweets for 4 hours"
button) should make this filtering trivial to accomplish.

~~~
jpindar
Why not make a list of your friends?

------
013a
The way I see it: If you don't want to run into assholes, you can make your
account private. Or, you know, not use Twitter. Its that easy. If you have
thicker skin, there are tools to manage public accounts, like blocking and
reporting.

A large number of people want to have their cake and eat it too. They want the
advantages of a public twitter, primarily publicity and fame, but they can't
deal with the darker side of human nature. Twitter should do everything they
can to tame that darker side, because fundamentally their platform is built on
public discourse, not private cliques, but its a losing battle. And moreover,
any control they exert has the unintentional effect of polarizing people
further, which makes the problem worse; Twitter is, to a degree, their own
worst enemy.

> where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who
> posted it

So, Reddit.

Twitter is trying to steer clear of a massive storm on the horizon, except the
ship has a hundred million people on it and most of them want to sail right
into the Eye. They may be in for a small shock when they realize that it won't
work.

Its far beyond the product they publish to the app store; there's a culture on
there that you can't just change. You can't change a few lines of code and
expect people to behave differently, or still want to install it. Facebook was
_very_ smart and knew this; the primary platform got took over by grandmas and
bad flash games, so they started buying tangential properties like Insta and
Whatsapp.

------
NelsonMinar
If it's time to rethink the fundamental dynamics of Twitter, maybe they could
start by hiring a full time CEO?

------
TomMckenny
A serious complication is that there are now several autocrats and would be
autocrats who use the platform to spew fear mongering, race baiting and
unfiltered falsehoods to their public. I imagine Dorsey knows he will face
very real retaliation if they perceive he has diminished their reach.

------
nategri
Looks like we're in store for more random casting about for optimizations from
those at the helm. I expect this continue until the service is an
unrecognizable, unusable mush of content with zero signal to noise for what
matters.

------
pier25
> He suggested that the service works best as an “interest-based network,”
> where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who
> posted it

That's how Reddit and (to a lesser extent) HN work.

------
freewilly1040
The comments here are full of people saying what they want out of Twitter, and
confidently asserting that what they want is what everyone wants. Except,
there’s basically no agreement between them.

------
dfischer
Fix: every tweet costs money. Some micro transaction.

Even better: completely decentralized.

Leverage it as a protocol. Let clients charge how they want for additional
features / and or advertising outside of the main intents.

------
chobytes
Jack demonstrating yet again that he has never used his own website.

------
StreamBright
This guy again. Now that Twitter is approaching irrelevance and there are a
plethora of external services trying to make the UX better maybe there is the
time to rethink some of it.

------
hackeraccount
They need to reopen the api. There's a all sorts of weirdness that's possible
with the platform but Twitter doesn't have the time or the imagination to
explore it.

------
daenz
>“More relevance means less time on the service, and that’s perfectly fine,”
Dorsey said, adding that Twitter can still serve ads against relevant content.

What do shareholders think of this?

------
AzzieElbab
That Reddit, isn't it? Well, given you avoid using the app

------
user764743
I thought they realized trying to make Twitter more like Facebook was a
mistake but then I read they want to force content from non-followers even
more. Oh well.

------
pier25
The solution is very simple: let people subscribe to tags.

------
bashwizard
I'd say it's about time he does since Twitter has turned into a far left
leaning cess pool of circle jerking fact resistent SJW's.

------
savrajsingh
If you could remind me why I followed someone, that’s a start. Often I see ppl
in my stream and I wonder why/when I initially followed them.

------
bitL
Jack said that Twitter was not created, it was discovered. Now it's in the
risk of being undiscovered for someone else to find it.

------
leftyted
HN has a good (partial) solution to the "twitter problem".

Don't show "likes" to anyone but the person who made the comment.

------
Apocryphon
Remember App.net? If only it had addressed some of the problems with Twitter
we've discovered in the last five or so years.

------
lazyjones
What's with all the people going hysterical about social media lately? Twitter
and FB won't break our democracy and culture, it just annoys everyone when the
media are addicted to quoting viral Tweets and FB posts/videos instead of
doing their jobs as journalists. You can't "fix" Twitter in such a way that
so-called journalists won't quote every random Trump tweet and write 2
editorials and 3 articles around it. Someone just needs to give these
journalists a good wake-up slapping, so we can go back to reading actual
newsworthy stories.

------
ilovecaching
I made a Twitter and tried to follow just programmers for some wisdom, but
it’s just left wing politics, humble bragging, or bashing of some sort. Just
not worth the time.

------
rdiddly
So first they redefined and ruined the Tweet (the word their success added to
the dictionary), by doubling the length. Now they're talking about redefining
and ruining "following." I mean what else is there about Twitter besides
tweeting, and followers? Read the signs, this guy wishes he were only in
charge of Square.

------
floodyberry-
How clueless or ineffective do you have to be with what your original idea has
turned in to before people stop listening to or caring about your thoughts on
it? Oddly, the "meritocracy" crowd don't appear concerned if rich/powerful
males have no idea what they're doing.

------
whiddershins
Interesting that the quoted “hard questions” about failure to remove Nazis is
in direct opposition to the criticism Twitter has received on, for example,
the second Joe Rogan interview.

When I view what Dorsey is saying through the lens of the Rogan interview, I
don’t see a push towards “algorithmic feeds” which you have already, but
towards something where the users actually have more control over what they
see, not less. But it’s impossible to tell from these short quotes.

What’s fascinating is the ambiguity of goals and responsibilities Twitter has
regarding “hate speech” and so forth.

The quotes in the article seem to indicate questions presuming toxic
viewpoints need to have their platform removed, the questions in the Rogan
interview work from the assumption stifling speech is bad, and Dorsey keeps
saying he is concerned about the safety of individual users.

It’s bewildering because I’m not sure anyone really understands what anyone
else is even trying to accomplish.

~~~
mesozoic
From some comment Tim Pool made afterwards it appears that they got the
impression Jack didn't really understand this was a major issue or the depths
of dangerous stifling of speech they were participating in by potentially
banning people who were just labeled "Nazi" because it's now a synonym for
what you call someone you don't like or agree with.

It sounds like he's been looking into the issue and taking some executive
action to stop the platform from being controlled by a single ideology group.

------
jrobn
Another echo chamber pivoting to be another echo chamber.

------
sverige
> “It’s democracy at stake, it’s our culture at stake,” Anderson said.

Christ, the self-importance of the Twitterverse is astonishing. What they
don't say out loud is that Trump and Brexiteers and others they oppose have
used the platform to effectively end-run the media, they hate that, but they
can't figure out a way to stop them. A little bit of plain speaking would be
refreshing.

~~~
luckylion
Be happy that today it's not life on this planet or the universe itself that
is at stake. ;)

In my experience, there are primarily three kinds of people that regularly
claim there's a lot on the line, and it doesn't matter what their political
views are. 1) young people that are inexperienced, 2) people that need to feel
good about fighting for something important, and 3) people that exploit the
other two by appealing to that. It's a good tactic to motivate your base, but
like crying wolf, it loses it's effectiveness when done too often.

~~~
TomMckenny
Perhaps there are better examples of that claim.

More than a dozen democracies have fallen in the last twenty years. Many times
that over the last century, making predictions of that correct. Obviously
neither life nor the universe have ended as many times in that period.

Furthermore, I know of no well informed people that have ever predicted the
later but many who have successfully predicted the former.

~~~
sverige
I'd be mildly interested to see a list of these failed democracies. My other
question is, did they fail because Twitter allowed unfettered tweeting of all
kinds of unsavory thoughts and ideas? Or are they places where most people
don't know what Twitter is?

Edit: It also begs the question of whether democracy is the best form of
government for every country, but I leave that aside, since I'm not sure we've
reached agreement on whether Twitter is really that important or influential
in the lives of governments and societies.

------
drukenemo
How about a new “dynamic” with true freedom of expression?

------
triplee
You know what service had both communities of interest that thrived AND
individual followings AND wasn't overrun with Nazis?

Google Plus.

Now excuse me while I shed no tears for Jack.

------
burtonator
HE can start by suspending Trump's account who's spent the last 2-4 years
continually violating their ToS.

------
OliverJones
A modest proposal: Make it easier to pwn various twitter accounts. Uncertainty
about authenticity for any given twitter message would compel journalists to
verify the content of the message before repeating it.

Paradoxically, uncertainty about messages would slow down the spread of fake
news and hate speech.

tl;dr: Tweets Are Not News.

------
sonnyblarney
These are jump the shark moments for companies, they usually have insightful
opinions, but execution and the essential details lack.

The other alternative: we all stop using Twitter. There's simply no need for
it.

Maybe there should be a 'journalist Twitter feed' that journos can comment and
post on, but with no comments. So we get the live action, but not the clutter.

All pop culture and political tweeting is rubbish.

------
shard972
So we killed RSS feeds for this? I think it's time to bring back the RSS
feeds.

------
ada1981
I’m still curious why they don’t pull the plug on Trump.

It’s within their legal rights and it would irritate him. Seems like a no
brainer.

~~~
craftyguy
He's their most prized user. Cratering him would likely crater the entire
service, despite donald's blatant violations of twitter's TOS.

~~~
throwawayc6
There seems to be another set of rules for users with high follower counts,
presumably because Twitter is terrified of the backlash and claims of
censorship.

One particularly nasty individual with a blue checkmark has the habit of
screenshotting people who disagree with her, and then unleashing her followers
on them. It’s almost impossible to critically engage with this individual
without risking being destroyed professionally or personally. Twitter’s
response seems to be quietly demoting Tweets, but there is definitely a power
dynamic at play with people who have high follower counts, and it isn’t in
favor of Twitter.

------
writepub
Mr. Dorsey accurately answered the Nazi question with:

> “We have a situation right now where that term is used fairly loosely,”
> Dorsey said. “We just cannot take any one mention of that word accusing
> someone else as a factual indication of whether someone can be removed from
> the platform.”

~~~
mesozoic
Yeah that was the most impressive part. Gives me some hope for Twitter.

------
nicklaf
If I can't google programming-related search terms and get back a publicly
facing page for that tweet, then I'd consider the site as dead as G+ for
research purposes.

We need to stop useful community content from getting black holed into walled
gardens of Eternal September.

