
Twitter Has Become a Park Filled with Bats and Perverts - molecule
http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/03/julieanne-smolinski-quitting-twitter.html
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onion2k
The problem isn't that there are assholes on Twitter. They've always been
there. Dealing with abusive people who want to shout down things they don't
agree with has always been a downside to social media, especially if you share
or talk about any remotely "controversial" topic. Twitter's lack of tools to
help manage that problem didn't help but no amount of tools will completely
fix the issue. It's a fact of life that a minority of people are just not very
nice. The real problem is that there's no _benefit_ to being on Twitter any
more. The upside has vanished. The genuine conversations and _fun_ side of
Twitter has been lost. It's become a crowd of people all broadcasting without
wanting to engage with their followers.

I suspect it's simply a network size problem - once Twitter hit a threshold of
users it got too noisy. It's ironic that Twitter's value is considered to be
the size of its audience whereas that might actually be the exact thing that's
killing its usefulness.

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heisenbit
Yes, technology has removed any limits to reach large audiences in the world.
Combine this with zero consequences for abusive behavior. The solution in the
past has been to move to a new forum relying on the trolls to take a while to
figure it out.

On the other side is the FB model where one is forced to use real names and a
single account. That in turn exposes people to bullying in real life and
forces the freedom of speech on a kinder-garden level.

Then there are models where identity is tied to commercial assets (Amazon,
Apple) where banning has potentially devastating economic side effects.

Free anonymous accounts that cost nothing and are all powerful are not helping
civilized discourse. Commercial accounts are not simple either. But what are
the alternative?

~~~
Tempest1981
How does FB expose people to real-life bullying? I'm not seeing that
connection. (Or are you saying that bullying still occurs on FB using real
names?)

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brudgers
If Twitter had an interest addressing abuse, Twitter would strive to make it
easier to report abuse than to create it. Instead, retweeting is one touch and
amenable to botting while reporting is convoluted and a linear.

------
facepalm
Is this similar to perverts calling random women on the telephone? Now that I
think about it, wouldn't it have been easy to detect the callers and punish
them? Did that ever happen?

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webwanderings
Twitter has become what comment section at Yahoo News once was, which
ultimately what YouTube became. The crowd has just shifted over to Twitter
now. Nothing anywhere is any different, when it comes to unmonitored
platforms.

