
A hypothesis about how you might discover the next Twitter - grey-area
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/898919987657805825
======
mychael
I see the nastiness as a necessary evil of free speech platforms. Compare that
to LinkedIn where there is virtually no nastiness and virtually no interesting
conversations happening.

~~~
gremlinsinc
Probably makes some sense.. I mean Reddit is probably the most vulgar site on
the planet... (next to 4chan, but I'm not a 4chan fan and I think reddit has
way more market share to compare)

\-- and without the crazies I'm not sure it'd be as sticky as it is... Part of
the fun is saying "you honestly believe that what the fuck is wrong with you?"
Then getting banned from r/the_donald for being a 'libtard' /s

(disclaimer: voted for Bernie - proud libtard here)

~~~
leereeves
reddit has become a collection of ideological silos where no real discussion
or disagreement is allowed.

Few interesting conversations happen there, just 'circle-jerks'.

~~~
hliyan
With some exceptions such as r/changemyview and r/science

~~~
bobwaycott
And r/neutralpolitics, and a number of business-related subreddits.

~~~
Finch2193
Could you list a few of those subs you find interesting, business related or
otherwise?

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protomyth
Retweet was invented by the users (RT:) just as commenting with the link to
the original tweet (retweet with comment) was a user custom before Twitter did
anything about it. Not sure how you force users not to invent their own ways
to use a service.

~~~
geoffpado
Obviously it's only _partially_ helpful in their case, but you could do
something like Reddit does: links to other tweets on Twitter would be "read-
only", with no way to post or respond from the page you end up on. Pair this
with not automatically rendering retweets on the main timeline, and it could
go a long way toward neutering "retweet mobs".

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ezoe
Prevent madness systematically? I feel like it would be like orwellian world.

You can only tweet "good", "plus good" and "doubleplus good"

~~~
monksy
Criticism is violence

From what I've seen in some circles, they believe this.

~~~
mark_edward
Yes, the worst is the people who feel that "call-out culture" and SJWs are
some form of oppression and destruction of the right to free speech.

~~~
qu4z-2
SJWs seem mostly harmless, if mildly annoying. Don't feed the trolls, and move
on. It's a solved problem. They have as much right to free speech as anyone
else.

That said, "Think of the women!" seems to be the new "Think of the children!":
an excuse for pushing through terrible policies in a way that no-one can
publicly object to. Frankly the most disgusting thing about that is what it
implies about women's agency.

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grey-area
This article linked in the thread about how twitter became so angry is also a
really interesting read:

[https://www.fastcompany.com/3063060/a-brief-history-of-
the-a...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3063060/a-brief-history-of-the-angry-
social-network)

And also this one on how to fix twitter abuse:

[https://artplusmarketing.com/putting-out-the-twitter-
trashfi...](https://artplusmarketing.com/putting-out-the-twitter-
trashfire-3ac6cb1af3e)

------
Alex3917
FWD:Everyone is basically troll-proof because it requires the permission of
each message contributor before a user can publish an email conversation.
(Unless a message contributor has been anonymized.)

We've been mainly focused on building out the technology rather than promoting
it so it remains to be seen how this model will work, but we made this design
decision for largely the reasons that pg suggests. The theory is been to err
on the side of starting with too much friction, and successively remove
friction for people making positive contributions. This obviously means
getting off to a much slower start than most other social sites, but with the
benefit of avoiding the death spiral of negativity that kills most of the
social sites that get initial traction -- Secret, Whisper, Yik Yak, etc.

~~~
moreati
I don't understand the first line. Is "FWD" an acronym, or are you imitating
the subject line of a forwarded email?

~~~
grey-area
It's a service that makes emails public

[https://www.fwdeveryone.com](https://www.fwdeveryone.com)

------
wmf
Some people have thought about this topic for years, but Twitter ignores such
knowledge because destroying civilization is more profitable.
[http://anildash.com/2011/07/if-your-websites-full-of-
asshole...](http://anildash.com/2011/07/if-your-websites-full-of-assholes-its-
your-fault.html)
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/)

~~~
grey-area
_Some people have thought about this topic for years, but Twitter ignores such
knowledge because destroying civilization is more
profitable[https://twitter.com/anildash/status/898935261584801792](https://twitter.com/anildash/status/898935261584801792)
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/)
_

I think some charity is in order here - while it's easy to be mean (see what I
did there), it's harder to propose real solutions that will work at scale,
indeed lots of websites want to and no-one really has at scale (though many do
much better than twitter). I think Paul Graham has been going on about this
for years too, at least since he founded this site.

If Paul Graham was somehow associated with twitter I'd have more sympathy with
your viewpoint but it's not some sudden epiphany. Ironically, the hot takes of
twitter and retweet feature he's complaining about have been used here to
misrepresent his views and present it as such for the sake of a cheap
rhetorical point.

Also, twitter does have all three points in the article, but it's nowhere near
enough (I think they fail at the third point but there are also other more
concrete solutions they could try see my link below).

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voidz
To me, Mastodon is the next Twitter, and there is a lot less nastiness going
on because the character limit per message is 400 characters, leading to a lot
more nuanced and well thought out conversations.

It also helps that it is a decentralised platform, so there is no central
censorship going on like on Twitter, which has the incentive to earn money and
where the user is the consumer.

~~~
hliyan
Wouldn't you say that there is more to this problem than content length and
centralisation?

~~~
voidz
Like what?

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kemenaran
I find it interesting that Mastodon was built with a lot of input from
communities frequently harrassed on Twitter.

It influenced early design choices (the "retweets" count is not proheminently
displayed ; fine-grained options for muting/blocking/banning).

Plus, in the end, isn't per-community-moderation the only way to avoid the
"one rule fits all" dictatorship?

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astrange
His point is broadly accurate, but is slightly ignorant of history with the
implication that we need to invent “moderating Internet forums” over again.

I expect letting bluechecks moderate twitter would turn it from a libertarian
dystopia into a corporate dystopia though; when the WSJ rediscovers neo-Nazis
just to write articles about how well dressed they are, it’s good that all the
comments are mean to them.

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gargarplex
The key feature of Snapchat is that it allows you to communicate emotions. If
you were forced to sign all your tweets with a facial expression, you could
still upload text-only, and detect nasty/hostile facial expressions and ban
such communications

~~~
pjc50
Then watch your mentions fill with happy, smiling, racists.

(The idea of mandatory happiness is so absurd it was the premise of a Doctor
Who story, "Happiness Patrol")

~~~
gargarplex
I said nothing about happiness. I also didn't suggest the images should be
uploaded– just that they should be a key for uploading. I just said
nasty/hostility (e.g. racists) should be avoided.

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dionidium
I am blocked from seeing paulg's tweets, despite having never interacted with
him. Perhaps the next Twitter won't arbitrarily prevent me from seeing some of
its content for opaque reasons (and especially not in a way that makes it seem
as though I've done something wrong, without telling me what that thing is).

That seems like a good feature for the next Twitter.

I think we fail to appreciate just how _weird_ this feature is. Presumably,
paulg at some point saw some comment of mine that he didn't like. At this
point he had three choices: 1) ignore it; 2) mute me, thereby preventing my
idiotic words from ever reaching his eyes again; or 3) click a button that
prevents me from ever seeing _his_ thoughts.

Wait, what? What is this crazy third option?

~~~
EvilTerran
There's a bug (at least on mobile) that makes the "you are not authorized to
view these tweets" message sometimes appear when it shouldn't. Have you tried
reloading the page a couple of times?

(I'm guessing there's some authorization API endpoint that's slightly
unreliable and "fails closed".)

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z3t4
Just screw software patents. What exactly is it about React that Facebook have
a patent on ? How many patent trolls do we need before people see how
ridiculous software patents are !?

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fapjacks
F2F conversations are an awful example if you're talking about excluding
meanness.

