

Twitter’s Root Injustice - KhalilK
http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/02/twitters-root-injustice/

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tptacek
Nobody I follow on Twitter thinks like this. The idea of a Twitter account
having some intrinsic social capital baffles me. The "old" Twitter accounts?
The "new" Twitter accounts?

I follow Daniel J. Bernstein (@hashbreaker, a relatively new account) because
he's Daniel J. Bernstein. I am interested in what DJB has to say.

I am in conversations with other people who are interested in what DJB has to
say. We comment on the same threads. They wind up in my feed. Not
infrequently, one of those people will say something interesting. I will click
the "follow" button. Others do the same. Their follower count grows.

In what other way could this system meaningfully work? Why on earth would I
follow someone because of their Twitter stats? What do I care how Twitter
manages those stats? If you want a chance to be heard, say something
interesting.

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droob
This is kinda like saying people with more contacts in their cell phones have
more social capital, and the carrier should address that.

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molecule
Whether this is a problem is debatable, but referring to it as 'Injustice' is
entitled and inappropriately hyperbolic.

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dredmorbius
Injustice: "a quality relating to unfairness or undeserved outcomes. The term
may be applied in reference to a particular event or situation, or to a larger
status quo. In Western philosophy and jurisprudence, injustice is very
commonly, but not always, defined as either the absence or the opposite of
justice."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Injustice](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Injustice)

Justice "is a concept of moral rightness based on ethics, rationality, law,
natural law, religion, equity and fairness."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice)

An entitlement "is a guarantee of access to something, such as to welfare
benefits, based on established rights or by legislation. A "right" is itself
an entitlement associated with a moral or social principle"

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entitlement](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entitlement)

Criticizing an inherently moral concept on the grounds of a claim to morality
is ... somewhere between irrational and ignorant.

~~~
molecule
Next paragraph:

 _In a casual sense, the term "entitlement" refers to a notion or belief that
one (or oneself) has a right to some particular reward or benefit— if given
without deeper legal or principled cause, the term is often given with
pejorative connotation (e.g. a "sense of entitlement")._

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entitlement](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entitlement)

~~~
dredmorbius
It does but as a secondary sense. I still find the criticism voiced wanting.

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dredmorbius
First-mover advantage is a characteristic of a great many systems. Disrupting
that, out of concerns for justice or merely to provide a more compelling
reason for newcomers to make use of a service or tool, is an interesting and
ongoing challenge.

Another approach is to randomly present new content to users. Google's
attempted numerous hacks to both solve the "empty streams" problem and break
out of filter bubbles at G+, though many of these have been less than
satisfactory. The "What's Hot" feature (now deprecated to "Explore") had the
typical problems of juvenilia and vapidity, as well as the problem for those
whose posts were promoted to it of attracting vast amounts of generally
unwanted attention, to the extent that people were begging _not_ to have posts
featured.

It's not a specific problem of Twitter, there's a challenge in new-content
discovery and promotion generally. I'm not sure that the "active users" hack
is a sufficient fix. I do feel that leveraging both technical (e.g.,
algorithmically determined ratings) and social (FOAF type recommendations)
tends to produce more useful results.

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codybrown
This is the author of the post. would love to take any questions.

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merijn481
You make some very interesting observations. I'm pretty sure the folks at
Twitter spend a LOT of time working on user engagement and solving the signal
vs noise problem in recommendations etc. What's been their response so far
when you reached out to them? I would try to reach out to the people trying to
solve this problem (developers) instead of to management first, in case it's
not a matter of decision making but a more of an algorithmic problem.

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chipsy
Why would everyone on Twitter have imperial ambitions?

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lukifer
The _world_ operates as an unregulated market for social capital. To blame
Twitter for that is a little absurd.

~~~
aspec
Social capital is still capital. If social capital is what draws users to
Twitter, then Twitter's user engagement as a whole determines the value of its
shares. If new users aren't able to gain that capital through Twitter, then
Twitter's userbase will begin to stagnate, and its stock value will drop.
Regardless of who's to "blame", this is undeniably a real problem.

~~~
lukifer
I think that's a problem with an inter-networked world in general. Time and
attention is finite, and there are now many sites, apps, and people competing
for that attention. What you describe is every as relevant for aspiring
YouTubers, bloggers, etc.

I agree that Twitter is included in that overarching problem, but I don't see
it as their creation, and I'm not sure what they can do about it. (Facebook is
in an easier position, being oriented primarily around family and friends,
even though every brand on Earth also has a Facebook page.)

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aspec
I wasn't talking about a general problem with capitalism. I'm saying that this
is a unique problem that Twitter as a company has to face, for the reasons the
article describes.

