
Twitter Is Great. An Asshole Filter Would Make It Even Better - curtis
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/twitter-is-great-an-asshole-filter-would-make-it-even-better/
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philwelch
If you wanted to specifically design social media platforms to optimize for
meanness and radicalization, I don't know if you could do any better than
Twitter and, to a slightly lesser extent, Tumblr. In fact, I think a better
term would be "antisocial media".

Start by making everything anonymous and easy to bot. Then add a length limit,
thus eliminating all chance for nuance and optimizing for cheap slogans. Then
make sure reposts and low-context replies are cheap, but high-context threaded
discussions are expensive or impossible.

Twitter without replies or retweets would be considerably better. It would
cover virtually all of the good use-cases of Twitter while eliminating the
bad.

~~~
majewsky
> Twitter without replies or retweets would be considerably better.

Twitter started out without replies and retweets. Both features were initially
invented by users and only added to the UI after their use was already
widespread.

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neom
Am I the only one who would pay $10/mth for twitter if it meant I could only
be tweeted at by other people who are also paying?

~~~
arnaudsm
There's no known correlation between being Rich and not being an Asshole.

~~~
vim_wannabe
I think he meant a paywall, kind of like how some services don't waste their
time offering free accounts and receiving tons of support requests.

Billy Gates also famously pondered charging a fee for sending email to reduce
spam.

~~~
krapp
Paying for an account also leads people to feel they're entitled to do
whatever they like with it, which might be counterproductive to encouraging
civility.

~~~
jhanschoo
I’ve more commonly heard anecdotes to the opposite conclusion; receivers of
free work often value it little and feel entitled to request improvements,
while paying users value the service enough to pay.

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mcny
Speaking of more control, why does everyone insist on trying to make my
experience better? Why can't these "social" services let me be? Just give me a
reverse chronological feed (newest item first, no sorting, no filtering) add
some ads in between if you must but clearly mark them as sponsored content.
There, done.

Why do they insist on optimizing everything for everyone. I don't want it. I
don't need it. If you're reading this, please stop. Or at least give me an
opt-out!

~~~
krapp
Social media is a business. You're there to generate content that engages
people with the platform and increases its value, and those sites are designed
to optimize you both as a content producer and a product.

And the shareholders do appreciate your willingness to do that for free.

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malvosenior
That's pretty rich coming from Mother Jones. They've had a history of
extremely toxic Twitter usage.

Here is one example: [https://www.theblaze.com/news/2016/01/14/take-a-gun-and-
put-...](https://www.theblaze.com/news/2016/01/14/take-a-gun-and-put-it-in-
your-mouth-and-pull-the-trigger-mother-jones-editor-loses-it-on-twitter)

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DoreenMichele
"I love the world, except for all the people."

"I have an opinion. I am entitled to express it. You? Not so much. I don't
want to hear your shit while I tout the value of free speech."

"I'm a privileged white male. Of course, I think it is totes normal to expect
everyone else to kowtow to my comforts instead of me learning to not be a
butt. I see zero correlation between my bad behavior and the invective aimed
at me. LA LA LA not listening."*

In all seriousness, I am all for figuring out how to foster a more civil
environment anywhere people interact socially. But these sorts of solutions
are not it. In fact, they tend to be counterproductive.

* Not All Privileged White Males. Just, you know, the (hypocritical) assholes.

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dogruck
Filtering out “assholes” is not the path to great good.

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aaronchall
Mother Jones is the most extreme left-wing publication I can think of. This
particular article is not much of an exception, and I have flagged it.

To address the point, though, I've been working on making my twitter feed
better. I mute SJW's on sight. I've got an annoying hashtag and the words
"Trump" and "Russians" muted as well.

I try to constructively engage when I run into someone I wouldn't mind
following, but who is clearly at least temporarily being an Twitter activist
in a way that I disagree with. I try to mostly tweet about programming topics,
though.

But I've been talking with my friends about "the Twitter problem". We think it
might be better to just quit following our Twitter accounts and go back to
blogging and RSS feeds to stay on top of each other.

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dragonwriter
> Mother Jones is the most extreme left-wing publication I can think of.

Eh, Mother Jones editorial position is somewhere between the center of the
neoliberal faction and the center of the social democratic faction of the
Democratic Party, somewhere in the center-left. If they are the most left-wing
publication you can think of, you either have a very narrow or right-leaning
exposure.

Here's a far more left-wing publication: [http://revcom.us/revolution/current-
en.html?1](http://revcom.us/revolution/current-en.html?1)

~~~
sheepmullet
In truth mother jones is about as far to the left as is acceptable to people
in the center. Kind of like brietbart on the right.

Sites like Revcom are the infowars of the left. People in the center will
categorise you as an extremist if you start quoting them.

