I don't think quality of "debate" on Twitter can be salvaged. Everything was designed for "engagement" and turned out to be rage-inducing machine.
Quote-retweet is used to send followers to harass the person responsible for the awful tweet. RT is choir-preaching (you're a monster if you don't RT that kicking babies is bad), and replies to twitter-celebrities' tweets give everyone their 15 minutes of fame to post the most idiotic meme.
And the only time when someone tries to make a coherent argument, it's a "Tread (1/50)" with a total mess, and every single sentence has buttons for taking it out of context.
They've optimized for engagement, and they're getting a lot of enragement.
People seem determined to write things on Twitter that are absolutely begging to be taken out of context. Sarcasm, inside-jokes, rhetorical hyperbole, assumptions that everyone is following the same story they are, and so on. I don't know why they do it.
The simple answer to this problem has been clear for awhile: Make responses to quote tweets opaque to the original author.
1. Bob quotes a tweet from Alice he thinks his followers will find enraging
2. Bob's followers reply to the tweet with predictable outrage and abuse
3. (present system) Twitter becomes unusable for Alice as she is flooded with mentions from all of the angry and abusive replies to Bob's quote
3. (proposed system) Alice is not shown any of the replies to Bob's tweet. Bob's followers scream into the void.
4. (proposed system, cont'd) Bob's most clever followers know replies will not be seen by Alice, so they @ her directly. However, Twitter is even more clever and has a super-advanced algorithm that goes "if you follow someone who quote-tweeted someone else in the past 48 hours, @-ing the quoted user will not show up in their mentions." New accounts (less than 48 hours old) are also unable to @ anyone at all.
There, I fixed Twitter. Jack, I'll even write out some Jira stories for a very reasonable fee.
It might improve things marginally but at this point it's just an arm's race. Furthermore the people who will manage to work around these limitations will also probably be the more radicalized fringe of the community who are probably the most problematic one as well. It will deter the more moderate and give a larger audience to the radicalized.
Look at how people on Reddit, 4chan and elsewhere manage to identify Twitter accounts from anonymized screenshots in mere minutes in order to have a constructive discussion with the author.
I don't think technology can fix a community as large and diverse as Twitter, 4chan or Youtube. The problem IMO is that it's not even a community anymore, it's more like an amalgamation of thousands of communities with vastly different opinions and mindsets. You can try to isolate the communities as you propose and you end up with something like Reddit with mostly secluded communities. Look at how well it's working for them...
That's why I prefer smaller communities like Hacker News where there's still an actual sense of communities. We all see the same articles, we probably have vaguely similar interests etc... You don't default to assuming that whoever you're disagreeing with is a literal fascist/communist/whatever.
"people on Reddit, 4chan and elsewhere manage to identify Twitter accounts from anonymized screenshots in mere minutes in order to have a constructive discussion".
I assume you mean doxing and stalking. These are the instigators and manipulators... maybe they're the dangerous harassers, but most of the mob can't be bothered.
I don't see how it has been "clear for a while" that this is the solution to all of twitter's problems.
> 3. (proposed system) Alice is not shown any of the replies to Bob's tweet. Bob's followers scream into the void.
The problem of online harassment is not (mainly) that the service UI becomes cumbersome to use for the victim. It's that everyone else can observe they are harassed and the victim loses control over their online presence. Your proposal would actually make this effect worse, because the victim wouldn't even notice anymore they are harassed.
>> "Your proposal would actually make this effect worse, because the victim wouldn't even notice anymore they are harassed."
There's a perspective where this is a good thing, but I think I know where you're coming from. I've seen people on the receiving end of these attacks who say they still want to know about it so they know about any tangible threats.
It could be argued though that when it's known that the quote-tweeted person won't see replies to the quoting tweet, there's no point for a harasser to make threats that won't be received.
Generally, I'm always wary of "out of sight, out of mind" type solutions - for any kind of problem. In this particular case, this assumes harrassers only want the original author to know (and even then are interested in the actual outcome of their message).
I think the "shitstorm" dynamics are more complex and there are different motivations for people to take part in one. E.g., it could be simple venting, virtue singalling to peers in your brigade or you sharing the tweet to others in your circle - nothing that needs any perticipation by the original author.
In extreme cases, an author might not realize what is going on until they find outraged articles about themselves in the news.
See the comparable problem of cyberbullying for an example. There, it's often completely irrelevant whether or not a victim knows about the messages that are written about them. Indeed, they can be bullied on online platforms where they don't even have an account. All that is required is for participants in the bullying to know how to access the messages.
Of course, harrassing PMs are a different issue. Here, you can be sure the messages are exclusively directed towards the author and the harm is being done by having the author read them. Blocking those kind of messages would stop the bullying action itself and could work. But then again, this is not so much different from the oldfashioned blocking we already have.
I’d argue a fair number of people want to know what people are saying about them, it seems like instinct almost. So does it have any affect at that point if everyone knows everyone will look?
That might be the simple answer for Twitter, but the simple answer for everyone else is to avoid Twitter. It should be clear thst broadcasting yourself thst way is inherently unwise in most cases, and that’s even before you add in the toxic community and “engagement first” platform.
It doesn't help much if I avoid Twitter, when all the major news media outlets think that Twitterers are the vox populi, and use it to source their articles.
The corollary is to avoid any source of “news” which does that. Stick to written media in most cases, avoid lifestyle pieces and minimize your exposure to politics. When possible go for primary sources on foreign affairs and cross-reference several viewpoints. Most of all don’t spend too much time with the news, especially the “major” outlets because they’re just poison.
this point was made in, of all places, an episode of Parks & Recreation in 2012 where the moderator at a political debate has to read out a typo-filled question posed to the candidates, and remarks mockingly "and this question is from Twitter, which is something we are apparently doing now".
In the notification settings there are advanced filters to remove notifications from accounts that you don't follow, don't follow you, new accounts, accounts that have unconfirmed contact information. I don't know any other platform that offers so much control. I have been lucky to never experience this type of abuse but if I were under attack I would apply advanced filters until the storm passes. Twitter could certainly do better (and could take more of a stand against cut and dry abuse), but in the meantime there are tools in the hands of users today to take control of unwanted notifications.
I think there are certainly scenarios where this would be useful and preferable, but there is a quote-tweet use case for wanting to mention something to the people you follow but add your own support or opinion in good faith - it allows you to comment with at least a little context.
But this is probably me trying to salvage twitter for the non-toxic purposes and its probably a losing battle. The fact that what you propose is necessary is a terrible state of affairs.
I just wish someone else would come along and eat their lunch already.
If I'm not mistaken, aren't notifications on a quoted tweeted already muted for the quoted user? That is, the user sees the quoted tweet, but isn't notified with each reply/like of the quoted tweet? Just tested it on my own account but maybe I've changed a default at some point.
> Sarcasm, inside-jokes, rhetorical hyperbole, assumptions that everyone is following the same story they are, and so on. I don't know why they do it.
Done well and taken in context, it's funny?
Context-free humor is extremely hard but somehow twitter has managed to evolve that too. @dril may be the most well known example.
Using the internet for "debate" is pretty difficult outside of fairly homogenous, heavily moderated environments. It just about works on HN and even here it only works on certain subjects.
Besides, the entire premise of "debate" runs out for certain subjects: "we're taking away your rights because you didn't argue convincingly enough that you should get to live in peace" is inherently a disaster.
Quite simply they're playing to the crowd. That's what gets a reaction, so they do it more. Skinner box conditioning at its simplest.
Same outside the hardest moderated groups on Reddit. Threads that form a distinct pattern every time. For internet points, or twitter followers, or chasing meaningless numbers. :)
Sarcasm and smart works best if used judiciously.
How do you design a system to encourage quality debate? Going on the few places that have had quality debate (Here on HN mostly, Usenet prior to the inrush, well managed forums, Livejournal if you were careful), I'd suggest assembling an audience interested in discussion. Forums used to manage it.
Heavy moderation, not limiting post length and minimising buttons for gathering the lynch mob (I mean buttons for engagement) seems like it helps too. :)
One commonality is that eberything you mentioned is a site that specifically gathers people around a common topic/interest. Twitter puts everything together, so the tweets from the hardware hackers I follow are mixed in together with joke accounts. This is one of my biggest pet peeves with all social media, I just don't understand why we haven't figured out anything better than usenet for keeping interests separated.
Because you have to make assumptions when you only have 140 characters to get an idea through. And yes, I know the limit has been relaxed, but that doesn't change the habit.
Patton Oswalt did a series of tweets that were designed to be taken out of context - they made a clever point about that. Of course, that didn't stop him from continuing to use Twitter prolifically, so perhaps he missed his own point, or at least yours.
Due to debate getting worse and worse I left both Twitter and Facebook (they both became completely useless and just a waste of time); now it looks like most of low-quality "I am here too doing trivial things, applaud me!" posts moved over to LinkedIn, so I put my account to "passive" state there as well and am considering removing it altogether.
Are there still some places left on Internet for high-quality discussions? Reddit recently ramped up "moderation" and now feels like a mob mentality everywhere with prolific ban give-aways if one's opinion doesn't align 100% with the one of moderators (who sometimes fight with each other); alternatives are full of extreme content that got banned on the mainstream ones, and *chan was always a stable full of manure with some pearls hidden very very deeply for one to waste time finding them.
>Are there still some places left on Internet for high-quality discussions?
Web forums. There are good ones. They are independent of one another. Most forums I visit are centered around some subject, so people are bonded enough to be reasonably civil even if they disagree. Most aren't big enough to require much moderation. The best one have zero rules and very little trolling, but those are usually completely devoid of political stuff, since no one wants to spoil the good thing.
I think web forums are the best discussion medium developed so far. They support long-format content. They support hypermedia. They allow for offline conversations that don't get "dated" in 2 hours. They don't put thread authors on pedestal, unlike blogs.
I've heard there are mail/news groups out there too. Haven't used one aside from newsgroup for D Programming Language, though.
I’ve always found forums to be really helpful when searching for a topic but these days when compared to a voting system, forums feel dead or slow to update. I get that the voting system of get to the top is toxic and typically produces poor content but it does seem to work to an extent (for example HN).
I guess maybe forums feel a bit too heavy duty with all of the additional user stuff built into the stream of replies instead of having to click them.
What if HN didn’t show a number of votes and all the topics ranked based on invisible votes? I wonder if a system that’s more simple like that would carry over to forums to make them feel more modern but true to their roots?
>I’ve always found forums to be really helpful when searching for a topic but these days when compared to a voting system, forums feel dead or slow to update.
Voting systems create a lot of bad incentives. They encourage groupthink and filter bubbles. They discourage long-running conversations. I haven't felt that boards are "slow" if there is reasonable amount of new threads and posts per day.
The usual trouble with forums is that a lot of admins don't understand how to split one up into boards. They either create way too many, and those sit empty, or not enough, and then it's hard to keep track of conversations.
Maintaining the optimal number of boards and optimal average thread size are keys towards a healthy forum that doesn't seem empty, or overwhelming.
The trouble is, how often do you see a Reddit discussion show up in a Google search with helpful information? This is a rarity for me, and I don't think it has anything to do with how Google sorts results. The same voting system prioritizes pithy memes and snark comments over helpful discussion. While you might have to wait longer, I would argue that you are far better off asking a question on a dedicated forum vs. a subreddit. Fora have their own problems, but voting systems typically seem to encourage low quality content to gather imaginary points, hacker news is the only site with voting I've seen that stays tolerable.
As far as the high profile sites are concerned, civil discussion is dead.
Twitter is full of hatred. People who disagree with you will threaten you and try to publicly shame you. Someone takes something out of context, then shares it with hundreds/thousands of other like-minded people and attempts to get them all to target you.
Facebook is full of ignorance. Doesn't matter what you say, some ill informed person will speak over you and refute your points. FB is absolutely the worst for this. The public posts about controversial issues is loaded with ignorant people spouting nonsense over others.
Reddit is full of downvote and report abusers. If someone disagrees with you, they and their friends will downvote your comment until it collapses due to the negative vote threshold. The more extremist ones will report every single thing you say and attempt to get you banned.
These sites also have no recourse for abuse. Once you are banned, it is next to impossible to get it overturned.
I believe visible scores are the only reason for mob mentality. Take away the pluses or the minuses and the numbers attached to them and heard mentality weakens. You still have some attachment from surroundings opinions but to a much lesser extent. At that point the behavior shifts from micro to macro, from a single post to the whole platform. HN is the perfect example of this.
Twitter is built short-burst/high-speed communication - the kind that works great for machines but not for humans.
The result is that it has turned the world into one massive Medieval village; flash-spreading of rumours, hysteria, bigotry in-between maniacally virtue-signalling and choir preaching.
I find Twitter delightful again but I needed the following settings:
Media Preview: Off
Reduced Motion: On
Video Autoplay: Never
Increased Contrast: On
I also mute lots of accounts. It took a few months of muting anyone who replies with animated GIF or says negative things like “thanks for lecture” etc and I’m back to a well tuned information machine.
This makes a lot of sense. Someone had earlier posted about the design of Mastodon which uses boosts instead of Retweet Quote. I think the issues are inherently with design. It is a good first step towards that direction.
sure it can. the higher the effort the better. they should remove retweets too. i cant remember how many people i have unfollowed because they keep retweeting their political nonsense.
(in fact they should remove retweets and keep likes for the vanity crowd, as long as those are not interfering with my timeline whatsoever)
For a long time i thought the idea that my reply, not a quote, just a reply, to a tweet gets posted to my main timeline / follower's timelines...is also a bad idea, but I guess this also was designed for 'engagement' too
Your followers will only see your replies if they also follow the account to which you're replying or if someone they follow retweets the parent or your reply. Otherwise, users will have to visit your profile and slide over to the Tweets & Replies tab.
Completely agree. The day they decided to go with ads there was no coming back. It's a public company now and they have an obligation towards their shareholders. Ads -> grabbing eyeballs -> evoking reactions. It's quite impossible to balance the interests of your customers(advertisers)vis users if one of them is not paying. They are too far along to do that.
Seems like a lot of people only see the rage storm side of twitter. Most of my stream was peaceful. That said I had the intense joy to get some quote-retweet angst, it's at best half-pleasant.
Is the tool, any tool, guilty for its misuse then? It’s always the people, never the tool. It’s you too, if you are unable to make your Twitter the useful environment you want.
You must be part of some sort of culture war on Twitter. My experience is completely different. I don't follow people engaging in these battles and I don't post things that would be an engagement. It really is smooth sailing from there. Or, in the words of Steve Jobs:
"You're holding it wrong."
I use the "like" button for bookmarking interesting things. It would be unfortunate if I had to lose that because people on the "other side" of Twitter can't handle that responsibility.
"You must be part of some sort of culture war on Twitter."
Everything can become a culture war on Twitter. I follow a somewhat abstract modernist composer’s Twitter, which so far has been entirely about music and performance dates, and now it is up in flames because someone has decided to drag this artist into MeToo movement polemics.
It has also been pointed out that a lot of discussion forums for the arts and literature are pretty quiet these days compared to years past, and activity is only boosted when someone posts something politically provocative. We live in an unhealthy society where people are looking for a fight, and that desire might outweigh their interest in talking about anything besides politics.
> Everything can become a culture war on Twitter. I follow a somewhat abstract modernist composer’s Twitter, which so far has been entirely about music and performance dates, and now it is up in flames because someone has decided to drag this artist into MeToo movement polemics.
Then unfollow the guy. Seriously, it's that simple. You have the power to curate your own experience, that's my point.
> It has also been pointed out that a lot of discussion forums for the arts and literature are pretty quiet these days compared to years past, and activity is only boosted when someone posts something politically provocative.
Unfollow
I can't tell you how to cure your favorite subcultures of their bullshit, I'm telling you how to have a pleasant experience on Twitter. If that means your Twitter timeline becomes emptied, you'll have to find new people to follow.
> We live in an unhealthy society where people are looking for a fight, and that desire might outweigh their interest in talking about anything besides politics.
No, that's actually just what your slice of "society" is like. Mine isn't like that, because I curate it not to be like that.
As others already have mentioned, there are actual bookmarks in Twitter, that is not the "like" button (click the share button in the Android app, for example)
Maybe, but that feature is pretty new and it doesn't even show up on the Desktop site. I've never even heard of it until now. I've been using the "like" Button for bookmarks since forever. Those are my bookmarks.
You can access your bookmarks on the desktop by going to http://mobile.twitter.com/i/bookmarks, but it really doesn't make sense to me that they're not integrated into the non-mobile page. I often bookmark things because I want to read them a) later or b) on a bigger screen. Currently, only the first use case is supported by Twitter.
Upvoted - not sure why a perfectly reasonable comment is greyed out. My experience is same as yours - I only follow data scientists and data visualization specialists and my experience is absolutely brilliant. I also discovered some really great technical posts on R using Twitter.
Quote-retweet is used to send followers to harass the person responsible for the awful tweet. RT is choir-preaching (you're a monster if you don't RT that kicking babies is bad), and replies to twitter-celebrities' tweets give everyone their 15 minutes of fame to post the most idiotic meme.
And the only time when someone tries to make a coherent argument, it's a "Tread (1/50)" with a total mess, and every single sentence has buttons for taking it out of context.
They've optimized for engagement, and they're getting a lot of enragement.