> He suggested that the service works best as an “interest-based network,” where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who posted it
Yeah, no thanks. Has anybody ever been happy with Twitter's attempts to force content from non-followed users into the feed? A couple of times a year they'll opt everybody back into whatever crappy experiment they're running ("hey, we'll put some posts to your feed based on likes") and it'll take ages to remember just how to turn it off.
What I really dislike is the spam in the notifications section. If someone likes my tweet, replies to it or retweets it, that's relevant. I don't however want to see a notification for something Tweeter deems interesting under other people you follow liked/retweed this as a notification.
+1000 This completely ruins using Twitter as an official support channel for a business. I want to be notified immediately whenever my company is mentioned, but enabling email/push notifications so that I'm aware of these asap also means constantly opening Twitter just to dismiss whatever unsolicited spam they're trying to put in front of me. It adds up to quite a lot of wasted time and is a downright obnoxious user experience--in the end I had to disable the notifications and our response times suffer for it. At this point I would definitely pay to have these irrelevant notifications removed.
This is an honest question - why on earth should Twitter be an official support channel for a business? If I had a business, I would respond to Twitter support requests with “please see our support website for how to contact us” or “thanks, we are now contacting you.” I don’t know why Twitter users should get better support and it seems odd to me to rely on Twitter to provide or to ask for support.
This is flawed thinking. Surely you're not proposing to implement every support channel your users might want to use? People are generally happy to use designated channels, as long as it's discoverable, easy to use and effective.
People will call you out on Twitter. You likely have a brand account on Twitter already so you'll already get those mentions. Even if you don't have an account people will create a hashtag.
If you want to control your brand perception you don't want the first result when people look for your brand on Twitter to be people tweeting about how terrible you are.
The reasons to do support on Twitter have less to do with what's tech support needs and more with marketing and controlling your brand perception.
You do customer support via social media for the same reason you do PR and marketing on social media: because that’s where your customers are! People spend a lot of time on social media.
Go to your customers if you can. Don’t force them to come to you unless you have to.
I really hate when a company lists "Support Email" address and never replies to it. Dozens of companies did this to me (sent from my gmail). And yet in horrible and unusable twitter or slightly less horrible facebook they reply in hours, or even minutes.
Twitter has been the absolute best way for me to get actual support from Australia Post and Telstra*
Unfortunately, the Telstra CSAs on Twitter aren't actually allowed to do anything useful so they mostly direct me to other, more useless support channels.
Because it's cheaper than having an actual support hotline and easier to ignore than having email.
And in the US especially, companies hate having to support users, which is why they are also pushing for AI support instead of actually having a human there.
Think about it, when is the last time you had an issue with some Bay Area Saas company and could call them on the phone to get support, like you'd do with a bank?
To put it bluntly -- the prevailing mindset is that customer support is a cost-centre. It's hard to reliably measure customer satisfaction, so its value is misunderstood.
And if you're the only game in town with your own little walled garden, and everyone in your industry has entirely automated (read: low opex) support, where's the incentive to do better?
Which is partly because the business model is selling data to large companies and data brokers, not providing a service to the "customers" (users). And then you get places like Facebook that are themselves data brokers, and sell access to the data so they can claim they aren't Acxiom.
As a consumer, if a company with a Twitter presence responds that way I'll ignore them. Because 9 times out of 10 when I tweet at a brand it's either because I'm calling them out for actively harmful stuff (like using plaintext passwords) or prodding them about issues that likely affect more people than just me.
If I have a specific support request about my personal account, I'll go through the usual channels. But if it's on twitter, it's probably there because the extra visibility and public accountability is intentional.
That's a funny one. I worked at a place where the support team that worked for the social network accounts of the company had better tools and higher priority when doing their jobs than the phone/site support team, so effectively customers asking for support on Twitter or Facebook got better and faster support than customers asking for support on the phone or the site. I assume that's because companies are terrified of bad publicity on social networks.
Exactly. Social networks moved support from private, hidden systems to a public channel. This benefitted the user, since the brand has more to lose from interactions that are negative, non-responsive, re-directive, etc.
why on earth should Twitter be an official support channel for a business?
Note that the poster said "an official support channel" rather than "the official support channel". Adding more ways for customers to contact support is usually a good thing. There was no mention of taking away other channels that you might prefer.
Right--most of our support is done via email, but we also use Github issues, chat via our website, and Twitter. Which one gets used depends on the customer and what the issue is. I try to make sure that we respond as soon as possible regardless of the channel, but Twitter usually ends up being slower (unfortunately) because of the notification issues.
Might be an unpopular opinion, but I actually really like this feature. I'm usually not able to get to everything, so it's great to know when something important or interesting got tweeted and I know to check it out.
That notification was actually what slowly made me an active Twitter user, because they kept surfacing me interesting content and giving me a reason to come back and it became a gateway for me to discover other great content on Twitter
I don't use Twitter, except to look at tweets that people on HN or whatever link to. And the main reason that I don't is that the idea of "following" just doesn't work for me. I tried it. But even people who sometimes post stuff that interests me mostly post stuff that just gets in my way.
I like HN. But I never look at particular users' posts. I just look at the front page, or sometimes at the comments list, so see what people are talking about.
That's kind of the point though - I had no idea this feature existed until they started pushing it to me. I think it's too much to expect users to opt-in to things. How would I have known to opt-in to this? Yet I am now much happier because they improved the UX for me.
I think opt-out makes sense though, for users who don't a feature.
If you put it on a single, easily recognizable, easily accessible page (all new features, etc.), then many users will find it. You can even give a notification when a new feature is added (as long as kept to a reasonable amount).
Features that will go viral are worth adding for all, features that did not can be kept there.
You overestimate what people will understand from a technical description in a configuration option. Even if they were experimentally inclined, which most people are not, they probably wouldn't even notice the effect, particularly if not a new user. Twitter is a black box for most users.
Twitter very likely did market research on its effectiveness for the target market they were trying to please. Probably that's just not you.
But what if most people like it? I have to say I think it makes a lot of sense. If a high number of people I follow like something, you might want to show it to me too.
Agreed. I wish that they would just mix those into the primary feed. I keep using the "See less often" option, but the "Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your experience better." message that I get in response almost feels like a taunt at this point.
What really clogs up my notifications is when other people “like” a post I’m mentioned in. You get a few ‘runaway’ threads that pull on a few dozen people and every like becomes its own notification. A dozen people each liking a dozen tweets on the thread, the notification timeline becomes absolutely useless.
Let me mute all likes (potentially keeping likes only for my own tweets).
I'm always surprised by these threads expressing frustration at the timelines being re-arranged - then I remember I use a 3rd party client (Tweetbot) and that's why my timeline is not molested and spam-filled.
If they ever fully disable 3rd party clients that will be the day I cancel my account. I thought forced ads as you started a DVD were obnoxious...
They're certainly going that way. Group DMs don't work with the API (in that there's not even a "hey log onto the website your client doesn't support this" notification). A ton of features have been removed from or gimped in the API, to the point where many of the third-party devs have given up.
"Fully disable" - probably not. But they'll certainly make it nearly impossible to produce something "like the Twitter app but better".
Agreed. They have a useless option "see less of this", which has absolutely no effect.
My approach is now to unfollow any user when Twitter forces a notification from them. Maybe someone with some brains at Twitter will notice the clear pattern and fix their idiotic notifications.
I don't quite get why you can't disable these notifications at all. I really don't want to see the things I missed or it finds interesting. And they're purposefully pushing you to look at it to dismiss those notifications.
Algorithmic feeds are, in all cases, Satan's handiwork. What I want is to see posts from the individuals I have selected, interleaved in chronological order, with no tampering.
I follow a few hundred people with very varied interests, and I don't log in every few minutes. For non-addicted people, the algo is pretty nice. I want to see a sampling of interesting stuff I "missed" over the last day or two. If I want to go look at a particular person's chronological feed, I can do that.
You can change it if you don't like it, click the sparkle button to do so, but don't think nobody likes it.
Try doing that, and find out how many times Twitter helpfully resets you to go back 'home' - a home which they feel they own and control. I press that button about once a week to go back to a chronological feed.
I don't log in every few minutes - every few hours perhaps on a good day, but have no interest in an algorithmic feed - a scrolling chronological feed is just fine.
There are very good reasons they forced us all onto this algorithm, and they are not in your interest - it means they can insert content whenever they like, and make posters pay for it. You may be happy with it now, but I doubt you would be long term when it becomes pay to play.
Once a week? Lucky you, I have to set it to "Latest Tweets" almost every time I open the app. It even reminds me to set my "Content Preferences" every time I do it, just to ignore them over and over again. Helpful.
Have you ever tried Twitter lists? I find that having separate streams for "irl friends", "professional network", "people I might want to hire", etc. makes it easy to dip in, get a sense of what's up with that particular set of people/accounts, and then go about my day.
I agree. As soon as there is any tampering of what information is being displayed, users have a difficult time understanding why they are seeing it and ultimately find it less enjoyable to use.
Research keeps showing that for users to "trust" software then they need to have an understanding of why something is being presented to them. It is one of the biggest barriers with recommendation systems.
If that maximized user engagement, then that is the UI they would present. The fact that they don't do that should tell you that their tests have shown algorithmic feeds are more engaging for users.
"User engagement" is not a single, well-defined, easily measurable thing.
For one thing, it's easy for A/B tests to show something that looks good in the short term, but has longer-term negative effects. If your goal is to iterate quickly and stop your test as soon as you think it shows a positive result, you'll never see that.
But more to the point, there's no guarantee that the "user engagement" metrics Twitter cares about are actually a proxy for what users really want. If it takes me more time and more clicks to find the information I want -- enough to be annoying, but not quite enough to drive me away from the site -- that probably gets counted as "engagement".
I think something like this circular logic is actually useful, and in some sense true. It might better phrased as "companies which usually make bad financial decisions die, so the decisions of a company which hasn't died are probably financially beneficial." Further qualifiers could be added to account for longevity of a company (we might put more faith in a company which has spent longer not dying), earning reports, and the fact that a good decision isn't necessarily beneficial (just probabilistically so given available knowledge), but the basic reasoning seems valid.
You could apply this reasoning to literally anything, because every organisation / nation state / what have you has at some point and in some form considered the consequences of their actions. History shows that internal evaluation is an imperfect science. I suspect you know this and only reserve this extremely circular reasoning for cases which you already agree with. It would be easier to admit you've already formed an opinion and don't care to change it under any circumstance, rather than weakly appeal to Twitter's own authority to justify their actions.
It is not just an appeal to Twitter’s authority. It’s an informed opinion based off working in a similar field and conversing with others in this field. So unless you can come up with some concrete data supporting your points, instead of just attacking mine, you are unlikely to change my opinion.
Wikipedia's costs are extremely small relative the service usage. They don't have a lot of active development (relatively), and they don't need a ton of expensive infrastructure (relatively). Twitter's annual operating costs are in the $2+ billions. Wikipedia's are in the ~$60 millions. Not to say a non-profit twitter couldn't exist - this just feels like an unfair comparison. Just because two services are popular tech services doesn't mean they are apples to apples to operate.
We have an example of a service similar to twitter that's effectively free to run due to it's distributed nature in Mastodon/ActivityPub. Being financially sustainable without having to resort to dark patterns could just be an engineering question.
Dorsey has done three recent podcasts (two on JRE, one on Tales From the Crypto) where he states that he thinks there will be a decentralised blockchain based Twitter competitor in the future. I've taken that as a given for years, but to hear the CEO spell it out in public is pretty crazy. He wasn't even cornered into it, but rather brought the topic up himself.
I read that as Dorsey pandering to the audience. There is no room for a blockchain-based twitter competitor, because there is no sensible application of blockchain to the domain.
In 2019 you're more or less correct, but only due to cost and time constraints. Short-form public messaging on the blockchain already exists[0], it's just prohibitively expensive and slow. Imagine a blockchain with cheap, fast transactions. This should be harder to censor than other distributed solutions like a federated network or a similar scheme hosted on IPFS since you're taking the whole chain with you in the event of censorship, whereas the other schemes allow just the hosts of particular data to be targeted. Even before the economics work for full-on blockchain twitter, we might see a cheaper blockchain/IPFS hybrid where at least some metadata is censorship resistant. Unless the government wins the war on information, I'm reasonably convinced that a better blockchain twitter is coming.
I'm sure a gigantic portion of Twitter's operating costs are the once necessary to monetize their users. I have a feeling the product that is for the users would be much closer to Wikipedia-level costs.
If the feed shows me a pseudo-random sample of recent tweets, and each time I refresh I get a slightly different view, of course I'm going to keep refreshing to see if there's anything new or anything that I haven't been shown yet. But most of the time, I just keep seeing the same thing over and over. Imagine if your email client did this.
It's frustrating that this is the general trend today. I was using the Reddit app the other day and pruning my list of subreddits to reduce distraction when I'm in the app. Of course the app will still insert suggested subreddits in my feed. And then there are the streaming services that recommend (and auto-play) shows and movies to you.
Usually I just want to just use a service to consume specific things and then move onto some other activity, but each one is aware of the attention economy and trying to keep me in for as long as possible.
And the option to choose the algorithmic filtering based on my needs, in the rare cases that the number of individuals or volume of their tweets may be too large to take in chronologically.
>> In his view, that means rethinking how Twitter incentivizes user behavior. He suggested that the service works best as an “interest-based network,” where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who posted it — rather than a network where everyone feels like they need to follow a bunch of other accounts, and then grow their follower numbers in turn.
What he is describing sounds a lot closer to reddit than it does to Twitter today. I am not usually a Twitter user, and I’ve been giving it another go. The same basic design flaw is still present though: when I follow people, I’m following people, and I might be following an individual for a particular topic they are typically insightful on, but I’m also getting their sports and politics at the same time.
Contrast with reddit where the communities are topic centric and moderated according to their own rules, and /r/all can be safely disregarded if you’re just browsing.
That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I don’t think Jack Dorsey is planning to ape reddit’s design anytime soon, but I think a move in the direction to interest—based networks would be an improvement on their current design and think we should see what it this actually entails before we cast judgement.
That said, as largely a Twitter-outsider, I respect if you disagree. Personally, I think this move would make the service more valuable to someone like me, but I could also see why such changes wouldn’t be for long time users who are used to the way things are.
I configured twitter to keep tweets in chronological order and not to filter anything, so I only see tweets from accounts I follow, and I see all their tweets, and see them in chron. order.
What he wants to do is copy reddit. I can't see what they could add to reddit, but they'd completely lose what twitter is good at (following people).
That's ridiculous. Is topic vs author the only metric we use to categorize social media? What about thread flatness, delegation of curation/censorship and styling, quantitative and qualitative distinctions about how feeds are tailored to users, etc.? I can think of many distinctions between the two despite rarely using either.
Sure, but that will no longer be twitter, it'll be a reddit competitor. He should then also state what will make it better than reddit, from what he's public ally saying so far it just sounds like he's never heard of reddit and is going to invent it.
It's already a reddit competitor to some extent. I agree that it will be more of a reddit competitor, but it's already on the continuum. These things are mushy.
I use twitter specifically because it's focused on people and not interests. I love learning more about the history of communist mapping because somebody who I followed after meeting them at a conference tweeted about it.
> I might be following an individual for a particular topic they are typically insightful on, but I’m also getting their sports and politics at the same time.
I've had this happen, typically with interjections of sport commentary, and I will immediately unfollow them. None of the unfollows has been a great loss. People who are truly insightful have enough self-awareness not to self-indulge like this.
Anyone who's in a position to use Tweetdeck instead of Twitter's web UI will find a free, Twitter-maintained, product with no annoying algorithms and no advertising.
It's the version of Twitter targeted at newsrooms, etc.
I assume a lot of people already know and have reasons why they don't... but likely not everyone here has tried it so it may be worth repeating.
I had heard of Tweetdeck, but I assumed that it was a third-party client which provided a better experience and was therefore at odds with Twitter's interests. You're telling me that, not only is Twitter okay with it, but that they built it?
I'm doubtful of whatever sort of nonsense philosophical rationalization Dorsey comes up regarding how he thinks users should use, and should want to use the service. It's likely this:
> And while Dorsey said he’s less interested in maximizing time spent on Twitter and more in maximizing “what people take away from it and what they want to learn from it,” Anderson suggested that Twitter may struggle with that goal since it’s a public company, with a business model based on advertising.
I'm fairly certain that Anderson's expectation here is probably true, and that Dorsey is at best disconnected from the reality of how Twitter's business operates if he's not being outright disingenuous. The number of ads shown increases with the amount of time spent using the service, and assuming there is some business unit within Twitter tasked with increasing revenue, that business unit will likely attempt to increase time spent using the service. Inserting this extra garbage and preventing users from disabling it serves that purpose because it makes it more difficult to tell when you've reached posts you've already read and forces you to scroll longer to reach them.
I recently created a Twitter account, mostly as an experiment. I just followed some programmers, stuck to programming content. Immediately and every day after, I was constantly being displayed Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Justin Trudeau, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, etc. Not a single politician or voice not on the left. Considering how powerful Twitter has become, this is troubling. I know this is just one anecdote, wondering what the rest of HN sees...
I used to be annoyed about how a lot of the programmers I followed on Twitter would tweet about politics and feminism.
Then I talked to some people who were on the receiving end of the kind of programmers that don't care about those things, groan when they hear words like "feminism", "intersectionality" or "diversity" and instead believe in "meritocracy" and "rationality".
Now I'm one of those programmers who tweet about politics and feminism.
Sometimes you need to be confronted with the pain you've been complicit to in order to figure out why the people around you all seem to disagree with you and make such a fuss about stuff you don't care about.
This is what you see even if you follow nothing or if you only follow stuff clearly associated with the right.
When you follow stuff associated with the right, it often gets unfollowed. This was very noticeable with the movie Unplanned. Basically you couldn't follow it.
If you start off a new account by following only politicians on the right, you are highly likely to get your account banned.
I think video game players are probably actually left-leaning on average. GamerGate seems to have created massive misunderstandings on all sides of the issues. (And no, I'm not defending it or denying things that occurred.)
Game players yes. Prominent gaming channels are a mixed bag though. "Bro culture" is very much a thing and casual homophobia and racism is still very widespread.
I'd say "liberal" is a more accurate descriptor than "left-leaning". I'd call PewDiePie liberal but not a leftist by any stretch of the imagination, for example.
Programmers are usually very vocal leftists. I've always assumed that those who don't speak openly about politics don't care or are right wingers, but who knows.
Right-wingers are plenty vocal. It's just that Twitter is not necessarily what they use to vocalize their views, for reasons that are probably obvious.
As far as I can tell the real motivation for so many feed based services doing this is just that if you stick enough irrelevant non ad shit in users feeds the ads will blend in better. None of these companies will ever publicly admit that that's the intention though.
This would suit me, actually. I use twitter almost exclusively to follow motor racing journalists. However, because of this, I have to dig through the same journalist's opinions on Brexit, FIFA, or Game of Thrones. It would suit me much better to be able to follow 'motorsport' as a topic instead of specific people.
I think it's impossible to re-think Twitter and satisfy everyone. I completely switched who I follow (using Lists) twice already based on my interest changes in technology. First Rails, then iOS, now "crypto". I was early enough in the first two communities to know who the movers and shakers were. However it took me a while to find who is worth following in "Crypto Twitter". So I personally welcome any attempts to show me relevant content from folks I don't follow yet in the field.
Even IF it was relevant sometimes/mosttimes/alltimes... Why would you ever allow someone else to choose what you see?
Do you not realize the massive avenue for abuse? How about come election time and the impossible scenario where your "curators" don't agree with your opinions?
Google, Twitter, YouTube and Reddit are already creating/supporting bubbles. How would you know if you are in one?
Although I seem to be in the minority, yeah, I've been pretty happy with the recommendations they give me recently.
It didn't begin like this, but I'd say it's there now. But I use Twitter not as a social tool, but as a tool to follow things and artists I'm interested in.
For example, I follow lots of lowpoly, pixelart and indy-dev accounts. With some frequency I get in my feed someone that is followed by those accounts, or something one of those accounts liked. It tends to be something also related to that community (pixelart artists follow other pixelart artists, etc) so I like the post. Sometimes I check the account, see their feed, and end up following it. I'm not sure if that's how most others use twitter, but that's how I use it mostly, and it's worked out pretty well.
During the Joe Rogan podcast, he mentioned that what they are trying to attempt to give people the "other side" of the story rather than promoting creation of echo chambers.
I think Farage is a moron and I couldn't disagree with him more, but what a disappointingly closed-minded view you have. That view is one of the worst problems of Twitter, in my opinion.
I think Dorsey is trying to blow smoke up our ass on the other issues, because their core business is advertising no matter what he says, but I actually believe him on this and think it's one of the few really good things he's sincerely trying to do (though I doubt he'll succeed, unfortunately). Echo chambers are poison to good discourse, democracy, philosophy, humanism, and humanity in general. I strongly believe Brexit is monumentally and egregiously terrible, a result of some of our worst and most base instincts in many cases, but if you think Brexit backers don't deserve a fair seat at the discourse table, don't be surprised when that accomplishes the polar opposite of your desired goals.
Knowing what "Farage" is does not mean I wont debate properly with other political views.
Farage is not a moron he is dangerous nationalist stirring up violence for personal gain. Just as the "crank" end of the labour party has its own dangerous individuals.
"Here we have a climatologist, and for balance, someone who believes the Earth is a computer simulation, and another who is certain it's flat and was created by the Illuminati who are alien lizards."
> He suggested that the service works best as an “interest-based network,” where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who posted it
Not to mention Jack/Twitter's co-founder Evan Williams has a company called Medium that literally does just that.
_Maybe_ if they removed all their weird gating and order logic and presented tweets as a list of time ordered events that match the hashtag you're searching for (including user sources) and have another tab for tweets people you're following have retweeted and for tweets in your subject that were popular then they'd fix it...
Basically if they actually let users see the data they are holding onto.
Dorsey to me has it half right. Twitter should just follow with what we typically do in real life: "follow" people, but masked by interests we trust those people about. I want to read about politics from the political analysts I follow, but don't care about their cooking adventures on the weekend. I want to read about tech from the software folks I follow, but don't want to hear about their politics. I sure as heck don't want to see "liked" tweets by people I follow in areas outside of the interests of theirs I care about.
Beyond that, I'm generally disappointed that we never hear about features that try to get users to act better, by their own volition, vs reactively shutting them down. Social media tools should help us understand the potential impact of our words and actions before hitting "Send". Only if you assume people are incapable of improvement, or that people are not fundamentally good, would it be fair to ignore the potential for sites like Twitter to design things so users will act better on their own vs having to be slapped down when they do something terrible.
> I want to read about politics from the political analysts I follow, but don't care about their cooking adventures on the weekend. I want to read about tech from the software folks I follow, but don't want to hear about their politics.
This is the biggest reason I end up unfollowing people.
Say I follow a person because they post interesting technical articles. Over time (as their follower count increases, usually...) they drift toward making 80% political posts and only 20% technical. I'd still like to see their technical posts w/o having to sift through all the political posts. Usually I just end up unfollowing, depending on how bad it gets, but I wish I could still see and participate in their topics I care about.
This is true even in real-life relationships. There are some people you just don't discuss certain topics with.
I don't discuss politics or medicine with my in-laws. I don't discuss religion anymore with my cousin. Or history with my grandfather. I avoid talking about money with my brother. Why? Because over time I've realized there's nothing to be gained from participating in a conversation with them on that particular topic.
I found the same thing happening to me all the time. I follow software devs, writers, etc. because I am interested in what they do not whatever politics they go on about like everyone else. What I found helped a lot was twitter's mute words functionality, so I just muted words like Trump etc. and it cleaned up my feed a LOT. Much more enjoyable experience now.
> Beyond that, I'm generally disappointed that we never hear about features that try to get users to act better, by their own volition, vs reactively shutting them down.
I think the problem with this approach is that it assumes that typical users like you and me, not bots or people with a particular agenda or goal (i.e. brigading) are the primary sources of abuse.
Unfortunately I think it's much more likely to be the latter section of highly motivated users or bots that are responsible for a disproportion volume of abuse, and there's little incentive Twitter can create to motivate them otherwise
I have found that with social media in general it has never mapped to my interactions in person. I have friends I talk politics with, friends I talk sports with, friends I talk music, and etc. Sometimes they overlap, but almost never in totality. Social media gives me people in total, because I don't think people have really learned how to curate themselves, or really understand how the signal broadcasts. Everyone is learning by trial and error, and I don't think we are learning the right things yet.
> I want to read about politics from the political analysts I follow, but don't care about their cooking adventures on the weekend. I want to read about tech from the software folks I follow, but don't want to hear about their politics. I sure as heck don't want to see "liked" tweets by people I follow in areas outside of the interests of theirs I care about.
> Beyond that, I'm generally disappointed that we never hear about features that try to get users to act better, by their own volition
Now that's a great idea. Let me create multiple outgoing feeds. Lists become 10x cooler when "C programming" only contains programming tweets
I just can't get value out of Twitter, for this very reason. I know you can use any social network for any purpose, but for me, Facebook has always been about following friends and family, and I enjoy the content. Twitter has always been pushed as a way to be "in the know", but no matter how hard I try to 'curate' my feed, I find that following people who I don't personally know means that most of the tweets I see are worse than meaningless, they have negative value. So my entire feed ends up being either ads, or content I don't want to hear about from the people I follow for other reasons.
> I don’t think I would create ‘likes’ in the first place.
_You didn't_. It was called "Favorites", and you later renamed it to "likes".
Jack can introspect as much as he wants, but it doesn't change the fact that they keep making the platform _worse_, not better.
Another indication is that the official web/client is a cesspool of unrelated content I don't want to see, and somehow they now think they need to double down on that effort - oh, sorry, "make it a interest-based network" - instead of take a look at whether that's users want.
Twitter is a prime example of A/B testing gone wrong.
Twitter is a great example of fairly talentless people with large egos somehow finding success, and mistakenly thinking it is due to their merits. If Dorsey was going to make a good social network, it would have happened 5-8 years ago. It’s a lot like Etsy - someone had drive, funding and concepts to make a project at the right time. However, they were not actually good at running a business and had no idea what the hell they were doing socially or societally.
I get your point, but seriously, go read Nick Bilton's book about the early history or Twitter. From the time of Odeo to Jack coming back, none of the people in charge of this company or the board had a consistent idea of what they were building, an appropriate roadmap to get there, or how to monetize effectively relative to other social networks. This happened for years.
Square is amazing, but a B2B, modern Point-of-Sales for SMBs is an entirely different beast than a free, B2C social network. Jack can be great at one, and terrible at the other, at the same time. These are not related.
I'm not really sure what you're trying to argue here. The simple fact is the guy created two deca-corn companies. That basically completely invalidates any ex-post arguments by some author about the quality of his management. What I mean by that is that if a thing succeeds spectacularly, maybe you should question your premises before questioning its methodology. The process that appears to you to be disorganized and aimless produced Twitter. It obviously did something right.
I don't know what I'm talking about, but judging from the fact that Ev Williams founded or co-founded Blogger, Twitter, and Medium, perhaps he was the real visionary behind the idea. That's three different "write stuff online and share it" startups. He clearly understands social media and blogging and micro-blogging. Maybe Jack is more of the 'biz guy'?
My take on the founding of twitter is that you had a bunch of people and no clear leadership, and that different people had different opinions of what twitter should be. That ambiguity has undermined the platform from day one, no focus, no clear mission, no clear plan on how to spend their money.
It's a contributor to funding sure, but that's not what I asked.
The issue is, would a random person off the street be able to take VC seed money and turn it into a billion dollar business? The answer is obviously no. And they definitely wouldn't be able to do it twice.
A random person of the street? No. Somebody who did it once already and has all the experience and contacts? Far more likely. I would say the first time is a lot harder.
But that’s not the point... apparently you’re saying he deserves his success by merit. My opinion is that there are plenty of people of equal merits who didn’t start one of the top 3 social networks. I would attribute much of the success of Twitter and Facebook to chance.
> But that’s not the point... apparently you’re saying he deserves his success by merit. My opinion is that there are plenty of people of equal merits who didn’t start one of the top 3 social networks. I would attribute much of the success of Twitter and Facebook to chance.
How do you know? What evidence do you have of these imaginary other's merit?
It's not what I said but it's fairly obvious that money is like steroids. You can't turn a donkey into a race horse but any semi-competent person can be successful with enough cash injection and network to get good advice.
> You can't turn a donkey into a race horse but any semi-competent person can be successful with enough cash injection and network to get good advice.
You've obviously never actually started a company. Talk to me when you have. People with money flame out every day. A huge percentage of companies that do receive VC funding fail. Way, way more than half. An infinitesimal fraction of companies VCs invest in go on to be worth more than a billion dollars. An even smaller fraction of those go on to be worth more than 10 billion dollars. Jack Dorsey created two of them. There are only a handful of people on earth who have done that. And when I say a handful, I mean like you can literally count them on your hands.
Doesn't this run counter to even conventional wisdom about VC? 25-30% of all VC-backed startups liquidate all assets, and 75% return only the original investment.
That is a consequence of two things. 1) the all or nothing approach to business that VC backed startups take and 2) the lack of quality network for many founders. It's why I specifically mentioned network for good advice. If you look at the patterns emerging from silicon valley with the PayPal mafia and even YC itself there is a clear advantage to be had from A) access to immense amounts of cash coupled with B) a network of people who have been there and done that. I find it very hard to believe that white upper middle class males are remarkable for their genius intellect as successful founder profiles would have you believe if looked at in isolation. From a purely critical perspective there is a wide range of intellect levels on display amongst unicorn founders.
So, again, to be clear, you believe that a person with access to:
A) A "network", i.e. is friends with talented people
And has access to:
B) "Immense amounts of cash". How much cash? 1 million? 10? 100?
Can easily earn a 10x-100x return on that money? You think turning 10 million into 100 million is easy? Do you know how many people are trying to do that? Do you have any idea how difficult that is even with access to a network and cash?
Money is extremely cheap. The biggest problem in silicon valley right now isn't access to capital - it's that there's too much capital chasing too few good ideas. VCs are desperate for something worth investing in, precisely because of how hard it is to create a good company.
Erm...seriously? You believe that the hardest part of starting a billion dollar company is getting...funding? You think billion dollar companies primarily don't exist because nobody is funding them? It's hard for me to believe that you actually think that.
I think it is more a case of being everything to everyone, and one size fits all just plain sux.
IMHO there is no Twitter problem, but there are specific Twitter niche problems. Twitter is trying to solve the problems of people who want to follow a sport with those who want to lead a culture war in the same way and with the same perspectives and expected outcomes. They are not just very different problem spaces, but fundamentally different cultures, with different expectations and rules, and making either group live with a compromise between their cultures leaves everyone unhappy.
Reddit sidesteps this to a degree, with subreddits, by everything being less personal, and with moderation of sub reddits. Twitter, being account based rather than topic based, can't manage that. Twitter is just Twitter - a singular entity used in non-singular ways and criticised as a singular entity from very specific and singular perspectives.
How do you fix that? No idea. My hope is that Machine learning can give us better filtering, because the problem with Twitter is that people are not brands, so if I follow a basketball coach, and he has a bugbear about an issue that annoys me, I either lose all of his tweets, or put up with off topic rants.
But then, thinking about it, I'm not sure if that is a bug or Twitter's key feature. Maybe Twitter only works because the poor filtering forces people to see what they don't want to, and that drives usage and, in a perverse way, a desire to use twitter. That's a dark timeline.
Maybe you hate the idea of it becoming an interest-based network, and maybe I hate it, and maybe everybody on this site hates it, but we are a very very small speck of a subset of Twitter's active userbase.
Abuse and misinformation are certainly the big issues but even more bigger and rather meta-issue is the strong hub-and-spoke model that Twitter promotes. Here's an example: You could tweet some of the most informative and useful tweets relevant to, say, robotics enthusiasts for day after day and years after year, and you might still end up with absymal engagement in terms of likes, retweets and followers. Meanwhile, folks who happened to become celebrity by pure random exposure can tweet how they sneezed that morning and they might end up with dozens of likes on their sneeze tweet. The bottom line is that Twitter's ranking algorithms are strongly dependent on existing social engagement creating virtuous cycle of virality of irrelevant content as well as chicken-and-egg problem for not popular people. The end result is that Twitter is mostly a medium for information broadcast, as opposed to information exchange. This has fundamentally limited the participation as well as usefulness of Twitter and is the one thing they should strive to change.
That's not an issue of Twitter, but of human nature. I don't think technology can do anything about it. That is just wishful thinking about "future people" who spend their time learning and improving their skills 24/7, instead of slacking and having fun. Unrealistic - presumably people simply need time outs.
You could argue that Twitter actually does well with that problem: after all, if you follow a robotics enthusiast, you WILL see some tweets about robotics among all the sneezing.
It's most definitely issue of how Twitter ranks and promotes the content. To make content more visible, you must be popular in first place. To be popular, you must have your content more visible. It's a virtuous cycle 99.9% users cannot possibly break without winning random virality lotteries. I agree Pareto's law and exponential distribution applies in all social networks but for Twitter this is not only skewed by at least an order of magnitude but its current design and algorithms actively promotes this phenomenon instead of resisting it.
A thought experiment: Imagine Twitter was the only way to distribute information. How would that world look like? Everyone who doesn't have followers would almost have no chance of having followers and therefore their content will keep disappearing in Twitter blackhole regardless of how useful it might have been (given how bad their search is). Twitter algorithms takes rich-gets-richer phenomenon to whole new level. At times, it feels their algorithms wants to re-establish ancient model of nobility vs plebs. The whole notion of "follower" has negative connotations with implied power-play top-down relationship. I have seen people with mid-range follower count not following others even when they find them interesting because they don't want to ruin their followers/followee ratio. The notion of follower as opposed to friend or contact firmly puts in place one-way power structure, the information broadcast instead of information exchange model. Many folks have resorted to always following back any followers in protest of this model while many others resist following anyone who they don't consider their peers in power structure created by Twitter Universe.
A minimal fix Twitter can do is to identify good tweets from followers and occasionally show it to followees to at least have a shot at 2-way relationships. The current scheme of "likes" doesn't cut it because first one wins and everyone else gets buried deep. When people ask why Twitter is not so successful with larger population, not so much growing and still relatively quite small (after subtracting bots), I often get surprised they don't see above as the most fundamental issues with their model of social relationships itself.
Granted, it can be an issue of Twitter ranking content. After all, they could just decide to not ever show any robotics content at all, and only show celebrity sneezes.
What I mean by human nature is that humans will always follow celebrity sneezes, and seek to slack off.
I don't think Twitter could invent a ranking that would give the robotics enthusiast a following of 10 million people and weed out the celebrity person. They could do that - but people would stop using the service and switch over to Instagram.
One major issue, once social networks introduce ranking, is the question who they rank for. If the algorithm tries to maximize engagement, it will happily promote the celebrity sneezes. Of course algorithms could optimize for other things (personal development or whatever), limited by people actually keeping to use the service.
In the early days afaik Twitter had no ranking and filtering at all.
There are plenty of things that technology can do about this. For the nuclear option, complete anonymity would resolve this problem instantaneously. Comments would only be driven by the merit of themselves rather than by the merit of who's saying them. There is an obvious argument against this in that you'd ostensibly much prefer to hear from a nuclear physicist than an english major on topics of nuclear physics, and without the indicator of whose speaking this knowledge of expertise is removed. But on the other hand, I think this argument is very weak since we're already discussing the issue that, in practice, most people don't listen to the nuclear physicist - they listen to the english major.
Completely agreed, but that's also the point I was making. The issues with sites such as Twitter are fully self inflicted. The network is simply not designed for the spread or promotion of meaningful information. It's designed to attract followers through the promotion of celebrity/business accounts, and maintain their presence through maximizing "engagement" regardless of the direct consequences of prioritizing "engagement." And the celebrity/business accounts are attracted through the ease of being able to promote their business/persona/agenda, regardless of the value of any of these things. It's like running a casino and then suddenly having a fit conscientiousness about it driving poor economic decisions. It's your entire business model!
Excuse my outburst, but I'm wondering when these social network algorithms are going to realize: I don't follow "interests", I follow PEOPLE.
If you want to show users random news and gossip, then make a fucking news website already.
It's like if you build a chatroom, except instead of simply showing things that people in the current room are saying as they say it, it mostly pulls in vaguely similar stuff that people in other rooms are saying, and then sorts all messages in order of whoever is the most popular or says the most relevant keywords.
By making it more of an interest-based network, they further increase the interest-based siloing of users, making interest-based advertising more effective and more expensive. Like David Auerbach wrote about in Bitwise, the modern technology economy has now become about labeling users. The more labels you can apply, the more ads you can sell.
Having said that, I do agree with another comment I saw here in that, if I am following someone in the software architecture space, I care 0% about their political tweets, and if I follow someone in the Formula 1/motorsports space, I really don't need to see their thoughts on golf.
Facebook worked initially because you were 'following' people you knew in real life, but having users siloed into very small groups according to real-life personal connections makes it hard to sell targeted ads. Hence all the expansions we've seen there (not to mention, of course, the tracking they do extra-facebook). Twitter meanwhile has always been in sort of a weird spot. You end up "following" people you have zero real-world connection to, based solely on their knowledge on a certain topic. But you end up also having to wade through everything they post -- what they eat, their bad memes, their product endorsements, whatever.
It works great for celebrity fetishism, okay for news and reporters (who tend to mostly stay out of non-job-related posts on official accounts), and fair to poor for everything else in my opinion. It's definitely the social network whose appeal I understand least. It just feels like a warehouse of people all talking very loudly at each other about random topics.
> Having said that, I do agree with another comment I saw here in that, if I am following someone in the software architecture space, I care 0% about their political tweets, and if I follow someone in the Formula 1/motorsports space, I really don't need to see their thoughts on golf.
Absolutely, we need tags, and the ability to make them opt-in or opt-out for followers. So I can file ^food as an opt-in, and people who don't care about that can ignore them and just get the ^programming ones. Right now, followers and friends are all lumped together and so while friends follow you for life updates, followers generally only care about what you can do for them, eg your work. It's draining to try and manage multiple accounts. Some followers may find the side stuff cool, too.
I don't understand why Twitter hasn't implemented some kind of reputation gradient that would allow users to filter by levels.
Yes, I realize they are tricky to implement and subject to abuse but imagine you got points for using your real name, real photo, demerits for insults etc, then users could filter out hordes of trolls and gutter nonsense and instead focus on the meaningful conversations that do actually occur there -- the verified checkmark is a proto-version of this.
Instead they rely solely on blacklisting, which is a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. Even HN has a more sophisticated system, where users can be shadow banned or have their comments appear lower than normal.
Not sure how useful this macro-scale philosophizing by Dorsey on Twitter itself is for delivering new, useful features to users. Serious question: has Twitter released any new, major features in the last 2-3 years?
HN has such low volume that it can be centrally curated by a few people who enforce policies like "no flame bait -- and I'll know it when I see it." Or, for example, when someone writes a quick attack on HN, they are encouraged to flesh out their point with substance which is something that Twitter fundamentally discourages.
It's hard for me to see any way forward for Twitter. By design, it amplifies the worst characteristics of humans from tribalism to outrage fetishism.
For instance, even if you configured Twitter to never see posts from the opposing cultural faction or trolls (usually used as synonyms), the people you follow will retweet/quote them and bring them back into your feed.
Your point about Twitter's scale is fair, but I personally don't think the situation is hopeless, as you seem to suggest.
If you have troll engagers in your feed, unfollow them. But right now I have no way of filtering replies...it's frustrating. No system is perfect but let's at least TRY to improve the status quo.
If Twitter is consistently beta-testing new features to improve the quality of the UX/tweet replies, I personally am not seeing it.
It's like how you can /ignore someone on IRC and phpbb, but nobody actually does. They only threaten it. Hell yes they want to be clued in when you open your mouth so they can bark back! Humans love it.
Look how many people waste their time responding to Donald Trump's tweets with things like "RESIGN!" They could unfollow Trump. But they choose to spend their precious time on earth bickering about Trump because it's pure entertainment.
What also happens though is that we kinda know this. The more astute/introspective people will realize Twitter isn't bringing out the best in us. Sam Harris lamented this a while back and was able to quit Twitter for a couple days before being driven back to the crack.
I find myself doing this on HN too. Ever read a headline like "Javascript sucks", know the arguments you'll find in the HN comments, and click in to respond to one? The whole reason I'm here is to socialize, so I don't think filtering can be very effective. I'm not going to filter out the very things that draw me like the opportunity to call someone out on the internet, which is the same reason why nobody uses the ignore feature on forums.
Nobody would use the block feature on Twitter if it didn't tell the other person you blocked them.
There are some bugs in basic human psychology that I'm not so sure technology is ready to solve. Maybe this is the Great Filter that no civilization can surpass in the Fermi paradox.
The block function makes it inconvenient for trolls to read your tweets and impossible for them to RT them for a pile on. It's a "last resort" before moving to a protected account (which can't be RTd at all)
Personally I don't consider real name or real photo to be much of an asset of any of the circles I was in on Twitter. In fact, in my experience the ones with real name/real photo (or what seemed that way) were generally the least interesting posters. They were never willing to put out their own opinion, especially on controversial topics. In fact, in the kind of groups I was in (let's say political activism), having your real details on there is anything but an asset.
Not having a real name on Twitter isn't even a good heuristic for anything.
In a lot of circles, a Twitter profile with a "real photo" as the profile picture usually means you're looking at a spambot with a profile picture scraped from either Facebook or a dating site.
It's not a good heuristic for unique opinions -- sure (see: LinkedIn, the most horrifyingly boring social network feed). But it is if you want to filter out hate speech, which a lot of people do.
But my point is not real photos/names as the be-all, end-all. How about many heuristics, and let users filter accordingly? All this data available and none of it is used to improve the user experience, at least as far as I can tell.
As I mention in another reply -- I'm not saying this filtering would result in the most interesting feed, but it's frustrating you can't filter your feed at all.
If some people want more interesting opinions, great. If others want more bland but less abuse, also great. Right now you can't filter for anything and most of tweet replies are a giant waste of time.
I'd like that as well. Make the process so anybody can be verified then let me configure my client to only show stuff from verified users.
I'd like to see them try other things too. One of the nice features in G+ was that the owner of a thread (the originator) could delete replies. I think that could work nicely in Twitter too.
> One of the nice features in G+ was that the owner of a thread (the originator) could delete replies. I think that could work nicely in Twitter too.
Interesting; I think adding this feature without changing anything else would severely exacerbate the already intolerable echo-chamber effect. Sure, trolling and abuse would lose visibility, but so would even slightly contrary opinions. Thought bubbles would shrink even further, and the platform would become even less enjoyable. (Context: I'm a light Twitter user, reading ~10 min/day and sending 1-2 tweets/month)
Take Maggie Haberman, NYT reporter. Her Twitter replies are always a cesspool...what if she could lock down her tweets so only a whitelisted group of users (say people she follows) could comment? You'd still (hopefully) get contrary opinions but none of the dreck that dominates her feed now.
I don't know if that's the answer. But I don't see Twitter even trying, just Dorsey waxing philosophical about it.
What I call "Twitter Communities" is my answer to that problem. Invite only groups. The world can read but only group members can post to the group. Otherwise exactly like Twitter currently is. You can create a community and invite people to it and then when you post you either post to a community or global, everything still appears in your feed but you can filter down to just a certain community posts.
I think the features themselves aren't ground breaking on their own, but I'm willing to believe they do a lot of large scale semantic text analysis (eg for abuse prevention) which is innovative at least from an infrastructure standpoint and their size
wouldn't it be incredibly easy for this kind of system to be abused by opposing cliques? erroneous mob reporting is already common enough, giving aggrieved parties the ability to do cumulative damage to someone seems like it would only amplify that behavior.
>Instead they rely solely on blacklisting
twitter has implemented very heavy handed throttling as well in order limit the reach of users deemed unsavory. whether this is a good thing or not is up for debate.
in some sense i wonder if these networks have simply become too generalized to be moderated effectively in a manner that satisfies all of the different facets of the userbase.
Becuase you might not like - or they might not want you to see things that are popular.
How much would you complain if your Twitter feed was filled with Trump tweets? Better yet, how much would they not like that!? - Sorry though it's based on reputation levels and his is up there relative to non-famous users.
> He suggested that the service works best as an “interest-based network,” where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who posted it — rather than a network where everyone feels like they need to follow a bunch of other accounts
This is probably true for the majority of Twitter's users, but this is completely the opposite of what I want. Even with aggressively pruning the list of people I follow, I still feel the need to maintain topical lists with few people on them. (One of them is literally called "interesting" - it's for people who don't post often, but whose tweets I'm very interested in seeing, in chronological order, and don't want to lose in the shuffle and retweets and random shit twitter tries to inject into my stream.)
Networks are trying to move away from long tail content since it is so expensive to moderate. I think in next 10 years expect social networks and video playing websites to become much like network television. Ie there will be a vetted list of large creators, and everyone else will be a consumer. To do that you need to take away peoples ability to control exactly whom they follow / subscribe to.
> Networks are trying to move away from long tail content
This concisely expresses many of my misgivings with the Internet today. Things have been dumbed down and often cater to the lowest common denominator that people share. Evolutionarily speaking, it's chasing after low-hanging fruit (cheap and easy) and then hyper-optimizing for it to the point that it's all that remains. The problem is that it's sterile and dumbed down.
I don't like that we can't customize things or get out of the sandbox anymore now that everything has been siloed. With email and RSS we could construct filters and programmatically access our data. We could change the interface, query, backup, share.
The platform powers that be are dictating how today's internet works. They're taking away our browser tech (Chrome everywhere, increasingly without add-ons). We can't export our data in meaningful formats.
This is the hell future 1990's Microsoft could only dream of.
I understand the economic and legal pressure for this to happen, but how would that make social networks anything other than mass market gatekeepers, like newspapers and TV networks once were?
Wasn't the attraction that you could follow someone who matched your interests, like "antique model steam engine refurbishment", or whatever niche interest an individual might have? If twitter had a vetted list of large creators, they'd be right back in the "all of this network content is lowest-common-denominator dreck" situation that ABC/CBS/NBC were in circa 1985. Which may not be a bad thing for society as a whole (we can have an agreed-upon set of facts again! No alternate facts!), but why did we go through 30 years of media upheavals and the loss of the good things about newspapers and TV (equal time doctrine) to get back there? Was this all just about creating a different set of media moguls?
I think the "antique model steam engine refurbishment" is where we go off the tracks with social media.
If you are single mindedly contented with some obscure niche you have so many wonderful options today because nothing is easier to advertise to than groups with really specific interests that require buying things.
What's lacking is well rounded, pleasant experiences. I'm not a collection of discrete interests and I definitely don't want to become one nor am I interested in meeting one.
There's literally a scifi story about this scenario; a society creates enough "TV networks" to appeal to everyone. (They weren't TV networks, but close enough for this discussion.)
Except they made a mistake, and one person slipped through the net, and was completely miserable and driven insane by this.
To answer your actual question, I bet most social networks would be perfectly fine with just being mass market gatekeepers. It's expensive to have 100,000 newspapers and TV networks to appear customized enough for everyone watching; but it's cheap to have 100,000 versions of Facebook's wall, or Reddit's front page.
Why can’t a network have self moderation at a global and local level? Reddit does this to an extent, with each community having its own separate moderation and culture, and the front page which is curated from a list of communities. The trick is have a moderation bottleneck, the curation, between the local and global stages.
Because as a CEO you dont want to wake up every day to headlines that you are profiting off exploitation of children / nazis / hatecrimes. A probabilistic filter of best effort moderation does not cut it from a CEOs point of view. The world at large and the media makes a huge hue and cry (often for justifiable reasons) when objectionable hateful content is found on a large network. If you are a CEO you want to bring the possibility of that down to zero. The only way to do that is via dealing with large established players with whom you have signed contracts. Reddit does get this right more than most other places but there are parts of Reddit that Jack might not want to defend in front of Congress. In fact more than Congress, there is an even bigger constituency - advertisers like Kelloggs, Disney, Cadburys. These tier1 brands want a family friendly image and dont want their content shown next to anything possible objectionable. Jacks job is to reassure Disney that their ad will never run next to a tweet that propagates hate crime. How does Jack give this guarantee?
We all have the same problem, but if all the tweets are from interesting people, the ads stand out from the high quality content too much, and the ad clicks go down. This is why there won't be any for profit company who would implement real user following :(
I don't think it is true for the majority of Twitter's active users. It may be true for people who aren't using Twitter yet. Or it may just be something they need to make it easier to get users to engage with ads.
For whatever reason, Jack feels like he needs this to make Twitter more money and is trying to sell it as a benefit for active users. But it's really pissing on the active userbase and claiming that it's raining.
It's time to rethink twitter and launch another service.
Readers want to see the content they select, in the order they select, from people/posters they find interesting. Have conversations and maybe connect with people they follow.
Posters want to control their feed and who sees it, control the conversation a bit more, perhaps pay for better tools to curate replies, get rid of spam/trolls etc, have their complaints about stalking/nazis/trolls taken seriously by someone who cares.
Advertising is at the root of the problems of Twitter because advertisers are their only customer - they are forced by their bottom line to find ever more inventive ways to boost impressions (the overwhelming notifications, the dystopian 'home' view which shows you content selected by twitter, showing likes, plays for engagement/eyeballs rather than quality, and now this new 'interest-based network' idea which lets twitter select content). Facebook suffers from the same disease - they must own your feed and your attention, any user control hits their bottom line.
The solution is of course the radical option of removing advertising entirely.
Readers should always be free as they donate their time and attention.
Posters with thousands of followers (whether businesses or individuals) would happily pay for better tools to manage their readers, manage the feed, manage responses to posts etc. Some of them would pay quite a lot for more control/access.
Journalists, traders, businesses, developers would pay for access to a firehose of data and ways of working with that data (public data with user permission of course).
I'd pay to broadcast on a version of twitter without ads, nazis and trolls, wouldn't you?
Micro.blog has been discussed on HN before and people were, well, skeptical, in part because we've seen App.Net fail at this before -- but also because I think a lot of folks don't quite understand what Micro.blog is doing. (To be fair, I don't think they're particularly good at explaining what they're doing.)
In short form:
Micro.blog is built on IndieWeb principles. You can pay to have your blog hosted on the service (in which case you're paying for a full-featured Hugo-backed blog with themes, pages, full posts, themes, etc., not just a $5/month Twitter clone), but you don't have to -- if you have an existing blog which can meet Micro.blog's requirements (an RSS/Atom/JSON feed, webmentions, etc.), you can connect it up for free and get a Twitter-like timeline. There are no advertisers. Micro.blog doesn't have "better tools for managing readers," per se, but for the time being they're just not about the model of "celebrity tweeter with a million followers."
Micro.blog supports comments and follows, but favorites are private (i.e., mostly just bookmarks) and does not support quotes or reposts. This is by design. In theory IndieWeb principles would allow some or all of this to be added down the road, though.
Because this is, again, really a set of individual blogs doing traditional bloggy things woven together with bloggy standards, there's no way to do locked accounts or private posts.
Micro.blog has a full-time community moderator. No, that's not going to be enough to scale if it gets huge, but for the time being that's not a big deal.
Micro.blog has an API and has mobile clients available for both iOS and Android.
And, last but not least: yes, Micro.blog does support ActivityPub and Mastodon. You can follow Mastodon users on Micro.blog and they can follow you from Mastodon, and replies Just Work (tm).
That looks really nice - thanks for trying to fix this. I really like your straightforward home page.
In case this is useful my concerns would be on seeing your home page - Is this going to go out of business in 2 years and lose my stuff? Do I want to pay to post drivel about my life, and retweet the odd thing?
I don't really use twitter for personal blogging, and don't think I'd pay for it, but it's really interesting to see that there are probably several different audiences using twitter for such different things and your service is aimed at a different segment.
The value in twitter for me is the posts from prominent people in various industries who expose what they're really thinking, their foibles, interests and links to interesting research they've just read. I put up with all the drama, nazis and ads for that alone. I use several accounts to follow/promote different interests, and for some businesses, but wouldn't pay for personal use.
Personally I'm really skeptical of a federated network, it's a solution to a problem I don't have, which introduces other problems, but it's not a blocker, I just think it's a distraction to the real problems of social media.
To clarify, this isn't my service. I'm an early adopter, but it's created by Manton Reece. (Long ago he created a web service called "Tweet Marker" that a lot of third-party Twitter clients used to sync reading positions.)
So I have no idea if it's going to go out of business in two years, although I guess I wouldn't really know that even if it was mine. :) Those are always the big questions -- is the service viable, and are you going to use it enough to make it worth it? (And those two questions are connected, since enough people have to say "yes" to the second question to make a "yes" to the first question possible.)
I still use Twitter, and I use Mastodon, too, although I'm less sanguine about Mastodon than most of its proponents seem to be.
> Advertising is at the root of the problems of Twitter
This is true, but it's not only advertising. Replace ads with any revenue generator large enough to sustain the service and you'll find that (1) the audience disappears or (2) big compromises in user experience or privacy.
Maybe some services just can't be delivered by profit-maximizing corporations at all.
A big reason for the wildly improbable success of Wikipedia and Craigslist is that they are non-commercial. No ads, no subscriptions, no selling firehose data, no paying for more access, no "freemium".
We need an alternative asymmetrical social media service that is free for readers, free for posters, fosters deeper discussions than Reddit, and ruthlessly purges scammers, haters and trolls.
Maybe the only way to accomplish that is with a community-driven collective effort, not a commercially-driven corporate service.
Woah wait a minute, Craigslist is definitely commercial, they charge to make posts about certain subjects like employment and housing in certain cities. Now granted it's not super high growth but consider this:
> Last year, Craigslist took in upwards of $690 million in revenue, most of which is net profit, according to an estimate by the AIM Group, an Altamonte Springs, Florida-based research firm. Based on valuations of comparable publicly traded companies including eBay EBAY +0%, Forbes conservatively estimates that Craigslist is worth at least $3 billion. That makes Newmark, 64, who owns at least 42% of the company, worth at least $1.3 billion.
No no no, the content producers are the ones doing the work and the readers should be funding the platform somehow. And possibly the creators too. I'd like a "Reddit gold"-like system.
(I know I wouldn't pay to post because I have lurked on metafilter for most of its life but never paid the $5 to post)
Readers will never, ever pay. That's not sustainable and you need them to attract posters.
Content producers on the other hand are an assorted mix of businesses (make money from attention/clicks), personalities (make money from attention), influencers (make money from attention), academics (no money). If you have an audience many of them would pay.
You could charge the top 10% of content producers/businesses for better tools they would use and ask for all the time (moderation, blocking, shadowbanning etc), and also sell the public data of a popular service like this (for sentiment analysis, trending topics etc), and have a very healthy business model.
There is no need for advertising, it is actively harmful, and it results in misaligned incentives, but if you try to make it reader funded it would IMO fail too - several services have, I think I saw one on HN a few months ago, but the now defunct app dot net is the most prominent example.
> Readers will never, ever pay. That's not sustainable and you need them to attract posters.
You guys on HN keep saying this.
I keep paying. I pay for the local newspaper that I disagree wildly with. I pay for one of the big national ones (that I could mostly read for free anyway). I pay for Spotify, for Linux magazines, a couple of donations to the Guardian and sometimes I pay for Netflix as well (rarely have time to watch and they "forget" to copy half their content to European servers.) In addition I've supported Wintergatan on YouTube lately.
I could even pay more if it wasn't that almost every newspaper and what not seems obsessed with the subscription idea, I cannot subscribe to all of you but I'd be happy to pay 1/4, 1/2 or even $1 for a single story that I want to read.
Am I alone? Is everyone else so "smart" to sit back with their adblockers, torrent clients and what not and just complain about how it seems to get worse?
Maybe that should be more narrowly read as “Twitter users will never pay” or “Facebook users will never pay” which is probably true because the simple reality is that these services offer low-value content that is cheap to produce and easy to consume. It’s not valuable so readers won’t pay.
Consumers do pay for valuable content like Netflix, New York Times, books, etc., because they actually take effort to produce and are thus actually valuable. Twitter and Facebook and much of the free Web is dreck that is not worth paying for.
Yes, sorry Social Media readers will not pay, because as you say the content they are consuming is mostly snippets of thought and links elsewhere, it's not the sort of service you'd subscribe to, but it is the sort of service lots of people like to use.
I do think there is a segment of users who would pay though - those who use the platform to broadcast and want to have a bit more control over their feeds/profile/comments.
If the service is built to maximize the benefit to users (instead of to maximize benefit to advertisers, or to maximize a corporation's profits), then I'd argue that you cannot charge even some posters.
Maximizing the benefit to readers means getting the most and best content. Charging posters will eliminate some posts which is bad for readers.
And when a poster is willing to pay, that means the poster is profiting from the content, which means there's some motive other than writing the best content for the reader.
So my argument is that any financial gain for the operator, whether from advertising or directly charging users, will diminish the value of the service for both readers and posters.
If the goal is the best possible conversation, then let's look to non-commercial models that remove the distorting and corrupting influence of profit.
Not just that: by trying to decouple the content you see from the people you choose it makes specific people leaving Twitter less meaningful. I don't really engage on Twitter so I'm only there to follow a few people, if they left I'd leave.
This is an attempt to keep that dynamic from forming in the first place.
A common theme really. Just look at youtube´s "notification bell" and forced un-subbing. These social networks are going out of their way to be classified as publishers rather than platform providers. It´s going to bite them and us all in the ass so freaking hard and Jack, Mark and Susan will deserve everything that is to come their way both from regulators as well as users that will _eventually_ be fed up with these shady practices.
It's really weird to me how I was listening to the Joe Rogan podcast interview of Ben Shapiro and he made that same comment and I found myself agreeing with.. Ben Shapiro. But if the social media magnates are going to try and become publishers and not platforms, which they are by curating what is printed on their sites as much as any editor of any newspaper, then I don't think they realize what they have coming.
Or possibly worse, we don't realize that it's exactly what the government wants.
"Interest-based" is basically what Reddit does well. If you're reading the accordion subreddit and some users there are also interested in politics or crypto or whatever, you're not going to see their other stuff. (On the other hand, you also don't learn about their other interests.)
On Twitter, I follow people who post good stuff sometimes, but they also post other stuff that's irrelevant. Worse, I see stuff they "like" which is often inflamatory.
Dorsey recalled that when the team was first building the service, it decided to make follower count “big and bold,” which naturally made people focus on it.
“Was that the right decision at the time? Probably not,” he said. “If I had to start the service again, I would not emphasize the follower count as much … I don’t think I would create ‘likes’ in the first place.”
If you put something in front of people that looks like a score, they will start thinking of it as a score. And then they will inevitably start recognizing and incorporating behaviors that tend to increase their personal score. Which leads to competition among them as to who can rack up the highest score, and that competition drives them into a spiral of increasingly extreme behavior in order to stay ahead of the pack.
If Twitter was smart they would just stop displaying follower, like and retweet counts altogether, or at least hide them away someplace deep within a pile of submenus and dialog boxes. Displaying this information prominently is what created the feedback loop that made Twitter into the cesspool it is today.
Jack, we want to follow hashtags, not lists. We want to follow people and filter out their political tweets. Force them to tag their tweets for visibility. Show follower counts of a person’s hashtags.
Don’t ban accounts. Let us choose our moderators. You can hide accounts from the mainstream with your moderation. We want to see all accounts. You already do it for porn and countries.
Shifting to interest-based feeds entirely misses the problem, and would actually make it worse.
Trusting information isn't only about trusting the source, it's also about whether that piece of information fits into your established frame of reference for how the world works. It also depends on how many different emotional buttons the information presses, fear being the strongest.
Shifting to an interest-based delivery system would only reinforce filter bubbles. And what's the alternative? Forcing people to see things you know they'd disagree with? Somewhere in the middle?
I worry a lot more about the rise of advertorials and product placements replacing traditional advertising, than I do about the visibility or importance of follower counts.
The "one size fits all" approach to Twitter can't make everyone happy, maybe not even most people. Reddit really took off when they introduced subreddits so that there could be different interests, different rules, and different moderation.
So now the shameless plug: we built Bettr.social from the ground up to support groups for just this very reason. Users want the option of joining and/or creating their own groups that have control over content and behavior. It's sort of like a "Twitter with groups". You can also follow hashtags so you can follow topics, and not get someone's personal political views mixed in with their sports analysis or whatever. Not sure why Twitter has never allowed following hashtags. Weibo does.
Dorsey also mentioned the "Like." Facebook did well adding more reactions that just "like." People may like a post for different reasons, and people may react to a post in other ways than a "like." If there's no other reaction available, then they'll write something, often something nasty, and then the discussion can continue to go nasty and perpetuate. At Bettr.social we have several reactions like skeptical, troll, wow, and others (even Fake News). We think this helps reduce the snide remarks and drive-by one-time insults.
I don't think Twitter has innovated much in user experience in the past several years. They've change algorithms, and AI detection of abuse, but the features haven't really changed in awhile. And although not all change is good, it seems like there should have been some changes for the better in the UX.
> He suggested that the service works best as an “interest-based network,” where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who posted it
So reddit.
If you stick to smaller, interested based subs, reddit is a far superior product because it has human moderators and threading. The "breaking news" aspect of Twitter is extremely oversold imo, but people post things just as quickly on reddit.
I always tell people if they sign up for reddit, to immediately unsubscribe from the defaults and to specifically search for and subscribe to communities they may be interested in such as a subreddit for the city/state they live in or for any career interest or hobbies they have.
FWIW if something "world news" level happens, first thing I do is check twitter hashtags.
TV news and online news sites usually lag behind and rarely fact-check the "breaking news" so they're generally only worth paying attention days or weeks later when all the fact checking is done. If they're up to date, they're mostly recycling other people's content from social media without attributing any sources or real fact checking. If they're not recycling social media they're generally so vague and non-committal that they basically tell you nothing.
When the Notre Dame fire broke out the only thing I saw on TV was a short matter-of-fact notice in the evening news. Social media had live streams and people linking to articles about the renovations etc.
I’ve opted-out by deleting my account and choosing not to visit the Twitter site. I’ve done the same with Facebook following the same principle. I won’t suggest that my decision had no costs; I miss out on conversations I could learn from and have to be more intentional about reaching out to people in my network. But the costs are far outweighed by the benefits: less frustration, less anxiety, less FOMO.
I highly recommend opting-out to anyone who’s become fed up with the platforms, their conduct or policies, or the way they are made to feel using their products.
Removing counts is the only viable cure for social media that’s left.
Not removing the problems, but removing the addictiveness. Once we reduce the problem space of inputs to people who aren’t addicted, the results should be a lot less difficult to parse.
Visibility into why a post is top of page should not be granted through an integer mapped on a scale of 0 to infinity at any level of precision.
Not for upvotes, downvotes, replies, reposts. Not for unsolicited messages, or “X hours ago” (yes, time durations are 0..+/-inf integers, loophole denied).
High score chasing will be the madness of us all. If I could write a web extension to filter every page’s counts away I would, but I cannot figure it out in my spare time.
Map onto decaying average percentiles of traffic over X days, so that high-traffic posts are super bold and low traffic ones aren’t, or use 2-D colormaps (not Jet) and up/down arrows centered around 50th percentile. Relative comparison is absolutely invaluable and is a perk print newspapers don’t have.
But the screenshots indicate that they’re still showing the count to the user who posted, which is the only user that must not see them. Nice try, but it won’t be sufficient.
I just want a "Muffle" or "Volume Down" button for accounts. Some people are such prolific tweeters that they take over your feed. For some people, I just want the highlights.
Zero specifics. Are we not catching on to Dorsey’s modus operandi yet? We should stop giving him a platform to speak in vague platitudes about “learning” and “rethinking” that make him sound deep. If there are no specific concrete answers, ignore him.
I use https://twitterfall.com/ as my main interface for Twitter It just streams downward from the top, no need to refresh. It's not pretty but I like it.
Also, I don't recognize the issues lots of people have with Twitter, because I mostly only see the original tweets and only follow mostly sensible people that post interesting stuff (scientists, AI & robotics folks, tech journalists, some space exploration accounts).
Reposting from Eugene Wei's take on Twitter from a couple of years ago:
I believe the core experience of Twitter has reached most everyone in the world who likes it. [...]
Sometimes, the product-market fit with early adopters is only that. The product won't go mainstream because other people don't want or need that product. In these cases, the key to unlocking growth is usually customer segmentation, creating different products for different users.
...
The problem is that for those who don't use Twitter, almost all of its ideal attributes among the early adopter cohort are those which other people find bewildering and unattractive.
...
It's not surprising to me that Twitter is populated heavily by journalists and a certain cohort of techies and intellectuals who all, to me, are part of a broader species of infovore.
Twitter has to decide what's more important to them... liberty , 1st Amendment rights of free (legal) expression which includes unpopular speech... or being liked, famous, etc.
Organizations will eventually realize they can stand up their own social infrastructure (see ActivityPub).
It'll be interesting to see how Jack Dorsey reacts to that.
Edit: if anyone happening to read this works for Twitter or has the capability to pass a message to @jack, here's a free idea for a pivot to your business model:
Offer hosted ActivityPub federation utilizing your existing Twitter platform. In other words, become the "Google Apps for Your Domain/G Suite" for hosted ActivityPub instances. Media organizations, governments, and celebs should be paying a premium for the content hosting you provide today for free.
Look - Jack makes money of pushing upsetting content into everybody's feeds. It pushes up the enragement numbers.
Let's be clear here, he's not going to change it. He's going to continue to waffle around and pretend he wants to change, and it's not going to happen.
Can we stop giving air to these excuse publications?
To his credit, Dorsey seems to at least acknowledge the things at stake. It's a big contrast to zuck.
I dated a girl who worked on a moderation team at FB 2-3 yrs ago, as the fake news problem started getting traction. They had a serious smokescreen of corporate sounding names for the teams, roles and tasks. The tasks were very obviously editing, fact checking, and such... Much of it politically oriented. Meanwhile, they seemed to be in knots trying to make their obviously journalistic job seem like subcategories of spam or abusive IM related jobs. They didn't hire journalists (even though they are cheap and plentiful).
Twitter at least recognizes that they're the news, they're journalism, they're political.
That doesn't/won't necessarily/probably lead to anything useful, but there's an honesty in it that I respect.
I recently closed my Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit accounts. A week has passed since then and I have noticed that I have been really happy and optimistic. Probably the happiest in the last 5 years. I am still tempted to take a glance at Reddit or Twitter. It is almost a drug like addiction. These platforms are designed to provoke, agitate, and make you mad. It was immensely bad for my mental health and I am sure for countless others. I was time and again drawn to all the negativity and it had a slow pervasive effect in changing my mood. I sincerely hope as a society we move away from these toxic social platforms and go back to the days when we used to have civil in person conversations
Shouldn't only unhealthy social media accounts be closed? If anything, HN makes me a more thoughtful person because polite discourse is encouraged while poor discourse is reprimanded through mod actions (warnings and then bans).
I find HN more rewarding than any other social site I visit.
Healthy discussions, engaging topics and interests, no clear political slant in either direction, with multiple groups and opinions represented (you know, real diversity of thought). Finally no ads being shoved down my throat unless its engaging content disguised as an advert that reaches the top, in which case I am OK with because at least the advertiser tried, and it got support enough to be upvoted and shared.
I do think it’s a problem. Take anyone’s comment feed and you can cherry pick the most offensive or pointed arguments and create almost any narrative. Anyone else criticized a FAANG at some point but might want a job at one?
> He suggested that the service works best as an “interest-based network,” where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who posted it
Sounds like Twitter is taking a page from Google and not knowing when to leave well enough alone.
I'm always baffled how Jack doesn't understand how own product. Twitter is arguably the most powerful social media platform in terms of raw data for individuals... But be just doesn't get it
How about just letting the users have control over their own social media accounts/etc?
Why did social media go from a simple platform where people followed other people or interests to a place where they have to manage everything? How did it change from a platform where people can express whatever they wanted with whomever they wanted to a platform where social media has to say what people can or cannot say?
Seems like overnight social media turned from a place of user expression to a place of user control.
This seems to be a problem in general across all social media. They create a platform people like, people join up because they enjoy the format, then they tweak it until it's no longer recognizable. Twitter is a great example of this. No real UI improvements in years, just graphing gone wild. FB is the same.
The social media market seems ripe for a disruption, imho. It sounds crazy, to try and topple these current networks. But it's happened before.
Its almost impossible to de-dumb-ass-afy any social network or comment section. How can you prevent the lowest common denominator on public forums from posting heinous content / ignorant opinions? Moderators checking every post doesn't scale and AI may never understand nuance.
One direction would be Hacker News' model of a more restrictive approach where new users must grind up their trust score in order to receive full citizenship.
Twitter was built as a way to follow the lives of and content created by people you're interested in. Trying to turn it into a content aggregator service is a vision incompatible with the foundation of Twitter and its user base. People don't go to Twitter to find good recipes and learn about dinosaurs; they go to Twitter to see what their favorite author is up to and watch celebrities make fools of themselves.
What I want are separate feeds for "firehose" and "friends".
My friends have better things to do than to post to Twitter 20 times per day. A bunch of firehose feeds (NYTimes news updates, for example) or Twitter celebrities (Nicole Cliffe) will make it impossible to see the signal.
A simple UI change (a "I don't plan to make any more tweets for 4 hours" button) should make this filtering trivial to accomplish.
The way I see it: If you don't want to run into assholes, you can make your account private. Or, you know, not use Twitter. Its that easy. If you have thicker skin, there are tools to manage public accounts, like blocking and reporting.
A large number of people want to have their cake and eat it too. They want the advantages of a public twitter, primarily publicity and fame, but they can't deal with the darker side of human nature. Twitter should do everything they can to tame that darker side, because fundamentally their platform is built on public discourse, not private cliques, but its a losing battle. And moreover, any control they exert has the unintentional effect of polarizing people further, which makes the problem worse; Twitter is, to a degree, their own worst enemy.
> where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who posted it
So, Reddit.
Twitter is trying to steer clear of a massive storm on the horizon, except the ship has a hundred million people on it and most of them want to sail right into the Eye. They may be in for a small shock when they realize that it won't work.
Its far beyond the product they publish to the app store; there's a culture on there that you can't just change. You can't change a few lines of code and expect people to behave differently, or still want to install it. Facebook was very smart and knew this; the primary platform got took over by grandmas and bad flash games, so they started buying tangential properties like Insta and Whatsapp.
A serious complication is that there are now several autocrats and would be autocrats who use the platform to spew fear mongering, race baiting and unfiltered falsehoods to their public. I imagine Dorsey knows he will face very real retaliation if they perceive he has diminished their reach.
Looks like we're in store for more random casting about for optimizations from those at the helm. I expect this continue until the service is an unrecognizable, unusable mush of content with zero signal to noise for what matters.
> He suggested that the service works best as an “interest-based network,” where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who posted it
That's how Reddit and (to a lesser extent) HN work.
The comments here are full of people saying what they want out of Twitter, and confidently asserting that what they want is what everyone wants. Except, there’s basically no agreement between them.
This guy again. Now that Twitter is approaching irrelevance and there are a plethora of external services trying to make the UX better maybe there is the time to rethink some of it.
They need to reopen the api. There's a all sorts of weirdness that's possible with the platform but Twitter doesn't have the time or the imagination to explore it.
>“More relevance means less time on the service, and that’s perfectly fine,” Dorsey said, adding that Twitter can still serve ads against relevant content.
I thought they realized trying to make Twitter more like Facebook was a mistake but then I read they want to force content from non-followers even more. Oh well.
What's with all the people going hysterical about social media lately? Twitter and FB won't break our democracy and culture, it just annoys everyone when the media are addicted to quoting viral Tweets and FB posts/videos instead of doing their jobs as journalists. You can't "fix" Twitter in such a way that so-called journalists won't quote every random Trump tweet and write 2 editorials and 3 articles around it. Someone just needs to give these journalists a good wake-up slapping, so we can go back to reading actual newsworthy stories.
I made a Twitter and tried to follow just programmers for some wisdom, but it’s just left wing politics, humble bragging, or bashing of some sort. Just not worth the time.
So first they redefined and ruined the Tweet (the word their success added to the dictionary), by doubling the length. Now they're talking about redefining and ruining "following." I mean what else is there about Twitter besides tweeting, and followers? Read the signs, this guy wishes he were only in charge of Square.
How clueless or ineffective do you have to be with what your original idea has turned in to before people stop listening to or caring about your thoughts on it? Oddly, the "meritocracy" crowd don't appear concerned if rich/powerful males have no idea what they're doing.
Interesting that the quoted “hard questions” about failure to remove Nazis is in direct opposition to the criticism Twitter has received on, for example, the second Joe Rogan interview.
When I view what Dorsey is saying through the lens of the Rogan interview, I don’t see a push towards “algorithmic feeds” which you have already, but towards something where the users actually have more control over what they see, not less. But it’s impossible to tell from these short quotes.
What’s fascinating is the ambiguity of goals and responsibilities Twitter has regarding “hate speech” and so forth.
The quotes in the article seem to indicate questions presuming toxic viewpoints need to have their platform removed, the questions in the Rogan interview work from the assumption stifling speech is bad, and Dorsey keeps saying he is concerned about the safety of individual users.
It’s bewildering because I’m not sure anyone really understands what anyone else is even trying to accomplish.
From some comment Tim Pool made afterwards it appears that they got the impression Jack didn't really understand this was a major issue or the depths of dangerous stifling of speech they were participating in by potentially banning people who were just labeled "Nazi" because it's now a synonym for what you call someone you don't like or agree with.
It sounds like he's been looking into the issue and taking some executive action to stop the platform from being controlled by a single ideology group.
> “It’s democracy at stake, it’s our culture at stake,” Anderson said.
Christ, the self-importance of the Twitterverse is astonishing. What they don't say out loud is that Trump and Brexiteers and others they oppose have used the platform to effectively end-run the media, they hate that, but they can't figure out a way to stop them. A little bit of plain speaking would be refreshing.
Be happy that today it's not life on this planet or the universe itself that is at stake. ;)
In my experience, there are primarily three kinds of people that regularly claim there's a lot on the line, and it doesn't matter what their political views are. 1) young people that are inexperienced, 2) people that need to feel good about fighting for something important, and 3) people that exploit the other two by appealing to that. It's a good tactic to motivate your base, but like crying wolf, it loses it's effectiveness when done too often.
More than a dozen democracies have fallen in the last twenty years. Many times that over the last century, making predictions of that correct. Obviously neither life nor the universe have ended as many times in that period.
Furthermore, I know of no well informed people that have ever predicted the later but many who have successfully predicted the former.
I'd be mildly interested to see a list of these failed democracies. My other question is, did they fail because Twitter allowed unfettered tweeting of all kinds of unsavory thoughts and ideas? Or are they places where most people don't know what Twitter is?
Edit: It also begs the question of whether democracy is the best form of government for every country, but I leave that aside, since I'm not sure we've reached agreement on whether Twitter is really that important or influential in the lives of governments and societies.
> More than a dozen democracies have fallen in the last twenty years. Many times that over the last century
Is "the party I prefer has lost the election" the same as "a democracy has fallen"? Because I really don't see a dozen democracies that left democracy behind, and certainly not many times that. I suppose it depends on your definition of democracy, but for anything close to the common understanding of a modern liberal democracy, that just sounds ridiculous.
A modest proposal: Make it easier to pwn various twitter accounts. Uncertainty about authenticity for any given twitter message would compel journalists to verify the content of the message before repeating it.
Paradoxically, uncertainty about messages would slow down the spread of fake news and hate speech.
These are jump the shark moments for companies, they usually have insightful opinions, but execution and the essential details lack.
The other alternative: we all stop using Twitter. There's simply no need for it.
Maybe there should be a 'journalist Twitter feed' that journos can comment and post on, but with no comments. So we get the live action, but not the clutter.
All pop culture and political tweeting is rubbish.
There seems to be another set of rules for users with high follower counts, presumably because Twitter is terrified of the backlash and claims of censorship.
One particularly nasty individual with a blue checkmark has the habit of screenshotting people who disagree with her, and then unleashing her followers on them. It’s almost impossible to critically engage with this individual without risking being destroyed professionally or personally. Twitter’s response seems to be quietly demoting Tweets, but there is definitely a power dynamic at play with people who have high follower counts, and it isn’t in favor of Twitter.
Mr. Dorsey accurately answered the Nazi question with:
> “We have a situation right now where that term is used fairly loosely,” Dorsey said. “We just cannot take any one mention of that word accusing someone else as a factual indication of whether someone can be removed from the platform.”
If I can't google programming-related search terms and get back a publicly facing page for that tweet, then I'd consider the site as dead as G+ for research purposes.
We need to stop useful community content from getting black holed into walled gardens of Eternal September.
Yeah, no thanks. Has anybody ever been happy with Twitter's attempts to force content from non-followed users into the feed? A couple of times a year they'll opt everybody back into whatever crappy experiment they're running ("hey, we'll put some posts to your feed based on likes") and it'll take ages to remember just how to turn it off.