I refer of course to the Milo Yiannopoulos situation (edit: I said the article didn't mention. I missed the mention.). The man deserved what he got, but there are dozens of accounts that were his "executors" - doing the actual harassment for him in many cases - who got off scot-free, while he remains banned. There is no consistency.
I think there's a possibility that the arbitrary enforcement is partially because Twitter knows that if it were consistent in enforcing its own rules, so much of its population of users would disappear that it would be hobbling itself.
The only "safe" way to use Twitter now is as an echo chamber - only follow people you like, only talk to people who think the same way you do. That's a waste.
This x100. If you have no followers and no one is re-tweeting your vitriolic slime, why should twitter care, they simply want you to stay on the platform. Now if your circle has reach and you are a known public name, they must act as if they care. They play politics to please the masses, without subjecting the masses to the same politicking.
"Echo chamber" is a deliberately pejorative term, which I think is unfair here. If you use Twitter to discuss your beliefs, then, yes, it functions like an echo chamber, and that can be a bad thing because when your beliefs are wrong, they won't be constructively challenged.
But I generally use Twitter to discuss my interests. Sure, the line between the two is fuzzy, but I think there is a difference. I love pixel art, and follow a lot of pixel artists. Does that make my feed a "pixel art echo chamber"? I guess so? But that seems to me about as harmless as joining model railroad club.
Does this ever happen? It seems to me like every time someone says something unpopular, the world goes on a witch hunt to destroy that person's life. That's not what I call "constructively challenged". I call it "just short of hanging them, which is what people really want to do."
I'd love to see a world where I could debate a matter with someone without everyone getting so emotionally charged that logic gets thrown out the window, and ideas that are incorrect can be pointed out to a person without everyone hating one another.
No. Twitter incorrectly used him as some kind of example. They had also did temp bans on him in the past and also the immature move of removing his check mark.
The harassment was happening WELL before Milo was tweeting the ghostbuster. Milo wrote the article. Milo's tweets weren't anywhere NEAR harassment level. Trolling a famous person on twitter is not harassment and brigading. And as many have already shown the ghostbuster herself was just as guilty in the past of attempts at brigading.
There's even some communication from her where she was actually thrilled the incident would give exposure to her and the movie. Whatever people think of this, Milo didn't cause her any suffering or feeling of being 'unsafe' Other harassers were deplorable. Milo was not in that category.
Milo had tens of thousands of flying monkeys to troll and harass people on his behalf. He knew this perfectly well, and used it all the time.
His tweets didn't need to be particularly harassing: all he had to do was point the finger. Which he did.
If Milo deserved to be banned, then so does 30-40% of Twitter. He did nothing wrong, and certainly nothing worse than this: https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/756219192878268416
An echo chamber is bad because it not only repeatedly re-broadcasts beliefs, it also amplifies them. "The President is wrong and should be voted out of office" can turn into "The President is wrong and ought to be shot" in an echo chamber environment much faster if there's nobody around to say "wait, hold up, maybe don't."
My friends and I can change each other's minds quite often, by approaching arguments from their own rubric. For example, by drawing an analogy between the topic of discussion and one of their deeply held views, exposing some dissonance.
But it takes time, empathy, and understanding. Which is to say I doubt it ever happens on the internet.
It helps that I'm not employed in software engineering, so I have a degree of humility. Well, a little.
The rules are: Don't believe anything that isn't substantiated, Do be open to new ideas, but don't be afraid to question them, and don't be afraid to re-evaluate your position. After all, your ideas deserve as much skepticism as anybody else's.
Rational arguments, a bit of rhetorical ability, and persistence are surprisingly effective. The problem is the persistence part requires multiple interactions over months or years, so it's hard to study.
You won't charge their mind, but maybe you won't see each other in such negative light for what each person believes.
Sure those changes are generational as people don't get their opinion changed easily.
But allowing these discussion to take place freely especially amongst the youth is essential to let them shape their world.
So you want to change someone's opinion, but not going to allow someone to change yours?
I guess we'll end up with a conservative twitter clone, and a liberal twitter, and no-one will ever face the "danger" of seeing viewpoints they disagree with.
I don't like him or think like him, but it's sure fun to have a firsthand view on the dumpster fire that is the 2016 election.
That is by no means safe, when brigaders are actively looking for opportunities for whipping up a mob.
Basically, you'd get the same experience by having an email list of your friends.
Which is what Facebook is right now.
Bill and I were actually talking about what kind of investments GV was looking to make. He stressed that GV was looking to invest in businesses that were actually good businesses. As a counterexample, he brought up Twitter, which at the time he considered to be a "good investment" (said with a grin and a wink) but not a "good business". I had one of those feelings that you get when somebody really smart just shared with you The Truth.
Later I found myself in a conversation with Joi, I think as part of a group and not one-on-one, and Joi was talking about Twitter's lack of revenue. Joi was an early stage investor in Twitter, and he was telling us something to the effect of, "once we have all these users, we're going to bring everyone to the table and figure out how to monetize and what we can charge for."
Over the years I've thought a lot about Bill's distinction between a "good investment" and a "good business", and about Joi's "users first, money later" optimism. I always felt like Bill would be proven right in the long-term, and I think at this point he sorta has been.
Ultimately, though, either approach to investing can work -- but if you're gonna do the Joi thing, you gotta know when to get out of the trade. (I have no idea if/when Joi got out... just stating a general principle.)
I suspect that in 10 years Facebook will be an exception rather than a rule.
If anything happens that makes vested individuals doubt that Twitter is worth as much as it is, its value will drop, as it did right after the Q2 2016 earnings report was released.
I don't understand these statements that "Twitter is fucked". Twitter could improve filtering and safety but if it never changed I'd probably still get my news from it for the rest of my life. I just can't think of a better app for my use cases. I often like Twitter Moments, like something funny or some pop culture stuff I wouldn't have picked up on.
Every time there is breaking news Twitter carries it first.
I don't want longer tweets. That's what URL's are for. If you want to discuss really distill your thoughts and thread them. I'm on here to scan for stuff that lights up my brain not have an Op-Ed shoved in my face taking up the whole screen.
I just don't understand. I love twitter.
Twitter can be successful, at the same type that Pokemon, Facebook and other are successful. These companies aren't mutually exclusive.
The reason Twitter is screwed is because they created a popular product and absolutely no idea on to make money on it. Just freaking charge the users $10 per year after the first year and $250 for business accounts and be done with it. If people truly love Twitter, as much as they claim, it shouldn't be a problem.
For a brief moment, I thought Google had a chance with Google+. The discussion model is better, the moderation tools are better, but it just doesn't have the users. I wonder if they had launched with a read/write API and good developer libraries, would Google+ have achieved critical mass? I'd still love to see Google try this since they really have nothing to lose at this point.
This right here.
Medium, PostHaven, Wordpress, blog services, etc. All of those products exist for an extended thought. I always believed that where Twitter excels is in micro-sharing/blogging.
I am not willing to read, let alone comment on a 500+ word Facebook status post. But I'm certainly willing to enjoy/participate in a discourse over a 160 character thought.
If I am in the 500+ word reading mood, I goto Medium or PostHaven or the equivalent blog-platform. Where there's a forum, there's an audience. And Twitter's quick digestible tweets cultivates an insane amount of diverse discourse.
Sure, there's harassment. Sure there's spam. But there's a lot of gems on Twitter.
End result is that rather than have the potential to build a conversation chain, readers have to manually drill the "tree".
Never mind that they never implemented support for merged SMS (introduced all the way back in the 90s!), so you are constantly stuck at 140 characters.
All in all it is a quintessential US company with the classic US mobile network blinders firmly fitted.
But you're right, just perhaps not in the way you mean, Twitter isn't going anywhere. $11 billion market cap is nothing to sneeze at, however it's lost about that much value in one year. So is it a going concern? Sure it'll probably still be here in a year, but my confidence level beyond 12 months is weak at best. Five years? shrug 50/50. If it's not profitable, how does it continue to function at a certain point? At what point is it functionally on life support?
If you use popularity as the main measure of usefulness then yellow press is useful too.
i think moments and periscope are good steps. not perfect, but they emphasize _now_.
I dislike the way the article uses the word "violence". Nothing that happens on Twitter is violent. The definition of violence right from a Google search for "define:violence" is
behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something
Nonetheless, the author articulates the reasons I do not use Twitter myself. The amount of drama that site creates seems, to a non-user, to be far in excess of the amount of insight it generates. I have never heard of a really great conversation or unique, insightful idea emerging on Twitter. I have heard, a lot, about idiotic fights that escalate into real world problems. I agree that the 140 character limit is the cause of such problems.
You have to manage Facebook. Twitter is just a way to convey thoughts and ideas, occasionally with things turning into a discussion. That is an important service with a definite need that Facebook has never filled.
As for up to date news, I follow Google's top 10 searches in Feedly (where I follow hundreds of sites) and it works as a pretty decent up-to-date top news trend that gets updated every hour or so. I can appreciate if every hour or so is too slow for some folks though. I'm not in media, and don't really care if Rihanna fell of the stage a few minutes ago during her concert, but I totally get it if others do.
If Google instituted a $0.99 monthly fee to use Google search, people would line up to pay it. They don't have to, because their business model works differently, but they could do that, and it would work. I'd probably pay for an account.
If Facebook instituted a $0.99 monthly fee to use that, a lot of people would do it just because it keeps them in the loop with their friends. And in fact, many people would be willing to pay $2.99/mo for a business account which gets to do more (like post more events or whatever). Again, this isn't their business model, but this would totally work as a business model.
People would pay for Uber de-facto; they do pay for Uber.
Likewise, half my coworkers have bought coin packs in Pokémon Go. In general, lots of games do pay models.
If Twitter added a $0.99/year fee, there would be a clone written in a more scalable architecture taking all their users within a week. Some businesses would keep Twitter accounts, but that number would decrease as they lost users. Remember that Twitter added some minor advertising and instantly started losing users.
There are tons of other startups with this problem. The idea these days is, get a bunch of users and introduce ads. The problem there is that when you add ads, you're fundamentally changing your service. It's a bait-and-switch. And once you do the switch, if people weren't willing to pay for your service before, they're not going to want to start paying for it in the form of ads.
However, as a game developer with Free-To-Play development PTSD, I think this rule rests on an implied-but-important condition: People are already using and loving the service. Imagine that some shiny new app called Spark launches tomorrow and vaguely promises to be Twitter 2.0, well no one would be willing to jump on unless it was free. Even $1 a month is too much for us short-attention-spanned smartphone users, as the total shift to F2P games on mobile has shown us. Nothing outside of Minecraft is in the top 100 grossing apps on Android nor iOS.
Perhaps the answer lies in starting free, getting people hooked, and then easing in a subscription fee? This would also come across as a bait-and-switch, as you said, and some users would inevitably flock to the next free clone.
Ultimately, and unfortunately, I don't think there's an easy answer to monetization anywhere...
No, that's exactly not what I'm saying. Uber did just fine starting as a pay service as do a great many games, Netflix, HBO, Amazon, etc.
> Imagine that some shiny new app called Spark launches tomorrow and vaguely promises to be Twitter 2.0, well no one would be willing to jump on unless it was free.
Right--that's because Twitter 2.0 is also fucked from the beginning: they don't have something users would pay for any more than Twitter 1.0 did.
> Even $1 a month is too much for us short-attention-spanned smartphone users, as the total shift to F2P games on mobile has shown us. Nothing outside of Minecraft is in the top 100 grossing apps on Android nor iOS.
F2P is basically just an advertising strategy; I'd count that as having something people are willing to pay for, because they're willing to pay for in-game purchases or premium experience subscriptions.
> Perhaps the answer lies in starting free, getting people hooked, and then easing in a subscription fee? This would also come across as a bait-and-switch, as you said, and some users would inevitably flock to the next free clone.
I guess I wasn't clear about this, but I think a bait-and-switch business strategy will work fine if you have something people value enough to pay for. It's kind of pointless, though, IMHO, because it doesn't fail fast: if it turns out you aren't providing people anything they value, then you won't find that out until you get to the "switch" part.
Ultimately, I think the bait-and-switch strategy is just a way to extract money from VCs and offload risk onto them without having to prove your value proposition, but that comes at some significant cost. If I were a VC I'd probably want to invest to build something and then release it for pay up front--that saves the cost of implementing the bait-and-switch strategy.
> Ultimately, and unfortunately, I don't think there's an easy answer to monetization anywhere...
The answer is "provide value that people are willing to pay for", but I agree that's not an easy answer. :)
That's exactly what Google and Facebook did.
All I can take from your comment is "if hypothetical scenario then my opinion is true"
Would you pay to read Twitter? Do you think that anyone would?
The distinction I'm making here is that I don't think anyone will ever succeed over the long term in Twitter's product space, because they don't have a product people would pay for. A competitor might knock them out for a little while, but no competitor will have lasting success unless they figure out a way to modify Twitter's product into a product people would pay for. And at it's core, Twitter's product is kind of worthless, so I don't think there's a modification that would make it worthwhile.
Curious, what would be more scalable than Twitter's existing JVM based architecture? 3 years ago[1] they were able to handle upwards of 140 (edit) thousand tweets per second without any latency -- that's pretty ridiculous.
[1] https://blog.twitter.com/2013/new-tweets-per-second-record-a...
If I were implementing Twitter today, I'd probably do Elixir and Cassandra. I don't generally leap to go NoSQL but Twitter's structure is particularly suited to Cassandra. Elixir gives the ease of development I associate with Ruby with the scalable, decentralizable BEAM. I'd also consider going with Erlang straight up--it may not be as pretty as Elixir, but there's a lot to be said for maturity in a language.
But I'm saying this because I have the benefit of newer technologies and having seen Twitter's mistakes. From a technical perspective, I think Twitter is pretty well done.
What's missing is that other platforms, like Facebook, took a very hard stance on this and forced people to signup as their real identities.
Twitter, can easily follow suit. That won't fix all of the problems, but it will go towards improving things and it won't require massive product updates and changes to the UX.
Given that their MAU growth numbers are low, and no longer the number that they want the public market to focus on, actually instating this now wouldn't even be that damaging from a reporting perspective, and if they bled out a few users that weren't really contributing it could go a long way to improving things.
Technically there is a privacy setting that twitter doesn't play up that can be used for people that want to use twitter as a consumption platform and limit the interactivity from other people.
Twitter is still fundamentally different and more open than facebook and with requesting non-anonymous users they can still keep that open platform and potentially clean up some of the outlier conversations that seem to be a focus for so many people of what's wrong with twitter.
Facebook is /proof/ that the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory doesn't need anonymity. What the Internet proves about communication is that fuckwaddery (yes, this is a word, my word) is inversely proportional to interface friction. The quicker it is to spill the contents of your mind without the filtration enabled by interface difficulty, the more crap you can put out. Since 90 percent of everything is crap, [Sturgeon] even what you are thinking 90 percent of the time is crap and you're lucky if you manage to only commit the remaining 10 percent without contaminating it with the rest. Interface difficulty enforces thinking about what you commit to discussion. Which is why pen-and-ink letter writing "is an art" and the twitterverse is a cesspool - real names or not.
This is not to say that if everything went back to pen-and-paper that there would be no fuckwads. There would simply be fewer of them.
Lastly, I never used my real name on Facebook or other social media. Why should I give up what I have every right to do in real life just because it's electronic? People don't care whether I'm using my real name or alias as long as they know who they're talking to.
BMO's Revised Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory
(Normal person + communication medium) / interface friction = fuckwad
And when friction=0, you have a black hole of fuckwaddery. You usually get this when you use alcohol as a lubricant.
That might be why Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc are so screwed up. Because the userbase knows that there's a very slim chance they'll ever meet the person they're attacking online. That there's a slim chance there'll ever be any genuine consequences for their actions.
Of course, making it easier and more convenient like on the sites (or limiting people to only 140 characters) definitely makes it easier to be a douche. But you're not going to send a threatening SMS message to someone sitting next to you.
To a slightly lesser extent, Slashdot has also licked that problem: for any story that attracts enough comments (more than 300) the top rated ones are often pretty good and the worthless ones start auto-collapsed. Even though Slashdot gets a lot of jip these days, some of it deserved, I've still spent many enjoyable hours reading some of the top rated comments there. Especially nice is the fact that upvotes must have an adjective attached, which gently nudges users into certain kinds of behaviour. For instance it's the only site I've encountered where people often post extremely funny comments despite the serious topics. The moderation system there encourages that sort of behaviour.
We had ways of dealing with this on Usenet back in the day. 1) Thick skin, and 2) killfiles. Generally, killfiles weren't for people with whom you disagreed (though they could be, if you wanted), they were for people who were assholes.
What I mean is this: I agree with Jack's vision of Twitter being a "window to the world", a place where you can instantly get a sense of what your compatriots are thinking and how they are reacting to news. They have two features which accomplish this pretty well: hashtags and live video. When crazy things are happening Twitter is one of the best ways to "live" the event through those two features. Jack appears to have taken this to heart and recently said that Twitter's future will heavily involve breaking news. This also addresses one of the big complaints in this post - you can't have a thoughtful debate in 140 characters. But you can react! And you can absorb little pieces of information and media.
Unfortunately for Twitter, Facebook has also seen the writing and the wall and has built superior versions of hashtags and live video directly into their experience. I have seen a noticeable improvement in the specificity and granularity of their trending topics lately and we've all seen over the past couple weeks how effective and raw (maybe too raw) their live video is.
So I don't think Twitter is fucked - I think their future still, after all these laggard years, has a lot of potential. The problem is they have to stare down an 800,000 pound blue and white gorilla to win.
Speech can be hateful, harmful, hurtful, etc., but it is not violent. Speech can incite violence, but it is still not actually violence.
We see this all of the time when people want to resort to hyperbole -- "misgendering a trans person is violence!"
It doesn't further your case, it's just using a cheap rhetorical trick.
Yes speech is not the same thing as actively hitting someone or throwing someone out of a club. But At the same time there are classes of speech which cause direct harm.
To be pedantic about it, words can cause physical pain, fear, stress and anxiety. So words have been demonstrated to cause physical harm.
In short: your erecting a false dichotomy/comparison. There is violent speech, and yes it's not the same as physical violence. It's not considered to be.
Additionally, I think your short sentence encapsulates a particularly incorrect assessment of the modern world, and especially life "online".
Online Life is locution. An unusually large portion of ones persona lives in words exchanged online. All actions that occur which silence someone, elevate someone else, instruct, confuse, insult or praise do so through words. Speech is everything online.
Verbal and emotional abuse of children are serious issues, but they do NOT have to be violent for them to be horrible. The conflation of the two muddies the language that we have to describe the events that happen to us.
If someone says, my parents were very violent to me, what would you assume happened? Doesn't knowing that there was physical abuse help give context that helps you respond to the situation?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_Am...
[0]: People are great at communicating meaning non-literally (see: definition of literally) and one of the ways that manifests itself is through slang, which is going to break anything but a so-close-it-might-as-well-be-AI system. If you ban a word or phrase, it's meaning will be communicated through another word or phrase. The insulting adversary has an advantage here, as they can use other real words and phrases that would otherwise be innocuous to insult you, it would be especially advantageous to use popular/common words/phrases as replacements (see: euphemisms).
It's certainly possible to train a system in hindsight, but I highly doubt you could do so in real-time and any delay in reacting to new slang means that's when antagonists will strike. Hell, you could even do asynchronously defined insults, send many messages containing various words phrases and then announce, shortly after their delivery, what they mean (heh...).
Twitter 2.0 could do something as simple as forego the linear timeline (and the restrictions that that imposes re: filtering) and still achieve all the goals the author outlined.
I also think John De Goes doesn't mention the elephant in the room with which he got burned, the last LandaConf along their policy and handling of the created situation. And far from me to judge that situation in this comment, but I find his judgment compromised, to say the least, if not disingenuous.
As for some of his claims, I'm actually glad that Twitter doesn't filter my content. I DO NOT want any more filter bubbles. I actually want the people I respect to show me their religion and political beliefs. In fact I want disagreeing opinions, even if painful, because that's how I learn. I'm a tolerant kind of guy and I want to see the world for what it is. And if I can't tolerate somebody, then I'm not interested about his work or jokes either.
Freedom of speech doesn't include invading someone's privacy (this is illegal; doxxing, stalking etc. should be banned and actively fought against). But if you can't handle insults, it is not anyone's job to prevent them. There's always "Block" button, and then, there's always "delete account" button.
"Crybullies." And I literally thought this could not get any sillier a thing.
I don't care for Twitter particularly, but it's a thing that exists, and it's not likely to go away any time soon. And I don't care for shitposter brigades at all. As the current brouhaha demonstrates, manual intervention in high-profile cases is no solution at all. Twitter's engineering team is easily capable of an automated solution; all they need is for their management to turn them loose on the problem. I'm not sure why that hasn't yet happened. Of course it's impossible for any automated solution to make everyone happy - but what we're looking at right now is a response that has made everyone unhappy. Twitter can do better. I hope they take this incident as sufficient reason to do so.
It's rare that I get involved in drama on Twitter, but thanks to notification settings, I've found it pretty easy to filter out the negative people.
What other button we need to invent? "Activate our hordes of ML algorithms to make sure that all replies you receive are about kittens or pink ponies"? Can be done, but we already have Facebook for that.
For me, all this drama looks like an orchestrated attack on Twitter.
That's not going to exist in any medium that is controlled by a single organization, whether that's a government, nonprofit, or corporation.
If one person (or a small group of people) can pull the plug, eventually it will get pulled.
For example, I have never used the expression "crybullies," and if I did, it would probably be to describe the kind of white male who gets on a place like HN and cries that his freedom to be a raging asshole in somebody else's privately owned medium is being trampled by moderation.
But back to your point, I will argue with it in good faith. You say:
> There's always "Block" button, and then, there's always "delete account" button.
Well here's the thing. What is it doesn't work like that in practice? What if the "block" button is not an effective mechanism for using Twitter positively? What if Milo blocks me, but thousands of my followers insult Milo, overwhelming his ability to block them all?
It's more than just his feelings, if his entire experience is flooded with my army of trolls, he simply can't keep up with the tools in place.
And the kicker is this: People know this, so they "game the system" by flooding your mentions with so many new and different accounts that you simply can't block them all. Overwhelmed by a DDOS, you delete your account.
IF there were effective tools for ignoring insults and floods, I would agree with you that you have options, and if you delete your account that is entirely your personal choice. But in the current design, Twitter provides a grossly imbalanced power dynamic between those who wish to abuse other users, and those who wish to use the system without abusing other users.
Where does this imbalance lead us? To social network where only trolls remain standing. That is not in Twitter's best interests, nor does it have long-term survivability even if they thought it was. This dynamic has been repeated many, many times, and so far it has always worked out the exact same way; When the trolls arrive, you either moderate actively, or your social network dies.
Now, you say:
> if you can't handle insults, it is not anyone's job to prevent them
Furthermore, it has nothing to do with whether any one person or group of people can handle insults or not. Hacker News simply does not wish to cultivate an insult-heavy tone, period. So it has guidelines, and it enforces the guidelines, and people like you and I decide that the benefits of a moderated conversation outweigh the freedom to unleash our raging id.
Should Twitter be less like voat and more like facebook? That is a question of opinion. But it is not necessarily true that it's not anybody's job to police the the of a social network, and it is certainly not even remotely true that there is always the block button, because the consequence of Twitter's current design choices creates an asymmetry between abusers and the abused.
Of course, just like you do and everybody else is doing. Therefore, my opinion is just my opinion, and if somebody insults me, it is their opinion, and I am not obliged to react to it in any way. I might, if it would be someone I know and respect, but an anonymous account created two weeks ago just to post a random insult in my direction? I'd be flattered I am _that_ important for somebody.
And as you have just said, Twitter is a private company. They can serve needs of people like you or people like me (and I do not engage in insults, this is immature — but I do value freedom of speech and its total independence from the current PC handbook du jour). The question is what is more profitable and what is more aligned with founder's values.
This is an unnecessary escalation into racial/gendered personal attack.
Care to explain the ethical viewpoint that's led you to this conclusion?
The problem isn't "insults" and the solution isn't "handling them". The problem is social dynamics that create disrespect and dehumanization towards certain people. The dynamics and their consequences are real regardless of how the victims "handle" them.
Hard to make it past this part. Not sure what definition of violence you're using.
Twitter's core problem is that its product's design encourages users to behave badly. Mechanisms are baked deeply into it that make it very difficult for its users to come across as anything other than jerks. Even those with the best of intentions fall afoul of these mechanisms by accident periodically, sometimes with serious real-world consequences like loss of a job or important personal relationships. Users with bad intentions, meanwhile, are enabled and rewarded by other mechanisms.
Twitter is a Perfect Storm of bad discussion software design.
It's not just the size of tweets, though that does exacerbate things. The entire attention economy of online social media rewards viral attention, and therefore it rewards outrage politics. (Politics in the general sense of Homo sapiens following its social mammal instincts.)
Oh yes, it does! There's a ton of historical, economic, and game theoretic work that indicates this matters. A lot!
You want people to behave? Teach real civics in the schools.
That only provides the information, not the incentive. If you want people to behave, give them a stake in society.
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/violenc...
2. Strength of emotion or of a destructive natural force
But yeah one is a flavour of the month celeb and the other is a loudmouth who doesn't meld well with Twitter employees political leanings. But both violated TOS and both should have been banned.
The legal definition of free speech is based on a moral principle, for which Twitter does qualify.
When a platform such as Twitter or Facebook becomes the de facto public square, then a ban from Twitter or Facebook is a de facto ban from the public square.
I don't care about Milo in particular, but I do care about the fact that censorship by Twitter or Facebook is real censorship.
Wow, this is a really impressive observation that I think I, and maybe others, have sensed but couldn't quite express. This is super relevant to me in the music sphere, as I enjoy the art form but find numerous "Twitter Winners" like Father John Misty toxic in the long term. Disclosure: I needled FJM on Twitter following his immature diatribe that dropped 7 F-bombs on an un-expecting family-oriented afternoon because its hurtful to fans and other artists.
>This means if you follow someone for what they have to say about professional improv comedy, you also get to hear them trash your religion, berate the intelligence of people who vote the way you do, and otherwise rant about and retweet topics you don’t want to hear about.
This sounds like the author is asking for Twitter to build an echo chamber for him? I would rather not have that for my account tbh and I would like to discourage Twitter from heading in this direction (though it has already started to do some of that).
> There are four types of content that can earn you retweets:
>
> 1. Indignant
> 2. Insulting / Harassing
> 3. Cute / Funny
> 4. Insightful / Intelligent
> Of these four kinds of content, two are inherently violent,
> and the other two have the potential for violence (mean jokes, condescension).
I guess I'll just make dumb and obvious statements from now on, since I value peace.
There's no way for a tech company to be "completely non-political." So I actually think that people will continue to prefer providers whose politics they see as compatible with theirs. And it seems to me that tech companies like Google and Microsoft and Apple (in their public pushback against government surveillance) and AirBnB (bringing in Eric Holder to do a non-discrimination policy) see things similarly.
Specifically when it comes to harassment and hate speech, while I certainly agree with his points of making it easier for people to protect themselves, in the end there's no way to avoid taking a political stance. Twitter (like Facebook and most other large social networks) has a policy that "you may not promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease". Obviously that's an inherently political position. But conversely, not having a policy like that -- saying that attacking, threatening, and promoting violence against people based on these characteristics is okay and it's up to them to use the tools to insulate themselves from it -- is just as political. There really isn't a neutral position.
[Of course this is the same guy who doesn't see that a decision to let Curtis Yarvin speak at his conference is just as political as a decision not to. To be clear, I'm not saying it was a right or wrong decision; I'm just saying it was political either way.]
I hate Twitter, but I don't necessarily agree that it's too broken to fix. There's a place for a Twitter-like product in the world, and Twitter is already entrenched.
The question of a Twitter revamp is this: will it alienate existing heavy users? Will that effect be counterbalanced by new users?
Very proud and 'credible' news outlets face this problem and it's real. Either get the clicks or go out of business.
Sure trolls will support other trolls but I'm pretty convinced most people are good people and should easily outnumber and be able to take down gangs of trolls online.
This way the community self moderates and is able to weed out the undesirables and assholes on the platform all by themself, no intervention required.
The people you rated highly could also float to the top of your stream so if you enjoy the trash talking of milo or similar characters you can still see them without them poisoning the well for everyone else.
It's not only the number but also the ratio. There are people who have 200,000 followers because they are following 200,000 people. This tells you their tweets are worthless. (And if you're following 200,000 people, you're not reading their tweets.)
We're not all good little boys and girls, but we do want to have good conversations with one another, and so we try and do what we can to make things better as we go.
In some sense, I see the descriptions he made in Snapchat. The ability to consume content from where ever I choose, but my ability to reach out and converse with people who create content is limited by their desire to create a 1:1 connection with me. I wasn't a big fan of Snapchat when it first came out, but over time it has interested me with some of the decisions that they have made to really make the product about consuming moments that are personal to me, as well as interesting to me.
For instance, I asked John Carmack if he'd ever consider doing anything on the Atari Jaguar again (he ported Wolf3d and Doom to that platform back in 1993) and he replied saying that he'd more likely do Apple ][ stuff if he went retro.
How many times in a person's life do they directly talk to John Carmack? It's amazing that you can just type a few things in and someone that powerful replies to a relative nobody.
It adds communication to the world, with certain unique flavors... and some people have found ways to use it to improve reporting on news, events, or marketing. Some people have found ways to solve minor problems for themselves, specifically. And because of those things, it has found its traction.
But there is no major underlying problem shared by millions that Twitter solves. Which is why it also struggles to maintain a userbase.
Without a meaningful number of followers, on Twitter you get nothing.
Hashtags eat into your 140 characters, and are mostly used ironically or for singular events/causes, which aren't really appropriate for the majority of tweets. So no one's going to find it via search or hashtag.
There are no communities/topics/forums/subreddits to join. No way to tweet at all the other people who like this one thing.
So to get any kind of notice/interaction with a Tweet of your own you're left to tweeting at someone else, which feels wrong/argumentative/pushy for all the reasons this article laid out. Infinitely more intrusive than a comment reply. Hoping that they either retweet you or reply to you, which gets your tweet those precious views, favorites, and replies enjoyed (and dreaded) by the most average tweet of a well-followed account.
Those metrics (and lack there-of) either lead you to not tweet yourself and only follow [celebrities / internet-celebrities / news] or constantly [reply-to / tweet-at / annoy / troll] those same high-profile accounts. Which is better for Twitter?
Now I can "ask Twitter" a question and get interesting responses from dozens of people. But it takes time and effort, which I suppose most people aren't willing to spend.
Last night I was blocked by someone I followed for simply offering a tame retort to a comment they made whilst blocking someone else.
When I tweet, nothing happens. Granted, I'm not the most interested Twitter user in the world, but I'd like to think I have the occasional insight that might be worth reading, favoriting, or sharing.
The only time I actually see engagement is when I'm using it for current events, and respond to strangers. One would think that when this happens, you might be able to cultivate those engagements into future correspondence, but nope...it's all event based, and I have no time for that.
Despite my conservative nature and Jack's recent behavior/antics, I do like Twitter and want it to succeed, but it's not going to be long before I stop using it and eventually stop registering accounts for new businesses. We have more fun with Snapchat.
The author is right that the product has some major flaws, especially around harassment, but no one else seems to want to take over the space. And Facebook, Tumblr, G+, etc. are all much worse platforms for the kind of discussion that happens on Twitter.
So I think the toxic environment can definitely put a ceiling on the number of new users, so does the timeline issues, but it could probably just keep plodding along for another 5+ years as-is until these issues are worked out or something much better is put in place (not likely, but possible, IMO).
"everyone can send anything to everyone" is twitter's USP. I can't think of another many-to-many broadcast (publish-subscribe) platform. That is what makes it successful, and it is vulnerable to competitors who use that model, but I can't think of many. Snapchat kind of works like that, right?
I can understand why the author is somewhat frightened by the prospect, but fear doesn't justify inaction.
To say Twitter isn't free speech because it has limitations seems dubious. The U.S. is fairly well-regarded on the rights of speech, but even here there are limits. That doesn't mean free speech doesn't exist, it means it is paired with responsibility with penalties for failure to abide by those responsibilities.
As a similar example, Facebook's "no gun sales" policy now has people selling a pair of socks for $650 using a picture that just happens to have a gun in the background. (Examples: https://twitter.com/ecined/status/756940120826097664 https://twitter.com/monteiro/status/756639900796088320)
A dog barks. Several other dogs bark.
What? I thought they had to follow you for your Direct Message to reach them. So I can contact potential advisors through twitter if I can't figure out their email address?
https://support.twitter.com/articles/14606
It does say If you are sending Direct Messages to accounts that do not follow you, you may need to verify your phone number. and I did verify my phone number - still nothing.
Maybe it's because I'm not a celebrity of any kind, but it really seems like you get out of Twitter that which you put in.
[0] disregarding the misapplication of the word here, for a minute.
[1] Unless we count that time Zed Shaw called me an evil capitalist war monger or something like that.
I actually like this aspect of non-filtering. It forces exposure to differing opinions and makes people think.
Does the kind of posting culture the author writes extend to the international, non-anglocentric portion of the audience? I'm not entirely convinced it does.
For example Twitter is very popular in Turkey, where it's part of social culture [2][3], and while a great deal of 'western' content is consumed, most of the user-generated discourse is either casual or latently political. Trying to find English-speaking media covering abuse on Turkish Twitter only lead me to this article [4] about a political clique harassing users about political stances, and that was a sponsored effort, not 'organic' acts by self-organizing users.
Twitter is also fairly popular in Japan [5], where pop culture phenomena drive much of the engagement.
While I agree with nearly all of the points presented in this analysis, I'm just not sure it represents most of Twitter's non-US userbase, which is significantly larger in aggregate than its US users.
[1] http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/5797c8ca88e4a71b008...
[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomwatson/2014/03/25/turkeys-twi...
[3] https://www.socialbakers.com/statistics/twitter/profiles/tur...
140 Characters: I rarely see "thoughtful exchange of complex ideas" on Facebook which allows as much text as you can type.
Perverse Mechanics: it's the same metrics used on Facebook and every other social network out there.
Terrible Filtering: Same filtering as Facebook.
Twitter is intended to be public -- as private accounts vastly limit your audience, and at that point, you have much better alternatives to share content within your circle like Tumblr or Facebook or Instagram. You can adopt a pseudonymous identity, and most importantly, you can tag (ie. 'reply to') other public accounts, essentially arbitrary people.
He said, in fewer than 140 characters...
The fact that anyone in the world can read and reply to your tweets (and vice versa) is fundamental to Twitter.
It seems like what people want is an entirely different service, something like Slack or group chat with invite-only groups.
It makes me very uncomfortable.
It has almost limitless potential to take up all your attention, trying to stay up to date with what everyone is saying.
I can't think of a single thing I am missing out on, by not having an active Twitter account, but can think of many reasons to not have one.
I'm going to say something crazy, but I don't think the future of the internet is going to be a MORE social one. We're already at the saturation point, where people are just getting completely sick of updating their status, keeping up with a thousand conversations on Tinder that go no where, posting pics, tagging people, and on and on. I think there is going to be a breaking point where people are just going to actively unplug. You're already seeing it with the resurgence of board games. People want real human interactions.
Not that many people actually use Twitter.
That you think you are in the minority is a weird cultural phenom - people with the loud voices behaviours signal to us what is 'normative' even if it is not!
Because you see a lot of people using Twitter, you think 'everyone's doing it'. In reality - most people are far more neutral/central than the voices in the web. And most people just don't care about such things.
Try ignoring Twitter for a few months. You won't feel left out, trust me. It's mostly noise.
There was no time in the last decade were I felt "Gee, I wish I could put this in a 140 charter blurb and broadcast it to the world".
There are obviously millions who do do that, and that's fine. I just personally don't understand that drive. I don't even go there to consume stuff.
Very few times I remember looking there and seeing "Oh I have to keep coming back for more". Maybe I'd see an announcement of a release of my favorite tool or platform, but I am already subscribed to their mailing list. And can actually have meaningful discussions there as well.
I tend to be more "Social" on sites that focus on a specific topic like StackOverflow, Blogs that I follow, Facebook for friends and family, so Twitter offers nothing there.
Others seem to use twitter as a new aggregator where stories they care about get bubbled up by their followers. I use feedly though to track the hundreds of sites I care about and I've gotten very adept at filtering through the content I don't care about using it.
When I have used twitter, I've found the amount of content overwhelming and I hate that I feel this need to "Catch up" since last time I looked at it. It's endless monotony.
The same thing can be said for any social network. Some people see value, others see nothing but stress.
It was the second time I gave twitter a go. I must not be the target market.
Other than that, no idea. Oh sometimes TV shows use what you've said, which is neat.
Having this little gem read out by Daniel Radcliffe on Have I Got a Little Bit More News For You (Christmas 2012 I think?) https://twitter.com/ratsupremacy/status/280347060031614977 made my evening.
Additionally I can see all the latest industry news by just scrolling down a simple list. I subscribe to what I want to see, not to all the ISIS propaganda that is news websites these days.
Can't edit tweets
People follow you and unfollow you if you don't follow them back in a day or two.
Webcam porn stars like your tweets to draw attention to themselves.
Inconsistent user experience. Do I click the profile picture to edit my settings or edit my settings to change my profile picture? I always forget.
(This post: 136 characters)
Politics get violent, no matter where you express them, no matter the character limit. That's just the nature of the beast - half the people in the world disagree with the other half. Censorship is too difficult to execute at high level, because as it has been shown in the past, the people controlling the censorship are often biased.
The way I have found Twitter to be enjoyable is to not get involved in political threads (and yes, I have made the mistake of doing so, several times). I do not share the same political ideology as many of the people I interact with on Twitter, but I nonetheless respect their right to have an opinion. So long as I do not turn Twitter into my soapbox, I enjoy it (same thing applies to Facebook for me). If you completely block out people you disagree with (as many tweeters do), you will have a very narrow view of the world.
I think there is value in Twitter, and it could easily repair itself if it cared enough (unfortunately, it seems to care very little about improving itself at the moment).
One thing Twitter has done right: I have made more real-world friends (as in, people I have met in person) via Twitter than I have Facebook. Twitter encourages befriending people you do not know, Facebook still carries the privacy stigma.
Here are things that Twitter should do if it wants to improve:
- Fix the blue sticker. Stop handing it out to arbitrary people, and ignoring real influencers (example: thousands of video game streamers have the sticker, but Richard Garriott, one of the most influential game creators, does not). Allow people to apply for the sticker with a nonrefundable paid application (just enough money to pay the staff to evaluate whether or not they warrant the sticker).
- Monetize popularity the right way, and get rid of all the fake followers. Get rid of people who follow then unfollow just to get a high follower/following ratio. This makes people who build their follower base the honest way seem underrated/undervalued. Come up with a better ranking system than number of followers (i.e. how influential are your top 20 followers?).
- Emphasize and reward the flagging of fake accounts. Put the twitter population to work at eliminating spam and fake followers.
- Sometimes I want to express things that are not exactly advertisements, but if I want to promote them (using money) they will get marked as an ad ("promoted"). This just cheapens the value of whatever I want to promote. Its really not necessary; let users figure out what is an ad and what is not - it is pretty easy. Think of all the people willing to pay to get real exposure for their tweets (not spammy tweets, but just people that want to broadcast their ideas or content). This could be a business model on its own.
- Fix your software. I've noticed it makes my browser grind to a halt on some machines. Others have issued complaints across various platforms.
- There is much more, but I have probably already gotten too deep.
This article is hot on the heels of twitter banning Milo Y for cheerfully orchestrating yet another race baiting campaign against a black woman in cinema, and just a few months after Degoes himself got a lot of heat on Twitter and lost nearly all corporate sponsorship, having to rely on the businesses of friends for reduced funding for LambdaConf. This is a "hot take" in the Twitter parlance. And of course, banning Milo and shunning LambdaConf didn't fix the root causes or stem the tide of harassment of other behaviors that make the twitterLeft continue to be mad.
To directly address TFA's content, it's not possible in the modern era to be "non-political" because the definition of "non-political" varies so radically. More on this in a moment, but being "non-political" is neocon code for, "not offending me" (in the same way that "safe space" is actually code for "inoffensive space") and that's a rather complex and customized product to deliver.
It's very interesting though. We've all ended up in a place where the platform sort of holds us hostage. We feel compelled to share our bite-sized rhetoric chunks and then castigate people for being "unfair" and banning "rational argument" without considering that (and I stress, all sides of every issue has these people) a nearly unending torrent of ill-considered hate vomits at everyone involved in even the minutest controversy. _It's totally irrational to demand people remain rational under these circumstances._ The neurotypical human simply cannot be expected to handle the way Twitter amplifies negative data.
And yet, we cannot possibly deny the pivotal importance Twitter (and in abstract, media like it) has had on rapidly disseminating information that I think most people here would absolutely agree should get out. For example, Twitter rapidly spreads media and information about social unrest worldwide, has laid bare many abuses of official power in the West, and has been incredibly important for disseminating viewpoints during the current American election.
This conversation is valuable even though it is "political." It has value in every case where it brings raised awareness about the human experiences that define political conflict, social unrest, and violence worldwide.
The key difference is that in every case where twitter is used for news reporting and rapidly sharing personal perspectives, it trumps every other media. Twitter simply outshines every other media sharing design we've ever seen for news. Degoes is dead and demonstrably wrong that it's only cute and tidy tweets that get huge sums of retweets.
Many of the most successful tweets in the sphere of "politics" are just raw information. "Donald Trump said this." "Egypt's government is doing this." "This is happening in Libya." The same 140 character limit that quashes all but the most clipped conversations and promotes media actually severely limits the spin one can actually craft around any given fact and strongly favors media delivered so fast that any substantial working or processing has to be automated. That's probably to the platform's overall credit.
If Twitter has a future, it's as a news platform that makes everyone into a journalist. If Twitter is doomed, it's because it forces everyone into a common scrum of a debate where even if we could type more to more eloquently debate, it wouldn't matter because the overwhelming pressure of people tossing out quit hate fastballs would erode the conversation.
Those of us who are opponents of Degoes worldview overall are still in violent and absolute agreement that the platform needs more tools to curb 'harassment'. While we may differ on the subject of what harassment is in this case, we agree that ultimately Twitter needs to develop sophisticated tools for managing incoming content and filtering it.
They've refuse to do so. Maybe 2-3 years ago, we could argue it wasn't feasible at scale, but I think the industry has progressed to the point where we don't believe that anymore. It's entirely feasible to do even basic bayesian classifiers at "twitter scale". It could be done client side, even!
Ultimately, there have to be trapdoors in this for news and shocking information. A social conservative may not like it if we bring up some of Donald Trump's more outrageous turns of phrase, but if it's timely and corroborated data then it probably has value, and I suspect most people would appreciate receiving it even if it's only from one wing of their social graph.
Twitter's successful future isn't in some clever blocklist as Degoes suggests. I don't think it's about longer formats or an emphasis on rich media, either. It's in deeply understanding the content of tweets and finding a way to push timely, critical information to you via an amenable arm of your social graph. If you need to hear about the Muslim Spring through Pat Robertson to digest that information, so be it. That is you. If you need to hear about it through your favorite liberal pundit Colbert, that too is you. This is semantic analysis and machine learning in an unprecedented level of ambition, but I don't think anyone doubts it can technically be done.
Amazing your comment is top—given you didn't read the article.
> The man deserved what he got
From what I've seen (I'm no expert on the subject), that's debatable.
"Fked" is a cop out word used when you don't have enough mental juices left to actually describe what you want to describe.
