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0 pointsstevofolife4y ago0 comments

But how can you blame Twitter for the divisive political culture when “we” are the ones generating the content?

I’m not sure if I understand how Twitter is systematically dividing the culture.

I really don’t think Twitter is the root cause of this. But I may be wrong.

0 comments

The problem is that these sites have optimized their algorithms to show you content which provoke a reaction, they don't care if positive or toxic. At least that's what FB does, dunno about Twitter tbh.

invisible4y ago

Whenever this topic comes up, I think a lot of people assume this is some elaborate ML algorithm, but I believe it's really just "trending things go up, _sometimes_ categorized and targeted."

It's a really basic algorithm that captures the equivalent of groupthink.

el-salvador4y ago

> The problem is that these sites have optimized their algorithms to show you content which provoke a reaction, they don't care if positive or toxic.

Twitter should learn from Tiktok and Spotify. Their algorithms work very differently.

Spotify has allowed me to discover some great songs just by creating a Song Radio from a song I liked. And it has also broadened the genres I listed. And spending 5 minutes on Tiktok's For You Page can help me feel better after a stressful day.

On the other hand 5 minutes on Twitter can easily lead to more stress in my case.

scarface744y ago

But FB doesn’t randomly put “toxic” content in my feed. It’s because I’m either following “toxic” news originations or someone showed your crazy uncle how to get on line and you accepted his friend request. My feed has pictures of family, dumb non political memes, people talking about sports or “uplifting sayings and scripture verses” (I usually unfollow people who post too much of the latter)

BitwiseFool4y ago

>"divisive political culture when “we” are the ones generating the content"

I feel like this "we" is misplaced. In a broad sense, yes, these acerbic tweets are indeed being made by our fellow citizens. That being said, Twitter tends to amplify the messaging of a small and vocal segment of it's vast userbase. It's a vicious cycle because exposure begets exposure and anger begets engagement.

gurkendoktor4y ago

It's hard to prove any of this, but I feel that I see a lot more astroturfing on Twitter than on FB.

lariati4y ago

I mean Marshall McLuhan's entire career is practically about this.

A medium of communication is not neutral. A book is not just word of mouth stories written down. There is a feedback loop in there that a book becomes something entirely different.

I mean if we take things to extremes and make a platform that we can only communicate with 4 letter words, what words do you think are going to dominate engagement and take over the platform?

wizzwizz44y ago

Twitter optimises for engagement. That's not optimising for controversy, but it's close. Shiri's scissor statements[0] aren't the fault of the people writing the training data; they're the fault of the people making them.

Twitter doesn't synthesise things, but it fosters an environment where people are driven to write more controversial, outrageous, engaging things by tight-loop-feedback classical conditioning. It's not magic – the people posting such things are partly to blame – but Twitter wouldn't have half as many problems if it just showed random tweets to people. Instead, it shows people what it thinks will keep people on Twitter; short term, that works, but long-term it destroys Twitter's value (and value of everything Twitter touches, as a side effect).

[0]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/

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