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Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

nytimes.com

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Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#271

Post by Traubenfuchs »

jalada wrote: post #268
md224 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been saying this for a little while now: Twitter should really try to capitalize on Tweetstorms. What they don't seem to realize is that Tweetstorms enable Twitter to be a kind of inverse annotation platform. Most annotation platforms enable large chunks of text to be dissected by readers, but a Tweetstorm is the opposite: the author specifies the exact segmentation of the text as they release it, and each segme…

Whilst everyone is plugging their own stuff, we’ve been working on a little thing called Stormchaser for aggregating Tweetstorms in your timeline and lists: https://www.stormchaser.io

Because twitter is an insufficient blogging platform and normal blogs don't attract enough views people use tools to turn blogposts into tweets and tweets into blogposts.

This is a bit ridiculous. Not trying to demean your product, but it shouldn't be necessary to have it.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#272

Post by zcam »

djfm wrote: post #66
usaphp wrote: post #52

While it's a topic about twitter I'd like to ask a question that always puzzles me. Twitter has 3900+ employees and good portion of those are developers, I just don't understand how can such a basic product that almost never pushes any updates or radical changes/improvements require so many employees. What the hell are they doing except for burning investors cash? Just curious...

It's probably harder than we think because of the scale of it.

Whatsapp is a good counter example.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#273

Post by the8472 »

DanBC wrote: post #265
the8472 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> harassment I do wonder if this word is even appropriate to the situation. Using twitter seems akin to stepping on a soap box on the town square and shouting every single word you say. Maybe nobody will pay attention to you. Or maybe you'll get a crowd of people who think favorably of you. Maybe someone else will step on his own box and have a conversation with you, but still there for everyone to hear. And it goes…

> maybe just because you're too loud. This would be the risk if you stepped on a box of a real place. Or maybe just because you're Jewish. https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/judgments/sentencing-remarks-of... > You have to realize that the mob shouting you down probably doesn't really mean to attack a person. It is verbally attacking a public speaker on the city plaza. You get treated akin to an unpopular politician, not a…

Well, actually illegal behavior is for the legal system to deal with.

But if twitter is a public, open platform with global reach then you will also get people who react to you like a public speaker. Which includes things that do not meet the legal harassment standards. Just the texual equivalent of booing, hissing and throwing insults at people to get them off the stage.

And I think people need to be aware of this when they state political opinions on the global twitter soapbox instead of doing it among their friends.

I'm sure changes can be made to dampen it. But this is the current situation. And I'm not sure harassment is a good way to describe it.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#274

Post by Traubenfuchs »

lordCarbonFiber wrote: post #37
fooey wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

r/The_Donald or /pol? Really though, Trump would fit right in on 4chan.

Nah, 4chan is the opposite of the kind of forum he craves. Everyone is a nameless faceless anon, so unless Trump starts leaking things about himself, he's just another boring racist troll in a crowd of boring racist trolls (just maybe 5x the average age).

He could use a tripcode. /pol/ would literally explode.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#275

Post by Traubenfuchs »

danso wrote: post #71
rb808 wrote: post #4

It feels like Twitter the company should be imploding, but it must be a secure business if its the next president's primary communication channel.

Frankly, I wouldn't mind if we saw an end to Trump's tweets. Not because of their content, but because of their impulsiveness, which is a behavior that Twitter's design encourages. Which is cool when it comes to celebrities and such in which it's fun to see what they think about sans filter. But the president of the United States speaks with the executive authority for an entire nation. It's questionable enough when…

But that is what people want! They want a president with human impulses (Or at least one who pretends to have them -you can never be too sure with Trump.). People want someone who says whatever he wants to say whenever he wants to say it. No holding back for anyone. They don't want dignity and restraint. That's why he won and it's still something a lot of people just don't understand.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#276

Post by baccheion »

Twitter's Senior Management rating on Glassdoor is a 3.0/5 (where the goal is 4.0/5 or higher), one of the lowest among Bay Area companies. It's down there with eBay (3.0), HP (2.7), PayPal (3.1), etc. That is, they clearly need to replace their entire management structure.

For reference: Facebook (4.3), Google (3.9), Uber (3.9), Snapchat (3.8), AirBnB (3.7), Quora (3.7), Dropbox (3.6), Abobe (3.6), Apple (3.5), Pinterest (3.5), and Microsoft (3.4).

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#277

Post by stonecodegump »

SapphireSun wrote: post #51
TheOneTrueKyle wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moment Dick left was when I felt a disturbance in the twitterverse (but I also have a disdain for Dorsey). It kind of felt weird to me that Twitter went from this platform of literally starting revolutions to managing expectations of its users in the name "fighting harassment". I now use it simply to tweet out my latest recipes...

Since the US election, Twitter has been headline newsworthy nearly every day. Whether you think that's a bad thing or not, it's still a potent force in the world, surprisingly to me.

I signed up specifically so I could follow Trumps tweets post election. It seems this is where government policy is going to be formed for a while.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#278

Post by achievingApathy »

inimino wrote: post #244
grzm wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Downvotes are stronger than upvotes, and the downvoted content gets buried. I haven't seen this mentioned before, nor does it match with my observations of behavior on the site, though I admit the calculations of how down/up votes contribute to dimming is not transparent. Do you have a reference of where the relative weighting of up vs down votes is discussed?

Sorry, I don't. And I imagine that discussing the details in public would just create more work for the admins and limit their options for tweaking it; probably more trouble than it would be worth to make it transparent. Totally anecdotal, it's just my perception that a few downvotes are enough to grey something out, a few more and it gets killed and people stop seeing it. The first-order effect is that the worst con…

If you are interested, the Reddit admins discuss this at length and were planning to do this when /r/the_donald took over the entire front page. There are logs of their conversation that goes into the math.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#279

Post by [deleted] »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #8
chollida1 wrote: post #3

I think its valid to ask if Jack Dorsey is the next executive to leave. The moment Anthony Noto went to Twitter, all wall street could talk about was that he was brought in to sell the company. Who ever the next CTO is, they're going to have some tough decisions to make. Twitter already has to pay out an extreme amount of compensation in stock options just to get and retain talent. I don't want this to seem inflammat…

> They seem to be in the range of say PayPal in that they have a decent reputation but they aren't really a name that gets you any resume recognition anymore. PayPal doesn't get you "name recognition" anymore? In fact I would expect Twitter would garner more because of their larger open source initiatives but I still hear lots of chatter about PayPal and the people who have worked there. Maybe I'm just in a weird bub…

[deleted]

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#280

Post by inimino »

the8472 wrote: post #267
inimino wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since the election I've been spending time on HN and to a lesser extent Twitter. Every time I visit Twitter I find myself instinctively reaching for the downvote button, but there isn't one. About the only thing you can do when someone says (or retweets) something totally idiotic on Twitter is either unfollow, or, of course, reply. In other words, there is no way to register disapproval without simultaneously calling…

The problem with that is that twitter is a single platform with different communities. Implementing downvotes would mean that group A could just downvote posts of group B and vice versa. If downvotes weigh heavier than upvotes then even small groups could bury larger groups into oblivion. Add in sockpuppets and it gets worse. I don't think users attempting to moderate others is a solution. It would reduce the diversi…

Indeed. I didn't go into this level of detail, but this would clearly be a different problem than what we have on HN, where downvoting enforces norms across the whole community. Twitter is exactly as you said, a group of (overlapping) communities sharing a platform. We all see the same comments on HN, but on Twitter everyone has their own feed.

Downvoting on Twitter would need to have very different characteristics for the reasons you mention.

On the other hand, you actually do need users to moderate other users if you want to maintain a civil community. The alternatives are heavy moderation, which doesn't scale and introduces an institutional bias, or a free-for-all, where emotion drowns out thought, which is roughly where Twitter is today.

I absolutely agree the social graph should be leveraged. What if downvotes only by people you follow affect your feed? You already see retweets only from people you follow, so the idea that your followees influence what you see is part of the platform today. This just extends that influence into the negative direction.

Posters absolutely need to see the downvotes they are getting, the point of the feature is to moderate behavior, not just to create a filter bubble.

Obviously it's not a trivial issue and rolling out new features at Twitter's scale isn't easy either. However I'm pretty confident, with all the engineering talent they have, they could make progress if it was actually a priority.

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