Twitter and the Internet War • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter and the Internet War

#21

Post by intended » Tue, Feb 20, 2018, 5:01 AM UTC

aptwebapps wrote: post #11

danso wrote: post #2

This is the excerpt I've seen being tweeted about this piece: At the same time, her defenders say, Harvey has been forced to clean up a mess that Twitter should have fixed years ago. Twitter’s backend was initially built on Ruby on Rails, a rudimentary web-application framework that made it nearly impossible to find a technical solution to the harassment problem. If Twitter’s co-founders had known what it would becom…

The most charitable interpretation I can come up with is that this is a distortion of someone claiming that they couldn't build better anti-harassment tools because of excessive technical debt and maybe a lack technical acumen or focus.

Thats not charity - thats donating credibility.

Whoever was quoted has precisely Zero current understanding of moderation and the challenges it faces.

And worse - they haven't reflected on what "technical acumen" resulting on anti-harassment tools means.

Effective anti harassment tools can suss out intent, and by nature are also censorship tools.

Effective tools which can identify intent are so far past invasion of privacy, that they may as well be categorized as assaults on specific ideas.

If twitter does come up with this magical tool, then it's a sure bet that other nation states will also have this magic algorithm.

This rule applies to all lesser tools for "anti-harassment".

The solution sadly IS hiring more moderators, and journalists vetting.

Which I suspect is impossible at the scale and message type twitter operates on.

Re: Twitter and the Internet War

#22

Post by craftyguy » Tue, Feb 20, 2018, 5:05 AM UTC

oceanghost wrote: post #16

icelancer wrote: post #6

Lost? How is Twitter losing the Internet War? Their platform is more influential than ever and helped to seriously impact a presidential election (the results of which not too many people in media are happy with, fair enough). Yes, the platform is a failure in so many ways - failure to protect the identity and safety of the people on it. (Though as someone who has served a subpoena to Twitter, let me tell you somethi…

You're going to think I'm trolling, but I'm not-- What value does Twitter provide to ordinary people? I have friends who are celebrities in their industries or trying to market themselves-- but other than that it seems like the most hostile place imaginable. Why would I want to participate in that?

In the US, most ordinary people pay attention to twitter's top customer: donald trump

Re: Twitter and the Internet War

#23

Post by adventured » Tue, Feb 20, 2018, 5:08 AM UTC

akhilcacharya wrote: post #17

booleandilemma wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a .NET developer, not a ruby apologist, but fisher-price infrastructure ? Gimme a break. Someone go tell GitHub, AirBnb, Hulu, and Bloomberg.

Bloomberg?

They work with ruby on rails, eg -

https://job-openings.monster.com/Full-Stack-Senior-Software-...

https://job-openings.monster.com/Senior-Web-Engineer-BLAW-Ne...

Bloomberg is fairly well known for having top notch technical capabilities (in their general space). What they build tends to work, work well, and have high reliability.

Re: Twitter and the Internet War

#24

Post by marssaxman » Tue, Feb 20, 2018, 5:08 AM UTC

oceanghost wrote: post #16

icelancer wrote: post #6

Lost? How is Twitter losing the Internet War? Their platform is more influential than ever and helped to seriously impact a presidential election (the results of which not too many people in media are happy with, fair enough). Yes, the platform is a failure in so many ways - failure to protect the identity and safety of the people on it. (Though as someone who has served a subpoena to Twitter, let me tell you somethi…

You're going to think I'm trolling, but I'm not-- What value does Twitter provide to ordinary people? I have friends who are celebrities in their industries or trying to market themselves-- but other than that it seems like the most hostile place imaginable. Why would I want to participate in that?

I wonder the same. It has always seemed to me that Twitter gets a disproportionately large share of media attention simply because Twitter happens to be personally useful to the people doing the reporting. For those of us who are less interested in drama-hunting and reputation-mongering, its utility is unclear.

Re: Twitter and the Internet War

#25

Post by mattbierner » Tue, Feb 20, 2018, 5:14 AM UTC

danso wrote: post #2

This is the excerpt I've seen being tweeted about this piece: At the same time, her defenders say, Harvey has been forced to clean up a mess that Twitter should have fixed years ago. Twitter’s backend was initially built on Ruby on Rails, a rudimentary web-application framework that made it nearly impossible to find a technical solution to the harassment problem. If Twitter’s co-founders had known what it would becom…

The only way I can understand the argument is that their early UX / technical design influenced the community and culture that we now see. From the start, it seems like Twitter was designed for hottakes and emotional broadcasting, and countless little design decisions emphasized this (everything from the original 140 character limit to the UX around retweeting and followers.) The modern platform’s culture grew out of these early decisions and now embodies them in many ways, so much so that it’s difficult now to imagine that twitter could ever have been anything different.

But what if following had only been bi-directional for example? What if the platform never displayed retweet or star count? What if muting and blocking had been built in from the start? What if you could only @mention people who follow you?

It’s very possible that twitter would never have become Twitter if these things had been different, but that’s also my point. So while it may not be a technical root cause in the classic coding sense, I can buy the argument that many of twitter’s early technical and design decisions (as well as their early platform policies and who the first adopters were) led to their present difficulties

Re: Twitter and the Internet War

#26

Post by SllX » Tue, Feb 20, 2018, 5:16 AM UTC

oceanghost wrote: post #16

icelancer wrote: post #6

Lost? How is Twitter losing the Internet War? Their platform is more influential than ever and helped to seriously impact a presidential election (the results of which not too many people in media are happy with, fair enough). Yes, the platform is a failure in so many ways - failure to protect the identity and safety of the people on it. (Though as someone who has served a subpoena to Twitter, let me tell you somethi…

You're going to think I'm trolling, but I'm not-- What value does Twitter provide to ordinary people? I have friends who are celebrities in their industries or trying to market themselves-- but other than that it seems like the most hostile place imaginable. Why would I want to participate in that?

As a massive collection of humans sending messages to each other and broadcasting across the board, it has a lot of "stuff" to offer.

Exactly what this "stuff" is comes down largely to your own ability to curate a decent list of providers of "stuff". This doesn't necessarily differentiate it from any other large provider of "stuff" hosting enormous groups of humans messaging each other and broadcasting "stuff", e.g. reddit, but it is still host to certain groups of humans for which Twitter is their platform of choice to air this "stuff" out.

Product announcements, celebrities, certain subsets of certain industries (e.g. I used to follow a curated collection of Mac indie developers back when I was 15 and wanted to be one), activists, customer support reps, politicians, whatever, if you can think of it, you can probably find it has a place somewhere on Twitter and that is what makes Twitter valuable to you. It might be entertainment value, knowledge, news, lifehacks or whatever, and maybe for you personally you have much better sources for all of that, but Twitter just happens to be the place others get some or all of this from.

Then there are the people that treat it like a diary, or journal, or a place to vent. For them, Twitter isn't for following a curated collection of people, for them Twitter is just a place to talk. You know, a messaging platform.

Full disclosure: haven't personally used Twitter in years other than as a file transfer host from a particular video game console lacking decent file transfer options. It is valuable to other people, I just prefer my "stuff" in a different format than what Twitter provides.

Re: Twitter and the Internet War

#27

Post by ikeyany » Tue, Feb 20, 2018, 5:17 AM UTC

oceanghost wrote: post #16

icelancer wrote: post #6

Lost? How is Twitter losing the Internet War? Their platform is more influential than ever and helped to seriously impact a presidential election (the results of which not too many people in media are happy with, fair enough). Yes, the platform is a failure in so many ways - failure to protect the identity and safety of the people on it. (Though as someone who has served a subpoena to Twitter, let me tell you somethi…

You're going to think I'm trolling, but I'm not-- What value does Twitter provide to ordinary people? I have friends who are celebrities in their industries or trying to market themselves-- but other than that it seems like the most hostile place imaginable. Why would I want to participate in that?

Entertainment, and something to do, for the most part. If you look at who makes the most money in our society, it's obvious what "ordinary people" value.

Re: Twitter and the Internet War

#28

Post by adventured » Tue, Feb 20, 2018, 5:21 AM UTC

icelancer wrote: post #6

Lost? How is Twitter losing the Internet War? Their platform is more influential than ever and helped to seriously impact a presidential election (the results of which not too many people in media are happy with, fair enough). Yes, the platform is a failure in so many ways - failure to protect the identity and safety of the people on it. (Though as someone who has served a subpoena to Twitter, let me tell you somethi…

> And the platform is failing revenue-wise, yes.

Their business is in the best condition it has ever been in. They're finally profitable. Their business appears to have reached full self-sustainability. Dorsey has been driving it toward that since he returned. And not just at a low level, it looks like they can punch upwards of $450m-$500m in net income on an annualized basis in the near future. They also have $3.8 billion in cash.

Can they drive much revenue growth from here, without user growth? That's going to be very tough. The profitability gives them a lot of breathing room to work from.

Re: Twitter and the Internet War

#29

Post by firasd » Tue, Feb 20, 2018, 6:04 AM UTC

My general feeling when it comes to questions about harassment on Twitter is that people look at it too much as a policy issue ("you're not banning and deleting enough accounts according to my ideological stance"), which has its place, but there's a lot of product aspects that make it such a shouty place.

A good example is the way the 'quote tweet' feature is often used to start a pile-on. It's not a bad feature in itself, but there is a significant portion of usage that lends itself to starting food fights. Could things be improved by, for example, a setting that limits quote-tweets to people who follow you? There's a lot of dynamics like that which can be explored.

Re: Twitter and the Internet War

#30

Post by akhilcacharya » Tue, Feb 20, 2018, 6:22 AM UTC

adventured wrote: post #23

akhilcacharya wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bloomberg?

They work with ruby on rails, eg - https://job-openings.monster.com/Full-Stack-Senior-Software-... https://job-openings.monster.com/Senior-Web-Engineer-BLAW-Ne... Bloomberg is fairly well known for having top notch technical capabilities (in their general space). What they build tends to work, work well, and have high reliability.

I've worked at Bloomberg, I did not know they used RoR in large external facing apps. Only heard about it for smaller internal sites. My team worked on things very far from BLaw and BVault implementation details though.