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Twitter to remove ‘like’ tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate

telegraph.co.uk

31–40 of 278 posts

Re: Twitter to remove ‘like’ tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate

#32
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a good thing if they get rid of it and not just replace it with another symbol as they did with the favorites. Either people like your stuff and want to share it, or they don't.

> Either people like your stuff and want to share it, or they don't. Eh not really. Consider my use case. I don't tweet, retweet or anything. My profile is set to private. I mainly use Twitter for updates on the local public transport (and sport scores). Last week for instance the metro system had a really bad failure. At the end of the day, their Twitter account posted a big apology and you could see whoever was man…

If there are no likes, then shares are the new likes.

If you share to an empty audience, it will still be added to the share count.

Re: Twitter to remove ‘like’ tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate

#33
post #20

I don't think quality of "debate" on Twitter can be salvaged. Everything was designed for "engagement" and turned out to be rage-inducing machine. Quote-retweet is used to send followers to harass the person responsible for the awful tweet. RT is choir-preaching (you're a monster if you don't RT that kicking babies is bad), and replies to twitter-celebrities' tweets give everyone their 15 minutes of fame to post the…

"Every single sentence has a button for taking it out of context" is the best single-sentence summary of Twitter I have yet seen. Thank-you.

People seem determined to write things on Twitter that are absolutely begging to be taken out of context. Sarcasm, inside-jokes, rhetorical hyperbole, assumptions that everyone is following the same story they are, and so on. I don't know why they do it.

Re: Twitter to remove ‘like’ tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate

#34
post #20

I don't think quality of "debate" on Twitter can be salvaged. Everything was designed for "engagement" and turned out to be rage-inducing machine. Quote-retweet is used to send followers to harass the person responsible for the awful tweet. RT is choir-preaching (you're a monster if you don't RT that kicking babies is bad), and replies to twitter-celebrities' tweets give everyone their 15 minutes of fame to post the…

[deleted]

Re: Twitter to remove ‘like’ tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate

#35
post #7
post #4

How can debate on Twitter be good when they limit the length of the arguments that you can make to two or three sentences?

Agreed. Discussion and debate should be more than hot takes.. That said, most people won't read a wall-of-text from a stranger - HN being the exception ;-)

>That said, most people won't read a wall-of-text from a stranger - HN being the exception

Then most people need better education (and not just vocational training).

Re: Twitter to remove ‘like’ tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate

#36
Reposted every time it's relevant: https://twitter.com/actioncookbook/status/684515262712967170...

"USERS: we love twitter but it has problems

TWITTER: great we'll fix them

USERS: do you want to know what they are

TWITTER: absolutely not

USERS: you're alienating the people who actually use your product

TWITTER: likes are now florps

USERS: what

TWITTER: timeline goes sideways"

(The irony is that likes used to have a clear, simple use: bookmark something for your own reference while also telling the poster that you liked it. Twitter ruined this by injecting "liked" tweets by people you follow into your timeline, collapsing the distinction between like and RT.

Retweet is actually a user-originated function, people used to manually retweet by pasting and putting "RT" at the front.)

Re: Twitter to remove ‘like’ tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate

#37
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit can be quite good for that too.

To counter the downvotes: yes, Reddit can be a good forum for productive dialogue. It depends on the subreddit you're on—there are some subs (especially smaller and/or ones with heavy, thoughtful moderation) that are real gems.

Agreed,the quality varies a lot between subreddits.

Re: Twitter to remove ‘like’ tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate

#38

So I guess I'll have to retweet things now to bookmark them. It'd be nice if Twitter could reconcile it's shitty RSS replacement and crazy-drunken-uncle-shouting-into-the-void halves into something coherent.

I recommend to use a real bookmarking service like Kozmos (https://getkozmos.com) or Pocket instead of Twitter’s bookmarking tool. You can’t search and organize anything on Twitter, and you’ll lose them when you delete your account like I did.

P.s: I’m the founder of Kozmos, but honestly would promote any bookmarking service over Twitter features.

Re: Twitter to remove ‘like’ tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate

#39
post #20

I don't think quality of "debate" on Twitter can be salvaged. Everything was designed for "engagement" and turned out to be rage-inducing machine. Quote-retweet is used to send followers to harass the person responsible for the awful tweet. RT is choir-preaching (you're a monster if you don't RT that kicking babies is bad), and replies to twitter-celebrities' tweets give everyone their 15 minutes of fame to post the…

Completely agree. The day they decided to go with ads there was no coming back. It's a public company now and they have an obligation towards their shareholders. Ads -> grabbing eyeballs -> evoking reactions. It's quite impossible to balance the interests of your customers(advertisers)vis users if one of them is not paying. They are too far along to do that.

Re: Twitter to remove ‘like’ tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate

#40
1. You cannot argue faithfully with 140 characters. 2. Isn't a "like"/upvote tool necessary for debates? There isn't a formal judge to rate comments/arguments. Who "wins" is decided by the (very) biased community. This is obviously a bad idea as most communities aren't open to unpopular ideas. However, if you trust the community as a whole you can expect general consensus about sensitive topics such as gay rights, immigration etc.

If you would throw out any evaluation tool then extremist options have the same visibility as any other comment. Meaningful rejection would then be only possibly by 'spamming' a similar counter argument.

I think it's pretty much impossible to create a meaningful rating system because of the said biased 'judges' - removing the like functionality doesn't seem like an improvement though.

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