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

telegraph.co.uk

71–80 of 278 posts

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

#71
post #26
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can't. Twitter makes people unnecessarily simplify arguments. Unnecessarily simple arguments -> People get upset because you're misrepresenting them -> essentially screaming at each other instead of discussing. The fundamental nature of the platform is bad. It's basically arguing in clickbait form.

Speaking of which, I've found this particular platform the best for rational debate: https://www.kialo.com We once actually used it to have an internal debate about development processes and effort estimation techniques.

I don't like that it encourages short "bullet points" rather than more involved discussion.

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

#72
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…

You must be part of some sort of culture war on Twitter. My experience is completely different. I don't follow people engaging in these battles and I don't post things that would be an engagement. It really is smooth sailing from there. Or, in the words of Steve Jobs:

"You're holding it wrong."

I use the "like" button for bookmarking interesting things. It would be unfortunate if I had to lose that because people on the "other side" of Twitter can't handle that responsibility.

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

#73
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…

Twitter is built short-burst/high-speed communication - the kind that works great for machines but not for humans. The result is that it has turned the world into one massive Medieval village; flash-spreading of rumours, hysteria, bigotry in-between maniacally virtue-signalling and choir preaching.

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

#74
post #44

Good. Please remove retweet count as well. Maybe Twitter can become a social network without herd mentality. And then facebook(incl. instagram) can also remove their 'reaction emojis'

If that happens, then the herd will just move on.

And nothing of any value is lost

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

#75
post #69

I use the “like” button a lot but mainly because Twitter doesn’t have a read later or save function. I don’t necessarily like because I enjoy the content, I like because I want to digest it at a different time

It's a tweet. How long can it take to read that you have to save it for later?

Are tweets all about a bunch of text though? There are snippets, photos, links, videos, and other formats of content that might be useful for future reference.

Sure, an external app to manage this kind of content is good enough, but what OP is trying to say is that it would be nice to have it in-built in the Twitter experience by default.

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

#76

They should do like HN: keep the button but remove the counter visibility. I would like to see this generalized to all social networks actually. You still get to do an appreciation gesture but without entering the popularity contest. Maybe the author of the post could still see the total. YouTube "dislike" button on comments also works like this, you can dislike but it's not counted. In this case it's a bit stupid si…

basically use it as a squishy toy

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

#77
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And it's often inversely proportional to popularity

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

#79
post #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, im…

> You cannot argue faithfully with 140 characters.

Most people couldn’t make a coherent argument even if you gave them 100,000 words.

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

#80
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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