Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

telegraph.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 278 posts

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

#81

Post by mistermann »

hliyan wrote: post #26
blhack wrote: 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've always thought something like this would be a better way to approach public discussions, and their implementation seems to be fairly decent so far. There doesn't seem to be a whole bunch of activity yet, and not really much free style discussion under the few points I browsed, do you happen to know a particularly busy topic one could look at?

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

#82

Post by chosenbreed »

Ptyx wrote: post #46

Reminds me that Kierkegaard seems to have written about social media: "Man, this shrewd being, ponders day and night how he can invent new means to amplify the noise and how he can spread the sound and the empty talk as hastily as possible everywhere. What one achieves in such a way is probably soon the opposite: the message is soon brought to its lowest level of fullness of meaning, and at the same time, conversely,…

> Reminds me that Kierkegaard seems to have written about social media:

Interesting. Where did you get the quote from? I might add it my reading list :-)

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

#83

Post by village-idiot »

Honestly, I gave up on twitter. Changed my password to something random and long and locked myself out.

At this point I have 0 faith that Twitter can or wants to clean up the mess they’ve made. It’s been obvious for years that Twitter is trending in a dark way, yet it seems like corporate likes to pretend that they’re back in the happy early days.

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

#84

Post by sodosopa »

andrepd wrote: post #69
sodosopa wrote: post #63

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?

If you think it’s only a tweet, you’re naive. It’s the discussion and mainly it’s also links to the content. Just because it’s 140ish characters doesn’t mean it takes an instant to read and move on.

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

#85

Post by hugg »

zeroname wrote: post #72
pornel wrote: 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…

As others already have mentioned, there are actual bookmarks in Twitter, that is not the "like" button (click the share button in the Android app, for example)

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

#86

Post by mato »

p2detar wrote: post #56
nurino wrote: post #24

The fav button was a useful tool back when it meant "fav" as in "bookmark" and not "like". Maybe they should go back to that? I know they've recently added a "bookmark" button as well, but I hope they don't keep it hidden the way it is now. On the other hand: Twitter does not have to be a debate site. You can surely debate using it, but it's just a website where you can post short messages and follow your friends. Th…

I've always been confused about this change. I was using the "fav" exactly to bookmark tweets rather than approve their content.

+1. I've since switched (grudgingly) to sending myself DM's of Tweets that I want to "save for later". A poor substitute, but easy to reach for from the UI.

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

#89

Post by i_am_nomad »

chrisseaton wrote: post #33
meredydd wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Patton Oswalt did a series of tweets that were designed to be taken out of context - they made a clever point about that. Of course, that didn't stop him from continuing to use Twitter prolifically, so perhaps he missed his own point, or at least yours.
Post reply on HN