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

telegraph.co.uk

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

#111

Post by ognarb »

bitL wrote: post #93
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…

Due to debate getting worse and worse I left both Twitter and Facebook (they both became completely useless and just a waste of time); now it looks like most of low-quality "I am here too doing trivial things, applaud me!" posts moved over to LinkedIn, so I put my account to "passive" state there as well and am considering removing it altogether. Are there still some places left on Internet for high-quality discussio…

I'm on mastodon in a tech instance and for the moment I love it.

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

#112

Post by zeroname »

hugg wrote: post #85
zeroname wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Maybe, but that feature is pretty new and it doesn't even show up on the Desktop site. I've never even heard of it until now. I've been using the "like" Button for bookmarks since forever. Those are my bookmarks.

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

#113

Post by TangoTrotFox »

jobigoud wrote: post #61

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…

I'm still not entirely convinced this vote based filtering is really more effective than the basic old chronological threading it 'improved' upon. It opens itself up to extreme gaming and the threaded nature often results in what are, more or less, the exact same conversation chains happening multiple times in different places in a topic. Threaded + votes also results in a very artificial selection of top posts. Posts that are more viewed, and aren't awful, are more likely to get more votes further reinforcing their prioritization.

And maybe the most important thing of all. The vast majority of people do not check out new threads. So you get a very artificial selection of topics that end up making it onto the front page, since it's selected by the tiny minority that do view and vote upon the new topics.

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

#114

Post by orasis »

orasis wrote: post #109
jamiethompson wrote: post #100

It would be interesting to see how well upvote/downvote would work.

Just like here, it would quell community taboo opinions. If you want to be downvoted to oblivion on HN, just try pointing out potential moral issues with a new technology.

...and the above was instantly downvoted. Communities that use downvotes become blind to self-criticism.

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

#115

Post by zeroname »

radmuzom wrote: post #107
zeroname wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Upvoted - not sure why a perfectly reasonable comment is greyed out. My experience is same as yours - I only follow data scientists and data visualization specialists and my experience is absolutely brilliant. I also discovered some really great technical posts on R using Twitter.

> Upvoted - not sure why a perfectly reasonable comment is greyed out

It might be the hint that maybe sometimes people are at least somewhat responsible for their problems.

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

#116

Post by TangoTrotFox »

brilee wrote: post #108

Twitter suffers one simple problem: it conflates engagement with quality, and rewards people who create "engaging" content, rather than people who create "quality" content. So the problem isn't in what the users do; it's how Twitter filters the algorithmic feed to bring quality content to the top.

Unfortunately in the ad age this is the same for everything. It's the reason you see posts like "Have scientists discovered proof of an alien megastructure?" instead of "Light dimming from distant star system defies conventional explanation." even though I think the later headline is also still quite enthralling.

Things that get people clicking and active is what makes the money and so it's what gets optimized for.

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

#117

Post by nathan_long »

brilee wrote: post #108

Twitter suffers one simple problem: it conflates engagement with quality, and rewards people who create "engaging" content, rather than people who create "quality" content. So the problem isn't in what the users do; it's how Twitter filters the algorithmic feed to bring quality content to the top.

You're not wrong, but...

Distinguishing "quality" content from "engaging" content does not sound like a simple problem at all. It sounds like one that involves a whole lot of heuristics and opinion.

If it were easy, "clickbait" wouldn't be a thing.

I would say it is our own human inability to separate "engaging" from "quality" that causes this mess.

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

#118

Post by donatj »

jobigoud wrote: post #61

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…

I’ve often thought only being able to down vote with a comment would be a positive. There have been times where I have had posts down voted to hell, and legitimately have no idea why.

I think having to tell someone why you were down voting would be an improvement.

Maybe even work at so down vote comment doesn’t count if it it self has negative karma.

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

#119

Post by eksemplar »

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…

Can you remove comments from your twitter posts and block users from commenting if they spam?

Because giving users control of their own content frankly seem to fix many issues on social media.

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

#120

Post by fabricexpert »

donatj wrote: post #96

This seems like a massive mistake to me. I have 300ish followers. I’ll spend 5 minutes or so crafting a Tweet. If it gets one or two likes, that’s positive reinforcement, it feels worth my time. It’s rare I’ll get replies unless I said something someone else vehemently disagrees with. So you’re leaving all my reasons not to use the platform, while removing my reasons to use it. So now best case scenario is a retweet?…

Why bother with only 300 followers? It feels like twitter is only useful if you have several thousand followers, otherwise there's so much noise that you're just talking to empty room.
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