Twitter is like a free lifetime supply of the alcohol of your choosing. Yeah, some people can handle it just fine and not turn into full-blown alcoholics, but for many people there's just no way to not give in and have their lives ruined. People are really the problem more than Twitter, but man Twitter sure does enable mental dysfunction awfully efficiently.
Twitter to remove ‘like’ tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate
121–130 of 278 posts
Re: Twitter to remove ‘like’ tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate
#122Re: Twitter to remove ‘like’ tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Mastodon is cool, but it's far from immune to mob mentality – see Wil Wheaton thing a few months ago:
https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/31/17801404/mastodon-harassm...
Re: Twitter to remove ‘like’ tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The simple answer to this problem has been clear for awhile: Make responses to quote tweets opaque to the original author. 1. Bob quotes a tweet from Alice he thinks his followers will find enraging 2. Bob's followers reply to the tweet with predictable outrage and abuse 3. (present system) Twitter becomes unusable for Alice as she is flooded with mentions from all of the angry and abusive replies to Bob's quote 3. (…
It might improve things marginally but at this point it's just an arm's race. Furthermore the people who will manage to work around these limitations will also probably be the more radicalized fringe of the community who are probably the most problematic one as well. It will deter the more moderate and give a larger audience to the radicalized.
Look at how people on Reddit, 4chan and elsewhere manage to identify Twitter accounts from anonymized screenshots in mere minutes in order to have a constructive discussion with the author.
I don't think technology can fix a community as large and diverse as Twitter, 4chan or Youtube. The problem IMO is that it's not even a community anymore, it's more like an amalgamation of thousands of communities with vastly different opinions and mindsets. You can try to isolate the communities as you propose and you end up with something like Reddit with mostly secluded communities. Look at how well it's working for them...
That's why I prefer smaller communities like Hacker News where there's still an actual sense of communities. We all see the same articles, we probably have vaguely similar interests etc... You don't default to assuming that whoever you're disagreeing with is a literal fascist/communist/whatever.
Re: Twitter to remove ‘like’ tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate
#125Not that one can have much of a "quality debate" in 280 character bites, anyway.
Re: Twitter to remove ‘like’ tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate
#126"Like" was ruined when Twitter made it republish tweets, making it practically identical to retweet. It had been useful to mark posts for later review. Without it at all, there will be no way to "save" a tweet.
You can now turn off likes-as-retweets in your timeline.
I do not have twitter but based on this HN discussion here of the article it seems a lot of people are not aware of this functionality. I would say they have poorly advertised their settings and functionality which I believe is deliberate to obfuscate privacy settings as well.
Re: Twitter to remove ‘like’ tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate
#127> The feature was introduced in 2015 to replace “favourites”, a star-shaped button that allowed people to bookmark tweets to read later.
I have been using "favourite"/"like", like a bookmark, so am I going to lose all those now?
Re: Twitter to remove ‘like’ tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate
#128Isn't there a documented phenomenon that attaching praise or compensation (likes) to a behavior people would do anyway (tweeting) will essentially grind that behavior to a halt if the compensation is removed?
Intuitively I can't imagine twitter's numbers are going to fare well if they're handing out a third of the dopamine hits that they were previously.
Re: Twitter to remove ‘like’ tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate
#129This 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.
Everyone with several thousand followers had 300 once.
Re: Twitter to remove ‘like’ tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate
#130Reminds 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,…
I'm guessing this was about newspapers/journalists which probably isn't the message people around here would like.
"The lowest depth to which people can sink before God is defined by the word 'journalist'. If I were a father and had a daughter who was seduced I should despair over her; I would hope for her salvation. But if I had a son who became a journalist and continued to be one for five years, I would give him up." - Soren Kierkegaard