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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

#131

Post by xg15 »

mortenjorck wrote: post #99
chrisseaton wrote: post #33

Earlier 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. (…

I don't see how it has been "clear for a while" that this is the solution to all of twitter's problems.

> 3. (proposed system) Alice is not shown any of the replies to Bob's tweet. Bob's followers scream into the void.

The problem of online harassment is not (mainly) that the service UI becomes cumbersome to use for the victim. It's that everyone else can observe they are harassed and the victim loses control over their online presence. Your proposal would actually make this effect worse, because the victim wouldn't even notice anymore they are harassed.

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

#132

Post by DanBC »

mortenjorck wrote: post #99
chrisseaton wrote: post #33

Earlier 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. (…

Doesn't this already exist in "mute thread"?

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

#133

Post by donatj »

fabricexpert wrote: post #120
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.

There’s a sense of community, particularly around my programming languages of choice. I don’t need 1 million people to read my tweets to feel community. Just knowing that one or two people read it and appreciated it is enough.

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

#134

Post by Retra »

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.

Your personally sculpted use-patterns aren't really relevant to any of the problems that the platform causes within society. Twitter users still vote.

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

#135

Post by NeedMoreTea »

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.

> I don't know why they do it.

Quite simply they're playing to the crowd. That's what gets a reaction, so they do it more. Skinner box conditioning at its simplest.

Same outside the hardest moderated groups on Reddit. Threads that form a distinct pattern every time. For internet points, or twitter followers, or chasing meaningless numbers. :)

Sarcasm and smart works best if used judiciously.

How do you design a system to encourage quality debate? Going on the few places that have had quality debate (Here on HN mostly, Usenet prior to the inrush, well managed forums, Livejournal if you were careful), I'd suggest assembling an audience interested in discussion. Forums used to manage it.

Heavy moderation, not limiting post length and minimising buttons for gathering the lynch mob (I mean buttons for engagement) seems like it helps too. :)

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

#136

Post by ai_ia »

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…

This makes a lot of sense. Someone had earlier posted about the design of Mastodon which uses boosts instead of Retweet Quote. I think the issues are inherently with design. It is a good first step towards that direction.

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

#137

Post by netcraft »

mortenjorck wrote: post #99
chrisseaton wrote: post #33

Earlier 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. (…

I think there are certainly scenarios where this would be useful and preferable, but there is a quote-tweet use case for wanting to mention something to the people you follow but add your own support or opinion in good faith - it allows you to comment with at least a little context.

But this is probably me trying to salvage twitter for the non-toxic purposes and its probably a losing battle. The fact that what you propose is necessary is a terrible state of affairs.

I just wish someone else would come along and eat their lunch already.

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

#139

Post by conscion »

ctdonath wrote: post #88

"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.

There's an option to bookmark tweets. They then show up in your bookmarks section.

https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/product/2018/...

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

#140

Post by coldtea »

claudiawerner wrote: post #58
coldtea wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

I don't think we should confuse lack of willingness to read long form text on the Internet as a lapse in education of those people. A lot of people don't have time or the interest. I'm not sure if I qualify, but I'm a third year university student and all I've learned is that the Internet is tiring, and responding in detail will guarantee people don't read your comment. The amount of things discussed in philosophy an…

>I don't think we should confuse lack of willingness to read long form text on the Internet as a lapse in education of those people. A lot of people don't have time or the interest. I'm not sure if I qualify, but I'm a third year university student and all I've learned is that the Internet is tiring, and responding in detail will guarantee people don't read your comment

For some things, absolutely (after all 99% on the internet is crap). But if one can never do it, but can, e.g. spend 3 hours checking celebrity gossip, then there's a problem!

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