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

telegraph.co.uk

141–150 of 278 posts

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

#142
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,…

I love Kierkagard even more after reading this. I can't find the quote after a few targeted searches, where is it from? Thanks for sharing

It's a quote I read in German translated here via DeepL with slight changes. Seems like it is part of this work from 1851:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Self-Examination

From this chapter:

http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/zur-selbstprufung-der-gegen...

Couldn't immediately find an English version of the text.

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

#144
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,…

Do you mean Soren Kierkegaard, the philosopher who lived in the 1800s?

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

#145
post #4

How can debate on Twitter be good when they limit the length of the arguments that you can make to two or three sentences?

Actually you can just use multiple tweets. It's what people have been doing for quite some time to get around the 280 characters limitation. And I have seen many insightful discussions on Twitter. Not everything has to page long retorts.

These are horrible to parse, and make me want to remind everyone that blogs still exist.

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

#146
post #35
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Discussion and debate should be more than hot takes.. That said, most people won't read a wall-of-text from a stranger - HN being the exception ;-)

> 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 see why internet strangers think their walls of text are owed eyeballs. Time is short, the amount of content on the internet is near-infinite, much of that content is just noise, and without a very serious assumption that a source is both trustworthy and informative you'd be better off discarding it and moving on.

Reading things thoroughly takes time, and time is money. Scientists are paid to read the current literature on their field. Government and corporate analysts are paid to collect data and provide synthetic memos to executives. Journalists are paid to read sources as a background to their story. If you want me to read your wall of text, you either have to convince me that you are worth reading (through your reputation) or pay me to do it.

HN is indeed an exception in that I find the site to be a kind of guarantee that most of users are well-versed in tech topics and thus have something interesting to say. In that sense the whole website provides a reputation to its users. Twitter has no such guarantee.

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

#147
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,…

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 u…

Given the extreme anti-tech sentiment and inaccurate reporting pervasive in among journalists. I think many here would totally agree with this statement.

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

#148
I always thought that the dismal number of likes tweets usually get is a sign that nobody actually reads tweets.

On Twitter, I regularely see accounts with tens of thousands of followers. Yet their tweets get less then 10 likes. So a like to follower ratio of 0.1% or so.

On Instagram the situation is pretty different. Like to Follower ratio is more in the 1% range.

What is the reason for this difference?

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

#149

"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/...

Wasn't "Like" originally bookmark? Have we gone full circle?

Edit: I was thinking of favorites. I used favorites as bookmarks, so I got it mixed up.

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

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having studied philosophy, I can say with some confidence that your comment is the straw man, not mine. My comment may have flaws, but the straw man fallacy isn't one. Also, it's been my experience that a particular segment of the population loves to use "straw man", "whataboutism", "russian bot", etc attacks. Pointing out hypocrisy, making an observation or caricaturing one side isn't a straw man.

Your comment was flagged before I could read. Really curious...:-)

If you turn on 'showdead' in your profile you can read downvoted/flagged comments.
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