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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

#161

Post by danso »

zeroname wrote: post #112
hugg wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't blame you. Bookmarks is about as buried as lists are, but at least lists show up as an option on desktop mode.

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

#162

Post by madeofpalk »

donatj wrote: post #118
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.

Based on all the people commenting “f” on Facebook to subscribe, I don’t think this would actually change anything.

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

#163

Post by wafflesraccoon »

josefresco wrote: post #21

Not sure about likes but Twitter without retweets is a much better place. The people I follow rarely say something with their own voice, and I was tired of the "outrage" tweets for every new social issue. my feed is not much quieter, and when my Tweeps do say something, I pay attention.

People retweeted things before retweets were an official feature, ie ".RT ". Twitter adding retweets was something the community wanted.

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

#164

Post by donatj »

pjc50 wrote: post #159
donatj wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Slashdot had, 20 years ago, different types of upvote and downvote, so you could say things were "insightful" or "off topic". You could even alter the weightings attached to them so "Funny" would be negative rather than positive. Of course, slashdot was also where I first encountered trolling and regular attempts at posting racial hatred or obscene images into conversations...

Slashdots comments these days seem on par with YouTube.

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

#165

Post by pjc50 »

madeofpalk wrote: post #162
donatj wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Based on all the people commenting “f” on Facebook to subscribe, I don’t think this would actually change anything.

Surely "f" means "pay respect to", or is that a different meme?

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

#166

Post by pjc50 »

adrianN wrote: 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?

Twitter is of course not a debate site but a content marketing site. Ideas are just one kind of thing being marketed.

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

#167

Post by wafflesraccoon »

I use Twitter a lot (90k Tweets, 2.1k followers, my account is 8 years old), the best thing about the like is being able to end a conversation without saying anything. Liking a reply to is a great way to say "I've acknowledged your tweet with a positive connotation". I think Twitter forgets that the vast majority of content on the site isn't heated political debates but instead small communities of people who treat the website as a microblog.

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

#168

Post by zeroname »

Retra wrote: post #134
radmuzom wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"The data clearly shows that cancer causes smoking!"

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

#169

Post by 3pt14159 »

webninja wrote: post #129
fabricexpert wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah. Plus once you get over 700 followers things kinda tip and it's MUCH easier to get to 1000 followers than from 400 to 700. Each follower is a potential retweeter. It's the nature of the platform.

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

#170

Post by gambler »

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…

>Are there still some places left on Internet for high-quality discussions?

Web forums. There are good ones. They are independent of one another. Most forums I visit are centered around some subject, so people are bonded enough to be reasonably civil even if they disagree. Most aren't big enough to require much moderation. The best one have zero rules and very little trolling, but those are usually completely devoid of political stuff, since no one wants to spoil the good thing.

I think web forums are the best discussion medium developed so far. They support long-format content. They support hypermedia. They allow for offline conversations that don't get "dated" in 2 hours. They don't put thread authors on pedestal, unlike blogs.

I've heard there are mail/news groups out there too. Haven't used one aside from newsgroup for D Programming Language, though.

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