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

telegraph.co.uk

201–210 of 278 posts

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

#202
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…

[deleted]

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

#203

What does that actually mean. I use likes for kind of a reading list. Will I have to use an external tool now to manage that? Without likes, twitter is useless to me. /edit spelling

Ah, I see the bookmarks now. But it’s two taps instead of one :(

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

#204

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 t…

RT^

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

#205
post #118

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.

lobste.rs makes you select a reason, visible by the author, for downwoting a comment.

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

#206
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…

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…

"You must be part of some sort of culture war on Twitter."

Everything can become a culture war on Twitter. I follow a somewhat abstract modernist composer’s Twitter, which so far has been entirely about music and performance dates, and now it is up in flames because someone has decided to drag this artist into MeToo movement polemics.

It has also been pointed out that a lot of discussion forums for the arts and literature are pretty quiet these days compared to years past, and activity is only boosted when someone posts something politically provocative. We live in an unhealthy society where people are looking for a fight, and that desire might outweigh their interest in talking about anything besides politics.

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

#208
post #71
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of which, I've found this particular platform the best for rational debate: https://www.kialo.com We once actually used it to have an internal debate about development processes and effort estimation techniques.

I don't like that it encourages short "bullet points" rather than more involved discussion.

If it required you to make arguments in the form of First Order Logic statements and then did automated validation of them, then I would use it. I'll grant this is probably a niche use case. With the power of modern automated reasoning, and maybe automated fallacy detection, it seems a shame not to use that. Computer assisted argumentation would be a great forum feature.

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

#209

What does that actually mean. I use likes for kind of a reading list. Will I have to use an external tool now to manage that? Without likes, twitter is useless to me. /edit spelling

Ah, I see the bookmarks now. But it’s two taps instead of one :(

And, there is no API for bookmarks. So better to back likes up ASAP.

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

#210
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…

Is the tool, any tool, guilty for its misuse then? It’s always the people, never the tool. It’s you too, if you are unable to make your Twitter the useful environment you want.
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