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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

#251

Post by ajcodez »

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. (…

In the notification settings there are advanced filters to remove notifications from accounts that you don't follow, don't follow you, new accounts, accounts that have unconfirmed contact information. I don't know any other platform that offers so much control. I have been lucky to never experience this type of abuse but if I were under attack I would apply advanced filters until the storm passes. Twitter could certainly do better (and could take more of a stand against cut and dry abuse), but in the meantime there are tools in the hands of users today to take control of unwanted notifications.

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

#252

Post by 7000skeletons »

simias wrote: post #124
mortenjorck wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Twit…

>...in order to have a constructive discussion with the author.

Yeah, I think I've seen a few of those. Nothing says constructive discussion like death threats.

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

#253

Post by gambler »

danso wrote: post #243
gambler wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much. Their design isn't just bad, it's perfectly bad. No content structure. No context. No sense of "discussion spaces". No way to post longer, more nuanced messages. Encourages garbage in messages. (Tags, emojis, @something should be external. The more stuff like that you put in message, the less they look like actual statements made by people. This dehumanizes authors in subtle but extremely important ways.…

I think Twitter's move to 280 characters led to a massive improvement in overall quality -- I rarely find myself bumping into the limit, and I find that threaded tweets can read as well as short articles. A good use of the format can be found in the BBC's "Anatomy of a Killing" investigation into a military killing in Cameroon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18060709 I enjoy and have learned more from the discu…

>I think Twitter's move to 280 characters led to a massive improvement in overall quality

280 is a far more reasonable limit than 140, but it's too little, to late. The Twitter "mindset" has already settled and it's not pretty.

> There's no where else I can get into a discussion/argument with anyone from Elon Musk

In most cases it's an illusion of a discussion. You think you're being heard, but for a person with as many followers as Musk you're just an ant in an anthill.

If you think Twitter has discussions, you haven't seen actual discussions online.

I've visited some message boards where the same core group of people participated for years. We did elaborate projects together. The discussions of some subjects there fundamentally changed my outlook on things. Some of those people became my actual friends I keep in touch with. "Social" media has almost none of this. People can cite counter-examples, but those are one in a hundred thousand and could be easily replicated without social media anyway.

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

#254

Post by donatj »

weberc2 wrote: post #183
avip wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a very interesting idea. Force constructive feedback.

To downvote, please tell us what you don't like about this comment > asdfasdfasdf

I think that could be resolved by downvotes losing their power if they themselves get downvoted.

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

#255

Post by SyneRyder »

dang wrote: post #240

There's some doubt about this: https://twitter.com/TwitterComms/status/1056913093471670273 http://fortune.com/2018/10/29/twitter-like-button-staying/

To save others a clickthrough on that tweet from Twitter - it's not quite a denial, more of a "Not yet":

"We are rethinking everything about the service to ensure we are incentivizing healthy conversation, that includes the like button. We are in the early stages of the work and have no plans to share right now."

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

#256

Post by dsfyu404ed »

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.

> There have been times where I have had posts down voted to hell, and legitimately have no idea why.

It happens when you've struck a nerve but nobody wants to try and refute you because engaging in debate comes with a risk of you actually being right and them actually being wrong and some part of their ideology hinges on the correctness of whatever you're challenging.

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

#257

Post by zeroname »

zeroname wrote: post #115
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.

> Upvoted - not sure why a perfectly reasonable comment is greyed out It might be the hint that maybe sometimes people are at least somewhat responsible for their problems.

New Rule:

If you don't want the "like" button on Twitter, you're not allowed to press the "downvote" button on HN.

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

#258

Post by Operyl »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #223
Kye wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> "Your proposal would actually make this effect worse, because the victim wouldn't even notice anymore they are harassed." There's a perspective where this is a good thing, but I think I know where you're coming from. I've seen people on the receiving end of these attacks who say they still want to know about it so they know about any tangible threats.

It could be argued though that when it's known that the quote-tweeted person won't see replies to the quoting tweet, there's no point for a harasser to make threats that won't be received.

I’d argue a fair number of people want to know what people are saying about them, it seems like instinct almost. So does it have any affect at that point if everyone knows everyone will look?

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

#259

Post by ahakki »

hugg wrote: post #85
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…

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)

In the past the Twitter “Like” feature had a star instad of a heart and was called “favorite”

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

#260

Post by danso »

gambler wrote: post #253
danso wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Twitter's move to 280 characters led to a massive improvement in overall quality -- I rarely find myself bumping into the limit, and I find that threaded tweets can read as well as short articles. A good use of the format can be found in the BBC's "Anatomy of a Killing" investigation into a military killing in Cameroon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18060709 I enjoy and have learned more from the discu…

>I think Twitter's move to 280 characters led to a massive improvement in overall quality 280 is a far more reasonable limit than 140, but it's too little, to late. The Twitter "mindset" has already settled and it's not pretty. > There's no where else I can get into a discussion/argument with anyone from Elon Musk In most cases it's an illusion of a discussion. You think you're being heard, but for a person with as m…

To be clear, I agree I and everyone else is just an ant in Musk's anthill of followers, but there's no disputing that he has directly replied to and argued with me, as he has with dozens/hundreds of other random users. Of course, Musk is an outlier in that respect. Twitter's more day-to-day benefits is the serendipity of finding others interested in the same topics as I am. Most of my personal network is not on HN nor Reddit (or working in tech, for that matter), but more than a few are on Twitter, even as just lurker accounts.

You're mistaking tweets as being the only form of discussion on Twitter. What starts as tweets can go into a private discussion or email. My biggest project came from me tweeting about a data-scraping exercise I did -- turned out someone at a major news org was doing an investigation into the topic, and we ended up collaborating instead of competing with each other. I can't think of any other way we would've found each other, because I was only tweeting to show off something I did, and news orgs don't talk about investigations in-progress.

The other form of content on Twitter is the non-discussion -- i.e. when someone goes on a long tweet thread, and isn't particularly interested in debating with every reply. This is very similar to an old-fashioned blog post -- but the engagement experience is much different. Random people from all walks of life may publicly respond with personal stories to a trending topic (e.g. mental health), in a way that feels much more natural and frictionless than creating a blog post, if you even had a blog to begin with.

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