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How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t

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Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t

#191

Post by darkpuma »

theNJR wrote: post #132

A lot to unpack recently with Twitter and Jack. A few thoughts. 1. Jack doesn’t seem passionate about product, especially Twitter. 2. Kara seems to lack the vocabulary to talk about product which is both surprising and confusing, given her niche and time spent in it. She also doesn’t understand that Twitter has evolved way beyond Jack. “Why don’t you know, it’s your product!” she kept asking. The fact he doesn’t know…

>It’s about human connection and conversation in the medium of real time public text. It doesn’t work.

Your conclusion is too broad. It doesn't work on twitter, but I've seen it work just fine on other mediums. In fact I've seen people reconcile and resolve their differences on IRC when they couldn't/wouldn't do it face to face.

Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t

#192

Post by ConceptJunkie »

bilbo0s wrote: post #90
matwood wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we hang out in different circles, but I've never heard the level of insults IRL that I have read on Twitter. I have a feeling the large majority of those doing the insulting would be terrified to say those things to someones face because they know a physical altercation would end up being the common response.

HN User mc32 is being overly general in characterizing working class people. Lower working class people aren't out insulting each other and using expletives any more than "white collar" people. I live in both worlds, and that's just a stereotype with no basis in reality. In fact, I'd say that the average tech type speaks in a far more base fashion than most of the garbage men I know. (Certainly more base than any of…

mc32 didn't say that working class people are constantly insulting each other, he described how they would likely react to insults.

Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t

#193

Post by vb6lives »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #22

Regardless of what Twitter is or isn't, how in the world is the CEO surprised by how his product works? And we're not talking some obscure corner case, but basic use case? Having a conversation was a learning experience for him and his team? Such a basic level of unfamiliarity with their own product gives me a lot of pause that he can do anything to guide the company on fixing rampant automated accounts or making it…

> Having a conversation was a learning experience for him and his team?

Of course not. It's boilerplate CEO speak. It's a way of "answering" the question without making any commitments and seems to terminate any further discussion.

Joe Rogan and Sam Harris discuss this on Joe Rogans podcast #1241

Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t

#194

Post by ConceptJunkie »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #63
harryf wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially when you can deliver insults without the threat of receiving a smack in the face back

In the UK you can get arrested for tweeting in opposition to the groupthink, not a smack in the face as such, ...

... but just as violent, only administered much more slowly.

Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t

#195

Post by 5trokerac3 »

elcapitan wrote: post #161

In this case, it's probably not twitter's fault that the conversation fails, but Jack's. I saw him on Joe Rogans Podcast, who tried to get some concrete answers out of him, and he was probably the most evasive guest I've ever seen there.

The way he evasively responds to these important questions (not just with Rogan, but Sam Harris too) makes a lot more sense paired with the supposition that Twitter is not "failing" as Jack says here, but executing according to plan.

Look at recent bans, across the technology sphere (and more recently the financial sphere with Chase), and a clear pattern emerges. Nobody denies what the pattern is. The only argument is whether or not you support banning certain ideas.

From where I'm sitting we're seeing the formation of a new form of exile (I write that without hyperbole). Why bother setting up prison camps or penal colonies when you can completely remove someone's ability to publicly communicate, find gainful employment, or even open a bank account? We are inching closer to a world where, if someone engages in public wrongthink, they can immediately be shamed into poverty and banned from the public square.

Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t

#196

Post by darkpuma »

rchaud wrote: post #124
mcv wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then why even try to have this conversation on Twitter? You'd think that after a decade he would have some idea of what Twitter is good and bad at. I can imagine having this kind of failed interview when the company was 3 years old, but after more than a decade, it's a bit bizarre. Unless this was explicitly meant as a test, and not simply an online interview.

> But then why even try to have this conversation on Twitter? Many people are knowingly doing a kabuki theatre version of a conversation where they are specifically trying to get attention and grab more followers and retweets. You can see it in how responses are framed. There's a lot of attempted "mic drop" moments. Real people don't have conversations like that, because they're not playing to an audience. In real co…

Well I think you answered your own question. Twitter is successful despite it's dumpster-fire UX because the conversation quality on twitter is also a dumpster-fire and people love to watch that kind of shit. It's like NASCAR fans rooting for crashes.

Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t

#197

Post by WorldMaker »

dalbasal wrote: post #154
theNJR wrote: post #132

A lot to unpack recently with Twitter and Jack. A few thoughts. 1. Jack doesn’t seem passionate about product, especially Twitter. 2. Kara seems to lack the vocabulary to talk about product which is both surprising and confusing, given her niche and time spent in it. She also doesn’t understand that Twitter has evolved way beyond Jack. “Why don’t you know, it’s your product!” she kept asking. The fact he doesn’t know…

I don't think Twitter is a conversational medium, essentially. It certainly isn't a good one, for complex conversations. It's hard to find the horse-and-boogie analogy for something that's essentially new, but bumper sticker, or billboard is more apt. On the public utility front... email exists, RSS exists, the www exists... all open platforms, public by some (the right) definitions. The problem is that an open field…

> I don't think Twitter is a conversational medium, essentially.

As a very early Twitter adopter, I keep thinking this may be a fundamental breakdown in any consideration of what Twitter actually is as a product. Early Twitter was a conversation facilitator for pushing people to bump up in person (at for instance conferences, tracking a general zeitgeist of where interesting people were), or into more conversive media such as blogs / forums / IM / IRC. Early Twitter staff even knew this as this is partly the very motivating use cases the platform was built to enable. (The old 140 character limit to make sure that SMS notifications, and sending/responding to Tweets via SMS, were always an option, partly because of that push to in-person meetups in the era of dumb phones. Having mostly dropped out of Twitter in 2018, it's not a surprise to me that most of my remaining interactions with it are old SMS notifications I intentionally left on over the years, as that was the product I originally signed on for.)

A lot of the "we need to be our own conversational medium" standpoint from "modern" Twitter stems almost directly from "we need to monetize as many ads as possible". It's a bad fit for what Twitter was as a product originally, and it's creating so many of these gulfs where people forget that "let's take this conversation off Twitter" is a valid option, much less the best way to handle things more complex than bite-size soundbites. (It's working out for now for Twitter's investors, but how long until they burn out their reputation by being a toxic "conversation medium", because they are bad at being a "conversation medium" yet they need to be a "conversation medium" to sell ads?)

Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t

#198

Post by darkpuma »

mc32 wrote: post #84
matwood wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we hang out in different circles, but I've never heard the level of insults IRL that I have read on Twitter. I have a feeling the large majority of those doing the insulting would be terrified to say those things to someones face because they know a physical altercation would end up being the common response.

Ok. Let’s put forth some baselines. In real life most people don’t grievously insult each other (discount passive aggressiveness, microagressions, bravado, boasting and other ultralight insults) Most people on Twitter don’t insult each other. A low percentage of people do in both cases. Does Twitter facilitate and provide a more lubricated vehicle for insult? Possibly?

I think I get what you're saying. I've seen people call others "fat fucks" (heard that one yesterday) and shit like that in person in public, which is fairly extreme by face-to-face standards but very tame by twitter standards. I've never seen somebody accuse somebody else face-to-face of being a cannibalistic child rapist, but I've seen that on twitter! I think that's the kind of insult that would stand a decent chance of starting a physical altercation.

Re: How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t

#200

Post by ConceptJunkie »

switch007 wrote: post #135
Ntrails wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) I can't see a description of what he said, but if it's the case I remember he said something about blowing the airport up and someone reported it to police as a threat. Twitter is a broadcasting service, and you're responsible for how it is read. You don't get a pass because you totally didn't mean it that way. I can't get upset about this one. 2) & 3) Doesn't sound like arrest/prosecution? I don't doubt a lot of…

The OP mentioned arrest. You then wanted example of prosecution. I cited 3,300 cases of being detained and questioned, but that clearly didn't satisfy. There does not need to be 100s of successful prosecutions a year for there not to be consequences of police action (whether it be warnings, being detained, arrests, prosecutions, jail) and for there to be serious chilling effects. EDIT: > You don't get a pass because…

First off, if people are being arrested and not charged, that's a violation of their rights, and a huge hassle. If your law is written so that people are being unnecessarily arrested, that's a bad law.

Proving intention used to be the case, but I think a lot of speech laws being made aren't taking this into account, and this is incredibly dangerous. You used the words "gypped" or "scot-free"? Well, those terms are an implied racial (cultural really) slur.

"Hocus pocus" originally comes from Protestant mockery of the Latin words of Consecration from the Catholic Mass. Catholics could, in theory, be offended by that. (I'm Catholic, but I just see it as an interesting piece of historical linguistic trivia, although I know it wasn't always so).

You used the words or "niggardly" or "snigger"? Neither of which have any negative racial or cultural connotations. The first is of Scandanavian etymology, and the second is of Dutch etymology, but they sound a lot like a word that is insulting. If someone takes offense at your racial insult, when you were using a perfectly innocent word, can you use that as a defense? Will it matter when social media has already tried and executed you, and are marching for your punishment?

People are being arrested for using the wrong pronouns. There's no way it can matter whether that was intentional or not. Hate speech laws are defined based not on what someone does, but on how someone else reacts to it, and it's impossible to list all the ways it could be applied. For all we know, people can get into trouble for something that started out as a 4chan prank.

There's no way to prove it one way or another. Proving intention to murder or conspire can be made using physical evidence, but how can you prove you were doing it with or without malice aforethought?

Were you warned and then persisted in your behavior? OK, maybe that would count, but it could still be a slip of the tongue or a typo. This is about as Orwellian as it gets.

That's why hate speech laws, even the best intentioned, scare the crap out of me, not because I support hate-speech, or use it, but because I know that it's way to easy to turn them into a witchhunt, and to prosecute people for completely benign behavior.

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