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Jack Dorsey says it’s time to rethink the fundamental dynamics of Twitter

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Re: Jack Dorsey says it’s time to rethink the fundamental dynamics of Twitter

#201

Post by [deleted] »

markdog12 wrote: post #162
jsnell wrote: post #2

> He suggested that the service works best as an “interest-based network,” where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who posted it Yeah, no thanks. Has anybody ever been happy with Twitter's attempts to force content from non-followed users into the feed? A couple of times a year they'll opt everybody back into whatever crappy experiment they're running ("hey, we'll put some posts to your…

I recently created a Twitter account, mostly as an experiment. I just followed some programmers, stuck to programming content. Immediately and every day after, I was constantly being displayed Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Justin Trudeau, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, etc. Not a single politician or voice not on the left. Considering how powerful Twitter has become, this is troubling. I know this is just one…

[deleted]

Re: Jack Dorsey says it’s time to rethink the fundamental dynamics of Twitter

#202

Post by crummy »

zem wrote: post #140
ricefield wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's kind of the point though - I had no idea this feature existed until they started pushing it to me. I think it's too much to expect users to opt-in to things. How would I have known to opt-in to this? Yet I am now much happier because they improved the UX for me. I think opt-out makes sense though, for users who don't a feature.

i can see no way to opt out of it either

You can click the "I don't like this tweet" button in the dropdown.

Re: Jack Dorsey says it’s time to rethink the fundamental dynamics of Twitter

#203

Post by panarky »

grey-area wrote: post #172
panarky wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make the readers pay and you'll lose your audience. Make the posters pay and you'll lose your content. Without advertising, that means the service cannot make a profit. Maybe that's the solution to the puzzle.

Make the posters pay and you'll lose your content. I think that's only true if you try to charge all posters. Advertising is actively damaging our social networks, as it did newspapers before them.

If the service is built to maximize the benefit to users (instead of to maximize benefit to advertisers, or to maximize a corporation's profits), then I'd argue that you cannot charge even some posters.

Maximizing the benefit to readers means getting the most and best content. Charging posters will eliminate some posts which is bad for readers.

And when a poster is willing to pay, that means the poster is profiting from the content, which means there's some motive other than writing the best content for the reader.

So my argument is that any financial gain for the operator, whether from advertising or directly charging users, will diminish the value of the service for both readers and posters.

If the goal is the best possible conversation, then let's look to non-commercial models that remove the distorting and corrupting influence of profit.

Re: Jack Dorsey says it’s time to rethink the fundamental dynamics of Twitter

#204

Post by maxwell »

udwum wrote: post #193
massysett wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an honest question - why on earth should Twitter be an official support channel for a business? If I had a business, I would respond to Twitter support requests with “please see our support website for how to contact us” or “thanks, we are now contacting you.” I don’t know why Twitter users should get better support and it seems odd to me to rely on Twitter to provide or to ask for support.

That's a funny one. I worked at a place where the support team that worked for the social network accounts of the company had better tools and higher priority when doing their jobs than the phone/site support team, so effectively customers asking for support on Twitter or Facebook got better and faster support than customers asking for support on the phone or the site. I assume that's because companies are terrified…

> bad publicity on social networks

Exactly. Social networks moved support from private, hidden systems to a public channel. This benefitted the user, since the brand has more to lose from interactions that are negative, non-responsive, re-directive, etc.

Re: Jack Dorsey says it’s time to rethink the fundamental dynamics of Twitter

#205

Post by code_duck »

whatever_dude wrote: post #79

> I don’t think I would create ‘likes’ in the first place. _You didn't_. It was called "Favorites", and you later renamed it to "likes". Jack can introspect as much as he wants, but it doesn't change the fact that they keep making the platform _worse_, not better. Another indication is that the official web/client is a cesspool of unrelated content I don't want to see, and somehow they now think they need to double d…

Twitter is a great example of fairly talentless people with large egos somehow finding success, and mistakenly thinking it is due to their merits. If Dorsey was going to make a good social network, it would have happened 5-8 years ago. It’s a lot like Etsy - someone had drive, funding and concepts to make a project at the right time. However, they were not actually good at running a business and had no idea what the hell they were doing socially or societally.

Re: Jack Dorsey says it’s time to rethink the fundamental dynamics of Twitter

#206

Post by basetop »

How about just letting the users have control over their own social media accounts/etc?

Why did social media go from a simple platform where people followed other people or interests to a place where they have to manage everything? How did it change from a platform where people can express whatever they wanted with whomever they wanted to a platform where social media has to say what people can or cannot say?

Seems like overnight social media turned from a place of user expression to a place of user control.

Re: Jack Dorsey says it’s time to rethink the fundamental dynamics of Twitter

#208

Post by floatingatoll »

Removing counts is the only viable cure for social media that’s left.

Not removing the problems, but removing the addictiveness. Once we reduce the problem space of inputs to people who aren’t addicted, the results should be a lot less difficult to parse.

Visibility into why a post is top of page should not be granted through an integer mapped on a scale of 0 to infinity at any level of precision.

Not for upvotes, downvotes, replies, reposts. Not for unsolicited messages, or “X hours ago” (yes, time durations are 0..+/-inf integers, loophole denied).

High score chasing will be the madness of us all. If I could write a web extension to filter every page’s counts away I would, but I cannot figure it out in my spare time.

Map onto decaying average percentiles of traffic over X days, so that high-traffic posts are super bold and low traffic ones aren’t, or use 2-D colormaps (not Jet) and up/down arrows centered around 50th percentile. Relative comparison is absolutely invaluable and is a perk print newspapers don’t have.

I hope HN tests this someday.

Re: Jack Dorsey says it’s time to rethink the fundamental dynamics of Twitter

#209

Post by bradleyankrom »

baggy_trough wrote: post #25
jsnell wrote: post #2

> He suggested that the service works best as an “interest-based network,” where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who posted it Yeah, no thanks. Has anybody ever been happy with Twitter's attempts to force content from non-followed users into the feed? A couple of times a year they'll opt everybody back into whatever crappy experiment they're running ("hey, we'll put some posts to your…

Algorithmic feeds are, in all cases, Satan's handiwork. What I want is to see posts from the individuals I have selected, interleaved in chronological order, with no tampering.

I started using lists for this. I have a list of people I follow (I could just unfollow, I guess) and I get only their posts, in order, with no ads.

Re: Jack Dorsey says it’s time to rethink the fundamental dynamics of Twitter

#210

Post by darawk »

code_duck wrote: post #205
whatever_dude wrote: post #79

> I don’t think I would create ‘likes’ in the first place. _You didn't_. It was called "Favorites", and you later renamed it to "likes". Jack can introspect as much as he wants, but it doesn't change the fact that they keep making the platform _worse_, not better. Another indication is that the official web/client is a cesspool of unrelated content I don't want to see, and somehow they now think they need to double d…

Twitter is a great example of fairly talentless people with large egos somehow finding success, and mistakenly thinking it is due to their merits. If Dorsey was going to make a good social network, it would have happened 5-8 years ago. It’s a lot like Etsy - someone had drive, funding and concepts to make a project at the right time. However, they were not actually good at running a business and had no idea what the…

You know that Jack Dorsey also founded another successful company in Square, right? Pretty hard to argue that he lucked into both of those things.
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