71–80 of 198 posts
Unfortunately, I don’t think this is really an issue that can be fixed technically. People go to Twitter to yell at each other; that’s basically the point of the platform. A Twitter where people don’t yell at each other is basically Mastodon, which is a lovely network that basically nobody uses.
Simpler: stop showing tweets just because other people liked them. That's not a reshare, so it shouldn't be treated that way. More generally, discourage large conversations and encourage fragmentation.
Dorsey (from the article) : “I also don’t feel good about how Twitter tends to incentivize outrage, fast takes, short term thinking, echo chambers, and fragmented conversation and consideration.” But what has he done to fix the problem, besides tiny UX tweaks that go nowhere, and the occasional ban of a highly visible jerk? Twitter is on fire, and he just plods along. Dorsey, in this article, is about as believable a…
Which leads to an incredible amount of change aversion; if you have no idea what it is about your product that people like, you're naturally going to be terrified of changing anything, for fear that you might punch a hole in the wrong place and let all the magic leak out.
Twitter mostly proves that a lot of people are not happy unless they're outraged.
Either Twitter will do this or the future decentralized apps will do this naturally through micropayments of having to pay for compute through the network.
I see a distributed p2p database that costs money to interact with and anyone can build a client for it. Go ahead, build a client - maybe it's free, maybe it costs money because it uses the protocol really well and people like it the UX. Hell, maybe even the client has advertisements in it. Either way interacting with the actual content costs money and that will naturally bring in a balance of information. Right now we have information asymmetry exploited by advertising.
If Twitter had gotten people to stop yelling at each other earlier, there would be 2 more protestors outside soldier funerals chanting hateful and homophobic mantras. Keep that in mind while supporting an end to the yelling.
Unfortunately, I don’t think this is really an issue that can be fixed technically. People go to Twitter to yell at each other; that’s basically the point of the platform. A Twitter where people don’t yell at each other is basically Mastodon, which is a lovely network that basically nobody uses.
People are on Twitter for the inane arguing, same as the people in the comment sections of political sites.
> Over several days this spring, BuzzFeed News met with Twitter’s leadership and watched as twttr’s team worked on its first big push: helping people better understand what’s being said in often chaotic conversations. The team thinks that if people took more time to read entire conversations, that would help improve their comprehension of them. I had assumed that Twitter was aware of the implications of its design fo…
Yeah, I don't get this at all. I think it's even deeper than designing for controversy. I'm "older" (40s), though I work on products used by younger people, so I don't think this is just me being old, but I can't follow a conversation on twitter at all. When there's a link from HackerNews to Twitter, I click on it and sometimes see the thing mentioned in the HN title, and sometimes don't. Then there's a bunch of stuf…
> Over several days this spring, BuzzFeed News met with Twitter’s leadership and watched as twttr’s team worked on its first big push: helping people better understand what’s being said in often chaotic conversations. The team thinks that if people took more time to read entire conversations, that would help improve their comprehension of them. I had assumed that Twitter was aware of the implications of its design fo…
Yeah, I don't get this at all. I think it's even deeper than designing for controversy. I'm "older" (40s), though I work on products used by younger people, so I don't think this is just me being old, but I can't follow a conversation on twitter at all. When there's a link from HackerNews to Twitter, I click on it and sometimes see the thing mentioned in the HN title, and sometimes don't. Then there's a bunch of stuf…
I don’t think Twitter understands threads on Twitter, and they never have. They built something over a decade ago, it took off for reasons they never fully could fathom, and they’ve been afraid ever since to futz with what for them has been a good thing.
> Over several days this spring, BuzzFeed News met with Twitter’s leadership and watched as twttr’s team worked on its first big push: helping people better understand what’s being said in often chaotic conversations. The team thinks that if people took more time to read entire conversations, that would help improve their comprehension of them. I had assumed that Twitter was aware of the implications of its design fo…
Yeah, I don't get this at all. I think it's even deeper than designing for controversy. I'm "older" (40s), though I work on products used by younger people, so I don't think this is just me being old, but I can't follow a conversation on twitter at all. When there's a link from HackerNews to Twitter, I click on it and sometimes see the thing mentioned in the HN title, and sometimes don't. Then there's a bunch of stuf…
I'm afraid the reality is probably that you just don't have the motivation to figure it out, for whatever reason. No mass-market product like Twitter could succeed if it was as confusing as you say it is.
There's also the fact that a subset of computer programmer types have low tolerance for all sorts of "noisy" things that the average person doesn't have a problem with.