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Twitter’s Plan to Get People to Stop Yelling at Each Other

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Re: Twitter’s Plan to Get People to Stop Yelling at Each Other

#81

Post by hi5eyes »

bradleyankrom wrote: post #72
skybrian wrote: post #15

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.

If you have a relatively-short, curated list of people you want to see posts from, I suggest adding them to a list and viewing your "feed" that way. I've been using lists over the home page/feed for a few months and my experience w/ Twitter has been much better. Only posts from the people you've explicitly chosen to get posts from, which also means zero ads (at least on desktop).

I used to follow a couple hundred journalists/researchers etc. "real people" and eventually moved to curating each segment through different accounts and allowing each account to assimilate into the communities instead of a clusterfuck of interests in one timeline (yes i know lists exist but like fb groups it doesnt really serve the purpose of exploring content, not as easily at least)

its been relaxing, carefully curating people that complain/add negativity to my feed out and adding more interesting accounts as time goes on

Re: Twitter’s Plan to Get People to Stop Yelling at Each Other

#82

Post by fullshark »

alexandercrohde wrote: post #47

I used blame twitter for creating at outrage culture. But then I realized I had it backwards. There have always been people who find it fun to vent outrage, moral indignity, and condescension. They just got it from TV blowhards before.

Agreed. News junkies aren’t after the truth / meaningful debate. They are after confirmation bias and seeing people they hate get rekt.

Re: Twitter’s Plan to Get People to Stop Yelling at Each Other

#83

Post by bradleyankrom »

hi5eyes wrote: post #81
bradleyankrom wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a relatively-short, curated list of people you want to see posts from, I suggest adding them to a list and viewing your "feed" that way. I've been using lists over the home page/feed for a few months and my experience w/ Twitter has been much better. Only posts from the people you've explicitly chosen to get posts from, which also means zero ads (at least on desktop).

I used to follow a couple hundred journalists/researchers etc. "real people" and eventually moved to curating each segment through different accounts and allowing each account to assimilate into the communities instead of a clusterfuck of interests in one timeline (yes i know lists exist but like fb groups it doesnt really serve the purpose of exploring content, not as easily at least) its been relaxing, carefully cu…

whatever makes the experience tolerable and worthwhile

Re: Twitter’s Plan to Get People to Stop Yelling at Each Other

#84

Post by bradleyankrom »

dfischer wrote: post #75

Solution: people pay to use twitter. Kill advertising as the main model. 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 p…

This gets suggested as the solution to privacy/junk content/etc for every social platform - why have none of them (that I am aware of) adopted this model?

Re: Twitter’s Plan to Get People to Stop Yelling at Each Other

#85

Post by neuralk »

skybrian wrote: post #15

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.

I never (no longer, that is) see tweets that other people like. I think there is a setting to disable them from appearing now. At the very least, whenever one appears you can click the little arrow next to it and select "see less often" (or equivalent).

Re: Twitter’s Plan to Get People to Stop Yelling at Each Other

#86

Post by derefr »

Itaxpica wrote: post #32

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.

There really is a sub-network within Twitter of people who only ever have nice, productive conversations with one-another.

This sub-network seems to have a lot of overlap with the set of people who use their Twitter handle as a substitute for an email address—i.e. the people who want you to tweet at them if you want to collaborate with them on something. Which itself is vaguely overlapping the set of people who are "famous", but not celebrities—i.e. people who are well-known names in their own industries or hobbies.

Re: Twitter’s Plan to Get People to Stop Yelling at Each Other

#87

Post by derefr »

bradleyankrom wrote: post #84
dfischer wrote: post #75

Solution: people pay to use twitter. Kill advertising as the main model. 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 p…

This gets suggested as the solution to privacy/junk content/etc for every social platform - why have none of them (that I am aware of) adopted this model?

If you look at it a certain way, this is what email was before ISPs and bigcorps gave away email addresses; everyone who had an email address was paying their sysadmin for the privilege of having one (through their tuition at a university that has email services, or through the cost-center of the company they work for.) In either of those cases, people were more careful with email, because postmasters were easily angered (and this was, in turn, because causing trouble could actually get your system kicked off the network!)

In modern times, people pay to use Slack. It'd be interesting to study the sociology of paid Slack groups (as compared to free Slack groups, or as compared to any other free-for-everyone group chat platform.)

I've always thought it'd be a cool idea to have a group chat platform where, rather than some admin owning the group and maybe paying, the group has a tip-jar and anyone/everyone in the group can contribute. (Twitch sort of works like this, but you're really donating to the channel owner, not to the group itself. In my hypothetical model, there is no channel owner; the group persists because at least some of the user-base want it to, and so pay for it to.)

Re: Twitter’s Plan to Get People to Stop Yelling at Each Other

#88

Post by derefr »

rootusrootus wrote: post #42
bob_doggo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Or when the opinion: "group x are idiots for having opinion y." is hundreds of times more common than someone actually claiming to be an x with opinion y.

Political discussion in a nutshell. It's always possible to find some idiot who happens to belong to group X and holds opinion Y, and then use that to tar the rest of the group.

I can picture a perfect Improv Everywhere scene: a bunch of people get together and practice/research statements that make them sound like they hold awful opinion Y. Then, they sneak into a political debate, or a protest that has a counter-protest... on both sides. And then they all simultaneously try to call the other group out [with the other people they came with as their specific examples] for having opinion Y.

Re: Twitter’s Plan to Get People to Stop Yelling at Each Other

#89

Post by derefr »

LargeWu wrote: post #23

Twitter mostly proves that a lot of people are not happy unless they're outraged.

I feel like there's a mental illness the entire world is seemingly ignoring, whose symptom is constant, floating disgust and contempt and despise. The ability to be offended by anything, because it's not the stimulus that offended you; you were already offended as an equilibrium state.

Let me attempt to describe this mentality as a recipe (because I don't have a good name for it, but I'm sure you can recognize it): start by imagining clinical depression. Keep the "everything in the world sucks" part, but remove the part where you consider "everything" to include you. (This isn't narcissism; you don't think you're all that great. You just aren't down on yourself. You think of yourself in a normal, healthy way.) Then, take the parts of depression where you have no energy and don't experience any emotional affect, and replace those with a sliding scale from "neutral" to "panicked shouting." (Which isn't real panic, per se; it's just a very loud simulated fight-or-flight response, without any real fear or traumatic recall behind it.)

An increasing number of people are like this. Nobody notices these people as unusual at all. This used to be rare enough to caricature; it was the "I want to speak to your manager" mom. But everyone is like that now. Every age group has these people in equal numbers. What... happened?

Re: Twitter’s Plan to Get People to Stop Yelling at Each Other

#90

Post by boapnuaput »

bradleyankrom wrote: post #84
dfischer wrote: post #75

Solution: people pay to use twitter. Kill advertising as the main model. 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 p…

This gets suggested as the solution to privacy/junk content/etc for every social platform - why have none of them (that I am aware of) adopted this model?

Today, you learned about Something Awful[0], a social forum that charges a nominal fee for accounts[1]. After being banned by administrators, a rule-breaker must pay another fee if they wish to be reinstated.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Something_Awful

[1] https://secure.somethingawful.com/products/register.php

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