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Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”

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Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”

#61

Post by james-mcelwain »

malvosenior wrote: post #14

It's so annoying when platforms and product managers think they know better than their users. People want to retweet and they will even if you remove this feature (as they were before it existed). It basically comes off as Twitter doesn't like the users they have or the behavior they want. It's really hilarious that they use Gamergate as an example of why retweets are bad. That was a massive manifestation of the abov…

> Gamergate as a grassroots, distributed movement was very interesting and it's sadly not surprising that "the powers that be" want to reign back in control of the narrative.

Ah yes, distributed grassroots misogyny. If only the """powers that be""" hadn't reigned back control of this vital, important movement to harass women online.

Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”

#62

Post by dmix »

pjc50 wrote: post #39
malvosenior wrote: post #14

It's so annoying when platforms and product managers think they know better than their users. People want to retweet and they will even if you remove this feature (as they were before it existed). It basically comes off as Twitter doesn't like the users they have or the behavior they want. It's really hilarious that they use Gamergate as an example of why retweets are bad. That was a massive manifestation of the abov…

Gamergate was a harassment movement aimed at women in videogames that had some very smart people thinking of justifications and excuses to protect it in public.

That might be how the activists like to spin it but it became about much more than that when it blew up and went viral. It was really about an entire established lively and chaotic culture developed over multiple decades that people adored and got defensive over. So some heavy handed top down attempts to manually change it didn’t go over well.

Then the villainization of anyone who disagreed with the activists approach as women-haters who think it’s okay to harass women only increased backlash.

Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”

#63

Post by moosey »

dccoolgai wrote: post #30

So tired of these "OMG What Did I Create?" stories from social media devs. How about you grow a conscience _before_ you build these things? I have told managers to go f themselves for: Content that would demean people Lying to or misleading customers *Hosing over my fellow engineers ... among other things I don't think it's that special of a thing to do but reading these things makes it seem like it is.

I wonder if social media is a level one or a level two chaotic system, ideas that are separated based on how the system responds to prediction. Level two means that the system responds, but level one, the weather as an example, doesn't respond to prediction.

I don't think that it requires a lack of conscience to end up creating a dangerous behemoth in a level two chaotic system. We couldn't have necessarily have known that social media would lead to the ecosystem that we have today.

When I look at social media and the advertising ecosystem around it, I feel like the major flaw is the fact that social media companies must get eyes on the page, that they must supply value, and one of the requirements to meet this is that you simply cannot accomplish what is required if information is supplied as a 'dumb pipe' to the users. Users must be convinced that they are part of specific communities while online in order to keep them on site, so the dumb pipe is replaced with a 'feed' of some sort, which is nothing less than human experimentation. I think that twitter does this by building large emotional groups via these quick sharing mechanisms, which isn't necessarily bad, but the fact that everyone is informed of them as they are going on is, again, human experimentation.

I think that the social media fix is to reduce all of them to dumb pipes, because anything more than that is a huge risk. They should probably have things that fight spam, but that's a security issue, not a human experimentation one.

Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”

#64

Post by golergka »

plorkyeran wrote: post #24
ShakataGaNai wrote: post #8

One major problem with this: It's not like he "invented" the retweet. The userbase invented the "RT" prefixed message. Twitter the company simply took what the user base had done and weaponized it and empowered it. But at the same time they made it easier to track a single specific message being RT'd. So blessing and a curse.

The article specifically argues that the retweet button causes problems that manual retweeting didn't, and so he did invent the thing that's actually a problem.

Didn't the button appear in most third party clients long before?

Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”

#66

Post by [deleted] »

derekdahmer wrote: post #55
dccoolgai wrote: post #30

So tired of these "OMG What Did I Create?" stories from social media devs. How about you grow a conscience _before_ you build these things? I have told managers to go f themselves for: Content that would demean people Lying to or misleading customers *Hosing over my fellow engineers ... among other things I don't think it's that special of a thing to do but reading these things makes it seem like it is.

How could you have known in 2009 how the dynamics of twitter would evolve over the next decade? There's no way. I've used twitter since 2008 and if you told me then that 7 years later that the US presidents would be using it as their primary communication platform with the public I wouldn't believe you.

[deleted]

Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”

#67

Post by amiantos »

dccoolgai wrote: post #30

So tired of these "OMG What Did I Create?" stories from social media devs. How about you grow a conscience _before_ you build these things? I have told managers to go f themselves for: Content that would demean people Lying to or misleading customers *Hosing over my fellow engineers ... among other things I don't think it's that special of a thing to do but reading these things makes it seem like it is.

The problem is idealism.

> “I was very excited about the opportunity that Twitter represented,” Wetherell said, noting that he initially felt the retweet button would elevate voices from underrepresented communities.

The problem is that it didn't register to him, or anyone, that "racists" were an "underrepresented community", as were sexists, misogynists, homophobes, anti-intellectuals, quacks, and so on. When attempting to give a voice to minorities, they gave a voice to all "minorities", including people who had minority opinions. The idealism came in the form of expecting that these tools will, by default, be used for good... it wouldn't surprise me that people in the tech community, who have often come from privilege or at the very least live within privileged bubbles, are naive about what people are really capable of.

"A rising tide lifts all boats..." unfortunately some of those ships are full of pirates and disease.

It's sad, but you really need think about these things from a jaded and cynical perspective when building them, it's unfortunate that there's been a long crusade against cynicism. Being optimistic and feeling optimism about the world and humanity leads to problems like this.

Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”

#68

Post by RandallBrown »

derekdahmer wrote: post #40
plorkyeran wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article specifically argues that the retweet button causes problems that manual retweeting didn't, and so he did invent the thing that's actually a problem.

Yea the act of copying and pasting to do a retweet required just enough extra work that people had to think about what they were typing, and so users used it in a less reactionary way. It's kind of incredible that a tweak to one small feature could have such a large behavioral impact.

I distinctly remember people typing "RT @whoever some fake tweet they never said" as a joke or to be purposefully misleading. It solved a real problem with the old fake RT system.

Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”

#69

Post by eropple »

RandallBrown wrote: post #68
derekdahmer wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea the act of copying and pasting to do a retweet required just enough extra work that people had to think about what they were typing, and so users used it in a less reactionary way. It's kind of incredible that a tweak to one small feature could have such a large behavioral impact.

I distinctly remember people typing "RT @whoever some fake tweet they never said" as a joke or to be purposefully misleading. It solved a real problem with the old fake RT system.

There's a really solvable answer to that, though: ban people who do it. Enforce some controls on your platform.

But the search for more money continues...

Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”

#70

Post by luma »

dccoolgai wrote: post #30

So tired of these "OMG What Did I Create?" stories from social media devs. How about you grow a conscience _before_ you build these things? I have told managers to go f themselves for: Content that would demean people Lying to or misleading customers *Hosing over my fellow engineers ... among other things I don't think it's that special of a thing to do but reading these things makes it seem like it is.

I feel like this article covered that fairly well. The developers had no idea that this simple feature addition (which did nothing more than formalize what users were already doing) would result in what we have today.

Maybe you see further than others, but the rest of us are subject to the law of unintended consequences.

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