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Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve

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Re: Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve

#21

Post by runarberg »

verdverm wrote: post #8
hackyhacky wrote: post #5

Hacker News has a great community, features informative discourse, and doesn't suffer from the ailments that you list (or suffers from them much less than Twitter). Therefore we should invite all Twitter users to join our healthy community. Everybody wins. Edit: I hoped it would be obvious, but the second sentence of this comment was supposed to be sarcastic.

HN is still viable because it hasn't reached the masses. The self policing works well currently, but I'm not sure it would with the general populace

HN is industry specific. It very much has reach the masses, but only within a specific trait. It functions more like a trade union’s social media. I actually don’t think the self policing here is working at all, rather the excellent moderation by dang is doing the bulk of the work, keeping HN amazing.

Re: Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve

#22

Post by airstrike »

fullshark wrote: post #16

Subreddits solve I think the big problem of twitter, namely political flamebait leaking everywhere. Compartmentalize and quarantine that stuff and maybe you can get a healthy message board going, but I think people will never be as open and naive as they were in the early days of twitter / FB again.

Subreddits are the definition of echo chambers. The only subreddits that work are the ones with heavy moderation to keep things (a) sane and (b) on topic

Re: Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve

#23

Post by amadeuspagel »

There's no fire in the house. It's completely natural for people on HN to discuss what the next big thing might be, what we want from a new platform. Surveys? If you want to do surveys, sure, easy to do with MTurk. But if discussing the next big thing is like discussing how to improve fire extinguisher design while there's a fire in the house, then what is doing surveys like?

Re: Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve

#24

Post by dcist »

I don't know that Twitter actually needs to be fixed. It's very good for what it is - a microblogging platform that provides instant, timely updates on news and current topics.

I think Twitter could, however, capitalize on its platform and offer additional, successful features. Twitter could offer Patreon and Substack-esque features where users could subscribe to additional, richer, and more in-depth content from content creators. Twitter could also re-explore a live broadcast feature with associated live chat (similar to YouTube and Facebook live broadcasts). Twitter is a huge platform and has plenty of opportunity, but I don't think it suffers from inherent problems like Facebook (which has an aging userbase, users abandoning the platform, and a big spam problem).

Re: Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve

#25

Post by staunch »

> It's like there's fire in the house and all of us are discussing how to improve fire extinguisher design.

It's more like there's a problem with a new technology and people are discussing how to improve the technology.

Twitter is just a technology product that some few people created a few years ago. It's not a discovery like fire where we have to learn to adapt to its nature. We can change its nature radically.

Of course there are social problems that won't be resolved by technology but there's no reason to believe this is one of them. Twitter is a technology that created and exacerbated specific social problems. It's entirely plausible that it can be improved to eliminate and mitigate these same problems.

Re: Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve

#26

Post by lambic »

edude03 wrote: post #6

> only consume the content that aligns with their views And for this reason I believe social media is fundamentally harmful to society.

I think this might be partly a generational thing. My son and my younger friends follow a wider variety of people and aren't so easily sucked into the echo chambers.

The networks are also partly to blame with their recommendation systems.

Re: Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve

#27

Post by photochemsyn »

I just set up a Twitter account for the first time, to see what the Musk era is like.

One immediate issue I notice is that the recommendation algorithm immediately starts siloing you into a roomfull of mirrors. Based on who you follow, it recommends similar people to follow (based apparently on who your followees follow plus maybe other data), so you quickly end up in an echo chamber.

That's not the whole story, Twitter also tries to push-recommend 'noted celebrities' to follow, who can be summed up as the type of people who make the rounds of corporate media weekend talk shows. There doesn't seem to be any way to opt out of these recommendations.

So far it's not a very illuminating experience. I notice that many people get around the character limit by posting images of text, which is an interesting work-around.

Really, I think you'd need multiple Twitter accounts to get around this siloing effect. For example, on political issues, you could set up, say. 'socialist-communist-left', 'libertarian-capitalist', 'state-corporate-authoritarian', and 'alt-right MAGAs', 'politicians and media talking heads', etc. in order to get representative samples of the various competing US political views and actors.

All in all I think it's kind of a waste of time, there are better information sources.

[edit as others note, no real changes from pre-Musk era have taken place, so I'll just look at it once a week for a while]

Re: Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve

#28

Post by fullshark »

airstrike wrote: post #22
fullshark wrote: post #16

Subreddits solve I think the big problem of twitter, namely political flamebait leaking everywhere. Compartmentalize and quarantine that stuff and maybe you can get a healthy message board going, but I think people will never be as open and naive as they were in the early days of twitter / FB again.

Subreddits are the definition of echo chambers. The only subreddits that work are the ones with heavy moderation to keep things (a) sane and (b) on topic

Echo chambers seem to be the inevitable end state of any of message board. People with contrarian positions eventually get tired and leave except those who get off on that and people love having their views affirmed. Algorithmic feeds amplify this phenomenon big time but you can see it on even traditional message boards.

Re: Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve

#29

Post by onion2k »

No amount of algorithms can improve human behavior on any platform.

You can definitely make human behavior worse using an algorithm just by pushing content that provokes negative reactions in as many people as possible. I don't see why the opposite wouldn't be true. If the algorithm pushed uncontroversial content into people's timelines and didn't reward hateful crap they might get happier. Maybe Elon will give that a try!

Re: Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve

#30

Post by iinnPP »

I ran an official fan site once, for an EA title of all things. Doing this I learned some neat tricks to limit the amount of administration required. One thing that stuck was that there is a huge benefit to maintaining a specific section for garbage posts.

Sticky threads existed titled: Potentially offensive/spam? Post it here.

Everyone used it and followed the very few rules of the spam board. I rarely had to move anything. People would even use links to their rants as replies to regular threads, clearly identified so that people could avoid it if they wanted.

I also did the same for another hobby forum I ran in highschool. With 3 mods and one other admin we were able to keep a forum completely clean for years with ~2 million monthly unique visitors.

I do believe Twitter is about to do something similar.

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