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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

#71

Post by zozbot234 »

pj_mukh wrote: post #40
mFixman wrote: post #14

I used to agree with you until I created a new Twitter account from scratch. I'm not American and I specifically put non-political things in my interests. Yet, the second I signed up I got the following: 1. A notification about a smug reply a rando made to a Republican Congressman. 2. Posts from a meme page with a Pepe the frog avatar showing homeless people fighting in San Francisco. 3. Somebody I don't follow accus…

Here's the uncomfortable question though, can a social media platform achieve sufficient scale, so its more useful for discoverability than your group chats, without optimizing for engagement? Discord is a happy medium (just, really large group chats).

The Fediverse is pretty much that. It gets "scale" via interoperability, but each individual server is quite small and manageable.

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

#72

Post by tobyjsullivan »

mFixman wrote: post #14

I used to agree with you until I created a new Twitter account from scratch. I'm not American and I specifically put non-political things in my interests. Yet, the second I signed up I got the following: 1. A notification about a smug reply a rando made to a Republican Congressman. 2. Posts from a meme page with a Pepe the frog avatar showing homeless people fighting in San Francisco. 3. Somebody I don't follow accus…

"Welcome to Twitter. We'd like to introduce you to the 'vibe' here with a few select tweets..."

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

#73

Post by paulusthe »

onion2k wrote: post #29

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…

They wouldn't use it as much. The profitability of the site would suffer and it would cease to exist.

It's not like Twitter set out trying to create an outrage machine. Their algorithms learned what people respond to - because responses, interaction, and time on the site is Twitter's goal - and gave them what they want.

People don't want happy, good news. They don't want uncontroversial content. That's the problem, not Twitter, or its algos

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

#74

Post by rejectfinite »

mox1 wrote: post #66
mFixman wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord is actually a good example: I think I got 0 notifications about groups I don't follow, so isn't as big of an incentive to aggressively smugpost as in Twitter.

Join any server remotely related to crypto or finance, the spam messages will start rolling in. I get on average about 1 a day, something about "pumps" (whatever that is)

But with discord you choose what servers you join AND if you even get notifications or DMs from users...

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

#75

Post by csours »

Twitter's value prop is a flat audience of "the whole world". More and more, I see value in smaller groups in social media. The only good part of Facebook is Groups and Events.

People talk about information or social bubbles, but on Twitter you still have bubbles.

Any social group will form bubbles as soon as they start fighting about something. Having a flat view of the entire social graph does not prevent bubbles.

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

#76

Post by jalapenos »

Wouldn't this be fixed by grouping & filtering though?

IRL we don't listen to such people, because we associate with people we like.

Perhaps the problems would be resolved by improved ability to filter out undesirables? E.g. in the same way you can tell YouTube to not recommend whole channels, you could tell Twitter not to show any tweets grouped as political, or a sub-type of political.

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

#77

Post by pjc50 »

jen20 wrote: post #48
pjc50 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certain parts of non-US twitter were "polarized" enough to start the Arab Spring, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine (leading to its current situation), and it seems that through social media of some sort Iran is currently undergoing a revolt against its own morality police. A huge part of Twitter's popularity and success is linked to its role in coordinating anti-authoritarian action.

> Orange Revolution in Ukraine (leading to its current situation) A gross mischaracterization of which you should be utterly ashamed. Responsibility for the current situation in Ukraine lies at the feet of one man, Putin, and those who continue to enable him.

I meant the current situation as in everything from the deposing of Yanukovich onwards; the ability of the Ukranians to force a freer, fairer state that isn't entirely a Russian puppet state is their agency and it's down to the Orange Revolution / Euromaidan etc. This is a good thing.

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

#78

Post by rejectfinite »

pj_mukh wrote: post #40
mFixman wrote: post #14

I used to agree with you until I created a new Twitter account from scratch. I'm not American and I specifically put non-political things in my interests. Yet, the second I signed up I got the following: 1. A notification about a smug reply a rando made to a Republican Congressman. 2. Posts from a meme page with a Pepe the frog avatar showing homeless people fighting in San Francisco. 3. Somebody I don't follow accus…

Here's the uncomfortable question though, can a social media platform achieve sufficient scale, so its more useful for discoverability than your group chats, without optimizing for engagement? Discord is a happy medium (just, really large group chats).

Yep, I never understood having Twitter. I read linked posts but the "Community" peoploe talk about is lost to me because I used to use old forums and now Discord.

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

#79

Post by [deleted] »

iinnPP wrote: post #30

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 a…

[deleted]

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

#80

Post by Tenoke »

Herbstluft wrote: post #41

Until not that long ago I was a pretty happy Twitter user. I curated my follows (keeping them between 150 and 200), only followed people posting interesting , creative , or scientific things. When anyone started tweeting or retweeting low quality material, I simply unfollowed. Unfortunately, the devs at Twitter hate the way I use it. Nowadays ever 5th post or so on my timeline is from someone I do not follow, either…

Looking at my feed it's all accounts I follow (and people they retweet). No politics except for the few politics accounts I've chosen to follow. No toxicity except when I look for it.

As far as I can tell people are either exaggerating their experience or bad at curating since I doubt I'm getting a special version of their product.

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