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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

#101

Post by vkou »

dawnerd wrote: post #54
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…

I’ve tried this the other day and besides an insanely difficult captcha that made me add up faces on dice, I had the same result as you. Overnight got spammed with low quality notifications from troll political accounts.

Trolls and sockpuppets (bots) are the end-game of any unmoderated speech, and they can always shout louder than people speaking in good faith.

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

#102

Post by 1shooner »

paulusthe wrote: post #83
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…

That's definitely the problem, but the answer isn't to change Twitter's algorithms. We must ask why Twitter's algorithms ended up where they did, and the answer is that it's more profitable to do what Twitter does than the alternative. It's not like Twitter's creators maliciously set out to become the flaming hellscape it is now. It responded to market forces and user behavior. Neither of those factors have changed,…

>for-profit public square

This is an oxymoron, and distills the dysfunction very well.

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

#103

Post by nunez »

reddit's default home page has similar problems. a brand new account landing on /r/popular will see:

- a post about kanye - cute photos - more politics - entertainment news

this isn't so bad, but when you descend into the comments, it's all short, low-quality content.

i agree that more research into how we got here could be interesting.

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

#104

Post by dreen »

I quit Twitter years ago not due to any of these problems (they are endemic to the whole of internet), but because I was addicted to the scrolling. It was a lot easier than I thought to quit and I can't even imagine anymore what I thought I would be missing. While this could be changed with code, it's highly unlikely to make me come back.

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

#105

Post by azinman2 »

hbn wrote: post #81
legitster wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 3. Somebody I don't follow accusing another person I don't follow of being a nazi. I cannot believe how much of Twitter is exactly this.

Left-wing twitter is calling everyone nazis and right-wing twitter is calling everyone pedophiles. Enjoy the nuanced discussion.

Godwin’s law is alive and well. But apparently updated for the current GOP with pedophiles!

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

#107

Post by SilasX »

legitster wrote: post #47
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…

> 3. Somebody I don't follow accusing another person I don't follow of being a nazi. I cannot believe how much of Twitter is exactly this.

Yep, I discovered recently that it would constantly fill my notifications queue with "someone whose posts you looked at ages ago retweeted something you don't care about" ... and would also neglect to notify me about the direct replies I was getting to my tweets. WTF?

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

#108

Post by ThereIsNoWorry »

> It's more of a personal, interpersonal and a social problem which needs extensive research, surveys to find the "why" and how we might be able to fix it or avoid it from happening again.

Changing human behavioural patterns that emerged after millions of years of evolution? This seems incredibly naive to me. We can build our technology around the fact that we humans as a species are as we are. Limit this kind of toxic behaviour by various means, e.g. moderation and developing algorithms that detect such emergent patterns and then change recommendation types. Things like these. But changing how we biologically work goes into a direction that is filled with moral and ethical landmines.

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

#109

Post by dqpb »

phailhaus wrote: post #57

Agreed. The problem with Twitter is in its design . It's in what it allows you to do, and what it doesn't. I'll repeat what I raised in the other post: 1. People are high-variance, and yet we're only allowed to follow individual accounts. That's a problem, especially because network effects mean that one person's voice gets amplified exponentially with the number of followers they have. Consider the six degrees of se…

You agree and then list a bunch of technical problems.

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

#110

Post by pwinnski »

Tenoke wrote: post #80
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.

Twitter literally interrupts the normal feed with content you haven't chosen. Here, I'll load https://twitter.com to see:

1. dog pic from someone I follow

2. ad ("Promoted")

3. Steve Martin playing a banjo while dressed as a penguin (I follow him)

4. a tweet from an account I don't follow, but a friend liked it

5. a tweet from an account a friend follows, but I don't

6. a tweet from an account a friend follows, but I don't

7. ad ("Promoted")

8. Section of "Who to follow" with three accounts

9. pic from someone I follow

10. a tweet from an account I don't follow, but a friend liked it

11 is an account I follow, and 12 is an ad, but that should be enough to demonstrate. Only three of the first ten items I saw were from accounts I chose to follow, so 70% of the content was supplied by twitter based on whatever they chose.

70%!

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