111–120 of 279 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
TikTok, for all its woes, seems to somehow do this significantly better than Twitter and Facebook? Or is that just my filter bubble?
What I want is pretty simple (and isn't for everyone): I just want a spot I can keep tabs on the broader goings on of other people in infosec.
i tried to use twitter for news and devops/sre related stuff, but you have to drink the firehose to find content or use your network to find people to follow. absolutely does not help that many of the more active personalities also engage in creating FUD.
i use nitter now.
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 con…
I don’t think “I don’t think it suffers from inherent problems” is a universal opinion: https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-where-did-tweet... Also, people talk about the bot problem like non-stop, including the new owner.
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,…
TikTok is winning the race for zoomers' attention by doing better content filtering. I'm sure that a well-ran Twitter competitor can take all of their market.
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…
With utmost curiosity, how can making people happy get money for investors and SWE salaries?
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…
On a serious note I think the problem is actually the heavy moderation and algorithmic bubble creation. Then you had certain famous and controversial people who operated above all bubbles and the different bubble started clashing.
The only way I see to fix this is if the "middle" is one bubble. And no, that's not a middle ground fallacy, I dont think the middle position is the correct one but rather that a strong middle bubble is required to separate the majority from extremist bubbles.
Unfortunately a middle bubble required people to be tolerant. But many people lost the concept of disagreeing but supporting that someone should be able voice their opinion anyway. Musk actually understand this so I'm not overly optimistic but I'm curious to see what he will do.
Twitter only has one problem. How to pay $1 BILLION per year in financing. It's not actually possible, no user is going to put up with the fees or advertising required for that level of revenue.
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 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…
I disagree. Your points aren't necessarily wrong, but they ignore one big factor. Twitter chooses what content to promote to people. I could use Twitter quite happily not knowing about the latest "scandal" in, say, the knitting world. But Twitter actively promotes that content to me - either with the "trending" sidebar or by showing me content that it thinks will increase my engagement. That is a technical problem. H…
> How do you surface engaging content without also surfacing harmful / polarising / abusive content? But the most engaging content is also the most harmful / polarizing / abusive! "The algorithm" is mostly humans clicking buttons.