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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

#131

Post by cma »

lanstin wrote: post #49
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…

Do you use the time based fed or the default timeline feed? I use only the time based feed, and I read on my tablet zoomed into the middle third of the screen so I don’t really see trending or whatever. I do follow a lot more people than you, but I agree when that is all you see, it is like a allow listed Reddit, pretty easy to make an interest and entertaining content feed.

Use Firefox and you can install ublock origin, then zap the trending section with the element picker.

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

#132

Post by layer8 »

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…

And the main motivation for maximizing engagement is selling ad space. It seems that ads have become a major net negative to society.

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

#133

Post by boplicity »

csours wrote: post #85
edent wrote: post #13

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.

> "The algorithm" is mostly humans clicking buttons.

Actually, the algorithm is not the button clicks, but the code that interprets those button clicks. I don't think many people notice this, but HN gives a bonus to longer posts, in terms of keeping them at the top. It's not just the upvotes that determine which votes surface to the top. There are probably other signals that are inputted into the algorithm, as well, with different weights attached to them. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if certain inflammatory words or phrases subtracted points from a post on HN.

For the forum I run, I auto-generate a list of the top posts for the week. It is based on the number of likes, but also on the length of the post. This is then filtered manually, removing inflammatory posts. HN, with its effective moderation, doesn't seem to have much of a different process.

1. You can design an algorithm that optimizes for engagement and attempts to surface non-inflammatory posts.

2. You can design another algorithm that actively penalizes inflammatory posts.

3. You can further add a human element (a moderator) to penalize or decrease the visibility of inflammatory posts.

These are things that actually happen in online communities. However, they also don't always happen to the degree that would be beneficial to society as a whole. Hence, the problem.

Like other industries (oil extraction), there are negative externalities that can and should be accounted for.

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

#134

Post by mnw21cam »

jen20 wrote: post #44
photochemsyn wrote: post #27

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, Twit…

> Based on who you follow, it recommends similar people to follow I would actually be rather happy if this were the case beyond the trivial examples. For example, if I were to create an account and follow someone from the Linux kernel or open-source licensing space, and I got recommendations of other people working in that are, that would be _great_. Instead, I got Joe Rogan and AOC forced into my timeline because th…

It seems like a hard problem to solve: I want to be siloed into subject interest groups, like to do with the various hobbies and work that I'm interested in. But I don't want to be shoved into an echo-chamber for politics.

How does the algorithm distinguish between subject interest and politics? The difference is that for subject interest I'm looking for information specific to my subject, but the algorithm optimises instead for groups that agree with my opinion. I'd be quite happy to get information about my subject interest even if I don't agree with it.

Then also the algorithm optimises for high drama, but that's a separate problem.

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

#135

Post by PM_me_your_math »

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.

In the early days, Reddit was touted as a free speech platform (sound familiar?) yet it was always designed to be an echo chamber, and changes to the product up to this point have only ever served that end.

The mechanics of upvote/downvote, in collaboration with activist admins & moderators, ensures that comments which oppose the current group think are hidden, while comments that re-enforce the group-think (even if it is plainly false) are elevated and treated as canon.

The result is that opposing view points are drowned out and then stop all together when those with opposing view points realize the futility. To the outside observer, it would appear that the group think is the real world, when in reality, it is not. This is by design and it is not accidental. Given the politics of reddit staff (which closely match twitter staff) one can see the common thread among these companies and why so many people believe the gaming is by design (because it is.)

Reddit is an unmitigated cesspool of mostly 20-somethings who have accomplished very little, but seemingly know everything. It is one giant cluster-** of propaganda save for a handful of subreddits that are actually sane places with great ideas and content.

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

#136

Post by seti0Cha »

nunez wrote: post #112
BeefWellington wrote: post #3

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.

yes, this. 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.

Yeah, that's what breaks it for me. I try to follow people for technical content, but so many people periodically inject their political opinions that keeping it purely technical is difficult. That'd be ok, except that people who do drive-by political posting almost never post anything interesting or original. It's usually smug attacks on strawman positions or repeating their political tribe's concern of the day. I'm perfectly happy to see original or carefully thought out political views, but I find this low quality stuff hard to ignore because it triggers both my contrarian and pedantic instincts.

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

#138

Post by abeppu »

I think the palette of social media products today shows us that Twitter has options, but it needs to decide what it wants to be.

- LinkedIn shows us that if you're going to be seen by people you know in real life, and whose opinion of you may eventually be important, people will be try to gain status and show off, but not in a hostile way. Is that "good"? Possibly only if you have another revenue stream (recruiters) because the content is boring.

- Instagram shows us that if you want to get influencers who can inspire a purchasing intent, you need not just photos and asymmetric follow relationships, but comments should live as a second-class citizen, and posts shouldn't have reply-to structures.

- TikTok shows us that you can get high engagement without much vitriolic disagreement, but only by giving a lot of control to the algorithm, which seeks engagement, and by heavy-handed curatorial bias towards fluffy content. You don't have to suspend or shadow-ban accounts if you can just suppress them forever.

Twitter's big choices in this lens are:

- asymmetric follower relationships

- reply structure among posts, all of which are retweetable

- mostly text posts, with low energy barrier to respond

It structurally favors bickering, retweeting / quoting someone's post to rally a response, etc, even before you consider stuff that gets recommended into your timeline.

What no one's demonstrated is a platform which hosts people discussing potentially contentious issues in a consistently civil and constructive way. I don't know if people can do that, but if you wanted to try:

- lean on NLP heavily to group posts, and highlight the ones that are contributing something new rather than repeating any party line

- multi-dimensional feedback on posts. Not just 'like' or 'retweet', but 'this is insightful', 'this is funny', 'this is cute', 'this makes me uncomfortable', etc

- time-out / forced wait to reply to a post, to kill rapid back and forth

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

#140

Post by phailhaus »

renonn wrote: post #88
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…

Quoted post unavailable.

That's not constructive feedback, and contributes nothing to the conversation.
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