You could probably say the same thing about how people react to professional sports. Everybody has an opinion.
Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve
171–180 of 279 posts
Re: Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve
#172It takes awhile, but one can already create the personalized Twitter experience Elon cited in his letter to advertisers.
You just Block everyone who disagrees with you, even slightly, as well as any nut job you see. It takes a while, but eventually, the only wrong or insane tweets on your TL are someone you Follow, "X", trashing someone of the wrong persuasion, "Y". So you Block Y.
It does get a little boring, but still, you're aware of what the morons on the other side are saying. You can't avoid it.
It's similar to watching MSNBC but not Fox, or vice versa.
Re: Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the problem is why does he a non American get pushed shit from American political fringes at all.
The problem is that nobody needs this shit. And we need a social network that doesn't have incentives to promote and create an environment conducive to toxic content. Compare to HN. (I think) We all enjoy HN, mostly because it's quite effectively moderated and the site admins don't have the same OKRs as twitter/FB etc. do.
I don't want the network to decide what speech I want or not. Just provide me with easy to use moderation tools and I'll moderate my own feed. How about give me access to the feed itself so third parties can produce alternative moderation tools on top as well.
Re: Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve
#174IMO twitter has always been for losers
Re: Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve
#175I 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 why is it that whenever curiosity gets the better of me and I actually do click on one of the 'Trending now in the UK' 'hashtags' wondering what it's about... it's about absolutely nothing? Seemingly everyone's using it to talk about something completely different, none of which is 'trending' at all. Just a naive algorithm not delivering anything useful at all. Just random crap in various languages, nothing to keep me on the platform and 'interacting' at all.
(Of course I can't remember many examples, but earlier it was '#confirmed'.)
Re: Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve
#176I 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…
The AT protocol I was looking at the other day has a concept of choosing your own algorithm to aggregate content. I think that’s an important option in order for a dominant platform to be useful to society. I think the submission is exactly wrong, the culture of an online space is heavily linked to the technology of the platform, interlinked with its business model.
> the culture of an online space is heavily linked to the technology of the platform, interlinked with its business model.
This is really nicely phrased.
Rather than thinking the OP is wrong, I think this should be another bullet point within their post.
Re: Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Try tweetdeck.twitter.com.
Re: Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve
#178Earlier 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.
This isn't just Twitter now. This is mainstream politics, it's all name calling. The UK Home Secretary blaming the "tofu-eating wokerati" from the dispatch box a couple of weeks ago.
It's not so much the name calling. It's that you are arbitrarily invited into random people's gossip.
Re: Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve
#179I 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…
Agreed. What's missing from many of these conversations is Twitter has been a publicly held company with a legal duty to increase value for its shareholders for a decade.
If it were only held to its own morals then this would be much easier to solve (albeit still VERY hard). But it must make decisions to make $ and grow. It found its local maxima by optimizing for ad revenue, coming from eyeballs on screen by incentivizing and distributing emotionally engaging content - e.g. exciting "dunks" and political drama.
The side effect is an increasingly polarized populous. Seeing drama encourages more drama.
Now that Elon has taken Twitter out of the capitalist rat-race, there's an opportunity for them to dislodge from this local maxima and find a new one - perhaps one that doesn't subsist on human drama. The question becomes, how do you find that new local maxima? What does it look like? How does it make money?
Elon is an ego-driven wild boar in my eyes, but he's given Twitter an unprecedented couple years to reinvent itself outside of fiduciary shareholder duties. Now, what will he do with it? What would we want him to do with it?
Re: Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve
#180I'm sure the tiny cross-section of people who are active Twitter users will always find a place to fight online. But the rest of us might want to stop amplifying their idiotic whining because withput that amplification, it's