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Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”

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Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”

#2
I found this to be a rather refreshing take on the traditional "tech people didn't consider the consequences" - it doesn't place blame on the tech person, and reflects thought and awareness before and after. (It's easy in hindsight to say "people suck, so this is a terrible idea", but far harder to do in advance).

Left unanswered is what do about it - the implied "require some effort" isn't likely to be successful, as the incentives to make things easier is there, and the incentive to promote long term civility is...not.

Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”

#8
One major problem with this: It's not like he "invented" the retweet. The userbase invented the "RT" prefixed message. Twitter the company simply took what the user base had done and weaponized it and empowered it. But at the same time they made it easier to track a single specific message being RT'd. So blessing and a curse.

Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”

#9
post #6

I think the real problem is Twitter refuses to make sophisticated filtering available to users. Simple mute, block, and keyword filtering are inadequate.

I was wondering today why Facebook et al. don't break their share functions into emotionally binned categories.

"Share because it makes me angry" etc

Seems like they'd get amazing whole text training sets, as well as a signal to better guide their platforms (e.g. under-weighting negative emotions in share velocity).

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