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We Don’t Need a New Twitter

calnewport.com

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Re: We Don’t Need a New Twitter

#11

Post by Dig1t »

7e wrote: post #3

Twitter need distributed editorship. If a tweet is inflammatory, viral, or incorrect, a group of respected users can suppress it or edit them to remove bait headlines. This would be similar to the Wikipedia editor model. Editors can be elected and their actions would be a matter of public record. This would give us a democratic republic of tweets. Eventually users would learn to tweet quality items.

Twitter has "community notes" now, which is something similar to what you describe. If something contains wrong or is misleading information the community can vote to add extra context to the bottom of the tweet that the author did not write. The note only shows up if people with a diverse set of backgrounds all vote that it is useful/correct. It's a feature that was introduced after the Twitter -> X conversion and it's a pretty good feature in my opinion. I have seen many instances of misinformation on the right being "community noted" where extra context is appended to the bottom of something inflammatory.

Re: We Don’t Need a New Twitter

#12

Post by Robotbeat »

leetharris wrote: post #10
damnesian wrote: post #2

When thinking of the real value of Twitter, I end up thinking about how it seemed when it was first on the scene. For a short while, users as a group were using it "correctly" (or maybe "usefully," or "sanely"): reporters found it to be a great way to get breaking stories out in the public sphere. I remember what for me remains "peak" Twitter- following a favorite investigative journalist who happened to be near grou…

I find comments like that your last sentence so bizarre. Just don't use them and you can still be happy? Millions of people use and enjoy X, it's ok if you don't.

The problem is the East Coast media still spends way too much time on these things. The worst culture war takes end up getting articles written about them. It’s like our sociopolitical landscape is determined by the most insane 100 people in the country with access to the Internet.

Re: We Don’t Need a New Twitter

#13

Post by PaulHoule »

When I first started using Mastodon I felt a bit overwhelmed by angry toots from certain communities. One of my pet peeves is leftists who, just as the John Birch Society saw "communists" everywhere, now see "fascists" everywhere. (For the record I am a leftist, a friend and I were the first people to put Chomsky audio lectures on the web, I've been to Howie Hawkins' house, etc.) It was clear to me that the "explore" tab was toxic because it listed things that got the most boosts and angry content spread like a virus.

At that time I was looking for an open source sentiment analysis model for social media (as opposed to product reviews) and couldn't find one. From a machine learning standpoint it didn't seem difficult to me but I thought I'd be destroyed by the process of collecting 5000 angry toots to train it.

With such a model one could: (1) filter incoming toots so you don't see them, (2) filter outgoing toots so my own anger doesn't escape (I even thought of making one that enforced

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime

but then realized instead of saying "Kier Starmer is a (borderline) fascist" (according to sci fi writer Charlie Stross) you can just load adjectives: "Fascist Kier Starmer promotes fascist policies that his fascist supporters applaud") or (3) put filtering in the network itself to bring down

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_coefficient_(epid...

which would be the most effective. Now (1) and (2) have the advantage of being less political, that is, people are very unlikely to find out you are blocking there but angry people will become aware of (3) and have something new to be angry about.

Over that time though I: (a) discovered that I get really good engagement sharing photos I take, particularly that are tagged #bloomscrolling, (b) I've added a lot of really great people, (c) got very quick to block "anti-fascists" and people who proclaim they are uncomfortable in their own skin or that I should be uncomfortable in mine, and (d) blocked a few keywords and I am enjoying my Mastodon experience a lot more.

If Threads or somebody else wants to make a serious attempt at (3) however, I am all for it.

Re: We Don’t Need a New Twitter

#14

Post by flerchin »

dragontamer wrote: post #8
7e wrote: post #3

Twitter need distributed editorship. If a tweet is inflammatory, viral, or incorrect, a group of respected users can suppress it or edit them to remove bait headlines. This would be similar to the Wikipedia editor model. Editors can be elected and their actions would be a matter of public record. This would give us a democratic republic of tweets. Eventually users would learn to tweet quality items.

Wikipedia being a non-profit, and Jimmy Wales being a respected leader, is key to Wikipedia's success. Why should I contribute to the curation of a for-profit company? Especially if Twitter will simply be sold off to the highest-bidder, such as a rich narcissist with a chip on his shoulder? ----------- This past year, we've seen the collapse of trust in three community driven websites: 1. Twitter 2. Reddit 3. StackOv…

What did StackOverflow do?

Re: We Don’t Need a New Twitter

#15

Post by randomdata »

damnesian wrote: post #2

When thinking of the real value of Twitter, I end up thinking about how it seemed when it was first on the scene. For a short while, users as a group were using it "correctly" (or maybe "usefully," or "sanely"): reporters found it to be a great way to get breaking stories out in the public sphere. I remember what for me remains "peak" Twitter- following a favorite investigative journalist who happened to be near grou…

> reporters found it to be a great way to get breaking stories out in the public sphere.

Isn't that how it is still used? At least with a weather bent? That's about all I ever see in my Twitter feed is information about upcoming weather risks, with far more detail than you get from your usual weather forecasts.

It's great and I've been able to learn a lot more about the weather because of it.

Re: We Don’t Need a New Twitter

#16

Post by pessimizer »

7e wrote: post #3

Twitter need distributed editorship. If a tweet is inflammatory, viral, or incorrect, a group of respected users can suppress it or edit them to remove bait headlines. This would be similar to the Wikipedia editor model. Editors can be elected and their actions would be a matter of public record. This would give us a democratic republic of tweets. Eventually users would learn to tweet quality items.

We need to develop tools and theory to facilitate that. Wikipedia's online governance model is completely vulnerable to attack to the point that it's almost shaped by attackers. Not a lot of good online models of governance even exist outside of Debian.

It's a hard problem, which is why real-life protocols like Robert's Rules of Order are so large and complicated when their aims seem very simple: to allow a group of people to agree on a course of action.

edit: Community Notes and other (open) algorithmic governance that is designed to withstand certain classes of attack are clearly an advance over simple voting systems. Robert's Rules use overlapping votes within votes within debates of motions, repeals, and amendments. The structure of every RR vote is determined by a mechanical classification of the thing being voted on, including the amount and type of notice that has to be given before the vote, and whether representatives of general membership get to vote, majority or 2/3rds vote/majority-of-membership, etc.

I think we should start from there, and take advantage of the fact that meetings can be distributed, continuous, and concurrent online to simplify them. RR is the way it is because they all met in one place to talk about the same thing at the same time, and didn't have the internet or any of our cool devices.

Re: We Don’t Need a New Twitter

#18

Post by losteric »

leetharris wrote: post #10
damnesian wrote: post #2

When thinking of the real value of Twitter, I end up thinking about how it seemed when it was first on the scene. For a short while, users as a group were using it "correctly" (or maybe "usefully," or "sanely"): reporters found it to be a great way to get breaking stories out in the public sphere. I remember what for me remains "peak" Twitter- following a favorite investigative journalist who happened to be near grou…

I find comments like that your last sentence so bizarre. Just don't use them and you can still be happy? Millions of people use and enjoy X, it's ok if you don't.

Your post basically says "it's bizarre you're expressing your opinion, don't do that" - that is not healthy for productive conversation (ironically op's point about those products)

It's ok to express negative opinions about why one doesn't use something. Other people benefit from learning from a valid dissenting view

Re: We Don’t Need a New Twitter

#19

Post by frithsun »

Twitter is working just fine.

And since the service is going to be run by a rich jerk with his or her own opinions that they think are facts, it's refreshing that the rich jerk in question is extremely transparent about what those opinions are now.

Re: We Don’t Need a New Twitter

#20

Post by sbszllr »

Twitter’s real value was its “global RSS” nature. You could get short, quick updates about local news, published papers, sports events, political happenings, and more.

It made it easy to source info from your followers (or their followers) quickly. Think Ask HN but broader.

Activity on Twitter is down now, mastodon and threads aren’t cutting it. There’s more activity on LinkedIn but it’s quite phoney.

I genuinely feel that Twitter provided me with useful information from people of interest.

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