Twitter’s Plan to Get People to Stop Yelling at Each Other • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter’s Plan to Get People to Stop Yelling at Each Other

#131

Post by baroffoos » Thu, May 16, 2019, 6:14 AM UTC

bluetidepro wrote: post #10

josefresco wrote: post #2

> Twitter, predictably, immediately dysregulated in response. This a rant, but I hate this trend of taking what a couple/few people say and calling it "Twitter" or "everyone is saying" or "people are calling for" or "the Internet hates". Reference the actual person who said the comment and don't lump millions of users in with the comments of a few. Whenever I dig into an issue like this, I find maybe a handful of com…

THIS. This is "Twitter Moments" in a nutshell, and it drives me absolutely crazy. It may be the most toxic "news-source", in my opinion, because of this. It takes a handful of tweets (usually not even verified accounts), and tries to make mountains out of molehills. It tries to drive narratives based on trends of a few "loud" users, and it's so deceiving. It rarely paints a full picture, and it tries so hard to manip…

I once did the research on an article with a title in the format "X group is outraged over Y's comment on twitter" and when I found the original post I found no outrage and at most just a mild dissatisfaction.

Re: Twitter’s Plan to Get People to Stop Yelling at Each Other

#132

Post by enraged_camel » Thu, May 16, 2019, 6:17 AM UTC

toephu2 wrote: post #126

slater wrote: post #104

Does it involve banning nazis?

Why do you have nazis in your timeline in the first place? I never understood the people that always complain about nazis on twitter. Like seriously what are you clicking 'Like' on that your twitter is fully of nazis?

It’s not my Twitter that is full of Nazis. It’s Twitter in general. And their tweets make it into my life because non-Nazis respond to them, and those responses then become popular and are shared.

Re: Twitter’s Plan to Get People to Stop Yelling at Each Other

#133

Post by s_y_n_t_a_x » Thu, May 16, 2019, 6:23 AM UTC

nullc wrote: post #99

The product has "twit" right in the name. Twitter is where you go to read twits or become one. Why is anyone surprised? From its tiny size limits to its byzantine threading and inability to follow all of one person without creating an account (which they often instantly ban, even if it does nothing but read)... Twitter is a communications medium constructed in a way that maximizes the ability ferment outrage and mini…

Protip: you can text "follow @username" to 40404 to follow people without having a twitter account.

I much prefer getting a text from a select few people when they tweet. And if you're not a fan of twitter there's the bonus of it costing them money without giving ad revenue.

Re: Twitter’s Plan to Get People to Stop Yelling at Each Other

#134

Post by shambolicfroli » Thu, May 16, 2019, 6:23 AM UTC

To see where new behavior (by the platform) is needed, they should look at what breaks incipient good discussions, and how to prevent that. (I'll also note that the HN conversation on this post seems quite different in tone from the usual HN.)

Re: Twitter’s Plan to Get People to Stop Yelling at Each Other

#135

Post by ramblerman » Thu, May 16, 2019, 6:24 AM UTC

fjsolwmv wrote: post #92

theoh wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people used to feel this way about IRC. I'm afraid the reality is probably that you just don't have the motivation to figure it out, for whatever reason. No mass-market product like Twitter could succeed if it was as confusing as you say it is. There's also the fact that a subset of computer programmer types have low tolerance for all sorts of "noisy" things that the average person doesn't have a problem with.

IRC is also terrible for conversations.

It isn't but solely because IRC channels are of a reasonable size, and have some form of moderation.

If you wanted to chat in a channel with 1000s of people (like twitter), the IRC model would be untenable.

Re: Twitter’s Plan to Get People to Stop Yelling at Each Other

#136

Post by jokoon » Thu, May 16, 2019, 6:29 AM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #15

Simpler: stop showing tweets just because other people liked them. That's not a reshare, so it shouldn't be treated that way. More generally, discourage large conversations and encourage fragmentation.

> More generally, discourage large conversations and encourage fragmentation.

Doesn't that encourage bubbles?

Re: Twitter’s Plan to Get People to Stop Yelling at Each Other

#137

Post by cjslep » Thu, May 16, 2019, 6:55 AM UTC

aloisdg wrote: post #125

chrisbrandow wrote: post #118

I think human conversations at scale with strangers is inherently difficult to solve. We are prone to quick, context-life reactions. Threading management only gets you so far…

HN, Reddit and most newsgroups are not so bad.

The low quality of Reddit-think slips into the workplace all the time. If it isn't a debate about semantics (the lowest form of argument, "well this word also means..." Etc) it's a debate about the second lowest form (the form/framing of an argument, "that's a reductionist argument..." Etc), and when I challenge said co-workers on this ("what kind of reductionism? So what if it's reductionist? Don't assume I believe in Kant's first formulation of the categorical imperative which you use" etc) I get silence as a response because this kind of archetype persona also cannot admit when they are wrong, or want to keep using these techniques as a self-defense mechanism and substitute for their own thought. And they'd rather not continue to have a good faith argument with me at a higher level, because I can get rough around the edges when people pull this nonsense on me.

I find it incredibly frustrating. It's a lot of energy spent on my part and I get no actual debate. No matter how civil I try to be about the whole thing.

Re: Twitter’s Plan to Get People to Stop Yelling at Each Other

#138

Post by kashprime » Thu, May 16, 2019, 6:57 AM UTC

derefr wrote: post #86

Itaxpica wrote: post #32

Unfortunately, I don’t think this is really an issue that can be fixed technically. People go to Twitter to yell at each other; that’s basically the point of the platform. A Twitter where people don’t yell at each other is basically Mastodon, which is a lovely network that basically nobody uses.

There really is a sub-network within Twitter of people who only ever have nice, productive conversations with one-another. This sub-network seems to have a lot of overlap with the set of people who use their Twitter handle as a substitute for an email address—i.e. the people who want you to tweet at them if you want to collaborate with them on something. Which itself is vaguely overlapping the set of people who are "…

Very true, especially in the emergency medicine and critical care world where entire conferences and movements are organized around hashtags (like #foamed or #medtwitter). It's too bad Twitter doesn't give it's users tools to screen out bad actors and accentuate the positive.

Re: Twitter’s Plan to Get People to Stop Yelling at Each Other

#139

Post by bubblewrap » Thu, May 16, 2019, 7:20 AM UTC

nullc wrote: post #99

The product has "twit" right in the name. Twitter is where you go to read twits or become one. Why is anyone surprised? From its tiny size limits to its byzantine threading and inability to follow all of one person without creating an account (which they often instantly ban, even if it does nothing but read)... Twitter is a communications medium constructed in a way that maximizes the ability ferment outrage and mini…

Except you can follow all sorts of experts and famous people om there. Not all of them are twits. Even Paul Graham drops the occasional tweet: https://twitter.com/paulg

Re: Twitter’s Plan to Get People to Stop Yelling at Each Other

#140

Post by michelb » Thu, May 16, 2019, 7:24 AM UTC

carriers wrote: post #59

skymt wrote: post #33

> Over several days this spring, BuzzFeed News met with Twitter’s leadership and watched as twttr’s team worked on its first big push: helping people better understand what’s being said in often chaotic conversations. The team thinks that if people took more time to read entire conversations, that would help improve their comprehension of them. I had assumed that Twitter was aware of the implications of its design fo…

Yeah, I don't get this at all. I think it's even deeper than designing for controversy. I'm "older" (40s), though I work on products used by younger people, so I don't think this is just me being old, but I can't follow a conversation on twitter at all. When there's a link from HackerNews to Twitter, I click on it and sometimes see the thing mentioned in the HN title, and sometimes don't. Then there's a bunch of stuf…

This is why I use https://threadreaderapp.com on tweetstorms. Kinda silly, but it's the only way to properly read threads, as even Twitter itself seems to mess up the ordering.