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Twitter to remove ‘like’ tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate

telegraph.co.uk

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Re: Twitter to remove ‘like’ tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate

#151

Post by josefresco »

Phee7the wrote: post #65
josefresco wrote: post #21

Not sure about likes but Twitter without retweets is a much better place. The people I follow rarely say something with their own voice, and I was tired of the "outrage" tweets for every new social issue. my feed is not much quieter, and when my Tweeps do say something, I pay attention.

When you're following artists reetweets can be useful to discover their fellow artists. Not all of twitter is about debating current political events.

True. It's why I'm happy they allow it per-user. Some users retweet great stuff, it's the political/social outrage of the day I'd rather not have rammed down my throat every day (I'm perfectly happy with pulling my doom and gloom)

Re: Twitter to remove ‘like’ tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate

#152

Post by avip »

testudovictoria wrote: post #106
nothis wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's what I'm thinking when companies remove votes or scores or whatever: They're just hiding the problem. Like, people still like the stuff, it's just no longer tracked. They sure as hell won't stop tracking views or whatever. Which are likely (heh) just a factor removed from "likes". The problem is that you're giving fake news the power to dominate million's of people's twitter feeds if you're just ruthless enoug…

This isn't a sarcastic question nor an attempt at snark: have you ever moderated a message board, forum, subreddit, facebook group, etc. with decent post traffic? It's tough. Even something that has a hyperfocused topic (e.g. a subreddit for dogs with sunglasses riding skateboards) will have naysayers of what should and shouldn't be allowed. Someone posts a pic of a dog. It doesn't have sunglasses, but it does have o…

Hopefully downvoters did not miss the irony.

Re: Twitter to remove ‘like’ tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate

#153

Post by Kye »

pjc50 wrote: post #36

Reposted every time it's relevant: https://twitter.com/actioncookbook/status/684515262712967170... "USERS: we love twitter but it has problems TWITTER: great we'll fix them USERS: do you want to know what they are TWITTER: absolutely not USERS: you're alienating the people who actually use your product TWITTER: likes are now florps USERS: what TWITTER: timeline goes sideways" (The irony is that likes used to have a c…

>> "Twitter ruined this by injecting "liked" tweets by people you follow into your timeline, collapsing the distinction between like and RT."

There's a furry eSports person (https://twitter.com/SonicFox5000) who likes a lot of gay furry porn on his main account. Many people were surprised when Twitter started doing this.

Re: Twitter to remove ‘like’ tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate

#154

Post by zarriak »

blhack wrote: post #12
adrianN wrote: post #4

How can debate on Twitter be good when they limit the length of the arguments that you can make to two or three sentences?

It can't. Twitter makes people unnecessarily simplify arguments. Unnecessarily simple arguments -> People get upset because you're misrepresenting them -> essentially screaming at each other instead of discussing. The fundamental nature of the platform is bad. It's basically arguing in clickbait form.

This doesn't happen. Most of the time people either:

1. post something where you can understand what they mean but they didn't spend the time (not that you should have to) to refine the point and people are pedantic

2. post something so absurd that has no basis in reality.

I agree that the end result is screaming at each other but nobody is on Twitter to engage in debates in the first place. Nobody can present a valid discussion that was hampered in any serious way by twitter's character limit.

Re: Twitter to remove ‘like’ tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate

#155

Post by madeofpalk »

pjc50 wrote: post #36

Reposted every time it's relevant: https://twitter.com/actioncookbook/status/684515262712967170... "USERS: we love twitter but it has problems TWITTER: great we'll fix them USERS: do you want to know what they are TWITTER: absolutely not USERS: you're alienating the people who actually use your product TWITTER: likes are now florps USERS: what TWITTER: timeline goes sideways" (The irony is that likes used to have a c…

God this is exactly what I thought of immediately. Also, “How is Twitter supposed to know what we want?” https://theoutline.com/post/4936/what-do-twitter-users-want

Re: Twitter to remove ‘like’ tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate

#156

Post by avip »

donatj wrote: post #118
jobigoud wrote: post #61

They should do like HN: keep the button but remove the counter visibility. I would like to see this generalized to all social networks actually. You still get to do an appreciation gesture but without entering the popularity contest. Maybe the author of the post could still see the total. YouTube "dislike" button on comments also works like this, you can dislike but it's not counted. In this case it's a bit stupid si…

I’ve often thought only being able to down vote with a comment would be a positive. There have been times where I have had posts down voted to hell, and legitimately have no idea why. I think having to tell someone why you were down voting would be an improvement. Maybe even work at so down vote comment doesn’t count if it it self has negative karma.

That's a very interesting idea. Force constructive feedback.

Re: Twitter to remove ‘like’ tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate

#157

Post by danso »

mortenjorck wrote: post #99
chrisseaton wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People seem determined to write things on Twitter that are absolutely begging to be taken out of context. Sarcasm, inside-jokes, rhetorical hyperbole, assumptions that everyone is following the same story they are, and so on. I don't know why they do it.

The simple answer to this problem has been clear for awhile: Make responses to quote tweets opaque to the original author. 1. Bob quotes a tweet from Alice he thinks his followers will find enraging 2. Bob's followers reply to the tweet with predictable outrage and abuse 3. (present system) Twitter becomes unusable for Alice as she is flooded with mentions from all of the angry and abusive replies to Bob's quote 3. (…

If I'm not mistaken, aren't notifications on a quoted tweeted already muted for the quoted user? That is, the user sees the quoted tweet, but isn't notified with each reply/like of the quoted tweet? Just tested it on my own account but maybe I've changed a default at some point.

Re: Twitter to remove ‘like’ tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate

#158

Post by dorfsmay »

Twitter doesn't work if you want to know what's hot out there, because lack of threading, awkward interface, no possibility to organise by subject. Finally the need and concept of "following" people, but by default you don't follow them since you only see a subset of their tweets, only the ones that are popular. If this is what you are looking for, use reddit.

Twitter works fine for it's original purpose, follow a few people and wanting to know what they post. You have to tweak a few settings:

  • Disable "Timeline: Show the best Tweets first" (in "Account")

  • disable "Quality filter" (in "Notifications")

  • "Turn off retweets" for people you follow who tweet interesting stuff but retweet garbage

  • stop following people who tweet more than a few times a week (nobody has that much interesting stuff to say!)

Re: Twitter to remove ‘like’ tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate

#159

Post by pjc50 »

donatj wrote: post #118
jobigoud wrote: post #61

They should do like HN: keep the button but remove the counter visibility. I would like to see this generalized to all social networks actually. You still get to do an appreciation gesture but without entering the popularity contest. Maybe the author of the post could still see the total. YouTube "dislike" button on comments also works like this, you can dislike but it's not counted. In this case it's a bit stupid si…

I’ve often thought only being able to down vote with a comment would be a positive. There have been times where I have had posts down voted to hell, and legitimately have no idea why. I think having to tell someone why you were down voting would be an improvement. Maybe even work at so down vote comment doesn’t count if it it self has negative karma.

Slashdot had, 20 years ago, different types of upvote and downvote, so you could say things were "insightful" or "off topic". You could even alter the weightings attached to them so "Funny" would be negative rather than positive.

Of course, slashdot was also where I first encountered trolling and regular attempts at posting racial hatred or obscene images into conversations...

Re: Twitter to remove ‘like’ tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate

#160

Post by [deleted] »

fiala__ wrote: post #123
ognarb wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on mastodon in a tech instance and for the moment I love it.

Mastodon is cool, but it's far from immune to mob mentality – see Wil Wheaton thing a few months ago: https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/31/17801404/mastodon-harassm...

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