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Goodbye, Fleets

blog.twitter.com

211–220 of 306 posts

Re: Goodbye, Fleets

#211
"We’ll explore more ways to address what holds people back from participating on Twitter."

Perhaps I can help.

Twitter is always angry. You'll find the most idiotic, extreme, harmful statements from both sides of the political spectrum. Worse, Twitter actively rewards it. The more unhinged and controversial, the more engagement you get.

The replies will be equally angry. Any attempt to add nuance or reason is futile. Because the damage is already done in the form of retweets, likes, quotes.

Hence, the unreasonables run Twitter. And they have normalized a lot of absolutely pathetic behavior. Taking things out of context and applying the worst faith interpretation of it, willingly. Sub-tweeting, screenshotting, exposing private conversations, speaking badly of others within their bubble, and sometimes this triggering further attacks or even cancellations.

This culture of perpetual outrage, hate-addiction even, and the many childish behaviors that come with it, are born at Twitter.

After a Twitter session, one feels miserable and depressed. There is nothing delightful, nothing new you learned, no new friend you met. It's horror. Like the news, but then 10 times worse.

Wait, sometimes there's non-hateful tweets too. 99% of them are self-congratulatory or stupid. Something like: "My 3 year old just commented that an intersectional approach in politics is most effective".

Attention starved, completely made up. Yet for sure it will get thousands of likes. Both hate and idiocracy are richly rewarded.

To stay in line with the ever narrowing Twitter culture, one has to use it at least 6 hours per day. Otherwise, you might miss that word you used your entire life suddenly being problematic. Could even be a particular emoij. Anything triggers outrage. Anything at all. It seems the entire point of Twitter: maximizing outrage perpetually.

It's a Twitter thing and a Twitter thing only. I've never experienced it with such intensity anywhere else, and I'm merely lurking. The reason I hate it so much is that it goes beyond just a website sucking, its effects are cultural.

Re: Goodbye, Fleets

#212
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would think that a big problem here is to only allow correcting typos, not changing meaning of a tweet - which would suck for a public, fast-paced platform like twitter. I feel like GitHub already solved that problem by showing an edit history on comments. Twitter could do the same thing. Even easier: don't actually publish tweets for 60 seconds, during which time they can be edited.

Having a time where it's not actually posted would work fine but probably not be super effective: after all, you already have an unlimited amount of time to look at the message sitting on your screen before you actually send it. It's just often very hard to read your own writing for typos. Still it would be a step forward. You could even make it opt-in.

How about a preview then?

Re: Goodbye, Fleets

#213
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think that a big problem here is to only allow correcting typos, not changing meaning of a tweet - which would suck for a public, fast-paced platform like twitter. This isn't as simple as counting the number of changed characters, especially when you have to consider at least dozens, better hundreds, of languages. But then again you can already cram about ten times as much meaning into a single tweet if you w…

Instead of rendering it as hidden or even as an edit history, render it with an "inline diff" (using the kind of algorithm you see Wikipedia do, or GitHub within a line) as a cross-out of the old content and the next content next to it... changing a lot of text like that would be extremely noisy and obvious--to the point where it wouldn't accomplish any evil goal and would also just be generally discouraged by its na…

I don't think it needs to be that in-your-face. I believe an inline "this tweet has been edited" link to a revision history or diff would thwart most abuse.

Re: Goodbye, Fleets

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

archive.org scoops up all kinds of tweets - deleting them isn't really a safe way to get rid of it, just fyi

Do those archive let you search for tweets?

sort of - if you search the wayback machine for something like http://twitter.com/username/* - it will list all the tweets it has - and then a user can download everything and search locally. so, it's not as simple as searching by keyword, but it might be something to be aware about, if you are concerned for that kind of thing

Re: Goodbye, Fleets

#215
post #211

"We’ll explore more ways to address what holds people back from participating on Twitter." Perhaps I can help. Twitter is always angry. You'll find the most idiotic, extreme, harmful statements from both sides of the political spectrum. Worse, Twitter actively rewards it. The more unhinged and controversial, the more engagement you get. The replies will be equally angry. Any attempt to add nuance or reason is futile.…

I think the simplest solution to this would be to simply hide comment/retweet/like counts. It will be possible to sort of figure this out from the engagement, but it won't be easy to figure out if a tweet is popular or wildly popular.

Re: Goodbye, Fleets

#216
post #4

> Although we built Fleets to address some of the anxieties that hold people back from Tweeting, Fleets are mostly used by people who are already Tweeting to amplify their own Tweets this is exactly my problem with Twitter. It's an even bigger echo chamber than FB. As much as I try, I can't seem to escape the oversaturated bubble of a handful of extremely loud mouthed tweeters and their ardent followers. Mix in the t…

I currently look at Twitter as a destination for socially approved statements. Twitter is a place where you are either celebrated for having approved perspectives or risk professional destruction. New users can only be craven popularity chasers. Old users either conform or quit. Why would anyone play in that sandbox if you have any respect for diverse opinions?

Yet the difference between socially approved on Twitter and in the real world is massive.

I imagine that quite a few Twitter-socially approved statements would raise a lot of eyebrows in the real world. for being plain weird, nonsensical, or the listener simply not able to understand it at all.

I imagine a subset of things said on Twitter and/or tactics used will make you wake up in the hospital when applied to the real world.

This is why hardcore Twitter users tend to be so shocked when the election results come in and learn that a vast majority of people do not support their view.

Re: Goodbye, Fleets

#218
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please point to one person whose life was ruined from a single tweet, and who didn't deserve it. Yes, it exposes unapologetic racists and misogynists. That's a good thing. People who genuinely learn from their fuckups are generally called out, but their lives are hardly "ruined".

David Shor - he was impulsively fired by his firm last June for just a tweet linking to academic research (I think by a black academic) that argued that violent protests following the MLK assassination reduced the share of Democratic support in the following presidential election, while non-violent protests increase Democratic support: https://www.vox.com/2020/7/29/21340308/david-shor-omar-wasow... . David Shor is a…

In the responses I read through on twitter, no one accused him of racism. People were upset that in the wake of a tragedy he seemed to only care about getting blue votes, which is pretty insensitive. Also, just like you said, he's doing fine now.

The claim that tweets are ruining lives gets repeated over and over again, but it's a complete myth. It's a conflation of actual actual racists and nazis getting outed and ostracized, and people getting mildly called out for doing something dumb, but those are never the same people.

Re: Goodbye, Fleets

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To prevent context collapse. Some people are unable to understand what I say and take offence. That could be because of the way I'm saying it or because of them. Either way, I don't care. I would like to expend energy on my audience. Ideally, I can talk to my audience and to no one else.

Great, make your account private then… or do you want all the benefits of a completely public account without any of the costs? I’m not suggesting blocked people should be able to interact with your content, just that they can still read it. This applies especially to information being disseminated by government.

I mean, I could just as well say "Log out of your account then". That will negate the effect of the block.

Re: Goodbye, Fleets

#220
i dont tweet, despite having an account registered in '08 because quite frankly its a very toxic and argumentative environment, with a lot of noise, nonsense and bots galore.

adding features without cleaning house isnt going to bring new tweeters into the fold, we left and dont participate because of the culture on that platform.

same reason FB is having issues growing, i would imagine.

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