Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 279 posts

Re: Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve

#231

Post by MockObject »

kibwen wrote: post #182
noxer wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it isn't a crime or spam then it is in fact disagreement. There is no inherent different from calling someone a "racist" or "nazi" to calling someone a "groomer". On Twitter these "slurs" are used by different sides (bubbles) but other than that there is no difference. It might be a baseless allegation or there could be more to it but either way it is clearly an opinion and disagreeing is fine no need to prevent a…

> But whatever it was, why does it bother you? What exactly is so horrible about posting something "wrong" and deleting it? It wasn't just "wrong", it was a propaganda article designed to dismiss a right-wing terrorist attack that almost killed the husband of the third highest ranking official in the country by painting the attack as a "false flag" designed to cover up homosexual infidelity. And Musk is the richest m…

People are jumping to "false flag" stories because the story as presented is simply unbelievable (the third highest ranking official in the country has zero security?), and the media is being evasive (Politico reporting a third man opened the door, then reported that it was a baseless claim!), and the media is also aggressively eager to portray a nudist hemp jewelry maker illegal alien as a MAGA loyalist.

If the story were straight, and reported honestly, some very few would remain suspicious.

Re: Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve

#232

Post by oersted »

rishair wrote: post #179
edent wrote: post #13

I disagree. Your points aren't necessarily wrong, but they ignore one big factor. Twitter chooses what content to promote to people. I could use Twitter quite happily not knowing about the latest "scandal" in, say, the knitting world. But Twitter actively promotes that content to me - either with the "trending" sidebar or by showing me content that it thinks will increase my engagement. That is a technical problem. H…

Agreed. What's missing from many of these conversations is Twitter has been a publicly held company with a legal duty to increase value for its shareholders for a decade . If it were only held to its own morals then this would be much easier to solve (albeit still VERY hard). But it must make decisions to make $ and grow. It found its local maxima by optimizing for ad revenue, coming from eyeballs on screen by incent…

I think the world keeps overestimating the impact of Twitter. When you are on it it feels like everyone is there, but they only have 77M users in the US and 238M worldwide. That's a tiny minority. The population at large is nowhere near as polarized as Twitter makes it seem, and very few people are actually impacted by this biased perspective.

Re: Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve

#233

Post by pwinnski »

razwall wrote: post #198
pwinnski wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter literally interrupts the normal feed with content you haven't chosen. Here, I'll load https://twitter.com to see: 1. dog pic from someone I follow 2. ad ("Promoted") 3. Steve Martin playing a banjo while dressed as a penguin (I follow him) 4. a tweet from an account I don't follow, but a friend liked it 5. a tweet from an account a friend follows, but I don't 6. a tweet from an account a friend follows, but I…

Sounds like you're using "Home" view. You can switch to "latest Tweets" view, which would eliminate 4, 5, 6, and 10 from your list.

I don't care enough about twitter to actually solve the issue. I was just pointing out that people aren't lying or exaggerating.

Re: Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve

#234

Post by numpad0 »

paulusthe wrote: post #83
mFixman wrote: post #14

I used to agree with you until I created a new Twitter account from scratch. I'm not American and I specifically put non-political things in my interests. Yet, the second I signed up I got the following: 1. A notification about a smug reply a rando made to a Republican Congressman. 2. Posts from a meme page with a Pepe the frog avatar showing homeless people fighting in San Francisco. 3. Somebody I don't follow accus…

That's definitely the problem, but the answer isn't to change Twitter's algorithms. We must ask why Twitter's algorithms ended up where they did, and the answer is that it's more profitable to do what Twitter does than the alternative. It's not like Twitter's creators maliciously set out to become the flaming hellscape it is now. It responded to market forces and user behavior. Neither of those factors have changed,…

Politics ragefest require almost zero prior training, education or qualification, to generate buzz and be gratified of attention gained.

“Good” contents that the vocal minority wants are rocket science compared to that. They’re not finding @NASA after another.

Re: Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve

#235

Post by runlevel1 »

Brakenshire wrote: post #145
mFixman wrote: post #14

I used to agree with you until I created a new Twitter account from scratch. I'm not American and I specifically put non-political things in my interests. Yet, the second I signed up I got the following: 1. A notification about a smug reply a rando made to a Republican Congressman. 2. Posts from a meme page with a Pepe the frog avatar showing homeless people fighting in San Francisco. 3. Somebody I don't follow accus…

The AT protocol I was looking at the other day has a concept of choosing your own algorithm to aggregate content. I think that’s an important option in order for a dominant platform to be useful to society. I think the submission is exactly wrong, the culture of an online space is heavily linked to the technology of the platform, interlinked with its business model.

I'd like to think making the platform a more positive, constructive place would improve engagement and therefore be compatible with their business model.

However, I confess I'm leaning towards the more cynical outcome.

Re: Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve

#237

Post by noxer »

jlebar wrote: post #201
noxer wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it isn't a crime or spam then it is in fact disagreement. There is no inherent different from calling someone a "racist" or "nazi" to calling someone a "groomer". On Twitter these "slurs" are used by different sides (bubbles) but other than that there is no difference. It might be a baseless allegation or there could be more to it but either way it is clearly an opinion and disagreeing is fine no need to prevent a…

> What is so hard about the concept of allowing people to be wrong about things? Because democratic society requires us to agree on basic facts in order to function. "People are wrong about" things like: - who got more votes in the last US presidential election - whether future elections in the US will be fair - whether global warming is real - whether Democratic politicians are literal lizard people who molest child…

Lets assume hypothetically someone disagree with your comment. That someone is an admin on HN. Do you want that someone to challenge your comment with arguments/reasoning (with the possibility that it is very bad reasoning might even contain factually wrong "facts" ) or do you want that someone to just remove your comment?

And which of these 2 options is more likely to make your and that hypothetical admin's opinion come closer?

What about 2 other people reading your post. One agrees 100% the other partially disagrees. Which option from above would be best for them? Which option is more likely to move their opinion more towards something all agree on?

If for any of the above situations you think deleting would be the best then ignore this reply and pretend the whole thread was deleted ;)

Re: Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve

#238

Post by trs8080 »

MockObject wrote: post #231
kibwen wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But whatever it was, why does it bother you? What exactly is so horrible about posting something "wrong" and deleting it? It wasn't just "wrong", it was a propaganda article designed to dismiss a right-wing terrorist attack that almost killed the husband of the third highest ranking official in the country by painting the attack as a "false flag" designed to cover up homosexual infidelity. And Musk is the richest m…

People are jumping to "false flag" stories because the story as presented is simply unbelievable (the third highest ranking official in the country has zero security?), and the media is being evasive (Politico reporting a third man opened the door, then reported that it was a baseless claim!), and the media is also aggressively eager to portray a nudist hemp jewelry maker illegal alien as a MAGA loyalist. If the stor…

It really isn't unbelievable. A mentally ill man was radicalized by right wing propaganda and went to a lawmaker's home to harm her. Her security wasn't there because she wasn't there. End of story.

You're looking for conspiracy where there is none. There is nothing "suspicious" unless you're trying to deflect blame.

Re: Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve

#239

Post by csours »

boplicity wrote: post #209
csours wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You work on a forum - it is by design limited to some area(s) of focus. Twitter is not like that. I think forums are great. I think forums are better than Twitter, because they can have some focus. I think social media probably doesn't scale, because social groups will always surface conflict. I think you can design those algorithms if you know what area(s) your community cares about. Twitter cares about everything.

The algorithms I've designed are in no way aware of the content of the post -- and they have worked as intended; reducing the amount of inflammatory posts that are surfaced. I don't see how, in this case, large social companies can't implement similar, content agnostic algorithms. There are very simple signals of "quality" that are not based on the actual content beyond the length of the post. It's not that different…

It's not just the content of the posts or discussion, it's the content of the people coming to your site.

Re: Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve

#240

Post by rsync »

pjc50 wrote: post #12
hackyhacky wrote: post #5

Hacker News has a great community, features informative discourse, and doesn't suffer from the ailments that you list (or suffers from them much less than Twitter). Therefore we should invite all Twitter users to join our healthy community. Everybody wins. Edit: I hoped it would be obvious, but the second sentence of this comment was supposed to be sarcastic.

.. because it doesn't allow pictures, has aggressive downvotes, and a very careful moderator (dang) with the power to ban people. The problem is that dang doesn't scale.

I think the absence of pictures and avatars is a very significant aspect of the HN success.
Post reply on HN