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

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

#251

Post by iinnPP »

colinmhayes wrote: post #119
iinnPP wrote: post #30

I ran an official fan site once, for an EA title of all things. Doing this I learned some neat tricks to limit the amount of administration required. One thing that stuck was that there is a huge benefit to maintaining a specific section for garbage posts. Sticky threads existed titled: Potentially offensive/spam? Post it here. Everyone used it and followed the very few rules of the spam board. I rarely had to move a…

The issue with this is that the "garbage" posts are the ones that maximize engagement. Twitter and all the other social media sites are showing them on purpose. They're trying to maximize engagement, why would they decide to quarantine the most engaging posts?

People post in the garbage area all the time. It saves a lot of moderation work and everyone from my experience seemed better off for it.

Venting can be quite therapeutic but without an audience it isn't as effective.

Also, the community developed a bit of a stigma towards people with garbage posts outside of the designated area. Politely, in order to not themselves be stigmatized.

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

#252

Post by colinmhayes »

quesera wrote: post #197
criddell wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why would they decide to quarantine the most engaging posts? Maybe as a private company, they can start to think beyond shallow, short term metrics.

> Maybe as a private company, they can start to think beyond shallow, short term metrics. Only if Musk operates Twitter as a public service, at a personal expense of at least $700MM/yr. ... Elon's debt service for the purchase exceeds $1BB/yr, for an unprofitable business with $600MM of revenue. If he cuts operating costs by 50% while maintaining revenue (not likely but possible, surely Twitter has too many people to…

Twitters revenue was 5 billion last year.

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

#253

Post by iinnPP »

xiphias2 wrote: post #43
iinnPP wrote: post #30

I ran an official fan site once, for an EA title of all things. Doing this I learned some neat tricks to limit the amount of administration required. One thing that stuck was that there is a huge benefit to maintaining a specific section for garbage posts. Sticky threads existed titled: Potentially offensive/spam? Post it here. Everyone used it and followed the very few rules of the spam board. I rarely had to move a…

It looks cool, but right now there are 2 sides of the same coin. Maybe one would need a ,,victim / possibly being offended'' section as well.

You don't let people be offended by it. There's no "offensive" reporting, only illegal content reporting. The people who want to post edgy things will go there. The immediate result is that every other area of discussion becomes less "violent and offensive." People who are offended in the garbage pile get told not to go to the garbage pile. The offenders however, get told to keep their garbage in the pile.

Nobody gets censored. Nobody gets offended (without ignoring the warnings.) The entire planet cools down.

I have no idea if it would work at Twitter's scale though.

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

#254

Post by colinmhayes »

iinnPP wrote: post #251
colinmhayes wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue with this is that the "garbage" posts are the ones that maximize engagement. Twitter and all the other social media sites are showing them on purpose. They're trying to maximize engagement, why would they decide to quarantine the most engaging posts?

People post in the garbage area all the time. It saves a lot of moderation work and everyone from my experience seemed better off for it. Venting can be quite therapeutic but without an audience it isn't as effective. Also, the community developed a bit of a stigma towards people with garbage posts outside of the designated area. Politely, in order to not themselves be stigmatized.

I think you misunderstood what I was saying. Twitter wants its users to see the garbage content, that's what's driving engagement. I'm not saying users will refuse to self moderate, I'm saying twitter doesn't want them to.

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

#255

Post by MockObject »

trs8080 wrote: post #238
MockObject wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Her security wasn't there because she wasn't there. End of story.

Instead of waking Paul up and asking for Nancy so he could attack her, suppose he had planted listening devices, or explosive devices, and crept away unnoticed? But you're telling me it's perfectly reasonable to leave the home unguarded when the third in line for the presidency is away. Doesn't that seem like a horrible national security vulnerability?

It could possibly be true, but please, be honest enough to agree that it sounds unlikely.

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

#256

Post by SilasX »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #194
SilasX wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, I discovered recently that it would constantly fill my notifications queue with "someone whose posts you looked at ages ago retweeted something you don't care about" ... and would also neglect to notify me about the direct replies I was getting to my tweets. WTF?

> someone whose posts you looked at ages ago Someone you follow, presumably? > retweeted something you don't care about Are you really expecting an algorithm to make a judgement call on that? Maybe that IS how Twitter is 'supposed' to work - if it is, then I'm glad that's not how it seems to be working for me! I'm encouraged by recent talk from Musk about 'opening up the algorithm' and even the potential of configuri…

>Someone you follow, presumably?

No.

>Are you really expecting an algorithm to make a judgement call on that? Maybe that IS how Twitter is 'supposed' to work - if it is, then I'm glad that's not how it seems to be working for me!

A direct reply has higher notification worthiness than something it thinks I might be interested in. This shouldn't be controversial.

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

#257

Post by dqpb »

phailhaus wrote: post #250
dqpb wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should look up the word in a dictionary. You might be surprised by its definition.

1. relating to a particular subject, art, or craft, or its techniques. "technical terms" 2. of, involving, or concerned with applied and industrial sciences. Wow, that was completely useless. What's your point? Or was that just a "zinger" to get the last word in?

I'm using the word as broadly as it's meant to be used.

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

#258

Post by phailhaus »

dqpb wrote: post #257
phailhaus wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. relating to a particular subject, art, or craft, or its techniques. "technical terms" 2. of, involving, or concerned with applied and industrial sciences. Wow, that was completely useless. What's your point? Or was that just a "zinger" to get the last word in?

I'm using the word as broadly as it's meant to be used.

How does that help in the context in the current discussion? We're clearly drawing a distinction between technical implementation details and design decisions. Twitter made a design decision to only allow following people and Topics, and not supporting a dislike button. Notice how I didn't mention anything about how those are implemented, because those would be technical details.

Everyone's bogged down in how Twitter is implemented, rather than addressing the high-level design of the website itself.

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

#259

Post by jwarden »

It’s a socio-technical problem. But technology definitely contributes to the problem: the algorithms determine what kind of behaviors receive attention and this determines the kind of behaviors dominate the platform. I have written more about this idea here: https://deliberati.io/the-law-of-attention/

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

#260

Post by pj_mukh »

mFixman wrote: post #62
pj_mukh wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the uncomfortable question though, can a social media platform achieve sufficient scale, so its more useful for discoverability than your group chats, without optimizing for engagement? Discord is a happy medium (just, really large group chats).

Discord is actually a good example: I think I got 0 notifications about groups I don't follow, so isn't as big of an incentive to aggressively smugpost as in Twitter.

FWIW, I've found most of my discord servers on...Twitter. Discoverability is still a problem. How does everyone else do it?
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