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Twitter's Fucked

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Re: Twitter's Fucked

#281

Post by jsmthrowaway »

forloop wrote: post #235
ivraatiems wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noted that I didn't read that section, apologized to the first person to point it out, and edited my comment to reflect it. The rest of my points stand quite well on their own and have nothing to do with Milo except as an example.

> > I refer of course to the Milo Yiannopoulos situation You make reference to your first paragraph (see above) as being to do with Milo. The second para is about Milo. That's The majority of your comment. You sir, are a liar. Addendum: Presume I'm getting downvoted for calling the OP a liar. It's literally what he did. It's in writing.

No, you were getting downvoted because of your indignant hysteria and outright harassment of a commenter over something completely irrelevant, and now I suspect that will transition to being downvoted for complaining about downvoting. Don't do either.

Re: Twitter's Fucked

#282

Post by dabockster »

patrickmay wrote: post #43

Speech is not violence. The author's conflation of the two trivializes actual physical violence.

This whole thing reminded me of protected vs non-protected speech in the definition of First Amendment law. There's a really good legal precedent on why violence-inducing speech is banned.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_Am...

Re: Twitter's Fucked

#285

Post by thex10 »

im_down_w_otp wrote: post #16

I'm sympathetic to the author's general ideas, but also find myself perturbed by the myopic cheapening of the term "violence". (chars < 140)

I found the author's usage of the term eye-opening rather than myopic!

Re: Twitter's Fucked

#286

Post by Yabood »

I think killing the 140 character limit will severely damage Twitter and turn into a tumblr-like website. I do agree with the author on some of the technical aspects he mentioned like filtering. I'd add to that list how conversations are structured, they are a complete mess. It gets worse too if you're building a product that leverages their API.

Re: Twitter's Fucked

#287

Post by snaky »

st3v3r wrote: post #259
snaky wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conservatives are ok with freedom of speech, 'safe zones' are invented by progressives.

"Conservatives are ok with freedom of speech" No, they're not. They're the ones saying that people shouldn't be allowed to protest many things like Chik-Fil-A's support of gay marriage bans, protesting police departments that act like black lives don't matter, etc.

> They're the ones saying that people shouldn't be allowed to protest

Citation needed.

Re: Twitter's Fucked

#288

Post by monk_e_boy »

learc83 wrote: post #261
Neetpeople wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have personally lost the belief that you can actually change someone's opinion on almost anything. So an echo chamber doesn't have to be a bad thing. I think people overestimate the value of having your beliefs challenged, does it ever really change someone's mind? If that's the case, you might as well view twitter as entertainment and to clue into the things you care about, in which case it can be pretty useful.

I've had plenty of my opinions changed, and I've changed many of my friends and families opinions numerous times. I once even managed to change someone's opinion about gun-control, on the internet. Rational arguments, a bit of rhetorical ability, and persistence are surprisingly effective. The problem is the persistence part requires multiple interactions over months or years, so it's hard to study.

Was that over twitter? 140 characters is very restrictive.

Re: Twitter's Fucked

#289

Post by gluelogic »

scholia wrote: post #212
gluelogic wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Removing his blue check was especially ridiculous to me. "Because you are who you are, you can no longer be verified."

If you're Verified, you have access to a Verified Twitter stream, which means you can avoid seeing anything from people who are not verified. This provides a civilized version of Twitter that is mostly populated by smart and funny people. So Twitter removed a professional jerk from the Verified streams while allowing him to continue as a rabble-rouser.

So Twitter's verification is more about access to this socially elitist feed? That may be a feature, but I think the primary function is to avoid people impersonating well-known public figures on the platform.

Removing Milo's check out of politically-driven spite definitely undermines the validity of the entire verification system.

Re: Twitter's Fucked

#290

Post by digi_owl »

andrewfong wrote: post #153
ryanmarsh wrote: post #14

Does Twitter have to be Facebook to not be "fucked"? I don't understand these statements that "Twitter is fucked". Twitter could improve filtering and safety but if it never changed I'd probably still get my news from it for the rest of my life. I just can't think of a better app for my use cases. I often like Twitter Moments, like something funny or some pop culture stuff I wouldn't have picked up on. Every time the…

The tension is that Twitter wants to be both a place for both news in the moment and for actual conversations. It's fine for the former but terrible at the latter. That itself isn't terrible -- they could just drop or de-emphasize conversation functions and call it a day. But Twitter is a public company that, rightly or wrongly, feels the need to boost engagement and you don't get great numbers if your users only log…

They could have gotten the conversation right when they introduced the quote system (put a link to the tweet you are responding to and the client/site will embed the tweet body inside yours), but instead managed to break the existing system they had where a client could include a tweet id number to indicate what tweet someone was replying to when using @username.

End result is that rather than have the potential to build a conversation chain, readers have to manually drill the "tree".

Never mind that they never implemented support for merged SMS (introduced all the way back in the 90s!), so you are constantly stuck at 140 characters.

All in all it is a quintessential US company with the classic US mobile network blinders firmly fitted.

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