So -- remove the button. No? Why not?
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Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”
31–40 of 148 posts
Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”
#32Hyperbole. Social media is not broken. The retweet is not why. And this guy didn't invent the idea of republishing content. Other microblog services had that, and I'm pretty sure Twitter users were doing it on their own.
So I'm curious what you think is the problem, or if there is one - and if so, what your proposed solution would be?
Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”
#33Similar - https://www.nowtheendbegins.com/man-created-facebook-like-bu...
Also a guy who did major pioneering work on infinite scrolling https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44640959
Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”
#34So -- remove the button. No? Why not?
Maybe it's not actually a loaded gun in the hands of a 4 year old.
Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was wondering today why Facebook et al. don't break their share functions into emotionally binned categories. "Share because it makes me angry" etc Seems like they'd get amazing whole text training sets, as well as a signal to better guide their platforms (e.g. under-weighting negative emotions in share velocity).
People would quickly realize that if they share it under a negative category their share velocity would be hit. A better approach might just be to sentiment-detect negative emotion in Tweets and adjust share velocity accordingly.
You mean the Liberal Tech Billionaire Elite should use AI to secretly Suppress and Censor my tweets about how They’re Building Landing Strips For Gay Martians?
Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”
#36I think the real problem is Twitter refuses to make sophisticated filtering available to users. Simple mute, block, and keyword filtering are inadequate.
I was wondering today why Facebook et al. don't break their share functions into emotionally binned categories. "Share because it makes me angry" etc Seems like they'd get amazing whole text training sets, as well as a signal to better guide their platforms (e.g. under-weighting negative emotions in share velocity).
I wonder if it's already possible to do this without a new button.
If a lot of people close to you in your social network react "angry" to something and you choose to share it, there's a good chance you're sharing it because it makes you angry too.
Graphs are cool
Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”
#37There is a much larger problem here than RTs, and that is lack of journalistic integrity.
You can spread pretty much any sort of information without research or even a logical basis. Weirdly, we tend to default to accepting it as valid rather than questioning it.
The only realistic cure for this, outside of draconian authority, is to teach people how to be more skeptical and educate them on logical fallacies.
These are things that should be taught from elementary school and onwards IMHO.
Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”
#38It's so annoying when platforms and product managers think they know better than their users. People want to retweet and they will even if you remove this feature (as they were before it existed). It basically comes off as Twitter doesn't like the users they have or the behavior they want. It's really hilarious that they use Gamergate as an example of why retweets are bad. That was a massive manifestation of the abov…
I always roll my eyes when HN falls for interviews with "random engineer or product person responsible for [feature]", as if that automatically confers authority like they're Richard Stallman or Tim Berners-Lee.
Combining the fact that they have nothing insightful to say with the ego boost from being interviewed in visible articles means that people like this are going to say whatever they think will provide a punchy, clickbait headline for the less-discerning members of link boards to feed their biases with.
The only notable thing here is how hard HN falls for drivel like this.
Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”
#39It's so annoying when platforms and product managers think they know better than their users. People want to retweet and they will even if you remove this feature (as they were before it existed). It basically comes off as Twitter doesn't like the users they have or the behavior they want. It's really hilarious that they use Gamergate as an example of why retweets are bad. That was a massive manifestation of the abov…
Gamergate was a harassment movement aimed at women in videogames that had some very smart people thinking of justifications and excuses to protect it in public.
Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”
#40One major problem with this: It's not like he "invented" the retweet. The userbase invented the "RT" prefixed message. Twitter the company simply took what the user base had done and weaponized it and empowered it. But at the same time they made it easier to track a single specific message being RT'd. So blessing and a curse.
The article specifically argues that the retweet button causes problems that manual retweeting didn't, and so he did invent the thing that's actually a problem.
Yea the act of copying and pasting to do a retweet required just enough extra work that people had to think about what they were typing, and so users used it in a less reactionary way.
It's kind of incredible that a tweak to one small feature could have such a large behavioral impact.