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We don’t need a new Twitter

newyorker.com

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Re: We don’t need a new Twitter

#51

Post by BobbyJo »

mvdwoord wrote: post #35
abhv wrote: post #9

See also this thread from yesterday, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37147914 "Thousands of scientists are cutting back from Twitter" Essentially, a survey published in Nature about twitter usage among scientists dropping, in part, because of the phenomena mentioned in this New Yorker article. Eg: "Žiga Malek, an environmental scientist at the Free University of Amsterdam, mentioned in the survey that he had sta…

If you don't follow people, they don't show up in your feed. If you lurk on the firehose you get it all. Including all the parts you may disagree with or find despicable or... Perhaps also something nice? I really don't get this point... What do you expect exactly on a large platform?

Discovery is a feature we look for in social media platforms. Twitter offers discovery in the form of an optional more open feed. Twitters discovery feature is worse for these users now than it was before. They now feel less compelled to use the product.

1+1=2.

Re: We don’t need a new Twitter

#52

Post by kazinator »

Not mentioning Mastodon (not even just to disparage it as not being worth further remarks) makes the article look blinkered.

Threads is related to and interoperates with Mastodon; so Mastodon is relevant to an article in which Threads is the main topic.

Re: We don’t need a new Twitter

#53

Post by gmane »

mattbgates wrote: post #45

Soon as the takeover happened, my account got hacked, used for crypto spam, and banned. I can't use X. Had that account ever since the early days of Twitter. Tried putting in an appeal but its automated. Am I really missing out on anything?

No. A few months after the takeover I blocked Twitter at the DNS level for my house. I went back into the office for work one day and in some down time, I went to Twitter while it wasn't DNS blocked. It's a ghost town. I miss the old Twitter, but that's clearly never coming back.

Re: We don’t need a new Twitter

#54

Post by adminu »

ulrischa wrote: post #4

One important part is missing in this article: RSS Feeds! The missing aggregation of news can be done easily with RSS. I'm waiting for a online service that adds tue conversation part to the aggregation part that RSS feeds offer for years

That sounds interesting. Are you thinking about a comment system build into RSS?

I am interested in potential future RSS capabilities. Would you mind a chat about that? If so, please drop me an email, see profile.

Re: We don’t need a new Twitter

#55

Post by Swizec »

phailhaus wrote: post #33
Swizec wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a long-time enjoyer and early promoter of social media, I disagree with your translation. The real problem is that either due to algorithms or some inherent quirk of human nature, global public social media has become awful . Let me characterize the awfulness with a joke that showcases the vibe shift. You tweet/post: “I love sandwiches” 2009 twitter: “Omg I too love sandwiches! Let’s be friends, follow me back” 20…

This is a natural consequence of Twitter's design, which rewards attention and users with high follower counts. "Omg I too love sandwiches" is not going to get a lot of likes, whereas outrage sells. There's no way to punish toxic behavior, so the only direction is up.

> which rewards attention

Hence my thought that this is a quirk of human nature. We give attention to the wrong things.

All ad-based media suffers from this problem. Twitter’s algorithm is but a reflection of our revealed preferences. It doesn’t care what we say we want, only what we show we want with our actions.

Re: We don’t need a new Twitter

#56

Post by Bye_Felicia »

jmye wrote: post #38
Bye_Felicia wrote: post #7

[flagged]

That is a wildly lazy "translation" of the subtitle of an article you clearly didn't actually read or engage with. His argument boils down to none of the above, and your final point is such an incredibly ironic statement, that it's hard to believe it wasn't intentional. Twitter is, to his point, largely a worthless platform for discussion if you don't heavily curate your experience, because it does, by design (uninte…

If you use a misleading headline, then that is not my problem. I skimmed the article as the New Yorker is an overly verbose rag read by sesquipedalian obsessed pseudo-intellectuals.

Actually, YOU have just made an excellent point unintentionally, not everyone has the time or desire to read a long article. IF you prefer more longform content, then you can go to any number of platforms which specialize in that.

Twitter is what it always was, a quick take or bite-size morsel of information.

Re: We don’t need a new Twitter

#57

Post by coldpie »

moojd wrote: post #15
coldpie wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Removing verification was a major decline in usability. Verified accounts were good to know that you'd found the correct account for an organization or person you were looking for, but that's gone now. Verification was also a good first approximation that the account is at least somewhat notable, and not just some random online person, but that's gone now, too. With verification, Twitter used to be a moderately trust…

I agree that 'real' verification was useful, but on the other hand removing it had the nice side-effect of 'breaking the spell' of twitter's imagined importance. People take it way less seriously now which I think is positive.

To provide a concrete example, Twitter was nice for getting bus service updates from whatever transit agency operates in the city I happen to be in. I used to be able to look at a bus sign and see the service agency here is called "Metro Transit", so I could search "Metro Transit" on Twitter and somewhere early in the search results a verified account would pop up with something like "Twin Cities Metro Transit" in the description. I can be almost certain that's the account I want to look at. Now that verification is gone, I have to try way harder to find the right account in the sea of conversations, spam, inactive accounts, etc etc. Or go outside Twitter to find the agency's website and dig around for their social contacts, blah blah. Nothing to do with "importance" here, I just want to know what's going on with the bus service. Twitter used to be good for that, now it's a chore.

Re: We don’t need a new Twitter

#58

Post by phailhaus »

Swizec wrote: post #55
phailhaus wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a natural consequence of Twitter's design, which rewards attention and users with high follower counts. "Omg I too love sandwiches" is not going to get a lot of likes, whereas outrage sells. There's no way to punish toxic behavior, so the only direction is up.

> which rewards attention Hence my thought that this is a quirk of human nature. We give attention to the wrong things. All ad-based media suffers from this problem. Twitter’s algorithm is but a reflection of our revealed preferences. It doesn’t care what we say we want, only what we show we want with our actions.

You don't even need ads for it to happen. Take the ads out of Twitter. Drive the algorithm entirely off of what has the most likes and retweets. You're still going to get incredibly toxic behavior, because that's what people are more likely to react to and retweet.

The problem is that with Twitter, everything lives in one huge pool. You can't make a "nice Twitter" section cordoned off from everything else.

Re: We don’t need a new Twitter

#59

Post by jdblair »

I'm a little surprised the article didn't mention Mastodon. It has its warts and issues (i mean, ahem, features) like no full-text search and no quote-posting, but Mastodon does generate the small discussion forum feel, but with the ability to link out to other communities.

Re: We don’t need a new Twitter

#60

Post by Dan_Sylveste »

gmane wrote: post #53
mattbgates wrote: post #45

Soon as the takeover happened, my account got hacked, used for crypto spam, and banned. I can't use X. Had that account ever since the early days of Twitter. Tried putting in an appeal but its automated. Am I really missing out on anything?

No. A few months after the takeover I blocked Twitter at the DNS level for my house. I went back into the office for work one day and in some down time, I went to Twitter while it wasn't DNS blocked. It's a ghost town. I miss the old Twitter, but that's clearly never coming back.

That's weird, because I'm seeing as much activity, engagement and interaction as I've always seen.

There are a lot fewer insane takes being posted by accounts that may or may not be bots, but I'm not really missing that as they just derailed the conversation.

I get the impression that more 'normal' people are now using the platform; the quality and ... coherence ... of replies has gone way up.

Also happy to see a lot less engagement from 'people' that post insane takes then meme out and block when questioned.

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