I think it's funny, this developer is calling his users 4-Year-Olds. Reminds me when we used to call them lusers.
Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”
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Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Buzzfeed’s entire business was built on clickbait.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque > Tu quoque (Latin for "you also"), or the appeal to hypocrisy, is a fallacy that intends to discredit the opponent's argument by asserting the opponent's failure to act consistently in accordance with its conclusion(s).
How exactly is pointing out someone's hypocrisy not a legitimate way to discredit them?
Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't actually believe that, though. I think they're confusing the effects that rapid growth and their own cowardice in refusing to slow that growth by kicking bad actors off the platform had with the effects of adding a button to do what users were doing already.
Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”
#74Reading through some of the comments here, it occurs to me that there's a moral trilemma at play here: you can have power, you can have righteousness, or you can have impartiality, but you must pick 2 out of 3. If you bring something new into the world that gives new voice or new capabilities to previously disenfranchised groups, then you have a choice between explicitly selecting who you bestow this power on (in which case you can preserve your righteousness, but sacrifice impartiality), or giving this gift away free to everyone who can make use of it (in which case you remain impartial, but will inevitably end up empowering people you find morally abhorrent). Or you can choose to do nothing and never bring anything useful into the world, which is also valid, but means you're eclipsed by people who do.
Silicon Valley (and science/tech in general) has traditionally selected power & impartiality, while nation-states and religions have traditionally selected power & righteousness. Many of the commenters here would seemingly select righteousness & impartiality, which perhaps speaks to why we're discussing this on a message board rather than bringing startups into the world.
Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's conflating the actions of trolls with people that were critical of activists. Those are not at all the same thing. The former is NOT ok, the latter is ok and should result in healthy debate. But because Twitter doesn't like nuance, those get collapsed into a single, simple and most outrage-inducing format. A black & white hero/villain narrative. Which also avoids having to deal with any critiques, regardless o…
That ambiguity was a deliberate strategy of Gamergate (and still is a deliberate strategy even today of those with similar disposition).
Do you realize you are employing typical defence of any conspiracy theory when facing the fact that an alleged conspiracy doesn't look consistent to be real? And I mean absolutely literally. That exact statement I heard from people who believe in ZOG.
Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
They don't even have to be that sophisticated: just me automatically block accounts with no phone number and/or were created recently.
You can do that for 'no phone no.' accounts, people can still reply to you but you'll see no notification
Great, didn't know that. Thanks
Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque > Tu quoque (Latin for "you also"), or the appeal to hypocrisy, is a fallacy that intends to discredit the opponent's argument by asserting the opponent's failure to act consistently in accordance with its conclusion(s).
How exactly is pointing out someone's hypocrisy not a legitimate way to discredit them?
"You don't live up to your own argument!" is an attack on the person, not the argument -- a form of ad hominem. Just because someone doesn't take their own advice doesn't mean that the advice itself is unsound.
As the old saying goes, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”
#78One 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.
> 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.
Did he? Twitter clients already had one-click retweet functionality by the time Twitter subsumed/operationalized it, IIRC.
Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”
#79It'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.
No it wasn't. I actually looked into the whole saga as I kept on hearing about it (back in 2015ish).
From what I could gleen there were some individual women that said disparaging remarks about a whole group of individuals and were surprised when they got push back from the rest of the community which btw included women.
I've noticed more generally that one person will say something quite rude about a whole group of people, people quite rightly tell them to shove it and leave them alone and then that individual claims harassment.
Re: Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds”
#80So tired of these "OMG What Did I Create?" stories from social media devs. How about you grow a conscience _before_ you build these things? I have told managers to go f themselves for: Content that would demean people Lying to or misleading customers *Hosing over my fellow engineers ... among other things I don't think it's that special of a thing to do but reading these things makes it seem like it is.
As someone who's neither a heavy social media user[1] nor an engineer on one of these projects, I think this perspective doesn't really make a lot of sense in context. The consensus that social media is a horribly damaging drug that's destroying our democracy is quite recent.
Someone, a decade ago, decided to slightly lower the friction of the already-existing practice of retweeting by formalizing it as a feature. Expecting them to have the clairvoyance necessary to interpret that as an unethical act is beyond insane. The same is true of pretty much everything else on the product side of social media companies: you'd have to have a much keener, more cynical sense than average of how deeply horrible most people are in order to predict that social media would've evolved the way it has. "Not internalizing the fact that most people are mostly shitty people" isn't really a reasonable bar to tar people in knowingly being unethical. The new public square and its ability to unleash unfiltered humanity is _sui generis_, so nobody has a schema for how to handle this. The closest you come to people who've grappled with this question are people like The Founding Fathers.
(and to be clear, I'm no fan of these companies: I explicitly avoiding applying to Facebook and Twitter out of college because I either didn't agree with their ethics or thought itthey were shit at product. My opinion hasn't changed, but I don't think it's valuable to look back and place unreasonable standards of clairvoyance onto employees).
[1] I suppose depending on how broad your definition is, I use HN fairly regularly, but the frequency and level of interaction on a site like this seems categorically different to the kinds of social media usage you're talking about when you say "grow a conscience before building them".