The entire world wasn't meant to share a single town square with anonymity sprinkled in.
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
#92[deleted]
Re: Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve
#93AI can surely be trained to promote quality content and hide political snark and misinformation. How hard can it be?
Re: Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve
#94Absolutely disagree.
The social issues are exasperated by their recommendations (inflammatory topics) and constraints (short tweets).
In a town square, you can theoretically walk away from a screaming mob.
On Twitter, this is nearly impossible with today's tools. It would be like wack-a-mole, for every one harassing user, two more would show up.
So there has to be a way individually, to mass silence certain topics.
E.g. Use a regular expression to block any topic AND/OR user that tweets about topic Y containing X word patterns.
Re: Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve
#95Until not that long ago I was a pretty happy Twitter user. I curated my follows (keeping them between 150 and 200), only followed people posting interesting , creative , or scientific things. When anyone started tweeting or retweeting low quality material, I simply unfollowed. Unfortunately, the devs at Twitter hate the way I use it. Nowadays ever 5th post or so on my timeline is from someone I do not follow, either…
You can use lists to avoid all of these. You'll see tweets only from those you add to the list. No promotional tweets, etc. So, instead of (or, in addition to) follow/unfollow, you'll have to add/remove from lists.
Re: Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve
#96It may not be a technical problem, but a way forward may require or be facilitated by not-yet mainstream or novel technical architectures and implementations, including new algorithms.
(inb4 no, I'm not referring to tacking DOGE and USDC payments onto Birdsite)
Re: Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve
#97I used to agree with you until I created a new Twitter account from scratch. I'm not American and I specifically put non-political things in my interests. Yet, the second I signed up I got the following: 1. A notification about a smug reply a rando made to a Republican Congressman. 2. Posts from a meme page with a Pepe the frog avatar showing homeless people fighting in San Francisco. 3. Somebody I don't follow accus…
That's definitely the problem, but the answer isn't to change Twitter's algorithms. We must ask why Twitter's algorithms ended up where they did, and the answer is that it's more profitable to do what Twitter does than the alternative. It's not like Twitter's creators maliciously set out to become the flaming hellscape it is now. It responded to market forces and user behavior. Neither of those factors have changed,…
> It's not like Twitter's creators maliciously set out to become the flaming hellscape it is now. It responded to market forces and user behavior.
"I didn't tear down the rainforest, the markforces made me"
"I didn't cause global warming, I was merely responding to market forces"
Please. They wanted profits and made the world a worse place. Don't condone such behavior.
Re: Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve
#98Earlier 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).
TikTok, for all its woes, seems to somehow do this significantly better than Twitter and Facebook? Or is that just my filter bubble?
TikTok's algorithm sounds to just be generally less transparent than Twitter's. I wonder if they've gone out of their way to just reduce the reach of political content on there in general. Or, if Twitter just acts as the grease trap for this kind of content.
Re: Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve
#99Everything I know about Twitter’s technical history, it was a shit show when they first went public and now it’s considered pretty good and is actually referenced a lot in Designing Data Intensive Applications - the book you are always told to read to help pas a system design interview.
Re: Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve
#100I think your looking at the problem wrong. It's not Twitter's job to fix people.
It's Twitters job to connect people in a communications graph. This is absolutely a technical problem, as there are many possible configurations, operations, and filters one could apply.