I feel like I must be living in an alternative reality from the Twitter deriders in this thread, I've had almost the exact opposite experience. I've made more friends and acquaintances on Twitter than any other social network. It's also easily the most intellectual social network. (If that sounds crazy, really compare it to the others. They're either not intellectual or [youtube] not really social.)
If you care deeply about something, you will find other people on Twitter. If you work in public, people will find you. Someone right now I met from Maine is currently drawing up the plans to teach me to timber frame a structure I just got approved. About 20 people I met from twitter have been over my house (for dinner, etc) at different times. Far more people read my work because of Twitter.
If you don't use it as a political mouthpiece it's incredible and there's nothing like it. And that's really up to the user.
My experience is largely the same, but I have to concede with the haters on the point that Twitter has been doing what they can to make drama from the rest of the site leak into my feed. First the algorithmic timeline (and the dark pattern where if you switch to chronological it automatically switches back after time), then automatically suggesting tweets from topics outside my network with no way to turn it off.
The whole blue check Stanford Prison Experiment of giving verified people/accounts additional privileges and boosted rankings also doesn’t help matters. What was supposed to be a security feature became a status symbol.
I agree that the follow topic suggestions are awful. They don't even respect muted keywords. I can be browsing my timeline, peacefully looking at art and developer side-projects, and then out of nowhere I'll get hit with several political tweets from accounts that no one in my network even follows.
I used to have the same opinion as the parent poster. I'd tell people that Twitter is actually really great if you curate your feed. Unfortunately, I can't tell people that anymore, because it's not possible to do.
For some background, I've only become a real user of Twitter this year (I've had an account for ages, but never used it much). Currently there is one topic of interest to me I'd like to follow the community closely. Independently (before reading this article), I've also found the timeline useless as well. Instead I follow a handful to a dozen of people by turning on notification for them in addition to follow. Every day I go to notification tab in my Twitter app, tap on the one for tweets from people I enabled notification for. This is a chronologically sorted list of tweets by these people. This has been the only way Twitter has been useful to me.
It sounds like Lists is basically like that but allows me to follow multiple topics like that. It does however seem to require a different app than the official Twitter app, so I'll have to play around with it some more if there is another topic I care to follow on Twitter about.
You can use lists from the standard interface, just not quite as conveniently. Also, Tweetdeck is an official Twitter client. I think it used to be a third party app, and they bought it.
Or notifications. I was using Twitter kind of read only and it kept showing me fake notifications that were in fact trending tweets from pop developers I have no wish to follow.
I used to have these issues don’t seem to anymore. For example I used to have to switch my timeline back to Latest every so often. But I realize now that I can’t remember the last time I had to do that.
I also don’t seem to get weird tweets anymore and I just remembered that I added some weird strings to my mute list at the suggestion of someone else on Twitter. I Googled a few and apparently this is a thing? There’s an article in Vice about it, for what that is worth:
On desktop, I use https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ which has no ads, is chronological and doesn't suggest tweets or people to follow. You can set up columns for various accounts, etc.
On mobile, I think it stopped reverting to non-chronological for me many months ago. My suggested follows are typically friends/kids of friends. Like GP of this thread, my experience with Twitter is positive but I only follow about 100 people. Main criticism is that with a curated list, it can be a bit of a wasteland sometimes - either rarely new tweets to see, or you post something to generate discussion and get nothing.
> (and the dark pattern where if you switch to chronological it automatically switches back after time)
I see people complain about this a lot, but I've not experienced this. Is it a mobile thing? On my computer I got put into the algorithmic feed once, when they launched it I guess, then I changed it to "latest" and it's still like that today.
It certainly happened on the desktop, but several Twitter devs said they were going to stop doing it publicly so it seems like it has. Or at least that it eventually sticks.
The problem I have with Twitter is that it's too people centric. For example, I like to follow finance news, so I could probably find some Twitter accounts that post about that. But surely the people running those accounts would also post about other interests they have besides finance. I probably won't really care about their other interests so all of their non-finance related posts would just be noise in my feed.
On the other hand, there are topic centric social networks like Reddit where it's a lot easier to find and follow just the news about a specific niche (like finance).
I'm not totally against the people centric model. I think it can work well in social networks like Facebook and Instagram that are more friends and family focused, but I don't really get that vibe from Twitter.
> The problem I have with Twitter is that it's too people centric. For example, I like to follow finance news, so I could probably find some Twitter accounts that post about that. But surely the people running those accounts would also post about other interests they have besides finance. I probably won't really care about their other interests so all of their non-finance related posts would just be noise in my feed.
That's solved by being stingy with your follows and not being afraid to unfollow people. From my experience I have zero issues keeping my stream focused on finance (though i do follow one or two comedy accounts that post every once in a while)
That doesn't sound like a solution. Some people might have really good financial tweets but your solution would be to unfollow them for their irrelevant ones.
Or Twitter could let accounts create categories for their tweets so that you could opt-in or opt-out to them when you follow people. I may be into finance but I want to be able to post other things too, as I'm human. Trying to juggle multiple accounts is frustrating and time-consuming, and often thwarted by randomized phone number verification requirements on new accounts.
> I'm not totally against the people centric model. I think it can work well in social networks like Facebook and Instagram that are more friends and family focused [...]
I feel Instagram is 100% influencer focused -- i.e. sponsorship focused -- with just enough "friends and family" to not make it feel like an advertisement show.
You know how music on a commercial radio station is there to fill gaps between ads? That is Instagram and Facebook! Same concept but "done with computers". :)
Not judging, just expressing my disappointment about the lack of honest separation between ads and private life.
Topics are "curated" at best and algorithmic garbage-in-garbage-out at worst. Subreddits are moderated, often by people with at least a passing familiarity in the subject matter. Moderation allows on topic discussion without putting a gatekeeper behind exposure, as long as posters follow the rules.
Counterpoint: I've attempted to prevent it from becoming a political shitshow by specifically following people only in my field, yet it somehow seems to bring up political bullshit to me.
Youtube is far easier to make intellectual, there are tons of great educational channels & podcasts to watch and listen to.
This is especially true if you are in tech, I have over 800 videos in my watch later that are all from technical conferences, individual contributors, meetups that were all interesting enough for me to want to watch (and save) but haven't seen yet. There's an immense amount of value out there.
youtube videos at least take efforts to make. Tweets are cheap as dirt. I have my own thoughts, opinions and ideas, I'm not impressed to hear that other people have them too.
The problem is not that other people have political thoughts, it's that this despicable platform constantly tries to push them in your face even if you're not interested in them with things like the algorithmic timeline (that "accidentally" re-enables itself every so often) and showing tweets from people you don't follow.
> I think the problem with current recommendation systems is lack of user's ability to customize them.
This is a feature - the point is that if you were able to fully customize the recommendation algorithm you'll end up opting out of all the bullshit the platform wants you to "engage" with.
With the pandemic having seriously blurred the line between work and private life, I feel that all social networks, including LinkedIn, have degenerated into political shitshows.
This is how I feel. I unfollow or block users I don't want to see. I know which kinds of tweets from which kinds of authors are likely to have interesting discussion in the replies, and I only look at the replies for those. And generally I'm not on Twitter for deep nuanced discussion anyway- it's a platform specifically designed against that.
I never got the opportunity to get involved in Twitter because of these experiences:
1. Few people outside the politics sphere use Twitter in Australia. It's all politicians, public relations specialists, and journos. I could create an account and try and interact, but I'm unlikely be interacting with people who have any influence in my hemisphere of the world.
2. I once made an account anyway, out of curiosity, and was immediately defamed by someone I hadn't even met. To the point of having to delete the service, scorched earth.
3. Eventually I had to create an account to use the Twitter API as part of a big data assignment. However, every time I tried to verify my account, no email or text message would make its way to me. I contacted support for months, with no replies. Ended up having to use the tutor's Twitter account (which I'm sure would have breached ToS).
It's been over a year, and I still haven't received a reply from Twitter. Maybe they just don't want me to have an account?
Why would I get involved after all this? Seems like more trouble than its worth, to be honest.
I kinda understand them. I love Twitter but I have had a period of time where I fell out of love. For me, the 'algo' is poor and tends to promote the 'wrong' content, rather than informative and meaningful posts. Once start following the right people, the value you can get out is incredible. If you follow political or even brands/celebrities, you are going to have a bad time. At that point Twitter is used as nothing more than a way for those to promote themselves.
Follow positive, talented and creative folk, they will provide value back.
Is there even an "Algo"? I always just see every post of the people who i follow, and posts they like or retweet, and absolutely nothing else (other than the occasional ad).
Then again i keep a very tight leash on who i follow, and keep the number of follows very low, so i know exactly what sort of content will show up. Is that not how most people use twitter?
- Home: the algo one that twitter wants you to use. Mostly those you follow but not 100%; this will sometimes show very popular tweets or maybe something your followees liked (but didn't RT).
- Latest: which is just the (imo, good) original "everything from those you follow, reverse chronologically".
I think what we're learning (or not learning...) about social media is that you have to aggressively self-curate your own feed. I, too, have a marvelous experience on Twitter, but I do have to cut out the people who post in ways that I'm not interested in seeing.
Unfortunately, most people do not know how to self-filter.
Twitter has always had a List function that makes it a lot easier to only follow tweets from a set list (or many lists) of people. Yeah, you'll still see retweets if they do happen to retweet something you're not in the mood to see. But you're more likely to be able to pick and choose people who won't do that. By self-curating, I rarely see toxic tweets unless I start drilling down into very political threads.
What I like about Twitter above other social networks is that it's actually pretty easy to self-moderate. Only follow who you want to follow. Are they retweeting too much garbage into your timeline? Turn off retweets for that person. See an ad you don't want to ever see again? Block the advertising Twitter account.
You can go even further in your curation through the use of lists.
I feel like the people who complain about how awful Twitter is are telling me about the company they choose to keep. I know that's not the reality of the situation, but Twitter really can be what you make of it. Just because you're friends with someone doesn't mean you have to follow them on Twitter.
What blows me away is how often a reporter/author/expert will reply. Sometimes even super informally — I’ve gotten great restaurants recommendations from people I’ve just respected from afar previously. Extremely humanizing experience.
I emailed Jean-Yves Girard -- just to ask this question on whether he was aware of Deleuze (since he's becoming a "continental" type philosopher in old life, after a lifetime of great achievements in logic) once and he replied. It was a great reply too.
You're literally describing living in a filter bubble. Given how often this community talks about things like privilege and bias, it's highly ironic (or maybe telling) that a comment like that rises to the top here.
It would be one thing if the negative stuff from Twitter was just internet drama and stayed on Twitter. Then anyone could "opt out". But it doesn't stay there. You can't opt out of things that spill into your life, your downtown, your company, your country.
Ignoring politics is an indulgence of the privileged class. If you curate your feed to avoid it then you are perpetuating harm.
This is at least the argument that you will hear. On the one hand completely shutting out political content does seem like a let them eat cake attitude. But of course it isn’t binary. The problem is that the political content is everywhere now and it’s toxic. I don’t want to ignore the problems of the world and I also cannot allow the endless yelling to drag me into depression.
If your customized experience on a website is drastically different from experience of many other people on that same website, you by definition operate in a filter bubble, regardless of whether it has anything to do with politics.
You cannot use this customized experience as the sole argument to imply that experiences of other people on that website are somehow abnormal. When customized feeds and algorithms are in play, there is no such thing as "normal" experience to begin with.
Another layer to this issue is the fact that Twitter (unlike some message board from early 00s) is big enough to influence society at large, so while you might decide to ignore a particular drama, the drama might not ignore you. Because of that a lot of conventional wisdom about "The Internet" doesn't really apply.
95% of the negative stuff and 99% of the political stuff on twitter has absolutely no bearing on what "stuff" is going on in the real world and is more likely to bias your own views than by just listening to the people in whatever your personal friend/work bubble is.
Twitter is not real life. It's a deranged, toxic simulacrum of an alternative universe built by a god who hates us.
My Twitter experience was to be banned for life for no reason 24 hours after making my account and following two people. Support said they would never reply to one of my support requests
It's comparative, of all social media sites. Which other social media app/site would you consider to be more intellectual than Twitter? Facebook? Instagram? LinkedIn?
stackoverflow is where you go for indepth discussions. Math and physics stackoverflow are excellent, as well as cryptography, security, ancient languages. The mechanism of twitter doesn't really allow for going in depth and it promotes snarky one liners, which even with snark removed, remain one liners. It's a much more noisy medium, IMO, for intellectual exchange.
I find it much easier to find the subreddits for specific topics I'm interested in than to find the right people on Twitter for those topics. And it doesn't need to be as narrow as "/r/StringTheory", /r/science or /r/Physics are fine too.
I take your meaning but JTN r/StringTheory hasn't been active in over a year. (I will not succumb to the temptation to make that into a string theory joke.)
Can confirm — I’ve had awesome conversations with Simon on Twitter.
I’ve also had really negative experiences with Twitter.
My conclusion is that Twitter is frequently derided but really it does nothing more than act as a megaphone for human nature. If you don’t like Twitter, you’re probably just following the wrong humans.
> If you don't use it as a political mouthpiece it's incredible and there's nothing like it.
This matches my experience too. I’ve connected with a lot of interesting people in a reasonably niche field (audio software dev) who I would otherwise never have had the opportunity to. I’ve subsequently had the pleasure of meeting a few of these people in real life at conferences etc.
However anything political quickly turns into a dumpster fire. I can kind of see why people get sucked in to arguing on there, but it’s better to just ignore that side of Twitter IMO. I’ve definitely unfollowed people who have too high a ratio of political type content vs. what I’m actually following them for!
I have the opposite experience. Ditched twitter and miss nothing, but ocassionally there is a sporting event that only streams on Facebook or there is a coffeeshop that requires a facebook login to work. Hence a fake facebook name. Facebook appears much more indispensible to me.
Twitter "sucks" for politics from a user point of view, but politics and other "inflammatory" topics (including fake news and misinformation) are fundamental to this company's survival, at least until they change their ways and move fully to a subscription service.
Politics is a proven source of infinite "engagement" which is how this disgusting company (and similar competitors) make their money on, which is why it's so hard to "opt out" of it - opting out of politics (and other potentially inflammatory topics) would decrease your "engagement" which while good for your time and sanity is absolutely against the company's business model.
Any idea how you can mute/ opt out of topics like politics? Many of my trending topics are about politics even when I do not follow people around politics, have blocked words like Trump, Boris Johnson, and corresponding local variations, tell twitter I am 'not interested in this', and actively modify my twitter 'interests' once in a while.
What intellectual is supposed to even mean? It depends on the people you follow similar to any other social media site. If rather the people you follow you check the trends it's similarly horrible as any other social media site.
No, it’s common - particularly among people who were on Twitter in its earlier days; 2007-11. A whole lot of people I know came together during those years via Twitter, as well as blogs and offline meetups, but Twitter was the glue that kept people interacting day-to-day, and plenty of those people remain good friends. Indeed I pretty much met my partner over Twitter in 2010, we got together after group social gatherings in 2011 and now we have a wonderful son together.
Things are very different now that it’s so dominated by politically-charged rhetoric and piling on, and I can understand that new social connections would more likely get drowned out these days.
You could say that about Twitter today; it’s still a small minority of the mainstream population that is on it at all, let alone those who Tweet.
But whether it’s IRC, NNTP, Yahoo Chat, LiveJournal, Twitter, LinkedIn or any other online social platform, the practice of finding new acquaintances on the platform then parlaying them into offline professional or personal relationships is not at all unusual.
But to your point, early-days Twitter included most people who were into startups, many who were into programming, design, media, even music. Maybe small in number (say, only a few million people) but still significant and influential.
I’m conscious that this discussion is essentially becoming a debate over the definition of “typical”, which is rather pointless.
The point is that whatever your definition of “typical”, the number of people making offline friends and business connections via Twitter and other online platforms has always been significant.
What's weird to me - even though I grew up in BBS-land, ran forums, and met lots of people from online - is the degree to which normie youth culture has now made this the main way of engaging and meeting. If you observe any girl/boy interaction at any random bar now, it seems there's a 90% chance they're just meeting IRL for the first time. It feels like the pandemic has upped this. What I see as the downside is that it's a supermarket - you really don't see a lot of couples who've been together or are together for any length of time going out and enjoying each other's company. That seems to have diminished, along with other social skills that aren't mediated by a platform.
I was listening to a podcast interview, two people who live in different countries met on Twitter and started a online business and are doing very well. They have never met in person.
We can call it luck, fate, law of attraction or whatever. But these things do happen. Maybe not that common.
It's also very very funny to me the general tone of self-congratulatory nonparticipation all over this comment section about how superior we all are for not using social media or twitter or whatever.
HN is social media too! I've heard the arguments why it's not but they aren't compelling to me; it is one. The main difference between here and twitter is the tone.
On here there is a cultural expectation that you will perform dispassionate erudition but if you read beyond that at all very few comments are any more intellectually stimulating than an average tweet. Less, honestly, at least people on twitter still seem to value joy and humor and whimsy.
HN has an interesting business model relative to other social sites. Instead of serving targeted ads, the site itself is essentially one giant ad for Y Combinator. That creates better incentives to promote high quality discussion because low quality discussion more directly harms the YC brand. But it's still gotten a lot worse over the years.
HN's business model does not rely on "engagement", which means they encourage interesting and in-depth discussions instead of flame-wars and low-quality clickbait content.
Furthermore the "algorithm" is well-understood and is driven by users as opposed to a black-box algorithm designed to optimize "engagement".
Finally human moderation here is competent and keeps things in check, as opposed to treating it like a cost center and outsourcing it to underpaid people working in terrible conditions who most likely don't speak our language natively and might misunderstand the context or meaning of things (which becomes a problem when you're supposed to draw the line between what's offensive/snarky and not).
counterpoint:
1) the difference is on hn, shitposting, trolling and straight up being offensive is strongly discouraged.
2) I have experienced joy, whimsicality and humor in here. We are people not machines.
3) i have learned about more new things than in any other place. I have frequently changed my mind because of the quality of the arguments
4) no matter what the subject is people with deep expertise seem to show up and it’s a joy to actually hear from them
> You can pretty much be as cruel as you want on HN as long as you don't swear or call people names too much.
That is deeply not the case, and if you or anyone finds examples of it, you should let us know at [email protected]. If people are being cruel and not getting moderated, the likeliest explanation is that we haven't seen it, because we don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here. Oh and we don't give a fuck about swearing.
The generalization you're making is so false and so mean that I would call it a slur, both of this community and of the people who work on it.
I've just deleted the longer part of this comment because we've had this discussion in private mail several times, but for the record: I think you're focussing too much on naked words, and ignore evil behaviour (like intentional misrepresentations of the other one's position) too much.
I'll concede that your job is hard and you're doing a mostly good job. I just think it could be better.
The cruelty I'm talking about is not individual posters hurting each other. It's how we talk about people who are not here, who can't be here. How we judge the poor and dispossessed, uneducated, addicted and marginalized. People pushed aside and hurt by inequality that WE build in our work and then come here to virtuously discuss.
Can you honestly go look through the comments of any post touching any of those issues and call them kind? It's one thing to say it's out of scope for moderation because they keep it civil and calm. But to say the cruelty isn't there is to choose not to see it.
It took 15 seconds. I just typed "poor" into the search bar, sorted comments by dates, and the first comment that used "poor" in the sense that you did easily qualified:
It is wildly not the case that the median HN commenter who writes on stories related to economic inequality is biased against marginalized people.
This is a pretty clear instance of what Dan refers to as the "notice-dislike fallacy"; you've noticed people writing callous comments, because they rub you the wrong way (as they do me), but haven't noticed the countervailing comments, because they're boring (to you).
i think we may be moving the goalposts a little here.
we were talking about joy, humor, whimsical and we shifted to a straight-up utopia where everyone is kind to everyone and no bad comment is ever made.
Philosophically, I would say HM is like a wealthy suburb. You don't see trash in the street. People mostly follow the law and are good neighbors. Everyone wants their neighborhood to be okay and are okay sharing/learning about gardening and home improvement from each other. Now: are some people disconnected from the what other people experience as the harsh reality somewhere else? Absolutely. This is the case everywhere. What you do when you see or hear someone with a completely different perspective is listen and try to understand what they are talking about. We all need to get better at this no matter where we are (work, store, hn, twitter, etc)
You do a great job, dang. Frankly I'm baffled at how you do it, and I can see why this comment would upset you.
But all you can do is push the nastiness below a certain threshold of passive aggression. It's literally impossible to do more than that.
I've found it just a bit more unpleasant to post here with every few months which pass. Insults still get moderated and downvoted, sure, but bad-faith dismissals and pugnacious pedantry become incrementally more common, not to mention drive-by downvotes on neutral and factual posts which maybe signal some kind of tribal affiliation, no matter how weakly.
> I don't think this can be solved, but it's real.
Of course it can be solved, just not on a public pseudonymous forum. As long as people exist that are entertained by trolling, derailing or just in general making the internet a little worse every day you cannot win. Filtering content or accounts is a fools errand, filtering people allowed to comment and post on the other hand would trivially solve this, especially when their real reputation is on the line with every comment but then you don´t get the network effects that low effort account creation and pseudonymity give you.
> Of course it can be solved, just not on a public pseudonymous forum.
Here is an important observation I think I've made over the years:
All else being equal, the HN model (full names voluntary, IRL connection voluntary i.e only username and password, long lived profiles encouraged) has been better for interesting civil discussions.
Why?
Full name policies only encourage this explosive mix:
- People who don't realize the foolishness of commenting publicly using their full name on a controversial case.
- People with fake but real-looking accounts.
- People who realize it is stupid but does it anyway sometimes because even newspaper comments sections deserve some adult voices.
Very many of the people you'd want to hear from are silent because they don't want your name mixed in with the regulars in the comments there.
I don't know about that, I'll occasionally post lightly trolling comments out of whimsy and not malice and they generally don't get downvoted into oblivion.
I also really disagree that tone is a minor and unimportant factor, keeping the discussion civil manages to open up the door to a lot more discussion between people who disagree strongly. One of the users I recognize on here I recognize not because we agree - but because usually when we're talking in a thread it's an interesting conversation despite a really deep philosophical disagreement.
right, HN only cares about conforming to protocols. If you conform to the social protocol, you can advocate for the most horrible of positions on this site.
Just to clarify - why would we ever not want that to be the case? If someone is making a well reasoned argument that's clearly wrong then I'm happy to read it - I have faith in myself and those on this forum that they'll be able to comprehend the statement and read out the same conclusion - if it's hidden or using underhanded conversation techniques those will generally be called out but there might be a few interesting nuggets in an otherwise incorrect argument.
because if you have one party that is nice and polite and uses proper decorum and they are actively doing harm to another party, and that other party is upset because harm was done to them, and your response is "I will listen to the person that is behaving according to decorum", you are taking the wrong side. Bad actors -love- decorum, especially when access to understanding the rules of that decorum is itself a marker of class, tribe, or belonging in some way.
It's really pretty simple: Being polite is better than not being polite. This doesn't mean you should never listen to someone who is angry, but it makes perfect sense to make it a site-wide policy to disallow this sort of behavior when the goal is to have productive discussions.
The problem is not politeness vs. impoliteness, but rather acting in good faith vs. pretending to do so. As readers, it's our responsibility (now more than ever) to tell good faith from trollish decorum.
This place allows angry response in technical discussion, but not to following guy: I had seen on HN a guy literally advocating forced marriage and forced sex - all politely. He also advocate for strong punishmemts of women who have sex out of wedlock.
Oh and forcing them to marry a guy they had sex with, regardless of whether it was rape or not. As social engineering to force good behavior on others.
He was all polite and serious. And I still perceive him as the biggest threat to my safety and well being. And the most uncomfortable thing that was tolerated here.
No, being polite is not better and does not make it better. If I am expected to be perfectly nice to him in response, well this place sux sometimes.
I think it's also our responsibility as commentors to provide civil counter arguments so that other readers are able to see both sides of whatever topic is being discussed while not being pre-disposed to either angle. If you're an expert on a topic and see an error being stated you should clarify the discrepancy so that other folks less versed on the topic can see the error as well.
HN does have an assumption built into the guidelines that we should assume all arguments are being made in good faith - I don't actually have an issue with reading arguments made in bad faith in good faith myself - if someone makes a baseless claim that is refuted soundly and sanely in a comment then readers will be able to parse the two comments and will generally favor the one more clearly made in good faith. Ad hominem attacks actually hurt your argument here while on twitter they can bolster it - most of hackernews has no respect for "sick burns".
> I think it's also our responsibility as commentors to provide civil counter arguments so that other readers are able to see both sides of whatever topic is being discussed while not being pre-disposed to either angle.
it literally is not. The idea that all topics have equal both sides is not founded in any actual reality, it is a device used by those who would push falsehoods to demand an audience. Falsehoods do not deserve equal footing to truth.
I disagree - the truth should never be harmed because lies are dressed in fancy clothes and the truth is a madman running through the streets in rags.
I am totally fine with bad faith actors making ad hominem attacks since it weakens their argument, but responses made in good faith should keep it civil to not erode their own argument. By the way, I can sympathize with you somewhat as this can essentially lead to sealioning[1] and that is extremely common elsewhere on the internet. But with strong moderation and flagging mechanics that actually work quickly on HN obvious sealioning can be quickly called out and quashed. I understand that some folks get their jollies by making low effort arguments and forcing others to put thought and time into crafting a well formulated counter argument - this will happen on the internet and it can be depressing to realize it after the fact but I think it's still worth it to try and craft well structured[2] responses when you can.
I don't actually disagree with this statement:
> Falsehoods do not deserve equal footing to truth.
and if I were running a talk-show called Hacker News then I wouldn't invite on folks with obviously racist viewpoints, but this is an internet forum where we can't pre-emptively screen participants. So I'd argue it's less about putting falsehoods on equal footing to the truth and more about making sure the truth of the truth isn't eroded by it coming out of a poor mouthpiece that biases opinions against it.
If someone wrote a comment that's obviously in error to you please do write a response highlighting what you think the problem was in a calm voice so that other people who might not notice the error can see it clearly spelled out. And do that because you're options are:
1. Respond in a sane tone
2. Respond with personal attacks or a poorly formed argument
3. Decline to respond
On that list is not the option to delete the comment you think it incorrect so, of the choices, I think #1 is by far the best option.
it's really pretty simple: caring more about politeness than about the core of people's arguments is both intellectually dishonest and endemic on this site.
Like stated in another comment, it's not about politeness, it's about constructive discussion, you present rational arguments and that only. If someone's position is abhorrent, no matter how they sugarcoat it, people should be able to tell
except that's not at all the case for two key reasons, and possibly more: for one thing, the core of your argument relies on the assumption that participants should be able to tell, but the only way to separate information from disinformation on a topic is if you're already educated about that topic. The alleged purpose of this discussion board is for people to become more educated about the topics we're discussing. If we assume that everyone is coming to the table already educated on the topics, what we're saying is that this is a space where beginners do not belong, and that this space is not an entry point for the industry. A space that is not welcoming to the uninformed is not a welcoming or friendly space, it is a hostile space.
The second major way in which this concept collapses is that HN has a dangerous addiction to labeling things ad-hominem attacks. If someone makes a horrific argument, and you say "that argument is horrific and leads to harm being done to others", you are in every case met with responses along the lines of "that's an ad-hominem attack" or "that's politics this space isn't about politics". HN posters time and time again fail to separate the argument being made from the person making them.
It's not about being educated on a topic, it's about being good at reasoning (and as a consequence being able to spot bad reasoning). It's also about being curious and doing your own research when you see people talk (and disagree) about something that interests you. This is a much more general set of skills that anyone should have and it takes a lifetime to develop. There's no way around that.
> this is a space where beginners do not belong
Not true at all. There's a lot of introductory material hitting the front page every single day here. If you ask a technical question there's usually someone VERY knowledgeable who will be more than happy to teach you some things and point you to further guidance. I often see two people disagreeing about a topic they both know WAY more about the topic than me. What am I supposed to do? Tell them their knowledge is unwelcoming to me? No way! A level-headed dialogue between them is about the most productive form of teaching I could hope for.
You don't just talk over people who know their shit as if you knew more about it. You present your knowledge (and lack thereof) and ask questions, maybe build an argument. If they're interested in continuing, they will engage in a similar way. I don't see what's so "hostile" about that.
> "that argument is horrific and leads to harm being done to others"
If you just say that and leave it at that, that doesn't mean anything. It's not an ad hominem, but it's not an argument either. If you provide an argument and evidence, you should be taken more seriously. I can tell you I've seen A LOT more ad hominem attacks being labeled as such than actual arguments. What commonly happens, though, is a commenter mixes both a good argument with an ad hominem (or some other fallacy), and then others focus on the fallacy and not the argument. Of course that's bad, but it's all the more reason to not be fallacious.
I don't think that's the case on HN, which is what is being discussed on this comment chain. If you're indeed referring to HN, I'd be glad to read an expanded argument.
I agree that on Twitter this is a much more complicated matter.
Considering that downvoting and flagging have karma thresholds - coupled with the vouching mechanic for dead comments. I honestly think HN has a pretty good setup for this. We've also got something miles better than Reddit - a limit on how much Karma you can lose on a given comment. I think that works wonders against echo chambers by allowing objections and clarifications to be raised without any real fear of being karma bombed for it.
I'm not sure that it is true that there is even such thing as decorum on social media, or if there was, if you could reasonably define it. The Internet is a global communications system linking hundreds of countries, thousands of cultures, and perhaps millions of sub-cultures, class affiliations, and tribes. Even the fact that we are here, on HN, speaking English puts us squarely in the minority of people who use the Internet.
For me, that's exactly what I want: any opinion is okay to be expressed, as long as it's expressed respectfully. My problem with Twitter is exactly its "social protocol", which is often leaving out all nuance, taking things out of context, and provoking on purpose (in anything vaguely related to politics).
> If you conform to the social protocol, you can advocate for the most horrible of positions on this site.
You shouldn’t assume that every argument made against a particular solution to social injustice is an argument advocating for social injustice.
While there are some people who are just plain racist or bigoted or have certain religious views; and therefore believe that racial/gender/etc injustice is inevitable, many others are just arguing against a particular solution.
For example, not everyone agues against dialectical materialism because they want people to be poor. They just don’t think communism can work.
People have been talking about how "superior" the conversation on HN is compared to other fora for as long as I've been participating (over a decade). I don't find it much different.
It certainly has its share of silliness, especially around the subjects of VC and Silicon Valley culture generally. And economics...
If Twitter is multiple echo chambers HN is one echo chamber.
It's no surprise within the echo chamber things seem harmonious, but there's something really funny about seeing people from here thumb their noses down at Twitter.
If you follow the right people in tech on Twitter, their replies are pretty similar to HN, and it's a lot of the same people.
Crapping on Twitter while acting like HN is above it all is kind of like saying your favorite coffee shop is so much better than the entire City of New York.
> the difference is on hn, shitposting, trolling and straight up being offensive is strongly discouraged.
you can be deeply offensive on hn if who you are offending is people outside of what hn considers to be its own audience. hn posters will defend the harm their software does to society all over town. people on this site care only about decorum; the syntax of kindness without the semantics.
The site guidelines say "Be kind" for deep reason, and we attempt to encourage that in every way we know how. I don't know who you think "hn considers to be its audience" but the answer is: anyone with intellectual curiosity. That's basically everyone.
I'm biased of course, but I also see more of this place than anyone else does (at least I hope I am, since I get paid for it), and comments like yours do not reflect the community at all accurately. "People on this site care only about decorum" is a cheap shot, and—speaking of syntax without semantics—is a cliché at this point too. People in this community care about considerably more than that. ("Syntax without semantics" is a great phrase, though. Did you come up with that? I like it.)
The denunciatory generalization you're making seems to me an example of unkindness, and so a little ironic whilst denouncing others for unkindness. I don't like seeing anyone unjustly accused.
If you, or anyone, has a good idea about what we can do to make this place more kind, I'd love to hear it (as long as it doesn't reduce to "ban my ideological enemies", which turns out to be what a lot of people would prefer, but is not viable given the mandate of this site).
> I don't know who you think "hn considers to be its audience" but the correct answer is: anyone with intellectual curiosity.
That's what the HN organizers think it is and want it to be, but I don't think it's an accurate reflection of how HN users actually behave. It's prescriptive, not descriptive.
> People in this community care about considerably more than that.
I've been here many years and that has not been my experience. I come here to look for updates on libraries and tools I use and to hear about new libraries and tools. In the years I have been here, I have found this to be the most nihilistic, false-equivocating social media site I have ever encountered. What I have witnessed all too often is that admissible HN opinion talk stops at "what makes a computer program well-constructed", and very rarely considers "how might computer programs cause harm to their users and to society". Often times when people say "hey maybe that use of technology is harmful to [group of people not well-repesented on HN]", that discussion is immediately downvoted into oblivion. When it comes to software criticism, that is, the well-reasoned consideration of how software affects society, HN gets an F. HN doesn't care. HN would look at a Java program for a police torture system and would say "it should be written in Haskell" instead of "maybe we shouldn't be building instruments of torture". Maybe a given individual user wouldn't, but that's how the votes would land.
> If you, or anyone, has a good idea about what we can do to make this place more kind, I'd love to hear it
Sure. Here's a few.
Remove all visible scores from the site entirely. The idea that a person is aware of points given to them for saying the correct thing incentivizes saying things that get points, not saying things that improve the discussion. I'm not saying that no system of tracking the success of comments should exist. I'm saying that currently, the mechanics of HN allow people to see their own karma and are rewarded for saying things within the HN zeitgeist with more karma. The karma system precludes the Overton window from shifting.
It's a discussion board. There should be no point reward for comments posted. The reward is the replies you get from others.
Experts and beginners are given an entirely equal footing, but beginners outnumber experts in every topic; that's what makes them experts. If all of the experts in a topic think one thing, and all the beginners think another thing, should the beginners always win because they are more numerous? Hmm.
One solution might be to implement something akin to pagerank, but on a topic level. E.g., if a thread is posted about Ants, a user that had participated in a lot of past discussions about Ants should have their upvotes/downvotes weighed more heavily. There are doubtless other solutions, and since I'm not in your codebase I'm not sure what solution is actually reasonable.
Separately, make posts a limited resource. The mechanics of this are, I imagine, proper difficult to get right. Very very difficult. Some ideas that would have to be tested: You can only post if you have a post token. You're awarded a post token every six hours, even when you're gone. You can hold a maximum of four post tokens. Add in some mechanic where users can cause other users to gain post tokens. Some concepts along that line: When you reply to someone, they are awarded a post token (or a portion of a post token). Upvotes grant either post tokens or portions of post tokens. If a user really loves a comment, they can give one of their own post tokens to the person that made that comment. Users in their first week are given only 1 post token a day.
"What I have witnessed all too often is that admissible HN opinion talk stops at "what makes a computer program well-constructed", and very rarely considers "how might computer programs cause harm to their users and to society". Often times when people say "hey maybe that use of technology is harmful to [group of people not well-repesented on HN]", that discussion is immediately downvoted into oblivion."
Could you cite some specific HN submissions where you've observed this behavior? I honestly cannot recall a single one.
> defend the harm their software does to society all over town
I accept there are people who feel that an argument in defence of certain types of software is in bad faith, and an argument made deliberately to hurt and exclude others.
It’s not much of a leap, given that harm obviously exists to many in society, and software isn’t helping, or at least that some people get much more benefit from it than others.
However, not everyone believes that software harms people. Not everyone believes that that harm is deliberate. Not everyone believes that anything can be done, and even if they do it’s probable that they have differing ideas on what is to be done.
I get that when people see problems, and they see others ignoring those problems, or arguing with them, that they feel that those other are being callous, cruel and disrespectful. As the saying goes, if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.
I sympathise, but I can’t agree. There are so many solutions to the world’s problems and so few who agree on any of them. I can’t just assume that everyone who adopts a contrary position is deliberately being cruel, deliberately acting out of selfishness or deliberately acting to exclude and suppress other views.
A good concrete example of this are MBAs, one of HN’s favorite punching bags. With any article about something bad or stupid happening in a tech company, eventually someone will prop up an anonymous MBA straw man to blame and start beating on it. You’ll see vitriol targeted at MBAs that will get you a cooling-off ban if directed towards Rust programmers or entrepreneurs.
when you see a strawman point it out. people may not like it, you may get downvoted but... something about being the change you want to see.
for example: I routinely get down-voted every time I say something positive about cryptocurrencies. Should I stop telling people my opinion when the overall sentiment on HN is pretty negative when it comes to the likes of bitcoin and ETH?
nope. I disagree. I make a living from writing software and I will not defend the harm software does to society. I will go even a step further and say that I will not work in any place where it's clear that net result of the software produces does more harm than good.
people on this site care more than just decorum. sweeping generalizations like this rarely hold water.
honestly 1 3 and 4 used to be true, but I haven't felt that here in a while. Nowadays there are way more crackpots and conspiracy theorists here than I'm comfortable with
This is a horseshit reply that tries to counter an observation about how something actually works with a contrived hypothetical about how something else could work in theory. It ignores the impact of how a medium is organized on the messaging that goes through that medium.
Same. Social media is what you make it. If someone's experience with social media is that it's a highly toxic environment, the only person ultimately responsible for that is them.
Yep: I've met/dated/worked/traveled/written with people from there. It's a magical people-finder if you avoid the incendiary accounts and just approach it with good faith and open curiosity.
I have a reasonable twitter following (between 5-10k followers) and have recently realized that I needed to remove the app from my phone and only occasionally check it from time to time on a laptop. I'm considering giving it up all together.
I've struggled a bit with this decisions since I've made a fair number of real friends through twitter (people I keep up with in real life after) and come across a lot of interesting books, papers etc.
But I've come to realize that despite its benefits, twitter is ultimately toxic to your mind. I've seen far too many people I care about slowly dissolve into a fever of dopamine fixes as they slowly contort their personality into a stream of memes and rants looking to gain followers.
I always tried to fight the urge to post stupid shit just to grow followers, but anything genuinely nuanced or thoughtful you post will have virtually zero engagement. This is fine in isolation, but it leads all conversations to eventually degrade in to a miasma of garbage thinking that is just a mix of groupthink, rage and memes.
The final straw for me was finding myself angry about the vague opinions of people I don't really care about at all. This same type of thinking is what got me to drop facebook entirely years ago.
> The final straw for me was finding myself angry about the vague opinions of people I don't really care about at all.
I laughed when I read this because I've replaced browsing Twitter while eating breakfast with reading my local newspaper. Today I was so upset by what I read in the paper, the feeling stuck with me all morning. In my head I composed several "letters to the editor" and only now am I finally moving on. I won't write those letters, but I probably would have engaged with that content on Twitter. I don't know what this means, but being outraged at the news is not exclusive to new media.
This still seems healthier. You were angry about something presumably in much closer proximity to you, and therefore in a much better position to change/do something about. You didn't have an immediate way to fire off a response, so you had to think about it more. Twitter takes all those things and gives us the worst possible version: outrage you can engage immediately with, about issues on the other side of the planet.
I've always felt the fundamental flaw of Twitter is it focuses on people, and so ego gets in the way and ruins things. It's a popularity contest. Contrast that with say Reddit, where you can go to a niche subreddit and it's not about people at all, it's about the topic of the subreddit. Everyone is just talking about the topic, and no one cares who you are. I find that to be a much more healthy and enjoyable experience. And to be fair, mainstream reddit has a lot of ego in it too. My trouble is finding "niche twitter" seems to be impossible, after 10ish years now I still haven't found it. I'm convinced it doesn't exist.
The focus on people has upsides too though. On reddit, you tend to see mostly content from people who post a lot, even if they are kind of dumb. With Twitter, you can choose to follow only people you actually respect.
That's a good point. Although for me, I find it frustrating that content on Twitter from an account can be anything. They may be known for certain types of tweets, but nothing stops them from tweeting completely random things. In general I find the signal/noise on Twitter is often quite bad.
To be fair, I'm not a fan of Twitter, so I'm pretty biased in this discussion.
reddit can be incredibly angry as well. Downvoting has advantages, but a disadvantage is creation of echo chambers where people feed off each other to get more and more angry, only hearing the worst from those who disagree.
I agree, but I think that mostly happens in mainstream Reddit. I still feel like smaller subreddits are still a nice oasis in this current era of the internet.
As soon as I found myself one degree of separation from drama I packed up and left. It was a major factor in my livelihood and professionally very important, but it's not worth it. I've been adjacent to some people who the Twitter hivemind deathray has focussed its sights on, and it was deeply depraved/disturbing. For me Twitter has nothing to offer that'd make it worth risking that fate.
Facebook is actually pretty great for local community events. It allows for you to see what's all happening near you and you can add them directly to your calendar. Facebook honestly has pivoted to being a better tool to go out and do stuff socially than it is to actually post.
Reminds me of Nextdoor. Initially, you could only interact with people relatively close by. But then they opened it up to be citywide, to increase engagement, no doubt.
Now you see the same toxic behavior as on other social networks... the small community feel has been lost.
I think it would be funny to pick random accounts and a random topic for each one, then use a botnet to interact with any tweets from those accounts about their randomly assigned topic.
Could you gradually turn people into broccoli enthusiasts if they got 5x the engagement whenever they tweeted about broccoli? I bet so.
I have roughly half the followers and upon seeing similar dynamics, just started taking breaks and tweeting things of interest, but with a twist: I do not check on those tweets, until next session.
My main issue with Twitter is that you follow people, but those people have different interests. So I may follow @JohnSmith because he’s a known dev in the JS community and tweets about JS, but he also tweets about his country’s politics, what he ate at lunch, and engage in heated debats about pineapple on pizza I don’t care about.
Twitter recently introduced topics, so that you can follow one topic that aggregates lots of tweets from various people.
This is not what I want: I’d like to follow @JohnSmith, but only for the JS content.
As someone who tweets, I’d like some sort of kafka-ish topic queues: I would post tweets about JS in the JS queue, and tweets about Italian food in that other queue, so that people could follow the queues they want. In the end I don’t tweet on either topic because I’m afraid I’ll deceive people who followed me for the other content.
It seems the the rise of influencer culture led to everyone else feeling like they had to only be in a specific niche, and only speak about it or they weren’t going to serve their “fanbase”.
And you know they’re probably right that they wouldn’t serve that fanbase, but good grief has it made the net a generally much more boring place with space only for near-deified experts & influencers and perpetual newbs, leaving little room for anyone in the middle to have nuanced and varied conversations.
no no, that's not the problem. reddit lets one person post in a particular place for a particular topic, and other places for other topics.
no one is complaining that a given person talks about multiple things.
people sometimes complain that there is only one topic on Twitter: the main stream, and therefore only one way to consume the things those individuals say. it's all or none, and that's what people are not happy about.
there's an argument to be made that "this is how Twitter is" which is valid, I think.
there's also an argument to be made that "my interests are specific, and everything else wastes my time" and I think there is just as much merit in that point of view.
This is why I spend more time on reddit than other social networks. Though they've tried to move away from it recently reddit has always been a content-focused network instead of a people-focused network.
You’re on Hacker News, which is exactly the opposite of Reddit for the reason you describe. dang reminded me the other day of this comment of his where he lays out HN’s position as a non-siloed site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098
HN definitely has a topic, it's "things that hackers find interesting". Mainstream political news is usually off topic unless it's incredibly important. And you definitely can't post about that pizza you had for lunch, unless it's a rundown of how you built an arduino-controlled pizza oven.
Twitter has no topic at all. The interesting is jumbled with the inane, so the signal to noise ratio is very poor.
It's fine (and necessary) for everyone to be multifaceted. But it's not wrong to not care about some facets of a person you follow, in the context of social media.
Even two different people following the same person would care about different facets of that person, and not care about others.
The point is it's easier to manage the stream of information available to you if you can filter signal from noise in a way that you want.
Does that create a filter bubble? Maybe. Would it be better for everyone to read everything from everyone to get a broader perspective? Maybe. Or, maybe that would be worse, since there would be so much noise to sift through that the signal would be impossible to find.
I agree that it's extremely important that people be multifaceted. I also think people over-weight how important it is for them to express their individuality.
That said, I think the biggest issue is neither of the above, but rather that it's really hard to design interfaces that allow people to sort the signal from the noise. To weight/filter information. I just haven't seen it.
Back to OP and @JohnSmith: if OP worked in an office with @JohnSmith, OP could tune out @JohnSmith's pineapple-pizza rants … or walk away. This would be easy and natural. OP would that they were analyzing this and adjusting appropriately to maximize JS discussion while avoiding pineapple.
We naturally weigh, throttle, and filter the input of others. This allows us to take the good with the bad.
This is the nuance that Twitter—and most social media—lacks: how do I stay up on what matters most without being overwhelmed by what doesn't without separating content from context?
I don't think the issue is being multifaceted, that seems a really uncharitable interpretation of what he wrote.
Twitter is really great for almost any niche interest.
It is an absolute toxic wasteland dumpster-fire for anything related to politics (yes, even your politics) so sensible people would best avoid those political posts/discussions at all costs.
I want to follow @john-smith for his nuanced, thoughtful views on solid state batteries and EVs, and I'm extremely annoyed when he's retweeting moronic, tribalist politics into my feed.
They don't do this because it would massively reduce engagement. Same reason Instagram doesn't let you categorize your follows into lists such as "Artists" and "Friends" and "Travel", it would reduce the amount of time you spend scrolling, seeing ads, and engaging with content you wouldn't have otherwise.
All of these companies build user experiences entirely dedicated to profit, not giving the user the best experience.
I think in general just limiting your world view to singular topics is also just not a great way to learn about the world. We all have our blindspots, and it's exacerbated by that sort of curation
Everyone posting about $CURRENT_POLITICAL_ISSUE is not a great way to learn about the world, especially when they have no idea of what's actually happening and just post to feel good or be part of something. It's also way too biased for current US things. I don't need to see people talking about California fires for a month, and never ever hear about what's happening in my country. This is not "learning about the world", this is just a new flavor of the US cultural hegemony.
Maybe, but I barely tweet and don’t follow any individuals for the reasons OC mentioned. I’d love to follow an individual working on ML or AI, but the individual’s content is only interesting to me 5-10% of the time because of the varied interests OC mentions.
If Twitter could give me interesting topical content I’d be much more engaged on the platform.
I don't want to follow a tag, I want to follow the specific artists that I like and just see their work without all my friends' vacation posts in between.
> Twitter recently introduced topics, so that you can follow one topic that aggregates lots of tweets from various people. This is not what I want: I’d like to follow @JohnSmith, but only for the JS content.
> As someone who tweets, I’d like some sort of kafka-ish topic queues: I would post tweets about JS in the JS queue, and tweets about Italian food in that other queue
Very much this. As it is, if you've been followed mostly for JS, starting to tweet about Italian food feels like standing up at a JS meetup and telling people about Italian. I'd tweet more, on a greater diversity of interests, if that didn't mean hosing people. I'd also like to have tagging of "value vs smalltalk", to distinguish a JS thing worth standing up and bending 50 people's ears on, vs only worth an aside in an after-meetup bar-table JS discussion among local friends.
How might the market be altered to avoid network effects plus we've-thankfully-found-a-viable-niche conservatism from stagnating societal infrastructure progress?
In this aspect, Pownce[1] had 'channels' and later on Google+ had 'circles', so one could subscribe to a subset of one's interests. Pownce came along one year after Twitter and was quickly abandoned.
Meanwhile, somewhat on-topic, I'm still annoyed that Facebook's mighty algo is showing me posts in languages that I don't speak / interact with.
Circles were a way to organize contacts and had nothing to do with posts. It allowed you to share posts with a subset of your contacts, but offered no control to those users about which of your posts they see.
Google+ "Circles" didn't really do this. As a poster I want to be able to say "this is a post about parenting" which is either a hint to the Algorithm which it can use in its quest to maximize engagement, or an explict signal to notify people who follow jefftk:parenting. With Circles, the best I could do was say "please show this post only to the friends who are in my 'parenting' Circle". This has two problems:
1. What topics someone is interested in is something they probably know more about than the poster does.
2. Because Circles were used for access control, someone I had not placed in the "parenting" Circle would not be allowed to read the post.
The closest thing I've seen to this is bloggers having tags, and making RSS feeds available both for everything and for individual tags.
This is the biggest pain I have in Twitter. I use Twitter mostly for Statistics/Bayesian methods (in English) and Chilean politics (in Spanish). I wished people could chose which topic to follow — I don't want to SPAM people with irrelevant content.
As someone who post about cryptography a lot, but sometimes, literally, talks about pineapple on pizza (what would be the chances that you’re talking about me right?) I’ve always wondered how I’m not losing more followers by not remaining on topic.
When using Tweetdeck, you can create a column for only posts with a certain hashtag. It works well, I have several such columns which I can expand or collapse as I wish.
So I may follow @JohnSmith because he’s a known dev in the JS community and tweets about JS, but he also tweets about his country’s politics, what he ate at lunch, and engage in heated debats about pineapple on pizza I don’t care about.
You're following the person, not the vision you have of the person. If you're interested in just posts about a topic then Twitter isn't the platform for you.
If someone says "I wish X had feature Y", answering "then X isn't for you" does not contribute to the discussion. Products can change and feature requests shouldn't be dismissed on the grounds that the feature doesn't exist yet.
In this case it certainly could, and is almost already implemented (in the form of both the "hashtags" and "topics").
Yeah, I follow one person whom I deeply respect for his FOSS work, but he is so rabidly anti-Trump (despite being French!), that it was hard to bear, he retweeted every single story critical of him, even complete lunatic ones. I really wanted some kind of filter to silence this part of his stream.
I love Twitter and use it every day. Unlike many other sites, owned by tech-giants, I have a lot of goodwill for them and think if anyone can prove that social-media users can be paying customers, it's them.
It's just a bummer that Twitter Blue is not removing ads.
I assume they're not going ad-free because they don't want to cannibalise their ad-business. As in: You can't say your ads are so great and helpful and also offer a way to turn them off. That might decrease the value of their ads?
But it's also the reason I'm a bit on the fence here. I want to be part of the message that says: "Yes, I'm willing to pay for you Twitter!" but without removing ads (and frankly with a pretty bad value prop here) it's not an easy sell.
Was excited to be able to pay to kill ads, and was shocked that that isn't one of the "features". Ever since cutting cable, I refuse to pay for any service that still tried to monetize me further (looking at you, Hulu.)
That's probably how they can hit the $3 price-point though, I'm sure targeted Twitter ads these days bring in a lot more than $3/user/mo.
$3.72 billion (2020 revenue) / 12 = $310 million average monthly revenue
$310 million / 353.1 million (monthly active users) = $0.88 per user per month
Narrowing down to the monetizable daily active users, the users probably make up the vast majority of monetization:
$310 million / 152 million = $2.03 per user per month
Given that those users who are likely to pay for this service are probably even more skewed than that, yeah $3/month seems low. You're also somewhat selecting for users who have disposable income, which can't be great for ad value.
> You're also somewhat selecting for users who have disposable income, which can't be great for ad value.
Many years ago I worked for a company that had tens of millions of US subscribers, my job involved modeling their behavior in order to allocate resources at least a week in advance. The law of large numbers is pretty amazing to see play out in front of you like that, where you can clearly see the bright lines between your market segments - fundamentally different kinds of people. I have a feeling that there is only one kind of person who would pay for twitter, which will very likely end up as a flag in a marketing dataset that certain companies would find well worth whatever twitter charges them (or their data-broker). Not unlike Volkswagen, on the eve of a big sales push for beetles, wanting a list of everyone who regularly buys peanut butter and cat litter.
Yeah, which is why serving ads only to people who don't have disposable income (so don't pay for this subscription) makes the ads less valuable.
But that doesn't sound right to me. Not all products and services are targeted at people with disposable income.
I think the truth is just that Twitter is trying to have their cake and eat it too. Why cut off advertising and data harvesting if people are willing to pay you just to change some colors and the app icon?
According to this, Facebook revenue per-user-per-year is about $30, so $2/mo (post-Apple cut) is probably not far off for Twitter: https://www.statista.com/statistics/234056/facebooks-average.... But of course, why replace that revenue when you could double it?
That $30/year figure is likely averaged over the globe, therefore their North American stat is likely quite a bit higher. Given the quality of ads on twitter that I see, I suspect my value to them is much, much lower. Their ad network just seems terrible compared to Facebook so it's surprising they didn't offer a $10/month ad-free version.
you should really get these kind of data straight from the source when you can. stastica is sometimes useful for some hard to get metrics. this is not one.
Does it ever make sense to sell the ability to turn off ads?
I imagine the majority of people willing to pay for such an option are power users, the same group that likely generates the bulk of advertising revenues and lives in countries with high CPC.
These services show ads in ways that delay you accessing the content you want, banner ads, while annoying do not have that property and are a harder sell
Google tried something like that called Google Contributor back in 2017. You could basically just put money in an account, and instead of advertisers buying ads for whatever site you were on, it just took that same money from you and gave it to that site. Honestly a pretty elegant system, but I can kind of picture why it wouldn't have worked out.
That's a little unfair, it's a concept, not a public demo. There's apparently only a few people testing it so far. It might have been overlooked or just easier for some reason to inline the normal twitter timeline view, or whatever they call it, and there might not be a dedicated premium adfree view yet.
Surely they'll reduce ads for the public when paid users en masse have access to this.
The only thing I want to pay for is ad removal. I’d pay $10/month for Twitter without ads in a second. I already pay for YouTube premium, and while I wish they removed tracking in addition to the ads - it’s still great.
When I saw Twitter was launching a paid subscription then I figured it would probably be ad-free (like with YouTube Premium, Twitch Turbo, etc.). Odd that it isn't. It's a dealbreaker for me.
$3 for color themes and a reader mode? I don't like how it creates negative incentives to make regular twitter readable. I often see poeple here already complaining that threads are hard to read, and this could make it worse.
Edit: also quick undo. So they are monetizing the lack of basic features and their restrictions on clients. I don't really like the idea.
That and an option to permanently opt out of their curation of my timeline. I just want to see the content of people I actually follow in a chronological fashion.
At the moment I‘am quiet happy using Tweetbot but most 3rd party clients are hampered due to API restrictions on Twitters side.
I also use Tweetbot, and am experiencing very little of what everybody else is complaining about. I see only my timeline, and I use lists to make sure I don't miss anything from certain people I follow.
Tweetbot has had mute longer than Twitter has, and some, um, acquaintances I follow I've had muted for years. And I mute keywords if something is getting way too much play, like the electric F-150.
Will I pay Twitter $3/month? Sure, since I'd like to pay for what I use, just like I subscribe to the latest Tweetbot client. Will I use the Twitter client to get the benefits of Twitter Blue? Probably not.
This is just the beginning. They could add more features right? Similar to how Amazon Prime began as free 2-day shipping and then added Prime Video and what not.
Free 2 day shipping had still enormous value to many. Further additions to value also indirectly resulted in prices increasing over time.
I can't think of a reason why any one is going to pay for this ? If they at least marked users as "Blue" like verified perhaps the social status would drive sales, right now there doesn't seem to be any incentive all.
Twitter threads must die, they are an oxymoron and a fugly hack. Just bloody give people a "gist.twitter.io" for long form, or something like that, for goodness' sake.
The "point" or benefit of a twitter thread as opposed to straightforward longform is that each tweet (sentence or paragraph) can stand alone (in terms of liked and retweet circulation) as well as being a part of a broader piece.
"Can" or rather "could", but never really does in practice. Take away the thread, and 99.99% of mid-thread tweets lose all meaning. It just makes things awkward for the sake of it.
It's funny, I mean, you're not wrong, but there was a period when I wrote a lot of twitter threads, and I enjoyed the challenge of making each tweet stand alone. I think it made me a better writer. But yes, many don't take advantage of this.
Some people here will probably remember twitlonger, which wasn't that great. That or posting screenshots of text. I think threads, the idea, are fine; but the implementation is not good. I don't understand why, when you load a tweet in a thread that's not too long (< 50 tweets), Twitter refuses to just show the whole threads and makes you click "show more" every 5 tweets. That's a really bad UX.
Twitter in 2006: Hey, we made this new infrastructure! You can consume it with any kind of client that you can imagine. We're really excited what kind of experiences you'll create!
Twitter in 2021: For just $2.99/mo, you can view the tweets in your algorithmic timeline in this new exclusive colour theme!
Sanely thinking this sort of monetization model was inevitable... Just how much money from adds can you get, specially when significant part of content is "free" adds in reality...
I would pay even more to never again see "recommended" tweets from people I don't follow. I use Twitter sort of like RSS, insofar as I want to be able to see everything the people I follow tweet. It amazes me that its not possible to coerce Twitter to do this in the settings. Instead I have to view users individually to see what they've tweeted since I last checked the app.
I've noticed that other platforms like Facebook have been doing something similar. (not that I use Facebook much at all). It used to be a feed of things I've chosen... now half of it is stuff from meme pages, businesses, and animal rescue videos I've never shown any interest in. If I remove one of them, it just finds some other bullshit to push in front of me.
It's like a subtle admission that these platforms are on their way out and they're throwing their own Barnum & Bailey circus just to keep anyone around.
This masterpiece of user respect actually reverts periodically to the original, default, "shit up my timeline with likes of my follows from people i don't follow" mode that benefits twitter at your expense, even after you've set it to "don't do that" multiple times.
That, along with the fact that Twitter now censors its search results, are the main reasons I stopped donating content to the platform and deleted my account after 12 years.
I just looked at it again, and it's still on chronological, even though I haven't touched it in months (I usually read Twitter through tweetdeck). I'm actually surprised.
But you're right in that the changing-back behaviour was there some months ago. I don't know if they gave up this user-hostile behaviour or if they segment the user base in several groups and I'm lucky.
On some platforms, custom streams or lists can be used.
On the late little-lamented Google+, a set of features converged to give this option:
- It was possible to define what profiles could comment on one's own posts, or whose notifications would be visible. I simply piled all my contacts into two lists ("Circles") called "notifications" and "comments". If someone abused that privilege, they were removed.
- The default Home stream could include "featured" or "recommended" content. Individual lists could not. Obvious hack: don't look at the Home stream, and instead have a primary list. On desktop, I further hacked the CSS to remove any references to streams I wasn't interested in following, e.g., the short-lived "Games" category, and "What's Hot" (an absolute cesspit of anodyne irrelevance).
- On successor platforms, I typically set up about three lists in order of priority, often literally "A", "B", and "C". The highest-quality (and lowest-volume) posters go in A, spillover to B, and especially annoying / high-volume to C. If a profile's contributions are not useful, they're unfollowed.
- Mastodon has the additional feature of being able to block an entire instance. For large instances (tens to hundreds of thousands of accounts) this may be overkill. For smaller ones with hostile cultures, it's quite handy.
I'll note: HN has none of these features, but it has excellent moderation, and the option of collapsing annoying threads. If I find myself conversing with someone to whom my meagre skills in communication seem utterly inadequate, I collapse the thread and move on. HN preserves those collapsed states (at times this is an antifeature, here, it's useful).
This isn't quite as powerful as the block-user feature, but in the context of HN's other controls, it's generally sufficient.
I just use regular rss. thankfully there is still some content out there which uses rss. I like the fact that anyone can put uo their own rss feed with whatever they want without needing to be "curated" or "evaluated against terms of service" of some central system
Twitter have picked the wrong customer IMO (readers).
They should be selling features to writers, not readers.
Writers/Broadcasters of content would pay a lot more than $2.99 a month for extra features to curate their feeds and followers, publish content automatically, weed out spam and trolls, schedule posts etc.
Agreed. Those people want reach more than anything else. The utility for some tweeters is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The utility for tweetees isn't likely 10/yr.
I'm not on twitter, and poking my head into at least this corner seems pretty damn unhealthy.
In sequence a women accused this guy (falsely) of harassing her from some other random account (it's not clear why). Then another person said they overheard a conversation ages ago and stopped being friends with the guy - which turned out to not be true either. And it continued from there. Is there no consequence on twitter for this type of stuff?
Wonder if there is space for a twitter clone. Basically interesting ideas, sharing information. You'd be stuck with bad information, the response (instead of calling someone an idiot) would be to describe a different theory. No personal attacks of any kind.
HN seems to avoid a lot of this type of mob behavior around personal stuff and it's easier for non-involved people to engage then.
I think most people underestimate how vulnerable Twitter is to competition.
They have no technical moat, and their business decisions may have been a net negative to users. 95% of their value lies in network effects, and people are fickle. I expect twitter will go the way of Yahoo over the next decade.
Twitter’s moat is speed of new information. It is the fastest way to find out what is going on. That is delivered by a combination of technology, experience design, and network effect.
And basically every major competitor has ceded that ground to them. Google had a whole pilot project around real-time search. It only worked because they ingested the Twitter firehose, and when that deal ended, so did Google Real-time Search. Facebook tried to take this on with “going live” video; where is that now? Most platforms like Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, etc. did not even try.
>Is there no consequence on twitter for this type of stuff?
Ideally there would be social consequences for stuff like this, but there's absolutely no risk in trying to drum up lynch mobs against people online, but there is potential career benefit to be gained.
Mastodon have been a pleasant alternative to Twitter for me, but the experience is highly dependent on the instance (server) you choose to join. But the fact that virtually every server is community owned, contains no ads or algorithmic feed is making a huge difference.
But what about just dialing down the personal attacks? I mean, it's hard to engage with twitter as part of general population when folks are immediately in destroyer mode.
Couldn't twitter just have a flag for personnel attacks. Or is it considered good that these attacks happen there - plenty I'm sure are potentially supported by a bit more than the one linked from HN. But either way hard to engage with from the outside.
Twitter's business model relies on it being toxic. Controversy and drama generate "engagement", so they have no reason to change. This isn't specific to Twitter even, any ad-supported social platform has this problem and which is why advertising should be considered a cancer.
The HN comments are pretty unanimous on wanting to pay this amount to remove ads, not for more features. The problem with that is that an active US user is already producing more as revenue than that from ads. (40M US DAU, 500M US advertising revenue per quarter -> $4/month). Add to that the problem that for subscriptions they end up paying app store fees, subscriptions to remove ads just can't work. They'd need to price it at like $10/month, but it seems obvious few people would pay that.
This does feel somehow absurd, given how ineffective one would expect Twitter ads to be, but might be illustrative of the problems with paying to remove ads.
I had a Twitter account since late 2010 until a few months ago. I'm not much of a social media guy, but I felt that I had some sort of addiction during those years, an addiction that made me go back every few weeks and "leave" after feeling Twitter's toxicity.
Their system is smart at appealing to very specific personalities that just can't help being toxic. These people produce tons of controversial content and generate a lot of traffic.
However, the system also operates at a collective level by forming closed groups of users, that fall somewhere between gossipy cliques and low key cults. This is by far the scariest side of Twitter.
Something I would really pay for is the ability to manage one twitter handle from multiple accounts. That functionality is kinda there in TweetDeck, but it is hidden and I'm not sure it is supported anymore. In the API it works I think but no client supports it.
Ah and the ability to create an account anonymously without a phone, and maybe to pay with crypto. I understand why they don't want that, but if you post controversial stuff (IMO harmless progressive stuff, nothing agressive or hate-y, but enough to tick some people off who want to play culture wars) then you invite crazy people who try to dox or threaten you, and all kinds of legal threats. This is in West Europe, I can't imagine how it might be in acutally repressive states.
Unless you just post for fun about cats or food, social media turns out to be ungrateful work...
* No suggested tweets, no people I might be interested in, no tweets someone I follow liked - just show me the people I follow and things they explicitly retweet
* The timeline preserves order
* Threads are grouped together and the entire thread is shown
Exactly. Been using Tweetbot for years (a decade?). Never seen ads. Timeline is literally a “time line”. And nothing shows up that I don’t want to see like promoted tweets, tweets from people I don’t follow, or trends.
Even has some awesome features on top of that like muting (people or hashtags). They’re only limited by Twitter’s throttled API at this point. However, literally the day that Twitter opened up viewing tweet likes via the API, Tweetbot had updated their app to support it.
They switched to a subscription model with Tweetbot 6. And while I’m generally not a fan of subscriptions, I figured $6 per YEAR for an app that I use every day and have for nearly a decade is totally worth it to support the devs.
I once wrote about how you can achieve something similar with uBlock Origin: https://schleiss.io/fixing-twitter-design-with-extension The post was from 2018 so I don't know if the css classes are still valid, also I messed up the images after an update, but I hope you get the gist.
Same here, with such an offering I'd find a subscription attractive. But then again I'd also be more willing to subscribe in general if Twitter didn't try to sabotage my experience and timeline at every step already in the first place.
I hope Mozilla is watching closely. If (and it's a big 'if') this proves successful, it's an important datapoint on the viability of paid-for utility services on the web.
No, Firefox isn't the same thing as Twitter. But if large numbers of people show willingness to pay $2.99/mo to change the app's theme, surely there's enough privacy-conscious people that would pay similarly for a browser that was commercially incentivised to protect privacy rather than monetise it.
I would happily pay a couple bucks per month for a Firefox Pro that’s exactly the same as normal Firefox.
Provided, of course that it’s easy to start and end the subscription, and I don’t have to create a new account. Fortunately Apple provides all of this with the App Store.
A) I don't want to create yet another account and give my CC number to yet another entity who can lose it
B) I guess I don't fully trust them to use the $$ for anything that I care about. Tying the revenue more directly to Firefox IMO would send a stronger signal that this is what matters.
Donations don't go to the browser's development. They go to the Mozilla "Foundation" which works on projects which you may or may not agree with, but the browser isn't one of those.
As far as I know it's impossible to donate towards the browser's development.
Because he's lying. He would not pay for Firefox Premium. The set of people who would pay for this product is vastly smaller than the set of people who say they would.
I paid for Omniweb and I still miss it. Features included per site settings, and workspaces that worked like a mix of profiles and Apple’s Spaces. It was killed off by free competitors, look where that brought us.
A signal that you're willing to pay something. The amount here isn't really relevant, and usage goes beyond social signaling.
If it's exposed over the API and someone's logging into my product with that flag set, you could reasonably assume it's not a bot, or at the very least that whoever's botting has paid $3 of their own money.
If all they are doing is allowing color changes and slight UI tweaks (and the undo button), why not take a page from online gaming's playbook and just sell cosmetics?
There is pretty much no limit to what could be sold as a cosmetic...add "flair" to the twitter bird (googly eyes, hats, etc) ($5.99 - $25.99)...make circle logo on your profile an octagon ($1.99), a triangle ($1.25)...with a blue border for an extra $.99....etc
Does the premium version include unlimited API-access so you can use any client?
I use a third party client with no ads and no content except tweets from people I follow because I can’t stand the official apps, but I have since learned that this possibility was limited to new users.
If Twitter cut my ability to use Tweetbot and then charged $3 for it, I’d subscribe immediately. So I suspect this is a service more people would pay for.
Don't know if you meant it, but "knob", short for "knobhead", is offensive slang in UK. It's eerily fitting here, though (the idea that Twitter leadership might see their users as a bunch of idiots might... not be entirely false).
This is awesome. Not because I like Twitter. It’s pretty awful.
And I don’t hold out much hope that this will do anything to stop Twitter from boosting crazy garbage in order to maximize “engagement” and sell ads.
I’m excited because I think this will make it easier for competitors to come along and offer a better, more user-focused experience. You can do a lot with $3/user.
I will not talk about the ethics and privacy issues of Twitter but about user experience and quality of content on feed.
The quality of content on your feed is as good as the people you choose to follow. Choose selectively, block and mute liberally. Keep doing this, and your feed will be fantastic.
I use Twitter only for work. I set my Trending country to some country I have never heard the name of outside of trivia books containing nation capitals.
And my Twitter experience is fantastic. Have meaningful discussions, learn new things, gain new perspectives.
> The quality of content on your feed is as good as the people you choose to follow
Twitter is incentivized to introduce engagement-generating garbage into your feed whether you want it or not. You'll be fighting a never-ending battle.
Twitter's default view is an algorithmic timeline which in addition to being ordered randomly (you can't easily tell whether you've reached the end, thus spend more time on it and more opportunities to see ads - I believe this was the original reason why all social platforms switched to this model), it will also include tweets from people you don't follow.
You can opt-out and go back to the chronological feed (not sure if that also includes tweets from people you don't follow) but the setting "accidentally" resets every so often.
"Engagement" also goes beyond ads that you see. If you "engage", despite not seeing ads yourself, you're still contributing to their DAU/MAU metrics and creating content that others might engage with and they might see ads.
Speaking of awful: Something Awful is an example of a paid social club that flourished. It can work. Twitter is a bit large and comes with certain connotations of low-brow behavior (ie the very essence of only using 160 characters to convey a thought), so I'm not confident it will succeed. It'll be interesting to watch what comes out of the paywall though.
I don't think there's much to be learned from SA in this context. It existed during a different time of the internet, when cultural capital and honestly just raw power were allocated differently.
It existed into the "modern" era of rage engagement, influencers, clickbait etc, but I would consider its "flourishing" to have ended well before that.
The public’s reaction to this should be highly interesting to those who argue that sites should just have subscriptions instead of targeted ads. $3 is half the price of a single print issue of the Sunday New York Times, but already the story seems to be about Twitter creating second class citizens out of free users who can’t be $36-a-year elites.
I see all these comments about the trash and hate on Twitter, and I just wish that I could show them how I use it, and how wonderful a source of intellectual stimulation it can be.
My feed is highly curated.
1) I mute all political words. Nothing good comes from these discussions. I also mute things that just don't contribute to my peace of mind (a recent addition being "basecamp")
2) I block users who put out garbage content or try to stir things up
3) I use lists that I view on TweetDeck, so I can have lists based on my different interests (i.e. investing, entrepreneurs, interesting people, philosophy, etc)
Using this it becomes a dream feed. I get stimulating content, great discussions, and interesting ideas. On top of that I've actually made some solid friends from the network over the years, some in-person ones as well.
Have you ever considered that all this labor isn't worth it to a casual user? It's quite obvious, the surface Twitter experience is hostile and trashy. You've sequestered yourself into a bubble you think is fine, ok, but what incentive is there for anyone else to do the same?
Yeah I'm in this boat, too. In the end it might mean that I am paying Twitter $3/mo and the developer of the 3rd-party app, but to circumvent all API restrictions would be worth it. It seems a little unfair that Twitter gets so much of that money when it's really the app developer who is earning most of my value.
> Twitter without ads and a true reverse-chron view of the accounts that I follow.
I really expected Mastodon to get more adopted among the regular folks because these features that everybody wants are just the standard for Fediverse instances.
Mastadon will never, ever take off because of the federated decentralized bullcrap. No one cares about that shit and it makes the product confusing and weird.
DDG "Mastodon". Second result is "joinmastodon.org" which I assume is the right thing. OK so far.
No social content up-front on the page. Instead I have to watch a video if I want to know what I'm getting in to. (Yes I know Twitter just greets you with "sign up/log in" on their homepage these days, but everyone knows what they are so it's fine).
"Get started", not "sign up". Looks like I'm in for a process.
Four boxes telling me what it means to choose a community. Nothing immediately actionable. List of community categories on the left. Nothing against furries, but apparently this is the kind of place where they rate a top-level category, out of only ten categories... so. Hm. Ok.
One of the infoboxes: "You can move your account to a different community later without losing your followers." Ok, but what if I get banninated for some reason? Do I lose my stuff then? Can I still move it? How much control can an op take over my data if I upset them? Or if they just stop paying their server bill without notice? Yes sure, it may be "the same thing that happens if Twitter suddenly stops paying their server bill" but in any given year that's way less likely than that one of these listed community servers will do the same. Guess answering all that requires outside research.
I'll try the "general" category.
It's not clear, even in "general", whether some of these are topic-specific spaces. I think not? But it's really hard to tell and I'm just guessing. Some are "request invite" and it's cool that's supported.
Clicking on a few "join" buttons, all the pages I'm greeted with are practically identical aside from the color theme. That's good. Not sure I love the way "log in" and "sign up" are both given equal visual and page-position weight, considering I showed up via a "join" button, but whatever, that's a bit nitpicky.
There's a "see what's happening" link on the sign-up/in pages. Back on the joinmastodon.org instance list, they have "browse directory"(??? Directory of what? ???) links on each instance's little card, which seems to take you to some kind of user list.
Following the "see what's happening" link on a likely-looking instance. This instance, which noted on the sign-up page that it's "mostly English-language", presents me with about 50% posts in non-English languages (several different ones), and the English-language posts are context-free replies, it looks like, so they convey no useful meaning to me. It's like getting a random sampling of individual SMS messages belonging to 100 different people. The handful that aren't meaningless are kind of off-putting. I still don't know what's up with this whole thing, really, aside from I guess it's Twitterish? Kind of? Judging from the @ portions of the usernames, I think these posts are from a bunch of different servers, so I'm really not sure what the point is of treating the instances as separate and the choice as meaningful. Is it like email, so it doesn't matter where you're hosted as long as you have some host? They act like that's not the case and it really matters which host you choose, for reasons that mostly have nothing to do with longevity, stability, or likelihood of continued service, but I can't tell, from what I'm seeing, why. That's how I'd choose an email provider. I'm not getting how this is different, if this is what the "feed" looks like.
> I really expected Mastodon to get more adopted among the regular folks
Between the above and that if I didn't frequent nerd-spaces I'd never have heard of it in the first place, I think I can see why.
Yeah. It's not really clear what I'm supposed to be doing when I go there. IS it safe to sign up to a random community to try it out or do I need to spin up my own server if I want an un-revocable identity on the network? Can my node be kicked off if I do that?
I really like the idea of federated services like that, but they need to have two separate, clearly explained ways to participate; 1) What to do as a normal user and 2) what to do as an enthusiast running a server.
I also think those federated platforms will have scaling issues. What happens if I end up with some type of feed that includes content spanning 20 different servers of varying (hosting) quality?
Oh, I find their UIs, once logged-in, nearly incomprehensible. Nothing makes any damn sense. I don't know how people use them. I don't, for that reason. But signing up's pretty straightforward and there aren't really any choices-with-unclear-consequences you have to make.
I already have hand curated my Twitter and make full use of the `lists` feature. I have roughly 30 lists for different categories. One for techpress news, another for world news, another for quotes & inspirational messages, etc
This attempt to serve curated feeds to people is too late. I've already put in the hard work of organizing my feeds to my liking, and this has the bonus of me not having to give Twitter money.
(I will happily be their 'product' in return for me having insight into my interests and being abreast of world affairs, and local news too).
if you don't want to wait till twitter blue , you can try https://twimark.io , I have made this tool to bookmark tweets by categories and convert threads into labels. unfortunately the completion of my project and Twitter's announcement came at same time
To those saying that this is "$3/m for different app icon colors":
Based on their recent acquisitions of
- Revue (email newsletter service similar to Substack)
- Scroll (subscription that shares revenue with news sites, and removes ads on said sites)
I highly doubt Twitter Blue will solely get you different app/icon colors, they're likely to roll those services into Blue.
This is somewhat similar to the Amazon Prime approach, where you pay for a premium version of a site/service, and get access to a portfolio of services like Prime Video, Music, 2 day shipping, etc.
Their aim seems to be "Twitter Blue is to consumption of online news as Amazon Prime is to shopping/media".
The way I see it, a subscription model = moving away from a system that incentivizes a platform to maximize engagement/ad views, and instead incentivizes the platform to provide a positive experience, so users stay subscribed.
With the old 3rd party clients I enjoyed using a linear timeline with a synced timeline position via Tweet Marker [0]. I would pay for their subscription if they enabled this for their official clients + web app.
It was probably intended; I mistook the headline as a fast-track for 'Blue tick/checkmark' service. Regardless, it is not aimed at people like me, who are ambivalent about Twitter.
I haven't tweeted a single thing from my vintage account, and have no (zero) followers. It is basically a read-only account. Not only that, but I try not to follow any more than 100 accounts, which is still a lot! If curated properly, you can stumble upon interesting and thought-provoking interactions, interspersed with churlish and toxic behaviour -- some of which is fairly easy to identify, albeit hard to ignore. In general, it is theatre mixed with rapid insult delivery mechanism, which I find amusing, and prefer not to read into too much, and/or have any desire to interact with.
I have watched a ton of interviews with Jack and find him extremely inspirational and what he does (and has done) being truly amazing. Easily one of my favorite entrepreneurs to follow.
With Twitter, I get the sense he lost control of the company a long time ago because of a combo of monetization and culture.
So basically he helped build the greatest communication platform in the world and instead we get what Twitter is today.
This kind of weak Twitter Blue announcement, to me at least, just shows at what a lost the platform is for making money in a way that isn't engagement driven (aka, rewarding flaming-type behavior).
Alas, I mostly use iOS. I did just discover Tweetbot, which is pretty good, but apparently is limited by Twitter's API to (among other things) not be able to show notifications
I absolutely hate ads on Twitter and there's no way to block them on mobile. So I developed this obsession to block every ad account I see (which is about 4,300 accounts so far https://github.com/ahmetb/twitter-audit-log/blob/master/bloc...). I am willing to pay $2 more and get ads blocked as well. Once you start blocking ads, the relevance goes down and it drives you crazier.
You can browse Twitter from a mobile browser with ad blocking (ex: Firefox). The UI is basically the same, it's a bit slower but on the other hand you get multiple tabs and more privacy.
Twitter is such a garbage platform. If you browse the web page with your mobile it will eat up your battery pretty quick. Sometimes it rescrolls the page so you lose where you were. Or rerenders everything so you lose context completely. And because it renders quite slow it will misregister your thumb clicks on something else, like the back button. Or try to thumb click on a single line tweet, you will hit everything else. Pay for this? No, thanks.
The only FAANG company products that I am willing to pay any money for are Amazon's AWS and Google's Search. There is no way that Twitter can produce anything that is mildly interesting and their behaviour in the last 5 years was just pure trash. Some people argue that social media in this form is just damaging to society and should not exist. I am not going that far but paying for it would be really over the edge.
I like Twitter a lot. It's the only social media platform that has a lot of features for power users.
The trick is to regularly ban certain keywords associated with posts not relevant to you and to regularly block or mute users.
You can also use Lists to get rid of recommended tweets and create specific feeds for whatever use case you want. If you pin them, you can swipe left or right on your timeline to have a feed just for content related to the list.
What I need is a read-only Twitter. I can't keep myself from engaging with idiots and it always ends up a net negative. I wish I could take away the ability to react to things.
But so far this hasn't materialized and I feel better just not going to Twitter at all, even if that means missing out on some interesting content.
Twitter is the only social media I use. If they have to do this to make a profit then I have no issue with it. I'm surprised more large social media companies have not done this since there are so many outside services that will do things like this on their platforms.
I have no problem with subscription, but this feels like a really lazy attempt to monetize TBH, albeit being cheap.
Also note, HN folks are nothing like common users, and using their experience as indicator for public reception is a really bad model to say the least.
All will suffer from this eternal September unless you discriminate in terms of who you admit. People are totally unequal. Closed User Groups existed for a reason and that reason has been amplified many times over as internet adoption has grown.
I would pay Twitter to NOT use Twitter. Give me the option to lock myself out for a few hours/days so I can focus on work and withdraw from social media addiction. They can shove their colored icons. What is this?!
People should learn to engage their brain, maybe mull it over for a while before posting on twitter. It doesn't seem to happen though so they may as well charge people for the ability to undo their mistakes!
Undo Tweets? As in delete your tweet after you post it? Or it won't send the tweet for a minute or two in case you change your mind similar to Gmail Undo?
$3 as a one-time payment doesn't seem like it will meaningfully impact Twitter's earnings.
I wonder if they are doing this to increase the value of their ads shown to people willing to pay: if someone is willing to pay $3 for minor aesthetic improvements they are much more valuable advertising targets than the general population.
The principle issue I had with them was that they scale poorly. A few dozen principle feeds: OK. Hundreds or thousands, not so much.
You effectively see the same problem with Reddit forums, as a parallel. A smallish community of a few thousand subscribers, following the 90/10/1 rule meaning maybe 10 members submit 50% of the posts, another 100 contribute the other half is OK. A sub with 100k -- millions of members, both the submissions and comments are simply a firehose, and the temporal weighting (even with vote-based ranking) means arcane subjects slip off the page rapidly.
Algorithmic ranking => algorithmic gaming.
Temporal ranking => temporal gaming.
That is, the feed is dominated by the most-frequently-posting users.
Fixing this in a fair fashion for a large number of users with a high variability of interests is ... difficult.
In any large-audience medium, the default "show/no-show" decision for a piece of content approaches "no-show". Attention is finite.
(I'm not saying algorithmic social media is better. I'm saying the problem is hard.)
Twitter needs to move from an ad model to a subscription model, with subscription fees for accounts of a certain size. The platform would still be free for the majority of users, but accounts over 200K followers (or even 50K followers) should pay for the audience that Twitter provides them with. This would lead to better financial results because recurring revenue is reliable, profitable, and earns a higher multiple than transaction revenue.
I'm all for big companies having to pay for their social media presence. And a lot. That might make them host it themselves and I wouldn't need to look at their offerings on these horrible social mediums...
"Twitter Blue" is already a stupid name, after "YouTube Red" (which is stupid for the same reasons. At least YouTube tried it first, I guess) but it gets worse when the only feature I can see in that post is that you can select colours, other than the Twitter blue, making effectively not blue. At least YouTube Red keeps the colour (I guess, I have no idea)
Sounds like the product team had difficulty coming up with a name. You probably don't want to name it Twitter Premium if there's nothing exactly premium there except for an undo button and color choices, and Premium or Enhanced imply that their base product isn't sufficient. If you remove Twitter <adjective> from the consideration, really all you can do is come up with a name that's somewhat disjointed but related to the product.
I was thinking of Twitter as a social/comment/news webapp company using the word "plus" to market a new product in a space where a cash-rich competitor with a decade-old product with broadly similar functionality already uses the word "plus" as the entire name of their own entry in the category.
An analog might be game publisher King (maker of Candy Crush Saga) initiating legal proceedings against makers of other games that used the word "Saga" or "Candy", e.g. "Banner Saga"[1], even though those are obviously not reasonable claims -- and I think they lost? Regardless, they're still able to try, and it exerted pressure.
So, imagine you're sitting in a board room at Twitter, naming your new social web app product, and someone says, "How about 'Twitter+'?", and you know there's Disney+, and Apple TV+, and Google+ all already out there, and you say, "nah... that sounds like a headache we can do without." But maybe not, hence why I noted I was merely wondering.
Such naming is part of my break-up plan for the tech giants. If you break Facebook up into three successor companies with competing networks, you run into the problem of what do with the Facebook brand. It would be unfair and counterproductive to give one the brand and have the other two create new ones, so my idea is to give them color versions (e.g. Facebook Red, Facebook Green, Facebook Purple). Eventually they'd probably rebrand, but it's the best solution I can think of to start.
I guess this is their admission that you cannot monetize engagement if your community is highly toxic and mostly just produces shitstorms, lynchmobs, perpetually enraged morally superior idiots and professional victims.
I know that there's also good posts and good people on Twitter, but in my opinion it has been a net negative for society for quite a while now.
What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day. Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying.
I had a brief foray into Twitter, but had to stop. I followed my senator and found that no matter the post, the replies were filled with obvious disinformation, flat out lies, and irrelevant accusations.
I remember one person posting hand drawn graphs without a scale claiming global warming is just a cyclical process. Does it makes sense to report someone for bad science? They probably believe what they posted to be true, and others who read that unrefuted reply may begin to think the same. So I tried to teach critical thinking to random people on Twitter, but as you imagine this was a fools errand.
Twitter (and nearly every "social" media platform) is like democracy: a sewer hose of manufactured consent, ignorance, mob stupidity, disinformation, and bot-automated propaganda that you'll need more than a shower or 3 to rinse-off.
I gave up and blew up all of my "social" media because they didn't serve any purpose.
Maybe an invite-only platform could have higher signal with:
- multiple "vouches" of others to get an invitation
- frequency/reputation micropayment cost to post
- reputation/karma that isn't apparent or chased, and granted some with the invite
- elimination of pile-on
- multifaceted voting based on specific aspects of relevance, agreement, and insight
- humor voted/tagged and filtered by readers to avoid using dv for that
- dv has moderator-visible reasoning to double-check and prevent spurious dv
- prevention of dv retribution
- reduced anonymity (first name and picture) for higher-quality interactions
- mediation and de-escalation facilities such as pre-comment emotional content scanning (AI-based sarcasm detection would rock), posting delay of 2 hours, and side chats
- login required to view content, no search engine spidering
- operate as a sustainable nonprofit to avoid pressures of corporate profiteering
- servers and legally based in a country the US and EU cannot control
HN is not pursuing 10%/week growth, "engagement" etc. It doesn't care for bots, viral posts, there's a small, definable ruleset and largely enforceable.
It naturally attracts people interested in its themes and subjects, and doesn't try to cater to everyone needs. Hell, it isn't even trying to be beautiful or having any order other than chronological timeline and upvoted posts!
I loathe all ads, so HN is great in that aspect. The design is good with its beige and orange, very simple no pretentiousness. Also the community is smart and usually thoughtful in both replies and posts. Its really the only 'social media' I participate in.
The user base is sufficiently pretentious to bring the site up to the expected pretentiousness baseline for an SV product. Just needs a bit of quiet ukulele music in the background to really get it over the line consistently.
That's definitely true. Without messing up a good thing (HN), I wonder though how similar community platforms could be constructed incrementally better in terms of reasonableness, fairness, ethical/principled/respectful debate, curiosity, quality people, and signal.
It might be bad analogies but the lack of flash a-la Drudge Report (haven't seen it in years) or the old Fry's Electronics (stores and their website). I think it somewhat deters engagement addiction and focuses on content.
It is a toxic wasteland, though, at least sometimes. Also depends on who you are and how you experience the world - HN can be a very ugly place.
HN is no cakewalk. There are lots of very vocal climate deniers, homophobes, Nazis, etc. here. I've been called hateful slurs on HN that nobody has said to me anywhere else. Much of this flies under the radar of the mods and the users are frequently not warned or banned.
HN suffers all the same problems as Twitter or any of the others.
The difference is visibility. A few hours into a conversation, the top two comments are, more often than not, a well-reasoned argument for one side and a well-reasoned rebuttal. If you start in on a thread while it's early, you'll see a lot of garbage, but that tends to float to the bottom over time. In general, the HN system (tech+mods+community) rewards thoughtful content and penalizes shallow nonsense.
Twitter is the opposite. The most inflammatory comments trigger the most engagement, and so get the most visibility.
I don't agree with that. I think often hours in, the top comments often get more offensive here. Not less. The garbage floating to the bottom is not my experience here.
> In general, the HN system (tech+mods+community) rewards thoughtful content and penalizes shallow nonsense
I don't see this happening on HN. The shallow nonsense isn't the problem, it's the hateful opinions and "carefully reasoned, smart sounding" racism that is the problem. Calling it shallow nonsense makes it sound like no big deal or low effort hate posts. But that's not what I'm talking about.
People say the worst things here but they use a large vocabulary and so it seems to get a pass. The hate here is very similar to the hate I see elsewhere and often it is much much worse here than on Twitter, in my personal experience.
Ah, okay, I understand better what you're saying. So you do perceive Twitter as different than HN, but only in quality of writing, not in lack of hateful content.
Can you give an example of a thread that turned out that way? I'm genuinely curious if I've been missing something, or if I've just managed to steer clear of topics that end up like that.
I'm on Hacker News more than I care to admit and I don't see evidence of this widespread racism you proclaim. Please provide evidence if you're going to make these wild accusations.
I'm scratching my head on this one. There are passive-aggressive haters in the world, but I don't see much of that around here. People around these parts usually keep their biases to themselves or outright flaunt them and get hammered for it.
$5 words instead of plain speak is an accessibility problem but anti-intellectualism never solved anything. Maybe inferiority feelings or catastrophizing? Do what I do, subscribe to the Merriam-Webster Word of the Day. :) Go through the GRE prep materials if you want a bigger vocab. Heck, I would get a used unabridged dictionary and make it a point to work from cover-to-cover. Watch those obnubilated smarty-pants shudder in fear. :)
Twitter is dominated by outrage and disinformation. HN very much is not. You may still encounter conversations with people who hold terrible views, but they remain conversations.
I've never been downvoted for making a controversial point on HN. And, I have ONLY been downvoted for making glib, lazy, or intellectually weak arguments. This is exactly how it should be.
Your experience on HN does not resemble mine at all. I'm frequently downvoted for controversial opinions. And I see a lot of outrage and disinformation here.
And on twitter I see little outrage and disinformation. Our experiences are so far apart on social media that I'm not sure anecdotes will do much for the conversation here.
Anything critical of the failure that is the United States, it's crumbling democracy or the Frank insanity inflicted upon the world by the psychopaths operating out of silicon valley. Unbridled Capitalism of the American variety is cruel and big tech is complicit in propagating antidemocratic efforts through walled gardens and mass tailored propaganda.
How's that?
>I've never been downvoted for making a controversial point on HN. And, I have ONLY been downvoted for making glib, lazy, or intellectually weak arguments. This is exactly how it should be.
That's probably because you don't post any opinions that the HN hivemind finds controversial. Stray outside the lines just a bit and expect moderator censure and downvotes/flags.
It's hard but possible, I find, to post and discuss controversial things. You have to be very carefull how you present the topic, and you have to put a lot more effort into the discussion than you normally might to make sure it doesn't devolve, but if you wade through and cut off the drive-by commenters that misunderstand your position because they aren't actually bothering to think critically about it,and try to try to keep the discussion it on track, you sometimes get very interesting discussions out of it.
Sometimes I end up softening or changing someone's position on something, sometimes I soften or change mine or learn a lot of new things, and I have to imagine that happens with some lurkers as well, and I'm not sure what more I could hope for, besides wishing it was easier sometimes.
Compare this to Reddit, where some high-traffic sub-Reddits (/r/atheism coughcough) delete links to scientific evidence showing AA efficacy: https://archive.is/gEXfA Why let facts get in the way of a good social networking rage fest?
Certain topics like politics or war or religion or LGBT will always tend to produce flame wars and "toxic wasteland" no matter which platform. The technical threads are usually a lot better.
Please provide some specific examples. Even with examples, the important question is about how frequent they are, but without examples, your statement is just your personal experience.
PS: Your usage of “smart racism,” “nazis,” “homophobes” etc are strong bayesian evidence (to me) that you’re just looking to guilt-trip people and victimize yourself. The only kind of racism I have seen on HN is the kind I see literally everywhere: people don’t really care about people not in their bubbles. This is better named selfishness than racism, and it’s inherent in human nature. (If you’re curious, I am middle-eastern, and not exactly binary myself; I have been abused when I was younger for being “transgenderish.” Which kind of forced me to adopt more conforming, binary social masks.)
I've seen explicit scientistic (scientific-sounding) racism on HN somewhat frequently, usually as a mintoriy opinion, but somewhat tolerated - generally in discussions about IQ, stuff like The Bell Curve. Homophobia I've seen much more rarely, though maybe I didn't hit the right topics.
I've also seen anti-religious sentiments and anti-chinese nationalism popping up pretty proeminintely every now and again. Climate change denial is also rarely missing from any longer conversation about climate.
Dang's response came 4 days after the comment was written. Before being flagged, it was downvoted, but not to hell - it was gray, but still readable, like most of that poster's other comments. So I would say that someone may be justified in feeling somewhat attacked and not that well defended on such topics. As I said, it's a minority opinion, but it is somewhat tolerated.
Ideally, when someone claims that they can tell how smart someone is from how they look, that should be downvoted to oblivion and receive overwhelming counter-evidence or no attention at all.
Of course, what happened was quite OK, and much better than many other corners of the internet. But still, it's proof that that there is some explicit racism on HN, not just people not caring about others.
I understand the linearity of the Shrodinger equation under a model which MW entails. However, you are sidestepping the randomness involved in the choice of world that you reside in. You can dress it up all you want, but your consciousness is bound to one world of the many worlds. And that is a defacto random phenomena.
I’ve been abused all my life by religion, and the Iranian regime (which all evidence points to being much milder than the Chinese dictatorship). You’re no different than your predecessors; What are you doing to help people that actually goes against your bubble’s conventions? It’s not exactly an achievement to be pro-gay etc when gays etc are your bubble’s current fad.
I do not understand your point in any way. You claimed that there are no racists on HN and that claiming there are suggests someone is a drama queen. I pointed to some racists on HN to show that at least some do exist.
What does this have to do with doing something about the Iranian regime or Chinese regime or any other regime? I barely even discussed homophobia.
And note that you can be anti-fundamentalist without being anti religion, and you can be against the Chinese regime without being anti Chinese people (just like you can be anti Israel without being antisemitic).
I guess the issue is keeping moderation consistent (like bar exam grading) coupled with a manageable size of community that handles scaling. I wonder if social media platforms could cluster 10-25 people together into "troops" with a "troop leader" and a "guidance counselor." This way, it's not just a sea of individuals floating along ephemerally disconnected, but brings some tribal belonging and support back that people yearn for.
I've since come to believe that to have a high quality medium, you really need not just the editorial guidelines I've mentioned, but also someone who interprets those guidelines in the intended way, and the ability to enforce them properly.
That means you can, at best, have a small team of moderators/community managers, likely with the person who has manifested the editorial guidelines at the top. This does not scale, so the community is limited in size.
When I think back to the times of TV channels, professional magazines, radio shows etc., I remember how amazing the quality of that content could be. Reading the same magazines printed back then today confirms that to me.
Curated content wins.
Sure, some TV channels and magazines were terrible instead, but that's just because I did not agree with their curation.
Slashdot died from the incoming content, not the posts, as far as I recall from those days. Digg suffered the same fate. Reddit has so far been kept from it since moderators can only pin a few posts and only have "negative" control of the posts that appear at the top.
Yes, I was there. :) 23 years ago ;) I meant some sort of mechanism to improve the training/fairness/consistency of moderators rather than merely double-checking them.
Their metamoderation was innovative but ultimately pointless.
Instead of having one popularity contest, it was like a popularity contest that qualified you for another popularity contest. Theoretically the metamods were "good" posters, but being a "good" poster was ridiculously easy - you could just rack up karma by parroting the hivemind and bashing Microsoft or whatever.
That's true. If a community platform's moderation were more professional like the example I used of bar exam graders, who grade practice samples and do other calibration exercises, it would improve the signal and tend to reduce biases if the culture were one of strict professionalism.
HN has basically one moderator. It's just that we've trained an army of downvoters and flaggers that mostly clobber anything "un-HN" almost immediately. There's a community here and it defends itself.
Most subject-specific forums are actually ok. Because posting there demonstrates that you have something worthwhile to care about. Of course one can troll and flamebait on such forums as well but it takes effort and it's not going to seriously rile people up about anything. Twitter is poles apart from that, it's like being in a different universe.
Also, I noticed how most underdog / less socially-acceptable lifestyle/interest forums tend to be pleasant, humorous, and reasonable. The other aspect maybe that marginalized people (without chips on their shoulders resentment) know what it feels like to be othered / not treated well and go out-of-their-way to be friendlier. For example, I can't remember any LGBT+ people who aren't cool, decent, and sociable... and I'm the goofy, straight, ally interloper stealing all the pretty cis girls (or they're stealing me, IDK).
On niche interests-side where it's a small world, I think the cosiness reduced sized and inherent common interests also reinforce, promote better behavior, and friendliness.
Twitter and such definitely throw unbounded numbers of random people at each other, and so the odds of clashing are astronomically-higher. In this alternate (mainstream) universe, the sad part is that social and online ideological Balkanization has cemented echo chambers of memetic civil war; a people divided-and-conquered.
The reason for that is HN is not for direct profit, has a charter, is not afraid to moderate content, via flag, and to bar people, via marking them as dead, and actively hunts spam and trolls.
If Twitter/FB were to do this, they'll have 1/5th the customer base but will have more sane content.
I think the major ingredient for HN is focus on topics that are interesting to "techinical" people. When you focus on particular set of activities it becomes easier to just say no to a lot of other contents.
I don't have twitter but i check some users(like the pico8 dev) once a week for interesting content. I don't see anything offtopic there and it's very nice and sometimes i learn something even in the replies. Same with certain subreddits. Just consuming in polling mode, helps a lot.
HN is not social media. Social media has friends/followers, chats, inboxes, timelines... stuff like that. Social media involves some insularity. This is how so-called fake news spreads, because insular networks do not get outside feedback. .
If they introduce targeted ads or up-votes/interactions could be monetized in HN, even with the the same community, you would start to see the deterioration IMHO.
Cool headed, interesting or curious do not generate enough click through as much as controversial, conspiracy theory, outrageous, hateful, etc. It's interesting that there's no ban on political or controversial content in HN but still, you don't see them take over the platform. The incentive is simply not there!
HN has decently big scale. Somehow it works because of heavy handed moderation, manual, crowdsourced and automated.
I think twitter really needs a downvote button. But they prefer relying more on their AIs instead of crowdsourced moderation. Probably so they can sell more ads.
Oh my heavens no. There are certain topics that even this site can't discuss in good faith without groupthink, hurt feelings, big egos, and so forth. No, I will not list those topics here to avoid invoking them, but most of them are political. Sometimes they get just as toxic as twitter and reddit, just with less namecalling since that'll get you flagged off with a quickness.
On that note: If even HN can't do it, I think some of these topics can't be discussed online at all. Here you've got great moderation, a high SNR, and vanishingly few of the pathologies that infest most web fora. Almost everything else is a step down in quality.
"If even HN can't do it, I think some of these topics can't be discussed online at all."
They can be, just not in a any format where anyone can post, let's say, 10 paragraphs of whatever, and then hundreds of people can jam their 40 paragraph rebuttals and threats right underneath it. While convenient for many purposes, the formats where the interactions are this tight and integrated are not the only formats.
You need something more like a weblog-structured community, where people can post their lengthy thoughts at their leisure, and others can post their own rebuttals on their own weblogs, but I think it's actually important that there not be tight integration such that everyone is getting a phone notification every time someone posts some link to them.
I would agree that online platforms that stick everyone into one metaphorical mosh pit have certain topics that simply can't be discussed reasonably, but "metaphorical mosh pit" isn't the only option.
If we can respectfully disagree and see each other's point-of-views without ghosting each other, then we're dialoguin'. Otherwise, we're just talking past each other, seeking karma brownie points, or taking out our frustrations.. and then what point is there to participating if there isn't meaningful communication?
The political differences here are often stark. You also have a fair amount of Independents here which makes this place a bit more tolerable for me. I really can't stand left-wing or right-wing ideologues, much less the extremists.
HN caters to people from all across the US (most of the audience is outside Silicon Valley and the global audience continues to grow based on dangs postings).
You could say it's mostly male, but I've seen more usernames with women's names in them.
I have a dream that one day, there will be no political parties, only nuanced, informed debate on stand-alone issues. Tribal groupthink is one of my pet peeves (isn't that the tao of flat-earthers?) because it often places loyalty over honesty. Elections are almost as bad because they've devolved into celebrity popularity contests.
There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party, and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt — until recently - and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.
Our only political party has two right wings, one called Republican, the other Democratic. But Henry Adams figured all that out back in the 1890s. "We have a single system," he wrote, and "in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses.
― Gore Vidal
Maybe it's me, but I don't think about participants' gender or if there's enough/too much of any particular attribute group. I infer your point is that HN extends well-beyond the stereotypical academic, software engineer, or tech entrepreneur: male, Caucasian/Asian/Indian subcontinental, high-income or college student, SF to Milpitas.
Vidals assessment of Democrats is a bit rosey, I think. This reflects the average dishonesty in politics though. An equally rosey picture of Republicans or equally bleak picture of Democrats (or both) would've made better sense in an honest reflection.
The rest of this is pretty spot on, and your assessment of my sentiment was spot on.
I don't think that's the only thing going on. Twitter has code written and an ML model trained to actively and intentionally surface material of indeterminate quality that is likely to drive engagement. HN has people using moderation and upvoting to surface material of high quality assuming that drives engagement.
I think there's a virtuous spiral when the one (specific platform features, philosophy, and conventions) reinforces the other (people's perceptions, attitudes, and interactions), and people care about excellence.
The for-profit, outrage-seeking, clickbait model of "engagement" is the opposite of that.
We can't fix everything with technology (if there's still people problems) or with good people (if the platform fails them) alone.
HN started niche and attracted a narrow audience intent on productive communication; mostly college grads and/or positive attitude people (successful attributes, even if a bit rowdy and troublemaking at times), and not many lottery ticket buyers [1]. It is very open, so it could be overwhelmed by less signal crowds over time should it hit mainstream visibility.
Do some platforms need to limit the number of participants and do stack-ranking dismissals? IIRC, the ASW platform culled a bunch of accounts.
There have been studies on social media interactions (I can't recall the links atm, and am almost done posting from the loo :) and "captological" aspects that influence people's online perception, behaviors, and reactions. I think the problems are the people, the power they're given, the presence/lack of fairness they perceive, what they're presented with, and whether or not the community defends itself and its values strongly (I think dang does a Herculean job with this).
We have had moderated platforms for discussion, but when people don't like being told they're wrong (especially when they are) they create their own.
Personal details don't deter it, as shown by the various platforms that were inhabited by the alt-right. There's a cultural lack of responsibility for the truth.
Any open social media platform where you can choose who you follow and who sees or doesn’t see your content is effectively an invite-only platform.
Twitter is pretty close to that, except it’s default opt-in rather than default opt-out. Meaning everyone can see your content by default, rather than you having to explicitly allow rando’s to see your content and reply to you.
But if you follow people who make high-quality posts, and unfollow, mute, and/or block people who produce all noise and no signal, you’ll have a pretty good professional and personal networking experience.
Most other social media have ways of curating your feed, but you have to proactively do it, can’t just rely on the social media platform to do it for you.
> - reputation/karma that isn't apparent or chased
The more I think about those problems the more I'm convinced up- and downvotes are a mistake in general. They can only cause damage and are completely useless as they're not even used for the same thing by different people. For example when someone gets 5 downvotes it's probably for at least 2 different reasons, none of which are communicated to the poster. When I get a random downvote I'd really like to know if it was warranted, but there's no way to find out.
If any kind of rating system had to exist I'd vote for something like tags; with users being able to tag any content with any 1-2 words, and frequent ones are visible without some extra clicks. For one this would give more nuanced information, and at the same time it would make tons of content much easier to find or filter.
That reminds me of the slashdot moderation system - when a user gets modpoints they get to spend them on posts as they browse and indicate why they spent that modpoint that way (e.g. 'Troll' or 'Flamebait').
Having used many broken moderation systems and designed a few (also broken) myself, a few observations.
- Popularity itself is a very poor metric for quality. It's mostly a metric for ... popularity. Which is to say: broad appeal, simplicity, emotive appeal (or engagement), and brevity. This does however correspond reasonably well to sales and advertising metrics.
- My own goal tends toward maximised overall quality, with a high favouring of truth value and relevance.
- There's some value to a multi-point rating scale. This is called a "Likert Scale", typically an odd-number of points (3, 5, 7, ...), most commonly encountered as a star-scale system. Amazon and Uber are the most familiar of these today, and highlight failure modes. If users' ratings are rebalanced based on their own average rating, at least some of the issues go away (e.g, a very positive rater giving away 5/5 will have those ratings discounted, a conservative rater offering 3/5 on average would see those uprated). The adjusted average becomes the rebalanced rating.
- Note that a capped cumulative score is not the same as an averaged Likert score. Slashdot's moderating system is an example of the former. It ... kind of works but mostly doesn't. Highly-ranked content tends to be good, but much content deserving higher ratings is utterly ignored.
- Taking number of interactions and applying a logarithmic function tends to give a renormalised popularity score. That is, on a log-log basis, you'll tend to see a linear scaling from "1 person liked this" to "10 billion people liked this" (roughly the range of any current global-scale ratings system). See also: Power Distribution, Zipf Function.
- Unbiased and uncorrupted expertise should rate more strongly. In averaging the inputs of 300 passengers + 2 pilots for an airplane's flight controls, my preferred weighting is roughly 3300*0 and 11. Truth or competence are not popularity games.
- Sometimes a distinct "experts" vs. "everyone" scoring is useful. I've recently seen an argument that film reviews accomplish this, with the expert reviewers' scores setting expectations for "what kind of film is this" and the popular rating for "how well did this film meet established expectations"? There are very good bad films, and very bad good films, as well as very bad bad films.
- "The wisdom of crowds" starts failing rapidly where the crowd is motivated, gamed, bought, or otherwise influenced. Such behaviour must* be severely addressed if overall trust in a ratings system is to remain.
- Areas of excellence ("funny", "informative", "interesting", etc.) are somewhat useful but very often the cost of acquiring that information is excessively high. Indirect measures of attributes may be more useful, and there's some research in this area (Microsoft conducted studies on classification of Usenet threads based on their "shape", in the 2000s. Simply based on the structure of reply chains, there were useful classifications: "dead post", "troll", "flameware", "simple question everybody can answer", "hard question many can guess at but one expert knows the answer", etc.
- Actual engagement with content, even just for a voting or other action is a small fraction of total views. Encouraging more rating behaviour often backfires. Make do with the data that occurs naturally, incentivised contribution skews results.
- Sortition in ratings may be useful. It greatly increases the costs of gaming.
- As is sortition of the presented content. Where it's not certain what is (or isn't) highly-ranked content, presenting different selections to different reader cohorts can help minimise popularity bias effects.
- Admitting that any achieved ratings score is at best a rough guess of the ground truth is tremendously useful. Fuzzing ratings based on the likely error can help balance out low-information states in trying to assess ratings.
Many social media platforms have tried this and failed Even at the lowest level of having to get an invite from someone you know - its never worked:
- Clubhouse
- Google+
- ELLO
- Mastodon
The paradox here is you need people to generate sustainable communities. When you don't have enough people, users will stop using the platform. Another classic case of this is all the "decentralized" social platforms like Diaspora and others. Great idea, great implementation, but without enough people, its doomed to fail.
I agree nearly completely with the inherent failur-proneness of invite-only networks, and participated in three of the four you mention. I'd dispute Mastodon as invite-only however.
That said, the exception is a network created for an extant community. In fact, most of the major successful social media networks have emerged from just such a community, and quite frequently one that's academically oriented.
Email, Usenet, and Facebook all emerged out of academia. Email and Usenet with early Arpanet and major research universities. Facebook was once literally Harvard. Several other early networks such as The WELL and Slashdot were strongly adjacent to these.
Several early BBS systems emerged out of or alongside military service communities. I don't recall if it was AOL, Prodigy, or another early network which was strongly popular among US military personnel and families (a large, reasonably cohesive community, widely distributed, with contacts and ongoing communications in distant locations).
YC's HN would be another example.
But generally, creating an early cohesive community is a challenge, and many of the tricks for short-cutting this process tend also to greatly diminish the long-term value and prospects of the discussion platform.
My own contention is that Google+ actually did have a strong internal-to-the-network (not just Google) community (though one that excluded a great many people). I feel the social network hurt itself by trying to open too quickly (Ello certainly did), as well as by Google's own greatly bifurcated affinity groups: technologists on the one hand, and marketers on the other. Marketing/advertising is toxic to social cohesion, and this showed early in G+ evolution.
> - login required to view content, no search engine spidering
Why do you think this is a good thing?
> - servers and legally based in a country the US and EU cannot control
I see two ways that could go: either somewhere that China and/or Russia have control over, or in an unstable third-world dictatorship. Do you have any specific countries where none of the above would apply, or do you prefer one of the latter two to the US and EU?
No search engine spidering so discussions aren't monetized or ripped-off, discussions can be freer (half-way to being YC dinners), and potentially greater incentives to apply.
Most of those things are good, but they address symptoms more than root causes I think.
The root cause is that platforms like Twitter rely on engagement (and maybe more importantly, growth of said engagement) for their lifeblood.
When that's the case, the incentive will always be to increase engagement at all costs and nothing drives engagement like flamewars and other lowest common denominator garbage.
Additionally, as long as the social currency is "how much other members of the userbase like your posts" you'll wind up with either a single hivemind or multiple warring factions IMO (e.g. conservatives vs. liberals on FB)
HN manages to keep its discourse level fairly high because of this, I believe. HN does not need to grow nor generate revenue directly. A Twitter-alike, curated as strictly as HN, might work. It might even be able to turn a profit, if the goal was sustainable profit and not some impossible dream of unbounded growth concocted by investors wanting the next trillion-dollar hit.
> So I tried to teach critical thinking to random people on Twitter
Everyone everywhere on the internet thinks that the "other side" lacks critical thinking skills. I'm not surprised your effort failed, I'm sure if you offered to teach me critical thinking skills I'd wonder who the heck you thought you were.
Frankly your confidence in your own impeccable critical thinking skills cast doubts. The smartest people are those who know they can be deceived. If you don't have the humility to check your own reasoning then you are probably wrong about something.
I wouldn’t offer to teach critical thinking skills, that would be ridiculous. Instead, I would probe with questions and get them look at what they were posting more clearly or refer back to actual sources.
I also said it was a fools errand - something that had little chance of succeeding against the waves of misinformation on Twitter. And finally, you’re right that knowing you can be wrong and challenging your own beliefs is fundamental to critical thinking.
I think that's fair. The internet is full of people who won't even go to the effort of reading the article they are confidently promoting as the truth. Sometimes something as simple as "actually this study is about lions. not people" is enough to bust some people's bubbles.
> Everyone everywhere on the internet thinks that the "other side" lacks critical thinking skills.
It's not even about critical thinking skills. The 'other side' is often starting with a completely different set of facts. The only difference being which ones were highlighted and which were omitted.
This doesn't even touch on straight up falsities yet.
Until the sides can agree on some base first principles, it's going to be a hard problem to solve.
> Everyone everywhere on the internet thinks that the "other side" lacks critical thinking skills.
This point cannot be emphasized enough. I have encountered people on the opposing side of an issue who have stronger critical thinking skills than people who I agree with (and probably even myself). The differences come about due to a differences in the foundations of our knowledge or on pivotal points where neither side can claim to have an definitive answer.
I find that a lot of the "big" issues boil down to trust - in businesses, in Wall Street, in the government, in the justice system.
If one person's POV is that <institution> should help while the other person's is that <institution> can only hurt, then they are never going to agree no matter how many links and memes and snarky comebacks they throw at each other.
Sounds more like relativism than nihilism. Relativism is extremely common in mainstream political and moral discourse, especially in mass media journalism. This often takes the form of "bothsidesism" or "false balance," particularly in political discourse. So often, the merits of any claim (about politics, morality, scientific facts, even very basic claims about well-documented events that happened very recently, etc.) are judged by nothing except how strongly people appear to believe in them.
You see this a lot on Hacker News too, like when the discussion touches anything related to moderation, community standards/guidelines, censorship, fact-checking, etc. A particularly popular viewpoint around here seems to be that the government (or sometimes, any powerful corporation) cannot possibly be allowed to be involved in determining the validity of any claim, particularly if that claim is controversial, i.e. there are prominent people on both sides who appear to feel strongly about the claim.
Many people can teach, but to do it successfully they must come from a place of respect and trust. If someone I know wants to teach me about their field of knowledge, that will be successful. If an anonymous stranger presents information with an attitude of "I think this will interest you as it interested me", that will be successful.
If an anonymous stranger comes to me with "Let me tell you that how you think is wrong" - yea, I don't think I'm going to buy that.
What's the difference between this and pointing out how someone's argument is flawed? i.e. "You said 'X therefore Y', but following that reasoning you could say 'X implies (obviously-wrong) Z'. X is not logically incompatible with !Y because..."
(Not that this is ever successful in places like Twitter.)
"Arguement is flawed" is still in the eyes of the poster. I certainly wouldn't just unthinkingly accept this sort of feedback, and the simple truth is that internet "sources" are rarely trustworthy beyond the writer opinion.
It is still a matter of trust. Approach me with respect and I'll consider your POF. Approach me with "Your reasoning process is flawed beyond your understanding" and really - who the heck are you? In the anonymity of the internet you could be anyone.
It’s more that “teach critical thinking” often just means “condescend to an internet stranger about how flawed their thought process is” which, even if their thinking is flawed, isn’t exactly a winning strategy for helping people See The Light and whatnot.
But a person posting on HN is statistically more likely to be the critical thinker when compared to the Twitter baseline.
The whole thing is philosophically weird, but practically speaking, one can somewhat know that people saying aliens built the pyramids are the ones lacking critical thinking. For example, I don’t think people promoting the cancel culture lack critical thinking, even though I’d bet on it being a long-term disaster. But most anti-vaccers are pretty obviously lacking some critical thinking skills.
It’s generally the ability to tell your political interests apart from your epistemic knowledge. In simpler terms, the ability to engage less in wishful thinking. While perfection is impossible, I do think it’s possible to improve in this ability. Proving it to others is another challenge; You probably need to predict counterintuitive results consistently for people to somewhat trust in you.
I mention this every time "critical thinking" is brought up.
Critical thinking is a skill that is almost useless to most people and can lead to being a net negative. It's the skill of critique. One can be amazing at critical thinking and be absurdly terrible at constructive thinking. Politics in general needs far less critique and far more construction. It's really bad to get people very aware of just how badly they're exploited but then to give them no potential solutions to solve it. That's basically what wokism has done recently. Every solution proposed by them is so unpalatable to the rest of the nation that there is no place for constructing new policies.
The left has this problem especially bad since the radical left makes being really good at critique a whole component of their intellectual tradition:
Yet there are many differences between the folk spreading information online and the folks you encounter in the pub: the former will often posture themselves as an authority, while the latter you may know well enough to trust or distrust their authority on a particular topic. When people seek authority online, they are typically seeking someone who they agree with. While authority may be found in a pub, it is not really a place where one seeks it.
All of this makes educating people in venues like Twitter (and some of these exist outside of the online world) a very difficult prospect.
Yup. I think, as others like Chris Hedges have noted, individuals in Western society have become increasingly atomized and isolated, likely by design to sell more products and keep people feeling powerless/helpless: we're so close (in physical and online proximity), but so far (ideologically, wisdom, knowledge, and experience).
Instead of lionizing celebrities, money, infamy, or hyper individualism, maybe it would be worth respecting wisdom, mastery, expertise, monetary-agonistic accomplishment, and insightfulness.
The book The Mirror Effect by Dr. Drew comes to mind.
> Instead of lionizing celebrities, money, infamy, or hyper individualism, maybe it would be worth respecting wisdom, mastery, expertise, monetary-agonistic accomplishment, and insightfulness.
I wonder if that's ever happened in the history of humanity. I have my doubts.
I also wonder, but perhaps some of these may approximate more "utopianish" collective community integration:
- Genuine hippie communes (Do kibbutzes count?)
- Amish
- Indigenous tribes where elders are respected
- Rural/suburban Minnesotans because they tend towards hardy dealing with life and climate struggles and unimpressed by immodesty
- In the old days (80's/90's), my grandparents knew most of their neighbors, grocery store cashiers, butcher, hair stylist, and a number of other people well. What ever happened to that? I don't even know any of the neighbors in my apartment complex despite introducing myself, and one (Louis Vuitton-strutting cliché) woman neighbor next door won't even acknowledge my presence with pleasantries in passing. WTH.
Politicians are the worst people to follow on Twitter outside of maybe conspiracy theorists. Well, some politicians are both.
It's better to follow creative people. They tend to have much more interesting things to say. Follow people like John Carmack, Simone Giertz, or The Onion instead.
You almost have to follow politicians or news if you wanted to keep up on the vaccine and re-opening front. Following news outlets is about the same in terms of replies.
Well, you could get your news from news sites directly rather than following them on Twitter! Then you're very unlikely to see stupid replies. (But choose news sites that either don't have comments at all or at least hide them by default.)
My Twitter experience isn't nearly as good as it was some years ago, to be sure, but I follow fairly few people outside the "friends of friends" perimeter and rarely follow people who are given to performative outrage, even if they are people I generally agree with. While I do block people occasionally, I'm more free with "mute temporarily", "mute forever" and, importantly, "turn off retweets" -- that can have an almost magically cleansing effect on your timeline.
Following politicians is fine. It's the replies to politicians that are never going to be worthwhile. There's no discussion there, just rants and cheers.
> I had a brief foray into Twitter, but had to stop. I followed my senator
I very much find the Twitter experience is what you make of it. I did it wrong the first time I tried twitter, and I hated and abandoned it, too.
Second time around, I started with a handful of tech people that post interesting content or work in projects I'm involved or interested in, and organically grew from there. I also follow a couple people that post local (to my small city) traffic/news/etc. And within the last year, I follow some people that post COVID stuff about my region, who produce charts and stuff that are 10x more useful than the official government sources (eg: updated and realistic R calculations, include charts with hospitalizations/deaths, etc).
What is absolutely not useful is anything political (the replies to COVID stuff tend to get political, so I also ignore that), or pretty much anything in "trending".
Also don't be afraid to mute or unfollow people, and click "Not interested in this -> show fewer retweets/likes from this person" -- all things that have made it tolerable and even useful. If disinformation/lies or other similar nonsense starts getting in my feed, I do what I need to get rid of it. This has meant sometimes unfollowing someone I otherwise like (eg, they're replying that disinformation and causing fights) but honestly, it's just not worth it to me.
> Does it makes sense to report someone for bad science?
It would be lovely to have a platform/forum where the whole concept was just that the moderation would ban people not only for spreading misinformation or making ad-hominem attacks, but also for applying unsound logic / not citing sources when asked / etc. All the same stuff that'd get a journal paper rejected during peer-review.
(With public records of moderator decisions, and the ability to appeal a decision; but where the "appeals process" just translates to your post going through a Slashdot-like "bunch of regular users given temporary moderation duties approve/deny your post" — which, given the type of user who'd want to be on a platform like this, likely wouldn't be any more friendly to your post than the mods would be.)
It'd sure be a niche platform, but that'd match well with how much work the moderation staff would have to do to keep up with discussion on it. I'd pay to be there!
(Yes, this is what scientific journals were originally supposed to be: heavily-moderated public forums for conversation between scientists. They don't serve this function well any more, as they've been parasitized by the function of serving the needs of academic clout-seekers.)
Its an extremely hard problem to solve. How do you hire the moderators and how to you track if they're doing a good job? You will need to hire experts in multiple fields. Things get especially tricky when you go into super specialized fields and only a person working in that field can smell the BS.
I work in biotech, and lets pretend I'm an expert on a topic- say immunology. When I get home from work, what would motivate me to sift through countless posts about misinformation and flag them? No amount of money is going to persuade me - but that's just me ofcource.
> When I get home from work, what would motivate me to sift through countless posts about misinformation and flag them?
Turn it around. Make it like Reddit's /new: have moderators able to sift through countless posts about misinformation and approve the good ones. It's not a large difference in what moderators end up doing — they still have to at least skim over all the misinformation. But it's psychologically very different — you can just "walk away" from annoying things that stink of quackery up-front, while "engaging with" only the things that seem good, and eventually "upvoting" the things that still seem good even after you've read them carefully.
Yes, I'm actually suggesting that every post on such a site would go through a moderation queue. (Just one that any user can dip into to look at, if they like, but only moderators can actually vote on.) Or, if not every post, then a good sampling of them; or maybe every post from users with less than N approved posts.
The big effect of that would be that there wouldn't be "countless posts about misinformation." There'd be a couple, mostly by new users with clear signal of that user just being an attacker to the community who doesn't actually want to become part of it (and therefore, can just be banned wholesale.) Noise would drop over time, because crackpots wouldn't even get a short blip of engagement. They'd get none. Their account would die in the crib, never witnessed by anyone but moderators and curious /new viewers.
Combine it with a KYC mechanism (so users can't keep making new accounts) and the moderation load actually becomes reasonable.
Assuming you managed to hire an army of experts who are good at moderating the posts across various fields - Often times people also link to external articles/blogs/videos so now the moderators have to read through several page documents or sit through hours of video. I just find a moderation system like that hard to practically implement for a platform like twitter. And to be honest, I see this as going down a dark path - something that will lead to the 'Ministry of Truth' type entities with their own in-groups/fighting/politics.
That's one practical aspect, the second is, people are often times misinformed themselves and are simply posting something they heard from their buddy or on TV/youtube/etc in good faith - they're not bad-actors looking to attack the community.
Those are just my thoughts, but what do I know, I'm not an expert on these topics :)
> Assuming you managed to hire an army of experts who are good at moderating the posts across various fields - Often times people also link to external articles/blogs/videos so now the moderators have to read through several page documents or sit through hours of video.
The moderators would never be expected to audit "posts" (top-level links to big things that need a long analysis process), just comments.
Or rather — "posts" can be, in some sense, raw evidence/data, not assertions about anything in particular. (Think e.g. a link to a scientific study. Nobody assumes that the poster of such a link is asserting, through the link, that they believe the study's own conclusions to be true — just that they believe the study to be interesting in some way — worth discussing.)
Moderators would be expected to poke their head into a post link for just long-enough to confirm that it's that "artifact to be interpreted" kind of post. If it is, it's allowed to stand.
Whereas "comments" — those that are part of a post alongside the link, or those in reply/reference to a post — are almost always the conclusions drawn from the data, editorialization by the participant user(s). Those are what need moderating.
If you prune only the bad comments, then bad posts no longer matter, because their engagement (which is univerally in the form of bad comments) disappears, and so the post itself is no longer "interesting" according to any kind of social recommendation system.
("Posts" can also be external-to-the-platform editorializations/opinion pieces. I would suggest just banning this type of content altogether. Moderator notices an external link is to an opinion piece? Out it goes. If you want to talk about some externally-written Op/Ed in the forum, you'd have to "import" it into the forum in full text — at which point it would be subject to moderation, and would also be the karmic responsibility of whoever chose to "import" it. You'd be claiming the words of the Op/Ed as your words. Like reading something into evidence in a court room — if it turns out to be faked evidence, that's libel on the part of whichever party introduced it.)
> are good at moderating the posts across various fields
I see what I think you're imagining here, but I never meant to imply that moderators are required to actually verify that statements are true (which requires ___domain knowledge), only to verify on a syntactic level that the poster is engaging in valid logic to derive conclusions from evidence via syllogisms/induction/etc. (which only requires an understanding of epistemics and rhetoric.) Basically, as long as the poster seems to be behaving in good faith, they're fine. It's up to the userbase themselves to notice whether the logic is sound — built on true assumptions.
In other words, the point of the moderators is to catch the same types of things a judge will notice and subtract points for in a debating society. But instead of points, your post just never shows up because it wasn't approved; and you edge closer to being banned.
> That's one practical aspect, the second is, people are often times misinformed themselves and are simply posting something they heard from their buddy or on TV/youtube/etc in good faith
I mean, that's the main thing I'd want to stop in its tracks: repeating things without first fact-checking them. Yes, preventing people from parroting things they've "heard somewhere" without citing an independent source, would kill 99% of potential discourse on such a platform. Well, good! What'd be left is the gold I want out of the platform in the first place: primary-source posters who can cite their own externally-verifiable data; secondary-source investigative-journalists who will find and cite someone else's externally-verifiable data to go along with their assertions; and people asking questions to those first two groups, making plans, and other types of rhetoric that don't translate to "is" claims about the world. Who cares about anything else?
That is your mistake. People do not respond by being told how they are wrong. Instead, people will change their minds when they see that their friends do.
>But then you imagine that they must be thinking the same thing.
I'm not so sure about that. There are some people who take seriously the fact that they could be wrong. They approach discussion with an open mind, listen to the other, look at evidence with a critical eye, and respond fairly.
Others come to a "discussion" from a totally different headspace. They are bitter, angry, and, to be frank, not very smart. It's not discussion they are after, because they aren't open to the possibility they may be wrong.
My theory is that this is the "rabble" that used to be led by the church, and then by mass media, and now by internet media. The internet is fractured into close-minded echo-chambers, and for many alive today, the classic error-modes of public online communication are new and exciting. The right is enamored with the brutal effectiveness of trolling. The left seems to prefer doxxing and blacklists. And internet companies care about metrics that don't capture any of the externalities of their platforms.
Im amazed Twitter doesn't have a report option for misinformation like Facebook has. But whats worse is if you report someone for making violent threats you get an instantly email, and I mean instant, saying they found nothing wrong.
As for elected officials, I wish they'd just disable replies altogether for them. Nothing good comes from it.
Global warming could be a cyclical process, just like covid could have come from a lab, and hand-drawn charts don't make it any more or less true. The two (claim and charts) can be separated, that is part of "critical thinking."
There are many people who can think critically who also happen to use Twitter just as any other public space. Frankly your comment comes off as condescending and aloof so I can see why it didn't go well.
I don’t think I said there weren’t, I was only referring to the posts that were clearly incorrect - they exist everywhere, but Twitter allows misinformed posters to have their speech elevated to the same level as sitting senators.
Dude when ISIS was a big thing, I had a phase when I would try to debate the recruiters on Twitter (the guys who "thank the lions", write half arabic half english and seem to live in the middle east). This was fun time :D
Twitter is such a trash, I mean on the IRC at least you can split in groups, kick out and prevent unsignaled readership. On twitter millions can read a random shit without segregation it's awful.
I had to get away from it when the US required foreigners to disclose their twitter accounts upon entry, with all my ISIS "friends"...
I don't disagree with the assessment, but I think it might be orthogonal to the issue. I think it's very hard to monetize engagement, period, even if it's all positive, constructive, and intellectual engagement.
If your service's business strategy is "1) acquire hundreds of millions of users and charge them all $0.00 per year for many years, 2) acquire lots of expensive infrastructure and employees to support the service, 3) ???, 4) profit", it's not going to be easy.
If you're operating at that scale, I think "become a full-on advertising and ad tech company, platform, service, and network from top to bottom" seems like the only viable "step 3" (as with Google and Facebook).
I don't think just selling ads is sufficient; especially if it's not a service you can operate at a relatively low cost with a skeleton crew. I think it's probably either that or start charging for something. (Unless your goal isn't to ever make a profit, I suppose.)
Discord seemed to make it work (I think?) by combining an initial semi-skeleton crew approach with a freemium charging approach. They tried a few other things, but I think those efforts flopped.
> Forbes estimated 1 million people are using Nitro as of 2020, and they made $130 million in revenue in 2020. If you assume that's all the $10/month Nitro (not the cheaper Nitro Classic), then 1 million users paying for Nitro would only account for a pretty small percentage of that. If the Nitro users estimate is accurate, not sure where the rest comes from.
Twitter ads have not returned strong ROI for us (direct response for politics). And dubious for persuasion (more similar to traditional commercial brand ads) though I don't have much hard survey evidence just comparative engagement stats.
I don't know if it's primarily the format, or the different type of user compared to FB, but FB is the winner hands down.
The StackOverflow thing is a bit weird, because what the owners have and consider valuable is "a place where people feel comfortable coming and asking questions", but what the core community values is "high-quality curated content", and they're very willing to do aggressive gatekeeping, thus conflicting with value 1, to preserve value 2.
High-quality curated content has been SO's goal since day one. The question/answer format is a means to this end. That's why it has come that most people can easily find a solution to their problem. https://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/991082088689381376
>I wish more people understood that the goal of Stack Overflow is not "answer my question" but "let's collaboratively build an artifact that will benefit future coders". Perhaps SO could be doing more to educate people about this. -Jeff Atwood
Yeah, this is the kicker. I think SO's primary intended audience is people clicking Google search results.
If I'm Googling something technical and I see Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange results, I always click those first, because I know I'm almost always going to attain the most helpful-information-per-unit-time that way. Even if an answer's many years old, it's usually going to be more helpful than most of the much more recent links, which are often just cookie cutter blogspam.
>I wish more people understood that the goal of Stack Overflow is not "answer my question" but "let's collaboratively build an artifact that will benefit future coders". Perhaps SO could be doing more to educate people about this. -Jeff Atwood
But the way to built that knowledge base is by answering peoples questions because the questions people ask indicate what is relevant to answer.
I was following StackOverflow back when it was being planned on a podcast. "High-quality curated content" was very much the original mission. This was the driving factor behind the wiki-like interface. In fact, if anything, I'd argue that the problem is that this didn't take off as much as was hoped.
Yeah but now StackOverflow we pay for it in my company. Their value is in the whole info sharing model of the tool, the public one becomes more useless as you grow and the private one is invaluable to ask crazy questions about ultra specific internal idiocy people lost the source code of.
I only go to the public one a few times a day now, compared to being wired to it as a beginner :D
StackOverflow should be cheap to operate and the value comes almost exclusively from the community. So I don't see any good reason why StackOverflow would need to earn much revenue. Probably an annual fundraiser like what Wikipedia does would be more than sufficient to cover the operating expenses.
I don't have any problem with Twitter adding a paid option. I've never even used Twitter nor will I ever so it so anything they do to the platform doesn't affect me. It just seems weird that people are making the claim that you can't monitize a large unpaid user-base.
You can, but you basically have to masquerade your company as a user-facing service while behind the scenes it's almost entirely just an ad and ad tech platform.
I think it's plausible Jack Dorsey maybe genuinely just didn't want to sign that deal with the devil. I know I wouldn't want to if I made Twitter. (I have no idea if that's what happened, of course. Maybe he wanted to but couldn't find a good way to achieve it.)
Lmao. It's true. This is why I don't have identifiable social media and don't use it even anonymously except for limited purposes. Cyberdisinhibitionism is strongest when there are no repercussions to poor behavior, too much anonymity, flame/troll/instigators/touchy comments, and no manifestation of the person on the receiving-end. It's basically a sewer factory factory with a teaspoon of sugar sprinkled-in. I think it proves that either most people are disengaged and/or the most vocal people are the worst. (Proving your point). Maybe there should be a cost to post that increases proportional to increasing frequency too.
The irony is, translating to IRL, I apparently discovered I have this semi-employed, "macho" no-shirt neighbor who accused me of being racist for asking if they had an entrance keyfob to prevent tailgating into an access-controlled apartment building. Then they talked about all the (nonexistent) "cameras" around, began recording me (for what, I don't know), using racist slurs, and tried to start a physical fight (they're half my weight, like a yappy chihuahua). I'm wondering if they're schizophrenic and narcissistic, in addition to appearing like a victim-mentality crybully crybaby. My point is perhaps people are taking their online behaviors into the real world.
PS: You should've heard what Latinx gangbangers called me when I was a kid. I never got beaten-up because I was bigger than all of them, but I learned the finer points of swearing in Spanish. :) I understand the tall blade of grass gets clipped so I don't take any of it personally.
There is a zero percent chance that a latino gang banger would call themselves latinx. It's a word invented by Americans for a specific context but it's been rejected by the Royal Spanish Academy, which guides all Spanish curriculums in all Spanish speaking countries. It's also unpronounceable to a monolingual native Spanish speaker anyways. Neither consonant cluster exists in Spanish: "latinks" and "latin-ecks" both need a vowel around the k to sound natural.
It's ok to say latino, it's not a non-inclusive word. Grammatical gender is not tied to gender identity, grammatical gender is just an arbitrary designation to make word endings complement each other and "sound right". German has 3 genders, Spanish has two. You could call them A words and B words, Red words and blue words, and it wouldn't change their usage. Spanish speakers don't actually think books are boys and tables are girls.
Seems like bikeshedding on an irrelevant tangent. I'm trying to do whatever this gender-sensitive thing is that I'll get crap for if I do or don't do. Next, the safety pins will call Romance languages sexist for having gendered words.
Sorry I probably wrote too much I didn't want to be that person who just angrily points something out without explaining why. Some might take it that when a Spanish speaker opposes latinx they're opposing LGBTQ and I wanted to clear that up.
Amazing that you're downvoted. Latino is in fact what Spanish speaking people use, and they despise how woke gringos are trying to modify their language.
"Latinx" (pronounced "Latin-X", like "Malcom X") is a very common term among people who think they're better than other people, and Chicago politicians.
It's supposed to be an all-encompassing term for "Laino" and "Latina," but only serves to divide people further. Like almost every other ethnic rebranding of the last ten years.
> highly toxic and mostly just produces shitstorms, lynchmobs, perpetually enraged morally superior idiots and professional victims.
This is self inflicted. My Twitter feed feels like a really big friend group talking/joking about anime, tech, finance, etc. You are quite literally the company you keep on Twitter.
> Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying.
You won't get far taking the website this serious.
(I should add that I'm black and so are most of the people I follow so it's possible I'm basing this off a group of people that already have some larger sense of community off the bat)
Honestly CryptoTwitter, the part that isn't all scams, is the only tolerable part of twitter I've found. It's mostly shitposts and jokes, with the occasional good deed like raising money for people in unfortunate circumstances. Every other community I've encountered on Twitter is a dumpster fire. A perpetual competition to see who is the most oppressed.
Besides the gamified nature of crypto, I think what makes CT such a hopeful place is the way everyone shares the same goal of “making it” and keeps the reason they do it in mind. Even in hard times (like now) they can keep laughing because it may all be worth it in the end.
Compare this to politics where the end is never in sight and the goal posts are eternally moving.
I dont have twitter, but I click in twitter links here and there when they are posted on forums. Every time I scroll down from whatever tweet was linked, I seem to immediately end up seeing what I would consider partisan stuff about covid or other current events. Maybe on a personal feed it is different but it does seem set up to lure people into debate or disagreement.
I think the point is that random tweets - especially replies - may be low quality. But the 'curated' tweets from those you follow are much more likely to have value.
Not totally accurate. I have a highly curated twitter made up of finance and tech yet the suggested trends are HORRIBLE. Wonderful topics such as "Nazis", "RacistSoAndSo", "JimCrow", "UncleTom" etc etc etc.
Its a black hole, pile on of hate. I call it the trending two minutes of hate; and its built in with no way of turning it off.
That’s strange. My current suggested trends are “Future Hendrix” (rapper), “Kanye”, and “No Way Home” (the Spider-Man movie).
If I had to guess I’d say it goes off what your following is interacting with/talking about at the moment. I notice they get more negative when my timeline is talking about something more controversial.
It's much better if you train yourself to ignore that sidebar. I'm sure with the right plugin you could just hide it permanently via css if it's distracting.
The problem is fundamental to their design; Any time I've ever wanted to respond to a tweet I can't seem to fit what I'm trying to say within their character limit and by the time I've shortened what I'm trying to say enough to fit that limit I've condensed my viewpoint into nothing more than a soundbite and soundbite statements are always going to cause arguments no matter your intent.
>but in my opinion it has been a net negative for society for quite a while now.
What is Twitter but a reflection of our own society? These people really exist and they really have these views. I don't like the idea of banning someone for simply holding a view, or forcing someone to align with an ideology of choice. "Platform X is awful" is actually "People are awful".
>What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day. Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying.
Why not just avoid Twitter ? In any transactional setting you need to give something to get something. Twitter as a commercial entity needs users frequenting their platform and as therefore most comments on any social media platform are low going to be low quality (including HN).
What is Twitter but a reflection of our own society?
The medium is the message. I firmly believe that the thoughtfulness and value that goes into a communication is directly proportional to its length and indirectly proportional to its age (likely due to survivorship bias). Twitter, occupying the extreme short end of both spectrums, seems to amplify the worst facets of human nature.
Books, especially old books that have remained in print (survivorship bias), seem to have somehow tapped into the better parts of human nature because they represent and stimulate discussion of ideas that have remained relevant across vast shifts in time and space, technology and culture.
The problem we have is that it's difficult to get people to read and especially engage with these old books. Schools have tried this for years with little success. Many (North American) students will gladly tell you how little love they have for Shakespeare, Steinbeck, Hemingway, The Great Gatsby, 1984, etc. Thoughtfulness and the slow burn of classic literature just don't have the same gratification feedback loop that people get from Twitter, I suppose.
> What is Twitter but a reflection of our own society?
Twitter isn't just a reflection, though, it's a feedback loop. It takes a stream of ideas (usually ill-considered) from a ridiculous number of people and sends them directly to the people that it expects will be most emotionally affected by them. Those people then absorb those ideas and either react with anger or support, feeding the system with new material to repeat the cycle.
If Twitter simply reflected society, it would have done no harm. But instead it's amplified the most animalistic part of our collective nature.
> What is Twitter but a reflection of our own society?
A society in which the village idiot gets a megaphone and can cheat his/her way into amplifying that megaphone with no recourse? Or a terrorist disguised as a village idiot can do the same? Then sure yes Twitter is a great personification of our current society(ies).
>A society in which the village idiot gets a megaphone and can cheat his/her way into amplifying that megaphone with no recourse?
That is not accurate. The reality is the opposite of what you said. The megaphone is actually due to people voluntarily gathering around the person to listen to what they say. People only interact with content/people they agree with and this is causing social media bubbles.
> The megaphone is actually due to people voluntarily gathering around the person to listen to what they say.
It's based on inflated numbers derived from false information. Tell me this - if you saw two adjacent town square forums and one person had 10 people listening and another one had 100 people listening to them, what are the odds the 111th person goes to listen to one over the other? The 100 people of course. This is effectively how twitter works, but can be gamed by fake "crowds" of bots.
So, yes people are voluntarily listening to those with influence, but the gatherers are given inaccurate information to make that decision. The distinction is important.
Personification != same thing. I think you missed the point.
> That's not possible with sound waves at the town square.
Huh? I can simply not go into the town square.
> If we all agreed that twitter was trash and we all just stop going, then it's over - that village idiot has no power.
Exactly. but there are enough people benefitting from Twitter that they simply don't care that the village idiot has power (or they are the village idiot themselves).
> What is Twitter but a reflection of our own society? These people really exist and they really have these views
This is a little shallow of a view, as in it is much more complicated than that. At its simplest, sure you can say Twitter is merely an outlet with no interference on the platform itself. But if you actually use it for any period of time or just follow the various ridiculous outrages it produces, you will quickly see that, just as we shape Twitter with our tweets, it itself shapes us and how we articulate ourselves, the level of discourse we expect. To be specific, Twitter favors short, “smoking gun” style arguments, that can be compressed into 240 characters or divided up into those segments for a thread. This necessarily “compresses” discourse into a series of dramatic accusations as evidence. It is not enough to say that someone made a offensive statement years ago. Instead, it becomes that that person themselves is bad or x-ist. This I think is the net negative to society and I doubt we would arrive at quite this point with Twitter’s “help.”
I don't agree with your assessment at all. People adapt. People can be awful on HN, can be awful on Twitter, can be awful on IRC, on Facebook, Discord, Youtube, you name it.
People with shitty opinions existing in a disparate fashion is one hell of a lot different than people existing in large groups with shitty opinions affecting others' lives.
> I guess this is their admission that you cannot monetize engagement if your community is highly toxic and mostly just produces shitstorms, lynchmobs, perpetually enraged morally superior idiots and professional victims.
Twitter is already profitable today, even without this subscription service.
>Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying
There is a good reason they hid the tweet count, because most of the biggest names on twitter actually have Tweet counts that if you divide them by hours since their join date it would be as high as 0.8 to 1.2 tweets an hour every hour 24 hours a day for 11 years+
Once you learn this it puts those users in a very different perspective and they no longer seem like people you should be listening to.
you're ignoring the time required to find things to respond to and just how many times they're scrolling that timeline a day to hit numbers so high for 11+ years.
I would say 1,5 pages of text each day of year is pretty respectable output. Or at least would be with most other mediums. Like if all that effort was used on something else it could be 1-2 books a year?
There are multiple sections of Twitter and some communities are extremely toxic, but it’s also the single best place to follow breaking events. If you follow the right people it can be extremely informative, and highlights how often news bloggers get basic facts wrong.
One recent example, there was a news report that famous short seller Michael Burry had taken a $500 million dollar bet against Tesla. This number came from a basic misreading of Burry’s disclosure, but the news media ran with it and an article with this number showed up on the HN front page. If you followed the right people on Twitter you knew the number was wrong within minutes, while the news media has still not issued a correction. This situation happens all the time.
I can't see why you'd think that was a mistake, the people promulgating the [false] news report almost certainly are investing against the information they're putting out. That's what "news" owners do, surely.
Why is anything important? Investing is interesting to me and I want accurate information free from somebody else’s agenda. That’s not possible, but aggregating the opinions of many people I respect is the closest I’ve found.
> What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day. Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying.
This is why Twitter should be an open protocol, and people should be able to write their own UserAgents. Users should be in control of the filtering, not the app or the company.
> What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day. Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying.
Too drastic IMO. Some of the best posts I've read on Twitter come in threads, a chain of consecutive tweets by the same author. I would propose instead an option to filter profanity, most of the low value, or plain harmful, tweets use offensive words.
Maybe a warning that your tweet will get a drastically reduced audience for using X or Y words, so the poster can rephrase it before submitting?
> I guess this is their admission that you cannot monetize engagement if your community is highly toxic
Heh funny I had the exact inverse assumption: that maybe they realized single-minded attempts to monetize only engagement exacerbates toxic human behaviour.
I'm thinking the truth is probably somewhere between both.
> What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day.
+1 on this thinking! But more vibing with the idea of imposed scarcity, rather that the hyper-customized view of the world.
Related: I personally feel that more elements of consensus reality should play a role in our digital spaces, not each getting our own view just because we can have it. Just because we can fine-tune our reality to our preferences, that doesn't mean that's good for a system for its actors to do so highly. Imho there's a reason human minds generally all evolved to be mostly on the same page in terms of perceived reality (except for a few subtle knobs on some generally minor axes). And the neurotypes that break theses consensus reality rules are generally perceived as maladapted and tend to be ostracized (e.g. schizophrenia, barring value judgements about their treatment in society). I do believe there's an evolutionary lens to place over that vague shared sensibility (ie. what underlying feature of network dynamics did evolution "learn" and tune into?) and imho this all informs how we might build tech :)
You wouldn't pay to use Twitter in its current form with its low-brow unmoderated discourse (and neither would I), but would you consider paying for an "improved" version of Twitter? Not saying Twitter Blue is that, but perhaps the promise of getting a Better Twitter can you give you pause for thought and a reach for your wallet?
The experiment of directly paid social media is worth trying out, in my opinion. I know paying a few bucks a month won't necessarily get you out of the privacy/ad-tech spiderweb, but if it get us a more robust control over what our social feed looks like, I think that alone makes it worth it.
I'd pay for HN to be honest. But just talking about society on the internet isn't really worth while to me. More people should focus on themselves.
I've long accepted no one cares about how I live my life. A friend of mine spends a ton of their good energy getting upset over the latest 'take' some influencer has. It's like getting upset over an episode of WWE Raw. In any case very very little of what other people do or believe has any direct affect on you.
my curated twitter feed was sincerely (and i'm a jaded guy when it comes to internet) awesome.. creative coders, intelligent and fun people, some feud here and there but nothing spectacular
it's a pity most of twitter seems to be a perpetual shitstorm of low effort brainless buzz
ps: out of the whole internet debasement.. I kinda see something, is that talk has a purpose, if I talk to someone I'd rather have a nice moment, and the ability to debate endlessly with people I don't even (or bots even) is fruitless. a strange kind of lesson on using ones times correctly
Use debate to learn, not to change somebody's mind. Then it's not fruitless, even if it's endless or with a bot. If you're using it to change somebody's mind, you'll be incapable of allowing yourself to think critically since that can only cause you to fail at your purpose.
Yeah: when you debate you never change someones mind, especially DURING the debate. The very first rule of debating is that you try to change the mind of the public reading it, not the debaters.
Now what you learn is mostly to argue your way around your opinion better, not exactly to change it. But why would you: you change your opinion when looking for insight (reading a book), not when looking for a win (debating on an advertisement platform).
Debate for an audience is kind of awful. You have to sacrifice your honesty and ethics to score cheap points that don't actually show you're right but can fool the causal audience. What's the value of that though? You've convinced some strangers of a fact that you don't even know is true yourself. It's just creating fake knowledge pollution.
Spoken like somebody who doesn't use Twitter. They'd promote garbage onto my feed all the time. I had to constantly mark tweets as "not relevant." My feed very rarely consisted of tweets from the people I followed. It was mostly outrage/political/meme tweets from "my network" that had a lot of engagement.
I deleted my Twitter last year and I don't miss it.
That is the new "home" they rolled out like two years ago. There is still a setting which lets you only have a predictable and managed feed, and assuming you block ads you have a decent experience with only tweets or retweets from people you follow.
What's so strange is that I don't even recognise this description of twitter, and I've been using it for many years. My feed is almost entirely tweets from people I follow, with the occasional ad. I don't even understand what you mean by "network" as distinct from the people you follow. Can I ask, if you can recall, how many people you followed? It's possible that there's a minimum threshold to avoid noise.
I'm following 700 and it's generally a positive experience. I think, as other have pointed out, it could be the 'hot'/latest switch which, I fully agree, is an issue.
in the top right of the timeline there's a button whose icon looks like a few sparkles. Hit that and switch your feed from "Home" to "Latest Tweets" and you'll only ever see tweets form people you follow, listed chronologically.
Not really true. Twitter will pester you with things it thinks will "engage" you, and it can be quite hard to resist. It has a way to push you further than you would go if left to your own devices.
That's not how it really works in practice though because you follow humans who are multi-faceted instead of (human, topic). It is hard to be someone in the public eye and stay out of Twitter drama without turning your account into a RSS feed where you don't engage at all with your followers.
Hmm I try to stay on Twitter because it’s friendly and constructive rather than on Facebook. I guess it depends on who you follow. Unlike Facebook (where follows are social for better or worse) Twitter lets you set up a feed of interesting/friendly people and the (social) cost of unfollowing someone is usually zero.
I recently started to use Facebook to stay/get in touch with friends and family from previous lives.
My rule when using it is that I only interract with personal photos/stories, or stuff posted publicly.
I completely ignore postings that are not personal and to friend only (not public). Facebook has (or had?) huge potential for people to keep in touch but its bigger issue are private gardens where people can spin up opinions into silliness with no opportunity for anybody from outside their echo chamber to criticize and debunk.
If you follow the right people then Twitter is amazing. But the out of the box experience is wretched. TikTok for example quickly finds out what you want to see. Twitter puts that burden on you.
"Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying."
Only if you are looking for deep thoughtful comments. Twitter need not be that place. It could be a place to amplify the voices of the oppressed some of which may sound like noise. This kind of voice has never been available through mainstream media like cable or T.V.
I wish we can moderate this conclusion — it’s not fair to dismiss all these people as if they are all the same.
I personally believe that most of this toxicity is induced. I don’t think most humans are toxic by nature.
Can you blame victims of war for their tireless online activism? So what that they turn toxic, can you blame them when they are continuously facing mis/dis-information on a topic they are experiencing first hand? Yet this group can appear as toxic as any on Twitter.
We can criticize but not to the point of unilaterally dismissing these groups as if they are equal. A climate-change denier is not equal to a Gazan teen “journalist but only through tweets”. Both may annoy you with their “perpetual beef” but it’s not really fair to abandon the one good thing this platform has done - give people a voice. We need to just learn to deal with it.
I’m not sure what the impact of this will be, but I hope it won’t be the undermining of grass-roots activism. Even if that activism can border on toxic.
It’s election time here in Iran, and this time, we have essentially a one-man election, which is sth rare here (there usually are at least two candidates who can possibly win, and even though both of them are inside people already vetted by the regime, they have some small differences. At least, they are supported by different demographics.). I went to see what people were saying about this on Twitter, and did some basic searches on an account that doesn’t follow almost anyone. The results were pretty much all (90%) pro-government, and pro-one-candidate-elections.
Makes me wonder how much power these state actors have now that cancel culture is a thing. They can just whip up a mob and character-terror anyone they want, without being detected at all.
PS: I am not even saying these are bots. They can just pay people some meager money to do this. It’s an easy job in a country with very high unemployment. Heck, even Amazon does this in a small scale.
> What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day.
I'm not a huge twitter user (~2-5 mins a day, read-only), but I tend to do this manually. If I notice that an account is taking up the majority of my wall space I tend to unfollow. After iterating a few times I ended up with a decently balanced wall.
>I guess this is their admission that you cannot monetize engagement if your community is highly toxic and mostly just produces shitstorms, lynchmobs, perpetually enraged morally superior idiots and professional victims.
That's most "engagement" on the internet, lol. Twitter is bad but it's not like all the other social media platforms are that much better. It's just how some people behave socially (anonymous or not, it doesn't seem to matter), at least when they're not meaningfully focusing on some worthwhile goal or pursuit like most of us are here @ HN. And trying to stop it with heavy-handed authoritarian policies only makes it worse as people strive to abuse the policies themselves to troll and gain power over others.
Maybe it is more about just monetizing anything on the web?
I kinda suspect the notion of most of these services just being free and not resorting to really unpleasant ad systems and dark patterns and such ... just not viable generally.
Very surprising that's your takeaway. Sure twitter has shitbags but it is probably the only social media platform I engage with. It is a treasure trove of information and insights by folks I normally would not know about.
Twitter is a huge space and your experience comes down to what your bubble on Twitter is. The self development/Indie hacker/Tech/Devs/AI/Product/Life Lessons bubble, while still pretentious, at least is way better than the Celebrity/Cancel culture/Outrage bubble.
The mind boggling phenomena in tech is that Twitter is essentially required now...to get a job...this is not hyperbole. The number of threads I've seen where SV companies are hiring exclusively on Twitter, and looking for a very specific type of person (well described in your post) is alarming to say the least.
EDIT: This mostly only applies to very specific positions (mostly design positions). I'm not insinuating that these companies are literally requiring Twitter. It's a bit more complex than that.
Fwiw the small world of Japanese software engineering Twitterverse is quite a pleasant, funny (punny), and constructive place. I’ve actually made many RL friends through the medium.
>What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day.
Yes, that could also monetise it so it is only two free post per day and accumulate maximum of 10 before twitter charge them $ per tweet.
And more RSS Reader like features.
I could categorise people into different topics. Today I dont want to see any shit storm on politics, so I wont click on it. I only want to see tech and economics.
Right now moving to list and making them working in harmony with the main feed is a bag of hurt.
>What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day. Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying.
I've always felt like HN should display the upvotes/comments ratio rather than raw karma. It would be like the accuracy number in xonotic's insta-gib mode: you shoot carefully and precisely rather than spraying and praying.
I used Twitter early on when a co-worker urged me to join. We had a group of co-workers who used it as an offline, corporate chat room.
Once it blew up and became toxic AF, I unfollowed everybody, started following only specific people, blogs and sites related to my industry (software development) in order to stay up to date with the goings on around me. That was it, since then, its become another basic news feed.
I don't know I see a lot of great stuff from comedians and stuff on twitter posting all kind of shit. I enjoy the silliness, but my feed is definitely highly curated and even then I end up seeing toxic takes because people "like" the takes that I follow.
However, some of my absolute favorite twitter accounts post a lot. To each their own. I don't have to hit the button.
>I guess this is their admission that you cannot monetize engagement if your community is highly toxic and mostly just produces shitstorms, lynchmobs, perpetually enraged morally superior idiots and professional victims.
As long as those suckers and their audience still watch your ads, you can.
"I guess this is their admission that you cannot monetize engagement if your community is highly toxic and mostly just produces shitstorms, lynchmobs, perpetually enraged morally superior idiots and professional victims."
Facebook has many more tentacles into the broader internet than just their app or website. I've paid 0 attention cycles to Twitter, so I am totally unware of them offering these other devices that give them the same insight that Facebook hoovers up. Do they offer SDKs to app devs at the same level as FB? Do they have nearly unavoidable tracking abilities across the internet? If they do, the internet seems to be much less vocal about them than the FB offerings.
What I really dislike about Twitter it’s how different users play by different rules.
Take the name for example. Any other platform has a clear written or unwritten rule.
- HN: usernames
- LinkedIn: real names
- Twitter: a mix
On Twitter, you clearly lose out if you put your real name out there. You suddenly get trolled by strange avatars hiding their identity and very little community control.
That's a good observation. LinkedIn is so boring and chill, you can actually have difficult debates on there with everyone being polite and accepting lol
What's strange is facebook. The fact it's more segregated by close circle make the discussion nastier than on linkedin when you have your company name on top of your mean troll.
> What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day. Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying.
Which part of 'highly toxic and mostly just produces shitstorms, lynchmobs, perpetually enraged morally superior idiots and professional victims' isn't perfect for monetization?
I think a major problem and source of toxicity with twitter is it has become an acceptable and cheap source for journalists to get quotes from celebrities and politicians that Facebook and other social media platforms have not yet gotten the same traction. On the flip side it is an easy way to get a quote out there without having to answer/dodge follow up questions. Trump's power was not his twitter followers, but that anything outrageous he tweeted became front page news.
I agree. I’ve also been curious if everyone gets far-left wing takes (and low quality ones at that) in their “what’s happening” section or if that’s an algorithm targeting me either because it thinks I’m very left-wing or else because it thinks low quality left-wing content will make me angry and thus engage?
It also has to do with Twitter's complete incompetence at leveraging the information they have to create something monetizable in general.
Google and Facebook intrusively touch into every aspect of your life, to the extent that they can advertise things to you with pinpoint accuracy. They also operate at a scale of users that's at least 1-2 order of magnitude higher than twitter.
Tiktok, Snapchat (weakest case) and YT integrate adverts in a way that forces you to look at the content. Thus increasing engagement even if their user-targeting isn't as exact.
Reddit and twitch use an additional pseudo donation/commision system to keep money coming. Discord straight up charges for a premium package.
The weakest but still relevant case is by Pinterest. People visit the website when they are looking to buy something, so well targeted ads can get high engagement and the form of media is also higher engagement (pictures).
______
Twitter does none of them. From a service standpoint, it has created zero user-flows that involve making advertisements effective or allowing any user-to-user monetary interaction in a way that they can be the middle-man.
Theoretically, Twitter could massively expand its user base, but it has stagnated for 5 years, so I don't have much hope.
Otherwise, they could finally release a product where the content natively produces income (subscriptions, paywalls) and get more revenue out of each user. It's bewildering that Twitter didn't release a substack like product 5 years ago. It was practically staring them in the face. Maybe a YT-subscriptions-like join button on which you can take some commission? They could've served as the front-page-of-world's-news and helped generate revenue for news agencies while taking a cut.
There were so many places they could have gone, but they went nowhere. I dunno what the Product-Dev/PM role in twitter looks like, but I imagine it must be quite boring. Hiring a few competent PMs and giving them free reign for a bit, might not be bad idea for twitter. (as much as HN hates the average MBA PM, technical ones that also get business and product needs are hard to find)
_______
Admittedly, the core product of twitter is not bad at all.
I joined twitter in 2020 with a hyper curated list of sources, mostly politically unaffiliated individuals. I unfollow any account that tweets more than 5-times-a-day or opines of things beyond narrow topics.
It is also amazing for getting the real first sources, that previously would have needed a intermediary media org to get their point through.
It is amazing. But it took work to get there. It's like
I think that's beside the point - more relevant is that people were both willing to pay a good deal to organize the games and that the games were a central and import part of roman society.
You can argue - almost certainly correctly - that there was a significant portion of society that found the game distasteful, but you can't argue that there was still an even larger slice of the population that considered them so important that they built the coliseum to host them.
Gladiators were almost all of them slaves, but they were also entertainers who were expensive to train and keep, and often individually famous, much like WWE wrestlers.
So it was rare that they would be made to fight to the death.
Now, slaughtering prisoners in the arena happened just like you are imagining.
These are the types of features a novice app developer might implement in an afternoon after watching a tutorial video on youtube.
A company as huge as Twitter selling this as a subscription seems ridiculous to me. I don't use Twitter much, but IIRC aren't there a bunch of third party apps that have power user features like this already?
You're not paying for the feature, you're paying for the UX, which is gated behind their unusable API (so it's impossible for a 3rd party app to achieve parity with the 1st party app).
In this case it is quite easy, like delayed send third party app need not make the API call until n seconds after the tweet to give you time to undo the change.
Sure twitter may not do it client side and have special APIs etc, however ultimately they can also really do only limited time changes, other wise the tweets already read by others would start changing.
Of course they can still pull API access for violating ToS etc, however from technology context there is nothing they can do .
Didn't Valve make millions from hats[1] in TF2? Selling cosmetic items is way more egalitarian and less "pay-to-win". Would you want Twitter to charge $3 a month for an edit button?
1. Hats and other cosmetic changes to weapons, with no buff.
Those cosmetic items are visible to others in gameplay, so they serve as status symbols.
The features that Twitter is advertising for its premium service all seem to be purely client-side, with the exception of the ‘edit’ button, but that doesn’t seem like a particularly compelling justification for a $3/mo subscription.
To be clear: to my knowledge, Twitter Blue does not include an edit button! I was using it as an example of a "pay-to-win" feature that would burn (free) user's goodwill and is not a good idea in general. The only functional difference I can think of that users will tolerate between free tier and paid tier is probably removing ads
Sadly that is the one thing they are not offering, I would have considered paying for it had they removed ads and promoted tweets etc and I am very infrequent user.
- Revue (email newsletter service similar to Substack)
- Scroll (subscription that shares revenue with news sites, and removes ads on said sites)
I highly doubt Twitter Blue will solely get you different app/icon colors, they're likely to roll those services into Blue.
This is somewhat similar to the Amazon Prime approach, where you pay for a premium version of a site/service, and get access to a portfolio of services like Prime Video, Music, 2 day shipping, etc.
Their aim seems to be "Twitter Blue is to consumption of online news as Amazon Prime is to shopping/media".
The way I see it, a subscription model = moving away from a system that incentivizes a platform to maximize engagement/ad views, and instead incentivizes the platform to provide a positive experience, so users stay subscribed.
The first news story I saw about this only mentioned the amount. I assumed it was one-off for a new app, or maybe annual. Per month is crazy. I don’t object to subscriptions, but in so many cases the pricing is way out of line with the value.
There's a lot of great apps on App Stores that have a pricing model like this. Granted, most of them don't have millions in VC funding, but it's a fine business model that can make a tidy sum.
If you care deeply about something, you will find other people on Twitter. If you work in public, people will find you. Someone right now I met from Maine is currently drawing up the plans to teach me to timber frame a structure I just got approved. About 20 people I met from twitter have been over my house (for dinner, etc) at different times. Far more people read my work because of Twitter.
If you don't use it as a political mouthpiece it's incredible and there's nothing like it. And that's really up to the user.