[HN Gopher] Twitter confirms Twitter Blue
___________________________________________________________________
Twitter confirms Twitter Blue
Author : 0xedb
Score : 337 points
Date : 2021-05-28 14:57 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| m3kw9 wrote:
| I wonder what went down at the meeting when the name "Twitter
| Pro" was put on the table.
| cvwright wrote:
| 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.
|
| Full disclosure: I'm building a privacy focused social network
| that will be a paid subscription service.
| https://github.com/KombuchaPrivacy/circles-ios
| truth_ wrote:
| > It's pretty awful.
|
| 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.
|
| I keep away from politics and such.
| willis936 wrote:
| >It's pretty awful.
|
| 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.
| 8fGTBjZxBcHq wrote:
| 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.
| intricatedetail wrote:
| If this stops any tracking then sounds good. All platforms should
| give an option to pay with money rather than personal data.
| elpakal wrote:
| Can't wait to hear what Scott Galloway has to say about this...
| sergiosgc wrote:
| He already approached it on Pivot. Galloway's model is
| obviously better: Charge those that get value off a big
| following on Twitter.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| He's written his prescription here:
|
| _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._
|
| 5 Feb 2021
|
| https://www.profgalloway.com/overhauling-twitter/
| Ekaros wrote:
| 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...
| grey-area wrote:
| 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.
| debacle wrote:
| 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.
| TeeMassive wrote:
| Well Twitter hasn't been profitable for a while. They'll have to
| try to make some serious money or go bust.
| Zababa wrote:
| $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.
| dschep wrote:
| Doesn't twitter already have themes [0]? Or is it more than
| just the accent color?
|
| [0] https://twitter.com/i/display
| fernandotakai wrote:
| honestly, if they take out the ads and stopped selling my data,
| i would pay 3 USD without any issues.
| setBoolean wrote:
| 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.
| scioto wrote:
| 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.
| fernandotakai wrote:
| one way to force chronological is to add everyone you
| follow to a private list.
|
| even on official clients, it's always chronological and no
| ads -- but it's not perfect.
| jpindar wrote:
| All you have to do for that is to use Tweetdeck.
| bogwog wrote:
| Same. I don't even use or like Twitter, but with an offer
| like that I totally would.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| 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.
| manquer wrote:
| 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.
| toyg wrote:
| _> threads are hard to read_
|
| 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.
| Zababa wrote:
| 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.
| Nav_Panel wrote:
| 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.
| toyg wrote:
| "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.
| gaius_baltar wrote:
| Well, these mid-thread tweets can still be taken out of
| context and used to create sh*tstorms.
| Nav_Panel wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| I don't completely disagree but the point is mostly two-
| fold (which are related to your point).
|
| 1. Discoverability and engagement.
|
| 2. A tweet thread tends to be more conversational than a
| blog post and therefore can be more off the cuff (and
| therefore easier).
| tweettweet wrote:
| Twitter should be shut down. Jack Dorsey should be arrested.
| alkonaut wrote:
| 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.
| max_ wrote:
| These people (social networks) are no longer solving any
| problems.
|
| When they see users they don't see people in need as a service or
| product.
|
| All they see is a Knob.
|
| -> "Twist the user like this" Are we making more or less money?
|
| -> If yes, turn further to that direction, else turn to the
| opposite direction.
|
| Modern social media companies are no longer about offering
| effective social networking & communication services. Its all
| about the money now.
| toyg wrote:
| 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).
| [deleted]
| digitalsin wrote:
| I thought this had something to do with Twitter supporting law
| enforcement..then I realized it's Twitter.
| ______- wrote:
| 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).
| hs86 wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://tweetmarker.net/
| senectus1 wrote:
| gods this is pathetic.
|
| I predict this will be a failure at launch. followed by Twitter
| Pro which will be damned near exactly what everyone wants.
| greyhair wrote:
| Twitter Blew
| ilamont wrote:
| Me: I'll pay for Twitter without ads and a true reverse-chron
| view of the accounts that I follow. An edit feature would be
| nice, too.
|
| Twitter: Hey, check out Twitter Blue! Just $2.99 for reader view,
| colorful themes, and some other stuff you didn't ask for!
| gaius_baltar wrote:
| > 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.
| handrous wrote:
| 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.
| donmcronald wrote:
| 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?
| TheJoYo wrote:
| yey, now do this for facebook and twitter.
| hk__2 wrote:
| 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.
| pax wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pownce#Comparisons_with_simila...
| dpeck wrote:
| God forbid anyone be multifaceted.
|
| 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.
| obstacle1 wrote:
| > God forbid anyone be multifaceted.
|
| 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.
| naikrovek wrote:
| 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.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Back in the day, we'd tag our blog posts and people could
| subscribe to any subset of tags.
| kortilla wrote:
| It's not that there is something wrong with you posting that
| stuff. It's that it ruins the experience for followers.
|
| I follow a few hundred people who only post about specific
| topics they are experts in and it's still almost too much.
|
| The last thing I want to read is all of their half-baked
| political opinions thrown in with hemorrhoid complaints.
|
| The truth is idgaf about the individual persona on Twitter.
| Being multifaceted is for friends and other real human
| relationships.
| gffrd wrote:
| 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?
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Consider Asia Carrera as someone whose insights would be very
| interesting on a regular basis but who might also post
| content you would want to avoid.
| gffrd wrote:
| isn't this what hashtags _should_ be used for?
| jpindar wrote:
| 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.
| mgiannopoulos wrote:
| Google+ had Circles for this reason and you could follow only a
| specific Circle (tag) of a person. But people thought Google+
| was not cool enough :)
| cuchoi wrote:
| But weren't circles selected by the poster? In this case the
| "follower" want to filter
| cuchoi wrote:
| 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.
| The5thElephant wrote:
| 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.
| mcastillon wrote:
| 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
| onion2k wrote:
| _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.
| unityByFreedom wrote:
| I could see Following topics from a person becoming a
| feature. It's a natural extension of the current feature set.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| 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.
| jp1016 wrote:
| 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
| onassar wrote:
| Looks like a cool service :)
| pedrogpimenta wrote:
| "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)
| cblconfederate wrote:
| They should charge extra for color shades other than blue
| chomp wrote:
| 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.
| d3nj4l wrote:
| Whatever happened to good ol' "Plus"? Although, god forbid
| they come up with a "Twitter Pro"...
| wcarss wrote:
| I also immediately thought of 'plus' -- I wonder if there
| would be a trademark issue because of "Google Plus"?
| adenozine wrote:
| What? Do you think they own the idea of addition?
| TchoBeer wrote:
| Publishing in mathematics has been a nightmare ever since
| Google merged with the abstract concept of addition
| wcarss wrote:
| 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.
|
| 1 - https://metro.co.uk/2014/01/22/candy-crush-makers-
| sue-the-ba...
| toyg wrote:
| They should have chosen something like "Twitter Baller" -
| appealing to their core demographic while not diminishing
| the standard tier.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| I'm getting the weirdest powerful deja Vu from this post.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| "Twittest"
| monkeybutton wrote:
| Twitter Most(tm)
| drdec wrote:
| They are saving Twitter+ for the name of the inevitable
| streaming service
| Andrex wrote:
| Twitter still has the worst embedded video player of any
| "big tech" co, god help us...
| thejosh wrote:
| I'm happy to pay for YT Red for no ads, background play etc on
| my mobile devices. I use the platform quite a bit and it's fine
| for that.
|
| If you're really cheap you can signup through their indian link
| for a couple of dollars a month.
| Andrex wrote:
| YouTube Premium is definitely a much better name for the
| service.
| insonifi wrote:
| BBC was on it way before any of them even existed.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Red_Button
| [deleted]
| rustybelt wrote:
| YouTube Red was terrible because it was so similar to RedTube
| (which friends tell me is a porn site.)
| akomtu wrote:
| Not even a good one (an opinion of a consultant I hired to
| evaluate the site).
| TchoBeer wrote:
| What need did you have to hire a consultant to evaluate a
| porn site
| akomtu wrote:
| Academic research.
| tablespoon wrote:
| 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.
| pedrogpimenta wrote:
| I know, I understand it, I thought that too. It's just my
| opinion, I still think it's a silly name.
| everdrive wrote:
| Youtube Red sounded extra stupid, since it sounds very close to
| RedTube, which is a pornographic video site.
| eggoa wrote:
| Maybe they're all just Johnnie Walker fans.
| captainmuon wrote:
| 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...
| dayvid wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| efdee wrote:
| 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.
| wmeredith wrote:
| The free version of Tweetbot on the iOS App Store is read-only.
| spinningslate wrote:
| 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.
| amq wrote:
| I would actually pay $2.99/mo for firefox.
| cvwright wrote:
| Oh please please please make it so.
|
| 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.
| mstipetic wrote:
| Why don't you just donate then?
| cvwright wrote:
| Good question. I suppose it's because:
|
| 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.
| bosswipe wrote:
| Would it still have ads?
| brundolf wrote:
| Give me:
|
| - No ads
|
| - No pushy prompts for topics, follows, "tweets I might like" or
| anything else unsolicited
|
| - No tweets in my feed from people I don't follow
|
| and I'll happily pay monthly. Doesn't look like they do any of
| this yet, but I'll keep an eye out.
| jpindar wrote:
| You can get that with Tweetdeck for free:
| https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/
| antiterra wrote:
| 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.
| derwiki wrote:
| It seems Twitter Blue doesn't reduce ad volume
| henvic wrote:
| It's about time blogs + RSS feeds come back :)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| How do you answer discovery?
| henvic wrote:
| Feed aggregators, sometimes called planets.
|
| I remember back a little over a decade ago they were becoming
| quite common.
|
| One I liked a lot was KDE's.
|
| https://planet.kde.org/
| dredmorbius wrote:
| So, yeah, I remember those.
|
| 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.)
| henvic wrote:
| Good point. Now I want even more to build a better
| planet.
| simonsarris wrote:
| 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.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Most intellectual? Maybe if your niche is very narrowly focused
| like "string theory" or something technical like that.
| sangnoir wrote:
| 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?
| woopwoop wrote:
| news.ycombinator.com
| rsj_hn wrote:
| 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.
| paulpauper wrote:
| reddit
| sangnoir wrote:
| Maybe if your niche is very narrowly focused like
| "r/StringTheory" or something technical like that.
| JW_00000 wrote:
| 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.
| colllectorof wrote:
| You are smugly describing your personal benefits from the
| system that is also used to spread massive amounts of
| propaganda, organize campaigns to socially ruin people and to
| coordinate political violence.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| All systems meet that description. You should see radio
| broadcasting.
| popinman322 wrote:
| You could just as well be describing a bulletin board in a
| physical space, like a community center. Or even an
| SMS/WhatsApp group.
|
| The problems you're describing are endemic to social spaces
| and won't be resolved by removing _one_ social space.
| colllectorof wrote:
| 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.
| leviathant wrote:
| 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.
| brandrick wrote:
| This is largely my experience too.
| timdellinger wrote:
| 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.
| hahahasure wrote:
| If that person likes a political person, you have to see
| every detail. No thx.
| sixothree wrote:
| I found twitter has a high barrier to entry. Until you have a
| pretty good follow list, the usefulness of twitter is almost
| zero.
| babelfish wrote:
| 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.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| I just think the possibility of being fired for something I
| wrote over 10 years ago when everyone thought that thing was
| benign is enough to make me skip on it for work
| spike021 wrote:
| 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.
| connorkrowland wrote:
| Yes! The best use of technology is always grounded in reality.
| The only time I get excited online is when I might make a
| friend.
| nwsm wrote:
| 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.
| thekyle wrote:
| 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.
| soperj wrote:
| You can follow topics on twitter.
| akiselev wrote:
| 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.
| jdasdf wrote:
| > 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)
| gambler wrote:
| 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.
| tunesmith wrote:
| How is OP describing a filter bubble? OP is describing
| apolitical things as far as I can tell.
| 8fGTBjZxBcHq wrote:
| 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.
| rantwasp wrote:
| 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
| zemo wrote:
| > 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.
| 8fGTBjZxBcHq wrote:
| Yes exactly! This is a much better description than I was
| able to come up with.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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.
| dang wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| 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 cliche 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).
| zemo wrote:
| > 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.
| joeberon wrote:
| 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
| 8fGTBjZxBcHq wrote:
| Look I just really disagree sorry. The flavor is different
| but the beneath it's the same stuff.
|
| 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.
|
| You can find joy on here sure but it's despite the culture
| here not because of it.
| zemo wrote:
| 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.
| munk-a wrote:
| 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.
| zemo wrote:
| 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.
| throwamon wrote:
| 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.
| zemo wrote:
| 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.
| lovegoblin wrote:
| > Being polite is better than not being polite.
|
| And if it is those aforementioned bad actors who get to
| define and gatekeep what it means to be "polite"?
| throwamon wrote:
| 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.
| munk-a wrote:
| 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.
| munk-a wrote:
| 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".
| zemo wrote:
| > 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.
| munk-a wrote:
| 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.
|
| 1. http://wondermark.com/1k62/ if you're unfamiliar with
| the term.
|
| 2. Well, except grammatically, I make no claims that my
| grammar is in any way well structured - sorry if it makes
| it hard to read!
| JW_00000 wrote:
| 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).
| munk-a wrote:
| 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.
| dang wrote:
| > 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
| hn@ycombinator.com. 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.
| samatman wrote:
| 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.
| dtx1 wrote:
| > 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.
| 8fGTBjZxBcHq wrote:
| 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.
| tptacek wrote:
| 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:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27320284
|
| 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).
| [deleted]
| BoorishBears wrote:
| 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.
| qPM9l3XJrF wrote:
| 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.
| paulgb wrote:
| 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.
| dorkwood wrote:
| 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.
| leephillips wrote:
| It is possible. The trick is to use lists, and never look
| at your timeline:
|
| https://lee-phillips.org/howtotwitter/
| kache_ wrote:
| 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.
| d3ntb3ev1l wrote:
| Same
|
| I deleted FB 3 years ago and miss nothing about it
|
| Twitter on the other hand, when used properly is indispensable
| rsj_hn wrote:
| 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.
| CraigRood wrote:
| 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.
| jdasdf wrote:
| 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?
| lovegoblin wrote:
| > Is there even an "Algo"?
|
| There are two main twitter feeds:
|
| - 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".
| jborichevskiy wrote:
| 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.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| > Reader mode : Keep up with threads by turning them into easy-
| to-read text.
|
| So, your current text design _isn 't_ easy to read?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 3rd class service. Jules Dupuit rides again!
|
| https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/why-does-air-travel-suck-...
| throwitaway1235 wrote:
| How much does Twitter want to remove me from "view more replies"?
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| The chutzpah of adding an "undo" button as a monthly paid premium
| feature is just astounding to me.
|
| I assume the next step is to make sure that as soon as you stop
| paying them the $3/month, all of your undone tweets are
| republished.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| 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.
| strict9 wrote:
| Would happily pay this amount (or a little more) for a plan
| without tracking and ads.
| AznHisoka wrote:
| Will there be some sort of marker in my Twitter profile to
| indicate I'm a Blue subscriber? Maybe a smaller lighter blue
| checkmark?
|
| If anything, I would want it as a social signal rather than the
| features.
| tomcooks wrote:
| That's why you get icon colours, get ready for the screenshots
| pram wrote:
| A social signal that you have $3?
| mlvljr wrote:
| Had. Last month.
| zwily wrote:
| Well, _had_ $3.
| everydayDonut wrote:
| It seems to me that you can contribute a lot of the toxic
| behavior on twitter to the lack of nested comments.
|
| How can you ever have a healthier discussion when you can only
| ever reply directly to a tweet?
| StreamBright wrote:
| 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.
| Yaina wrote:
| 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.
| cvwright wrote:
| They're probably making more than $3 per user on the ads. IIRC
| Facebook makes somewhere in the neighborhood of $80/user per
| year.
| can16358p wrote:
| Just out of curiosity: you are referring to Facebook Inc as a
| company, including Instagram, right? Not the Facebook
| platform itself.
| cvwright wrote:
| Hmm, I think you're right. Also, I'm probably thinking of
| their North American market. They probably make less in the
| rest of the world.
| CamelCaseName wrote:
| 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.
| giarc wrote:
| Do power users click on ads though?
| MatekCopatek wrote:
| Well, Youtube Premium does it, so does Hulu, and I'm sure
| there's other examples.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| There are ads in YouTube premium? What is the point in it
| then?
| sralbert wrote:
| There are no ads with premium.
| heartbreak wrote:
| There are not ads in YT Premium. The comment was listing
| services that sell the ability to hide ads.
| Aperocky wrote:
| Youtube probably conceded that adblockers does it anyways
| for powerusers.
| jedberg wrote:
| reddit did it years before all of those.
| karolist wrote:
| 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
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Power users use Tweetdeck, and there are no ads I'm just
| realizing
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| 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.
| wbobeirne wrote:
| 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.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| There's also the fact that users willing to pay to cut adds
| are probably a very large chunk of Twitter's ad revenue.
| fossuser wrote:
| Hulu does have an ad free tier now just in case you weren't
| aware.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Hulu does have an ad free tier now just in case you
| weren't aware
|
| Well, it has a tier called (No Ads)*
|
| However, the * is there because it still has ads on some
| shows.
| jolux wrote:
| 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?
|
| edit: here's an ARPU estimate for Twitter in 2016, it was
| around $2/quarter:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/430874/twitter-
| annualize...
| kooshball wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://investor.fb.com/investor-events/event-
| details/2021/F...
|
| this is their q1 earnings presentation https://s21.q4cdn.co
| m/399680738/files/doc_financials/2021/FB...
|
| US/CA arpu is $48.03 for just q1 (just 3 month not for the
| year). Global arpu is $9.27.
|
| there's no way $3/mo makes any sense.
| username90 wrote:
| A majority of Facebook users live in third worlds countries
| though, they wont generate a lot of money no matter what
| you do.
| giarc wrote:
| 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.
| ijlx wrote:
| I would guess that the subset of users willing/able to pay
| for something like this is more valuable to advertisers
| than the average twitter user.
|
| At this price point I wouldn't be surprised if they would
| lose money by offering no ads as part of the package.
| Laremere wrote:
| That math is pretty easy to make a ballpark guess. Using
| stats from: https://backlinko.com/twitter-users
|
| $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.
| sennight wrote:
| > 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.
| jolux wrote:
| Isn't advertising to people with disposable income more
| desirable?
| bogwog wrote:
| 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?
| [deleted]
| fossuser wrote:
| 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.
| adenozine wrote:
| 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.
| hahahasure wrote:
| If there's a filter for political news, you can take my money.
|
| Or better, if the news is curated for my benefit rather than
| engagement, I'm interested.
| ArkanExplorer wrote:
| Don't forget that 90cents of that goes to Apple, and 40cents to
| Governments as sales tax (on average, depending on the region).
|
| Its a shame that the economics are so stacked against premium
| retail software instead of just slinging ads.
| buzz27 wrote:
| 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.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| might be a help to you:
| https://gist.github.com/IanColdwater/88b3341a7c4c0cf71c73ac5...
| lt wrote:
| this is awesome, thanks
| ffggvv wrote:
| i recommend making "lists". that's what i do. just add everyone
| i care to see to the list (can seperate lists by category also)
| asdff wrote:
| There are actually tools to connect twitter with RSS so you can
| enforce chronological and do what you say.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 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.
|
| - Block early and often. Where merely unfollowing isn't enough.
| https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/104371585950783019
|
| - 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.
| ravenstine wrote:
| 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.
| jpindar wrote:
| You can do that.
|
| https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/
| cblconfederate wrote:
| you can switch to "latest tweets" mode
| dizzy3gg wrote:
| I feel the Blue makes it feel a bit blue movie.
| mproud wrote:
| I don't think they have confirmed it, have they? They were asked
| about it and said no comment.
| o_p wrote:
| Ok but how much money do we need to raise in crowdfund to
| permanently delete Twitter.
| tored wrote:
| 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.
| argvargc wrote:
| Big tech Co. deletes/censors half its users then scrambles to
| update to a freemium model to try and stay afloat.
|
| That'll be $2.99 well-refused.
| dominotw wrote:
| I would pay for twitter if they gave me filter to mute out all
| the rage mob topic of the hour.
| underseacables wrote:
| I try to avoid Twitter as much possible, is there an option where
| I can pay to never see Twitter again?
| ttt0 wrote:
| Yes, you can pay me to turn your screen off.
| alpb wrote:
| 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.
| piinbinary wrote:
| Features I'd want:
|
| * No ads
|
| * No suggested topics
|
| * 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
| schleiss wrote:
| 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.
| alkonaut wrote:
| What you want is api access and a decent client (Tweetbot,
| Tweetdeck).
|
| My client does exactly this (no ads, feed in order) and I can't
| believe I have this for free already while others can't even
| pay for it.
| crispyalmond wrote:
| Curious, what's your client? I'm interested in that.
| mttjj wrote:
| 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.
| insin wrote:
| Apart from the last one, and retweets are low-effort so they're
| hidden by default too:
|
| https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter#tweak-new-twitter
| 2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote:
| 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.
| lovegoblin wrote:
| The last three things on this list are available in the
| "Latest" feed, rather than "Home."
| xg15 wrote:
| 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!
| Ekaros wrote:
| 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...
| mkl95 wrote:
| 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.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| 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.
| JI00912 wrote:
| Sometimes the toxicity seems like a feature of twitter.
| Everything is built in order to facilitate those mobs supported
| by Twitter.
| paulpauper wrote:
| twitter already makes a lot of $ with ads (which have a very
| high CPC and CPM for advertisers), but this is a way to make
| money on top of that,
| shoto_io wrote:
| 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.
| xwolfi wrote:
| 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.
| jpindar wrote:
| I have my real name on Twitter, am reasonably active, and I
| never get trolled. But I pretty much only post on tech
| related subjects.
|
| Do you post on controversial subjects?
| meowface wrote:
| 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.
| jxidjhdhdhdhfhf wrote:
| Somehow Google and Facebook figured it out. Why couldn't
| Twitter?
| nemothekid wrote:
| The both figured it out with incredibly invasive tracking
| and profiling. I don't know why this move is being seen as
| a slight to the company.
| jxidjhdhdhdhfhf wrote:
| 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.
| meowface wrote:
| 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.)
| [deleted]
| city41 wrote:
| And their stock shows that. Especially when compared to other
| big tech companies that started at about the same time.
| villasv wrote:
| As evidenced by the struggle with StackOverflow too, who sits
| atop a trove of content
| fxtentacle wrote:
| 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.
| xwolfi wrote:
| 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
| meowface wrote:
| I'm jealous. My company bought it and made a huge
| internal adoption effort, but it never really amounted to
| anything and is now pretty much dead.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| 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.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| 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.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| 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/codinghorr
| or/status/991082088689381376
| meowface wrote:
| >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.
| JI00912 wrote:
| >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.
| zerocrates wrote:
| "Sell ads" seems to be most places' "Step 3," though I don't
| know how well it's gone for Twitter.
| meowface wrote:
| 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.
| zerocrates wrote:
| Yeah by "sell ads" here I mean "do the whole data
| collection, targeting, whatever" deal that the platforms
| do.
|
| Discord... definitely different. It's hard for me to
| believe that Nitro really can be paying for Discord but I
| guess it's possible?
| meowface wrote:
| [removed]
| joshuaissac wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 1 million users * $10/month/user * 12 months/year = $120
| million/year
|
| That is close to the cited $130m annual revenue.
| meowface wrote:
| Yeah that's my bad, I mistakenly forgot to multiply it
| monthly for a moment.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| 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.
| EasyTiger_ wrote:
| You couldn't pay me to use Twitter, the idea of paying them is
| absolutely hilarious
| MajorBee wrote:
| 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.
| cvwright wrote:
| But would you consider paying to use Mastodon, or one of the
| other open source alternatives?
|
| Hopefully this makes it easier for them to support
| themselves.
| offtop5 wrote:
| 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.
| hkmurakami wrote:
| 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.
| 0x142857 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| LMAO you're absolutely right! source: me
| DSingularity wrote:
| 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.
| agumonkey wrote:
| 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
| exporectomy wrote:
| 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.
| xwolfi wrote:
| 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).
| twobitshifter wrote:
| 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.
| derefr wrote:
| > 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.)
| passivate wrote:
| 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.
| derefr wrote:
| > 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.
| passivate wrote:
| 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 :)
| derefr wrote:
| > 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?
|
| (Like I said: it'd be a _niche_ platform.)
| lovegoblin wrote:
| > I followed my senator and found that no matter the post,
| the replies
|
| "Never read the comments" is common advice for a reason, and
| it has nothing to do specifically with Twitter.
| paulpauper wrote:
| 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.
| xwolfi wrote:
| What is the first trigger, the first "friend" who change
| his mind, triggering the chain ?
|
| Someone must have dug and learned something, for everyone
| else to blindly follow.
| oefrha wrote:
| Relevant article discussing the sad state of Twitter and
| other online battlegrounds:
| https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/
|
| Discussed at the time:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22101244
| ericbarrett wrote:
| That was great, thanks for sharing it for those of us who
| hadn't read it yet.
| baby wrote:
| Youtube is worse honestly, at least in twitter you can sort
| of create your own community.
| hammock wrote:
| 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."
| matwood wrote:
| Nuance, the other thing missing on Twitter.
| airhead969 wrote:
| 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
| kleer001 wrote:
| An excellent set of wishes for an enforced good faith
| social network. No idea how it'd fly though.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| 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.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| > - 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.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 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.
|
| - The most critical question the designer of a moderation
| / rating system needs to ponder is _what is the goal?_
| See https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28jfk4/
| content...
|
| - 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 1 _1. 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.
| velosol wrote:
| 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').
| addingnumbers wrote:
| You say "dv" four times like people should already know
| what it means
| airhead969 wrote:
| Sorry! I thought that were obvious by mentioning voting.
| Mea culpa.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Specifically _downvoting_ (DV).
| edgyquant wrote:
| Downvote
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| > Maybe an invite-only platform
|
| 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.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 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.
| ttul wrote:
| ... in other words, something that is unlikely to
| materialize any time soon.
| tqi wrote:
| Hacker news is social media. Most of your suggestions
| aren't implemented here. Yet the discourse is generally ok.
|
| The only thing that matters is the size of community.
| Beyond a certain scale, it always breaks down. Ultimately,
| the problem is the people.
| anyfoo wrote:
| And competent moderation, essentially editorial
| guidelines. (Something that pretty much implies a
| community that isn't too big.)
| tqi wrote:
| That probably helps here, but I don't think moderation
| works once you get beyond the point where one moderator
| can handle everything.
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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.
| airhead969 wrote:
| 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.
| lupire wrote:
| Slashdot had metamoderation 25 years ago.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| 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.
| airhead969 wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| airhead969 wrote:
| 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.
| anyfoo wrote:
| 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.
| geraneum wrote:
| 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!
| xfer wrote:
| 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.
| yumraj wrote:
| 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.
| cvwright wrote:
| True, people will always be the root of the problem. But
| they are also the best part of everything.
|
| We need platforms that encourage the good stuff and
| minimize or discourage the bad. Not the other way around.
| airhead969 wrote:
| Absolutely.
|
| 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.
| nasalgoat wrote:
| HN is a tiny monoculture community catering to a niche
| audience. Of course the discourse is okay, there's almost
| no disagreement.
| [deleted]
| Karunamon wrote:
| 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.
| jerf wrote:
| "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.
| kodah wrote:
| Yeah, that's not really true.
|
| 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.
| airhead969 wrote:
| 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.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| Ah yes, Vidal, opposed to "The Property Party" yet owned
| luxury villas in Italy and the Hollywood Hills.
|
| Property for me, not for thee...
| kodah wrote:
| 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.
| edoceo wrote:
| Wrong!
| airhead969 wrote:
| OMG, you win the internet for today. Haha.
|
| 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?
| fernandopj wrote:
| 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!
|
| No wonder it hasn't become a toxic wasteland.
| airhead969 wrote:
| 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.
| ABCLAW wrote:
| Right, so the problem is making your KPIs exclusively
| about measurable 'growth', rather than optimizing for
| making the best communities possible.
|
| It isn't inherently social media or democracy that's the
| problem, it's the incentives behind it.
| mwarkentin wrote:
| A little ironic that this community was also founded by
| the guy who wrote http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html
| :D
| cryptoz wrote:
| > No wonder it hasn't become a toxic wasteland.
|
| 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.
| Siira wrote:
| 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.)
| tsimionescu wrote:
| 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.
|
| Edit: Here's an example that eventually got flagged, but
| sparked a long conversation that had a few supporters as
| well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26990070
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| You example is an example of the system working. It
| eventually got removed by mods, and the parent comment
| you're linking to called the behaviour out.
|
| I'm not sure what you'd like to see changed in this case?
| everdrive wrote:
| 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.
| placer wrote:
| Indeed. As one point of comparison: Solid scientific
| information showing efficacy for AA gets routinely
| upvoted here at HN:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25493182
|
| Compare this to Reddit, where some high-traffic sub-
| Reddits (/r/atheism _cough_ _cough_ ) 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?
| na85 wrote:
| >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.
| Siira wrote:
| Flags and moderator actions are also much rarer, but
| controversial stuff does get downvoted quickly unless
| it's quite high quality.
| kbenson wrote:
| 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.
| cryptoz wrote:
| 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.
| everdrive wrote:
| How depressing if true =(
|
| Can you point to some example topics I should keep an eye
| out for?
| marksbrown wrote:
| 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?
| ncann wrote:
| 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.
| lolinder wrote:
| 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.
| cryptoz wrote:
| 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.
| airhead969 wrote:
| 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. :)
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| If this is as widespread as you claim, I'm sure you can
| link/quote some real examples.
| lolinder wrote:
| 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.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| 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.
| subsubzero wrote:
| 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.
| theodric wrote:
| 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.
|
| /s
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| airhead969 wrote:
| Yes, that's absolutely right.
|
| 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.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Maybe money they raise is for purchasing a Dang?
|
| I know that scaling moderation is difficult, and can't
| imagine how it's all kept in check here.
|
| How Twitter intend to address that is interesting.
| bosswipe wrote:
| 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.
| airhead969 wrote:
| I think you're partially right.
|
| 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).
|
| [1] Best characterizes the lottery ticket phenomenon:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23393875
| rdiddly wrote:
| 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.
| paulpauper wrote:
| 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. .
| johncessna wrote:
| The rep meter is what makes the difference. I've caught
| myself posting something only to spam f5 to see if what I
| was said was accepted or rejected.
| croes wrote:
| Social media just needs the possibility to share media
| with other people to be called social media. So HN is
| social media.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| 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.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| "dv"???
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Self-reply: DV == "downvote", from other responses.
| ansible wrote:
| > _elimination of pile-on_
|
| I'm thinking of some kind of ML scheme where the site
| analyzes your comment and sees if it is similar enough to
| existing comments.
|
| Or perhaps also analyzes your comments to see if they are
| similar to older comments you have made already.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > - 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?
| airhead969 wrote:
| 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.
|
| Somewhere like Iceland or Greenland.
| pupdogg wrote:
| Is there an accessible list of countries available to host
| servers that aren't in a treaty with the US, EU, RU and CN?
| devwastaken wrote:
| 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.
| airhead969 wrote:
| Maybe for that subculture, but I meant generally.
|
| https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2205-there-is-an-inverse-
| rela...
| antihero wrote:
| 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.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| 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.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > So I tried to teach critical thinking to random people on
| Twitter, but as you imagine this was a fools errand.
|
| It is so hard to imagine how they just cannot seem to
| understand why you are right, despite all your trying to
| teach them.
|
| But then you imagine that they must be thinking the same
| thing.
|
| I cannot imagine what must've gone wrong in their lives that
| so many lies could be built on one another.
| [deleted]
| javajosh wrote:
| _> 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.
|
| Hopefully they'll all grow out of it.
| oblio wrote:
| I doubt it. Throughout history many people lived brutish
| lives and died none the wiser.
|
| Plus at some point some people can't be redeemed except
| for truly massive efforts no one will make.
| gregmac wrote:
| > 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.
| r00fus wrote:
| Same. I got back into it to get a better understanding of
| what was happening during fire season here in CA. Stayed
| for local + expert details.
|
| By curating my feed, I'm in general happy with it.
| atatatat wrote:
| > I tried to teach critical thinking to random people on
| Twitter, but as you imagine this was a fools errand.
|
| Only because we're effectively alone in the responsibility.
|
| Hint: lack of research isn't limited to Twitter, folks. It's
| in your pub, your break room, etc
| airhead969 wrote:
| 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.
| nomdep wrote:
| I don't think individualism is the defining
| characteristic of most twitters, they tend to herd
| mentality
| nineplay wrote:
| > 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.
| airhead969 wrote:
| 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 cliche) woman neighbor next
| door won't even acknowledge my presence with pleasantries
| in passing. WTH.
| II2II wrote:
| 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.
| MonaroVXR wrote:
| I tried this and was burned. Learned enough.
| jandrese wrote:
| 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.
| dawnerd wrote:
| 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.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| 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.
| jpindar wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| nineplay wrote:
| > 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.
| black_yarn wrote:
| So no one knows anything, no one can teach, and no one can
| learn? That's just nihilism.
| tshaddox wrote:
| 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.
| otde wrote:
| 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.
| nineplay wrote:
| 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.
| BHSPitMonkey wrote:
| 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.)
| nineplay wrote:
| "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.
| Siira wrote:
| 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.
| matwood wrote:
| > 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.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| 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.
| nineplay wrote:
| 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.
| II2II wrote:
| > 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.
| nineplay wrote:
| 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.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| 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:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory
| xwolfi wrote:
| 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"...
| dawnerd wrote:
| 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.
| dahjkol wrote:
| Wasn't the idea of Twitter just to be like an outlet of large
| organizations and popular celebs?
|
| It's kind of like a sweet metaphor for the eternal September.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| 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.
|
| Kind of sad what its become to be honest.
| pwm wrote:
| > 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.
| amelius wrote:
| > 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.
| ultimape wrote:
| I have been trying to transition to mastodon/pleroma.
|
| ActivityPub is an open protocol for this kind of thing.
|
| I use twitter as an external brain not that dissimilar to a a
| Xanadu inspired Memex intermixed with a Zettelkasten.
| dixego wrote:
| But then how are we going to serve you ads
| cvwright wrote:
| Maybe you could pay $2.99/month to your Mastodon host, and
| the ads can go to hell.
| Hamuko wrote:
| But Twitter already permits third-party apps that have no
| ads. I use one daily.
| moolcool wrote:
| "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 seems to be doing just fine
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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.
| olivierestsage wrote:
| Interesting how your comment so abruptly fell from the top of
| the thread!
| impulser_ wrote:
| I think you have been using Twitter the wrong way.
| [deleted]
| notatoad wrote:
| >What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts
| that post more often than once per day.
|
| this isn't quite it, but it's a good way to filter out a lot of
| trash: https://megablock.xyz/
| swiley wrote:
| >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.
| bigtones wrote:
| Facebook monetizes that type of engagement on their platform
| just fine.
| Natsu wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Ultimately, Twitter is a gossip site, so this should be no real
| surprise.
| patcon wrote:
| > 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 :)
| BashiBazouk wrote:
| 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.
| Siira wrote:
| 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.
| airhead969 wrote:
| 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.
| neither_color wrote:
| 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.
| airhead969 wrote:
| 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.
|
| Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
| neither_color wrote:
| 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.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| Getting yelled at on Twitter by white liberals for not
| using a term they invented isn't a good enough reason to
| do something.
| slothtrop wrote:
| Latino.
| reaperducer wrote:
| "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.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| A large majority of Latino people believe that "Latinx"
| should not be used to refer to them, according to Pew
| Research.
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-
| one-in...
| k_pres wrote:
| Also a term used by almost no actual Latinos.
| airhead969 wrote:
| That's cool. I have no idea what words to use these days,
| it will offend someone.
| JI00912 wrote:
| Those someones nearly always seem to be a small group of
| angry white people on twitter and rarely the groups
| supposedly offended.
| throwkeep wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| 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?
| camjohnson26 wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.fool.com/investing/2021/05/17/genius-behind-the-...
|
| https://twitter.com/Keubiko/status/1394351225316028420?s=20
| mola wrote:
| Why is that so important?
| camjohnson26 wrote:
| 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.
| an1sotropy wrote:
| thank you. the addictive hit of having some latest up-to-
| the-second information is not actually a rational need.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| 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.
| InvaderFizz wrote:
| My Twitter feed is pretty good, overall positive.
|
| Then again, I curate who I follow pretty closely and I have a
| long list of political buzzwords suppressed through the "Muted
| words" feature.
|
| I don't get notifications that contain those words, and tweets
| that include them don't show in my timeline.
| passivate wrote:
| >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).
| uncomputation wrote:
| > 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."
| passivate wrote:
| 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.
| lolinder wrote:
| > 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.
| chongli wrote:
| _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.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| 1) many many many users on Twitter are bots / controlled
| propaganda
|
| 2) a reflection of something bad makes the bad thing more
| visible and twice as negative
| mbesto wrote:
| > 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).
| passivate wrote:
| >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.
| mbesto wrote:
| > 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.
| gretch wrote:
| It's not the same thing because you can simply just choose
| not to go to twitter. That's not possible with sound waves
| at 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.
|
| I've stopped. Presumably you stopped too. If you are still
| going, maybe you're the idiot?
| codyb wrote:
| 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.
| ksec wrote:
| >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.
| zemo wrote:
| > you cannot monetize engagement if your community is highly
| toxic
|
| you're soooooooo close to getting it, but so far.
|
| monetizing engagement -creates- toxic communities, because
| toxicity is engaging.
| okwubodu wrote:
| > 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)
| ryanSrich wrote:
| 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.
| okwubodu wrote:
| 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.
| 29_29 wrote:
| > This is self inflicted.
|
| 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.
| okwubodu wrote:
| 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.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| 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.
| version_five wrote:
| 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.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| 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.
| senthil_rajasek wrote:
| "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.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _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.
| an_opabinia wrote:
| Sounds like what you're really saying is you hate New York - DC
| journalist - political - activist culture. Which Twitter
| distills.
| screye wrote:
| 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
| duxup wrote:
| 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.
| fullshark wrote:
| I don't think so, this is just trying to monetize their most
| hardcore users beyond the fact that they click more ads.
| irishloop wrote:
| 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.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| > 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?
| splistud wrote:
| Which part of 'highly toxic and mostly just produces
| shitstorms, lynchmobs, perpetually enraged morally superior
| idiots and professional victims' isn't perfect for
| monetization?
|
| Mostly kidding, but, well sadly it isn't a joke.
| dorfsmay wrote:
| That button exists, it's blue and written "Following" and turns
| red with the label "Unfollow" when you hover.
|
| And yes, you can configure twitter + using tweetdeck to only
| see tweets in chronological order and only from people you
| follow.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| >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.
| lupire wrote:
| 1 tweet per hour is 3.5KB/day, or about 1.5 pages of text.
| It's not a lot of content. Tweets are small.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| 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.
| Ekaros wrote:
| 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?
| uo21tp5hoyg wrote:
| 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.
| bilater wrote:
| 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.
| ppod wrote:
| You can choose exactly who you follow, you get the twitter feed
| you deserve.
| cvwright wrote:
| Well, you can try. In my experience they still show a lot of
| crap that I have zero interest in seeing, from people who I
| do not follow.
| irishloop wrote:
| Yeah they tend to show stuff that is "liked" by people you
| know. So it depends on what THEY like as well.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| If I follow anyone who persistently likes stuff I object
| to that strongly, I'll just unfollow them.
| jjulius wrote:
| "Choose" is an interesting word to use in regards to
| something designed to be addictive.
| astine wrote:
| Many drugs are addictive, but I can choose which drugs I
| get addicted to.
| jjulius wrote:
| No. You can choose which drugs you _try_ , but you can't
| choose which ones are addictive to you.
| Spivak wrote:
| 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.
| ezekg wrote:
| 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.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| 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.
| ezekg wrote:
| I only followed a couple hundred people.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| 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.
| Jiejeing wrote:
| 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.
| Tomte wrote:
| The trick is never to look at the main feed.
|
| Create lists of people (just one if you want the main feed-
| like experience, several if you want some order and
| structure). Only look at those lists.
|
| They are chronological, and without the random
| "suggestions" Twitter likes to put before you.
|
| And then you may come to like tweetdeck.twitter.com, where
| you can see all those lists side by side, and even have
| sensible keyboard shortcuts.
|
| (Unfortunately, Tweetdeck may become a paid feature, there
| have been rumors bout it for quite some time)
| zemo wrote:
| 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.
| bambax wrote:
| 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| >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.
| [deleted]
| celticninja wrote:
| And it will likely prove that people will pay $2.99 to cause
| and get involved in shit storms and lynchmobs :-(
| fxtentacle wrote:
| I believe in Rome, people where quite happy to pay handsomely
| to get a front row seat for watching gladiators get mutilated
| by lions.
|
| Maybe we have progressed less than we thought.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| I never thought of the old liveleaks site as a type of
| roman colosseum but I think you're right
| bambax wrote:
| Do we know that? I think most games were free? (I'm not
| sure).
| munk-a wrote:
| 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.
| forgetfulness wrote:
| 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.
| camjohnson26 wrote:
| They had a 1/5 chance of dying in every battle and an
| average age at death of around 25?
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladiator
| spoonjim wrote:
| 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.
| alkonaut wrote:
| 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.
| dorfsmay wrote:
| 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.
| arkadiyt wrote:
| > 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.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| 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.
| pkdpic_y9k wrote:
| Are you talking about any particular type of job here? I'm
| still pretty new to software engineering game and haven't
| heard about this yet.
| ewestern wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GM-e46xdcUo
| 45ure wrote:
| 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.
| not_jd_salinger wrote:
| 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.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| 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.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| 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.
|
| Probably some relation to Dunbar's number.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| 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.
| josefresco wrote:
| > 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.
| sersnth wrote:
| Your comment reminds me of this comic https://www.smbc-
| comics.com/comic/mind-3
|
| Perhaps with social media it applies as much to younger
| people as well.
| city41 wrote:
| 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.
|
| edit: HN also fits the bill here.
| qPM9l3XJrF wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
| city41 wrote:
| 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.
| ddingus wrote:
| 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.
|
| Works much better now.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| It's such a poor offering.
|
| I'm not completely unopposed to Twitter having a subscription
| offering, but this isn't what I'd want from it at all.
|
| (Number 1 would be unrestricted third party client before. The
| Twitter product team is awful and the UI basically unusable.)
| Raineer wrote:
| 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.
| WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote:
| 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).
| airstrike wrote:
| > greatest communication platform in the world
|
| Define greatest
| TheJoYo wrote:
| "communication"
| joshdance wrote:
| Interesting reading the replies.
|
| Twitter is the most valuable social network that I participate
| on.
|
| Friends, ideas, connections all come from finding people talking
| about things that are interesting to you.
| Qahlel wrote:
| When did we agree that everything has to be a monthly
| subscription and we shouldn't own anything?
| weasel_words wrote:
| 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
|
| I bet they'd make gobs more than a $2.99/mo.
| kumarvvr wrote:
| I guess more features will come out. Even they know 3 USD a
| month means they have to have good incentives.
| [deleted]
| jsnell wrote:
| 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.
| kevindong wrote:
| A decent chunk of HN is anti-SaaS in my experience.
| slownews45 wrote:
| Interesting - this came just after I'd read through the HN piece
| on life after an internet mob attack.
|
| https://twitter.com/pasql/status/1366795510355537924
|
| https://pasquale.cool/internet-mob
|
| 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.
| Ashanmaril wrote:
| >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.
| dkirill wrote:
| It's impossible to have HN-like discussions if platform targets
| general population
| slownews45 wrote:
| 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.
| KoftaBob wrote:
| 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.
| moat wrote:
| 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.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Nice, just for the record, do you plan to spend $3/month on
| Twitter Blue?
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| I guess I need to update my angel investors pitch powerpoint to
| answer their "How do you intend to make money?" question.
|
| "We'll charge users $3 a month to change the app colors and
| icon.".
| sangnoir wrote:
| 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.
| dahjkol wrote:
| What an intellectual dishonest and disingenuous point dude.
| bogwog wrote:
| Apples to oranges
| sangnoir wrote:
| They are both non-function-changing, cosmetic changes being
| sold, right?
| 10000truths wrote:
| 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.
| sangnoir wrote:
| 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
| manquer wrote:
| 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.
| toyg wrote:
| Winamp should have monetized skins...
|
| /s
| flatiron wrote:
| And whipping llama asses.
| d3nj4l wrote:
| 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.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| You make it sound as though this is an absurd way to monetize.
| This is the internet.
| njb311 wrote:
| 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.
| KoftaBob wrote:
| 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.
| asutekku wrote:
| This is how Apollo, the arguably best app for Reddit on iOS
| monetises.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Don't forget the undo button, which is presumably just the
| existing delete button being rebranded.
| Nav_Panel wrote:
| 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).
| manquer wrote:
| 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 .
| city41 wrote:
| I assumed it'd be like Gmail unsend: wait a little bit before
| pushing the tweet through, so undo can 100% make it as if it
| never happened.
| bogwog wrote:
| 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?
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
| people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| papito wrote:
| 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?!
| water8 wrote:
| Hard Pass.
| vecplane wrote:
| All I care about is being able to remove advertisements.
|
| I don't care about any of these new features. Can just I pay
| $X.99 a month to not see ads on Twitter?
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