[HN Gopher] Goodbye, Fleets
___________________________________________________________________
Goodbye, Fleets
Author : mattyb
Score : 266 points
Date : 2021-07-14 17:35 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.twitter.com)
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| The lack of innovation at Twitter, Instagram and Facebook is
| utterly baffling and points to a serious culture problem.
|
| Feels there are rooms of people now just being paid to clone
| successful features from other apps and only after those apps
| have carved their place in the market, literally become followers
| rather than trailblazers.
|
| In just a few years Instagram is going to seem completely old hat
| to anyone who didn't grow up with it, my 10 year old niece has a
| TikTok account where she makes weird minecraft and among us
| memes, she has over 2000 followers, I've never even heard her
| mention Instagram, not sure she even knows it exists.
|
| Think Twitter will be relevant for longer just because there are
| less companies trying to compete but honestly the app that was
| mostly about reading short form text thinks the future of their
| platform is half being a voice chatroom? Why? Because Clubhouse
| the new hotness a few months ago? Again just panicking to clone
| other services as a feature within their app who cares if it
| makes sense or complements the platform, lets just pray our
| existing users opt for doing their voice chat in our app rather
| than going to that new app.
|
| I'll admit IG managed to clone snapchat stories successfully and
| pretty much kill off Snapchat, but reels? IGTV? I no longer have
| any idea where I'm supposed to put my focus or post my content in
| that app.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Established social media companies innovating is how you get
| new reddit. I think the facebook strategy of not changing
| successful platforms and continually building/buying new ones
| makes the most sense.
| nerfhammer wrote:
| I've been thinking of it in terms of convergence, maybe they're
| all converging on the identical "optimal" social network.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Someone had a "history of MUD sites" in which they describe a
| two year lifecycle of popularity. I think the same applies to
| social media on about ten years; there's a _cohort_ of people
| who join in the first few years, because the site creates a
| different community that isn 't served elsewhere. Then it
| reaches saturation, slow decay, drama, and gradually exodus to
| the hotter new things.
|
| Hence all the desperate cloning of new platform features.
| dbbk wrote:
| I actually quite like the lack of innovation on Twitter. It
| takes an enormous amount of restraint to keep saying no, and
| stick to a small, simple vision.
|
| I would hate a hypothetical Twitter that turns into another
| Facebook amalgamation of 75 products.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| >It takes an enormous amount of restraint to keep saying no,
| and stick to a small, simple vision
|
| They literally just cloned Clubhouse and are going to put it
| at the top of your feed because it was the cool new app for
| like 3 weeks last year..... How is that restraint?
| dbbk wrote:
| They're certainly picking it up more recently with Fleets
| and Spaces. My point was I was quite happy with the status
| quo before.
| miguelrochefort wrote:
| Looks like we've still got:
|
| - Snapchat Stories
|
| - YouTube Stories (Google)
|
| - LinkedIn Stories (Microsoft)
|
| - Instagram Stories (Facebook)
|
| - WeChat Time Capsule (Tencent)
|
| - Weibo Stories (Alibaba)
|
| - Naver Snow
|
| https://miguelrochefort.com/blog/tech-giant/#65-stories-35
| cpeterso wrote:
| And Chrome's Web Stories:
|
| https://stories.google/
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| Never heard of all these services? How comes? It's like Poly
| that closed in June. Never heard of that until I heard it was
| closing:
|
| https://blog.google/products/google-ar-vr/poly-browse-
| discov...
|
| Is there a full list of active services provided by Google
| (or other big tech) somewhere?
| miguelrochefort wrote:
| > Is there a full list of active services provided by
| Google (or other big tech) somewhere?
|
| I'm only aware of the opposite: https://killedbygoogle.com/
| bdcravens wrote:
| How long before companies start dropping their "TikTok" mode
| everyone rushed to implement?
| jwithington wrote:
| Finally I can view profile pictures again.
| [deleted]
| simonsarris wrote:
| That's really too bad. I don't tweet much, maybe once a day, but
| I really liked using fleets, and lots of people told me they
| loved seeing them, in DM or @'ing:
| https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1415370626303504389
|
| I want my timeline to be mostly thoughts and nice photography
| that people can go look at as they please, and I don't want to
| pollute it or waste follower's time with one-off stuff (like
| making pasta every night, or some weird looking bug, or funny
| sign, etc). Fleets allowed for that really well. I think its a
| mistake to look at how Big Accounts are using them and make
| decisions from there.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| What is a baseline for tweets per day per regular user? One
| tweet per day means 365 per year, it looks huge to some people.
| simonsarris wrote:
| I'm not sure about regular user, there's a huge spread. I see
| most big accounts tweet 5-10+ a day. 10x that for media
| people.
|
| Paul Graham tweets about once per every other waking hour
| (though sometimes not for days). Patrick Collison tweets
| every 2-3 days.
| bogwog wrote:
| For real, my tweet rate is less than once per year, yet I
| still regularly use the app just to follow some interesting
| people.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Is Twitter actually used outside the US?
|
| Here in Romania, where we rputinely import most aspects of US
| culture, it's almost entirely outside popular consciousness.
| Politicians and stars are certainly not using it - they're on
| Facebook and Instagram, and YT or Spotify for music.
|
| How is it in the rest of the world?
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| The country that used the Twitter most isn't even the US.
| Turkey, Japan, UK, etc. all use it more (per capita).
|
| From my personal experience, Twitter is undoubtedly HUGE in
| Japan. Everyone and its dog use it, not to mention all the
| companies, personalities, etc.
| astrange wrote:
| It's very popular in Japan. Otherwise, journalists and celebs
| worldwide use it, which means crazy people yelling at
| journalists about politics somehow now run the news media.
| rconti wrote:
| As an American working in tech, I know there are other tech
| folks on Twitter, but it feels like it's primarily used by
| celebrities, politicians, academics, and journalists.
| hiidrew wrote:
| My biggest issue with their design was the horrible flow of
| clicking on someone's profile pic from a tweet that has a Fleet
| up, would pull up the Fleet instead of their profile
|
| In general, I'd like to turn off stories on every social platform
| I'm on. By far the most addictive design for me.
| mtnGoat wrote:
| i dont tweet, despite having an account registered in '08 because
| quite frankly its a very toxic and argumentative environment,
| with a lot of noise, nonsense and bots galore.
|
| adding features without cleaning house isnt going to bring new
| tweeters into the fold, we left and dont participate because of
| the culture on that platform.
|
| same reason FB is having issues growing, i would imagine.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Big tech companies especially Twitter and Google have zero
| longevity when it comes to new products. How about they add
| subscriptions to Fleets before giving up, I've enjoyed a few
| really great conversations there and it's a decent product like
| much of Twitter it just needs some love in terms of features and
| how they work. For example why on Earth am I not allowed to
| _read_ someone's _public_ tweets when blocked. Twitter is kind of
| the definition of getting lucky over being brilliant IMO, how it
| doesn't have an edit function yet is beyond me.
| rogerclark wrote:
| If I block you, I want it to prevent you from reading my
| tweets. Obviously you can use a logged-out browser window, but
| that extra step is supposed to be annoying enough to prevent
| most non-psycho people from reading your stuff.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Why do you care if I read your stuff that's public on the
| Internet, surely we should all be trying to understand each
| other's point of view more not less?
| renewiltord wrote:
| To prevent context collapse. Some people are unable to
| understand what I say and take offence. That could be
| because of the way I'm saying it or because of them. Either
| way, I don't care. I would like to expend energy on my
| audience. Ideally, I can talk to my audience and to no one
| else.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Great, make your account private then... or do you want
| all the benefits of a completely public account without
| any of the costs? I'm not suggesting blocked people
| should be able to interact with your content, just that
| they can still read it. This applies especially to
| information being disseminated by government.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I mean, I could just as well say "Log out of your account
| then". That will negate the effect of the block.
| okcomputerrrr wrote:
| twitter is way better than most social platforms in terms of
| being open and be able to view the content with out logging in.
| I think the main purpose of blocking is to prevent you from
| engaging with the said user / tweet. if you really don't want
| your tweets to be made public you can make the account private
| and only allow your followers
| andy_ppp wrote:
| That's exactly my point, I should still be able to hear what
| someone I disagree with says and even agree or understand
| their thinking on occasion. Blocking seems like an extremely
| blunt tool.
| rmetzler wrote:
| Are you really asking, why Twitter doesn't allow to edit tweets
| after publishing them? I think this is a feature, it means you
| can't change what you wrote. If this would be possible after
| you get responses, you could change the meaning of these
| responses.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| If you use your imagination you can still edit tweets and
| also have them be immutable. Loads of systems have an edit
| history or alternatively just a means to delete and recreate
| a tweet in the first 5 minutes after publication. There are
| probably other even better ways to solve this.
| adolph wrote:
| Or you could clone HN with a single-threaded UI.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| But you can anonymously edit your messages on HN?
| adolph wrote:
| Oh, you must be looking for a Wikipedia clone then.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Much shorter articles and only one editor...
| FalconSensei wrote:
| As I said on Twitter: I just want them to make me able to block
| my likes (and replies) from appearing on other people's
| timelines.
| fleddr wrote:
| "We'll explore more ways to address what holds people back from
| participating on Twitter."
|
| Perhaps I can help.
|
| Twitter is always angry. You'll find the most idiotic, extreme,
| harmful statements from both sides of the political spectrum.
| Worse, Twitter actively rewards it. The more unhinged and
| controversial, the more engagement you get.
|
| The replies will be equally angry. Any attempt to add nuance or
| reason is futile. Because the damage is already done in the form
| of retweets, likes, quotes.
|
| Hence, the unreasonables run Twitter. And they have normalized a
| lot of absolutely pathetic behavior. Taking things out of context
| and applying the worst faith interpretation of it, willingly.
| Sub-tweeting, screenshotting, exposing private conversations,
| speaking badly of others within their bubble, and sometimes this
| triggering further attacks or even cancellations.
|
| This culture of perpetual outrage, hate-addiction even, and the
| many childish behaviors that come with it, are born at Twitter.
|
| After a Twitter session, one feels miserable and depressed. There
| is nothing delightful, nothing new you learned, no new friend you
| met. It's horror. Like the news, but then 10 times worse.
|
| Wait, sometimes there's non-hateful tweets too. 99% of them are
| self-congratulatory or stupid. Something like: "My 3 year old
| just commented that an intersectional approach in politics is
| most effective".
|
| Attention starved, completely made up. Yet for sure it will get
| thousands of likes. Both hate and idiocracy are richly rewarded.
|
| To stay in line with the ever narrowing Twitter culture, one has
| to use it at least 6 hours per day. Otherwise, you might miss
| that word you used your entire life suddenly being problematic.
| Could even be a particular emoij. Anything triggers outrage.
| Anything at all. It seems the entire point of Twitter: maximizing
| outrage perpetually.
|
| It's a Twitter thing and a Twitter thing only. I've never
| experienced it with such intensity anywhere else, and I'm merely
| lurking. The reason I hate it so much is that it goes beyond just
| a website sucking, its effects are cultural.
| bqe wrote:
| I think the simplest solution to this would be to simply hide
| comment/retweet/like counts. It will be possible to sort of
| figure this out from the engagement, but it won't be easy to
| figure out if a tweet is popular or wildly popular.
| idownvoted wrote:
| Gee, who would have thought the culture on Twitter is experienced
| as hostile by some (ie all normal people).
|
| Never once in the last years have I opened the app without
| closing it 10 mins max later in exasperation of disgust.
|
| It really brings out the worst people, it brings out the worst
| _in_ people as some of the worst people ,,bring out" Twitter.
| rhacker wrote:
| Feel free to respond with get over it, but BLOG.twitter.com HAHA.
| thrower123 wrote:
| Maybe just blindly copying what your competitors are doing isn't
| the greatest strategic plan.
| pmulard wrote:
| I use twitter daily and fleets was nothing more than an annoyance
| to me. I would click on someone's profile picture to view their
| profile, and it would automatically make me view their fleets
| instead. Even after watching them (or skipping through to the
| end), I would click it again and it would still take me to their
| fleets. Getting to their profile took several taps on tiny
| sections of the screen instead. The UX was pretty terrible imo
| and made me frustrated more than anything.
|
| I like the idea of fleets, but I think it was implemented poorly.
| They just copied the same 'story' format that's been recycled
| 100x over. I think an alternative exists out there, twitter will
| just have to be a little more creative.
| molasses wrote:
| Never seen the option in compose for a fleet? How do you do one?
| charcircuit wrote:
| Hit the add button in the area where other people's fleets show
| up.
| dnissley wrote:
| It was a mobile app only feature
| throwawayswede wrote:
| Sure, like this wasn't just a grab at the quick growing market of
| social voice chat apps like clubhouse last year. What a bullshit
| org.
|
| Twitter management is synonymous with incompetence.
| udfalkso wrote:
| They should just have been normal tweets that disappear after X
| hours. No special location, no visual treatment, etc. Just
| ephemeral tweets that don't stick around forever on your profile.
|
| That would have gotten people tweeting when they might have been
| afraid to otherwise. That would have been the appropriate
| equivalent of the features they were inspired by on other
| platforms.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| aidaman wrote:
| That was a trashcan. Glad they are getting rid of it.
| spoonjim wrote:
| > Although we built Fleets to address some of the anxieties that
| hold people back from Tweeting
|
| Those anxieties are driven by the fact that every week someone
| destroys their career or even life with a single Tweet. In the
| worst cases, people have been driven to suicide by the backlash
| to a Tweet of theirs. Unless you are an aspiring celebrity trying
| to build a career or get a book deal from your Twitter persona,
| the rational move on Twitter is to not play.
|
| Twitter has the levers to fix this -- they can reduce the
| exposure of highly viral Tweets, especially by non-celebrities
| (i.e. people without a lot of existing followers). However that
| would greatly harm Twitter's business model because people love
| mobbing on someone and punching them in the face. So the answer
| to, "why are people hesistant to Tweet?" is that Twitter has
| decided that it's in its best interests to encourage a highly
| toxic form of entertainment on its platform.
| fleddr wrote:
| In typical Twitter fashion, all of the horror you describe its
| users would call "accountability".
|
| But yes, when people are afraid to use their own name, auto-
| delete tweets, and do all of this for not getting in trouble
| for middle-of-the-road views, you know you're in an extreme
| place.
| figassis wrote:
| I think there is a limit to how much this type of microblogging
| can grow. Some people are just not into broadcasting every
| thought. Also, the immediate fallout of many tweet missteps as
| well as cancel culture is sure to hold many back.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| I never saw Fleets. Were they made available to everyone? I use
| Twitter primarily on the desktop, but I don't think I saw it on
| the iPad app either.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| it's mobile app only. They are on the top, like instagram
| stories
| Tycho wrote:
| It was incredibly annoying how it took up significant real estate
| at the top of the screen and there was no way to disable the
| feature. Good riddance.
| charcircuit wrote:
| It didn't though. It took up 1/8th of the screen and it wasn't
| sticky. If you scroll down it's off the screen. Is it really
| that big of a deal that you can't see an extra tweet when you
| are all caught up?
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Kudos to Twitter for pulling the plug on a high profile feature
| that wasn't working out.
|
| I saw some reasonably interesting Fleets at first, but it quickly
| devolved into a low-effort self promotion feature as they noted:
|
| > Although we built Fleets to address some of the anxieties that
| hold people back from Tweeting, Fleets are mostly used by people
| who are already Tweeting to amplify their own Tweets
|
| Eventually I stopped clicking on them because I knew I'd see the
| Tweets during my normal scrolling anyway. I suppose this problem
| is inherent to Twitter, where Tweets are already low effort
| enough that they didn't need another feature for rapid-fire, low-
| effort content. Contrast with Instagram where people's posts are
| generally well thought out, but their stories are made for rapid-
| fire content.
|
| Twitter didn't have the same divergence, so Fleets and Tweets
| became the same content in different formats. And of course, the
| Twitter self-promoters took full advantage of a feature that let
| them bubble their content to the literal top of people's feeds.
| btown wrote:
| The one thing that Fleets had going for them, that I think
| Twitter needs more than anything, is the fact that they are
| _fleeting_. Many people, myself included, are afraid to tweet
| something inane on main, lest we forget to delete it (or lest
| it be archived by a crawler), and have it taken out of context
| years later in a way that might damage our careers.
|
| But it doesn't follow that "something is fleeting, therefore it
| is deserving of the rarest real estate on the screen." And the
| read-between-the-lines reason is that now it's Spaces that are
| more deserving of that real estate. "Ephemeral Tweets" are
| something that should be experimented with separately, perhaps
| as an option on a normal tweet and prioritized within the
| algorithmic timeline itself... but reusing the Fleets branding
| and presentation probably isn't the right way to do it!
| mdoms wrote:
| Most fleets in my timeline were solely to make fun of fleets.
| cpeterso wrote:
| The feature name "Fleets" was terrible. I know it was a pun on
| "fleeting tweet", but the word "fleet" just makes me think of a
| fleet of ships.
| cableshaft wrote:
| I just heard of it today and I assumed the same, like it was a
| fleet of people getting together or something, not 'fleeting'.
| charcircuit wrote:
| and tweets makes me think of birds it really doesn't matter
| [deleted]
| colesantiago wrote:
| Why did Twitter kill Vine?
|
| This is why pretty much why TikTok exists and filled that space
| very quickly.
| yoursunny wrote:
| I see Fleets as a thing that takes up a row in the Twitter mobile
| app, but I never clicked it. Now I hope Facebook says goodbye to
| Stories.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Oh, finally. Who knows, maybe we'll soon get rid of stories in
| WhatsApp, too!
| bigdang wrote:
| One thing I never understood about Twitter, and what keeps me
| from tweeting, is why on earth everyone needs to see how many
| likes, replies, and retweets my tweet has? I will never be a
| Twitter influencer, and have no desire to be. I just want to
| tweet one-off learnings or thoughts I have without the awkward
| struggle of trying to compete with others.
| renewiltord wrote:
| If it helps if you can't see them, then you can use Ublock
| Origin and block on ##div[aria-label$="
| like"] ##div[aria-label$=" likes"]
|
| And you will probably kill off that bar below your tweets.
| Saint_Genet wrote:
| If you think people are held back from tweeting by anxiety, how
| would you ever come to the conclusion that videos are the
| solution?
| cratermoon wrote:
| Yeah this explanation smells. Reading between the lines, I'd
| say that twitter fell prey to a couple of bad predictions. The
| widely-maligned "pivot to video" that ended up being based on
| FB fudging the numbers for how much engagement video got, and
| the idea that duplicating the success of IG or TikTok is just
| about enabling 30 second video snippets.
| adolph wrote:
| _Vine was an American social networking short-form video
| hosting service where users could share six-second-long,
| looping video clips. It was founded in June 2012; American
| microblogging website Twitter acquired it in October 2012,
| before its official release on January 24, 2013._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vine_(service)
| erehweb wrote:
| Inflated FB video numbers have been known for a long while
| now - references to it in Sep 2016
| https://www.facebook.com/business/news/facebook-video-
| metric...
| bogwog wrote:
| The contrast on that text makes me feel like they don't
| want anyone to actually read it.
| the_reformation wrote:
| I think the idea was the anxiety was that tweets aren't
| ephemeral enough.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Fleets are not videos. They can include videos, optionally.
| renewiltord wrote:
| What makes a fleet a fleet isn't a video, it's that it's
| transient. You can make a text fleet. Or could.
|
| If you've never used a fleet and have read the post, you can
| use the text from it "Most Fleets include media" to conclude
| that there exist fleets that do not include media. Video is a
| form of media. You can then conclude through pure syllogism
| that fleets do not require video.
| [deleted]
| irq-1 wrote:
| > Most Fleets include media - people enjoy quickly sharing photos
| and videos to add to the discussion on Twitter. Soon, we'll test
| updates to the Tweet composer and camera to incorporate features
| from the Fleets composer - like the full-screen camera, text
| formatting options, and GIF stickers.
|
| So more like TikTok and less thoughtful. Twitter became big
| because people (sometimes) expressed coherent thoughts and used
| it for serious issues like the Arab Spring and #timesup.
|
| It's much harder to foster conversation but this feels like an
| 'Innovators Dilemma' moment for Twitter: either go low and be a
| poor TikTok or go high and be something different.
| mrRandomGuy wrote:
| Why would I want to _watch_ someone's fleeting thoughts when
| their written tweets serve literally the same purpose?
| jaqalopes wrote:
| ... we hardly knew ye!
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| > Although we built Fleets to address some of the anxieties that
| hold people back from Tweeting
|
| Did Fleets address the problem of political extremists using
| Twitter to go after people's livelihoods?
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| They probably do actually - they disappear after a short time
| and you can't link to them.
| par wrote:
| > Although we built Fleets to address some of the anxieties that
| hold people back from Tweeting, Fleets are mostly used by people
| who are already Tweeting to amplify their own Tweets
|
| this is exactly my problem with Twitter. It's an even bigger echo
| chamber than FB. As much as I try, I can't seem to escape the
| oversaturated bubble of a handful of extremely loud mouthed
| tweeters and their ardent followers. Mix in the toxic
| conversations, and it's definitely not a place I feel comfortable
| discussing anything.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _It 's an even bigger echo chamber than FB._
|
| The trick is to block early and often. The feed is what you
| make it.
| arkitaip wrote:
| This simply doesn't work. I've tried every tool and trick
| available and sooner than later the feed becomes filled with
| drama, politics and random noise. Partly because humans are
| inherently social and political, partly because Twitter will
| throw random tweets and topics at you.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| I'm on at least my 15th account. Speaking as something with
| a barely-serviceable love-hate relationship with the
| service... You have to add people slowly, and be quick to
| unfollow if you notice a disturbance in the force. Even
| though I'm keen on programming and related topics, I don't
| follow a lot of very-popular IT-type folks because of the
| drama they bring, ESPECIALLY "infosec" Twitter. I've
| noticed that's a bubble among bubbles. I love a lot of the
| folks in that bubble, but I won't follow them because The
| Algorithm gets heavily weighted with them.
| Raineer wrote:
| Hah - I was hoping I wasn't the only one doing this. In
| addition to just not being good at "viral twitter", I
| never have any followers because I nuke-and-pave probably
| one a year with a new account.
|
| As you called out, most of what I follow is infosec
| twitter. And the drama ratio is high. I'll follow someone
| because they do genuinely create a couple excellent
| technical posts or links, only to find out they are trash
| and I spend the next month hearing about it.
| ggreer wrote:
| I can't block the topics that Twitter constantly recommends.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| This is it, no matter what words you mute, no matter how
| much you block/mute users. Twitter considers it of the
| utmost importance that they get to push content, politics
| and news they consider important in a 3rd of the screen,
| always.
|
| The last thing I care about in the world is what employees
| at Twitter consider valuable to put in the "What's
| happening" column.
|
| Twitter could do with taking a page out of TikTok's and
| oldschool Reddit's book at making their app about me and my
| interests and passions rather than being a megaphone for a
| few insufferable bluechecks and twitter employees that I
| struggle to hear my interests from under the cacophony of
| things I do not care about.
| taytus wrote:
| > As much as I try, I can't seem to escape the oversaturated
| bubble
|
| Pro tip: Mute words and people.
|
| I can't tell you how much better my experience has been since I
| started growing my muted words list.
| astrange wrote:
| You can't mute anything in a link though, so it can't be used
| to block spam or people who reply to everything with their
| gofundme.
| RankingMember wrote:
| Thanks for pointing out that muting words was even an option!
| That seems like a super useful feature.
| papito wrote:
| I don't understand how it's even usable if you follow hundreds,
| let alone thousands of people.
| zarriak wrote:
| You really just need to follow one good Twitter account and
| they will usually retweet other people who are interesting and
| usually share a characteristic that led you to followed the
| original account.
| umeshunni wrote:
| Got it, so build a bigger echo chamber.
| hluska wrote:
| Or be judicious about who you give attention to. Over the
| last couple of years, I've made a concerted effort to
| follow smart people who I don't agree with. Sometimes this
| has proven that I'm wrong and other times, it's made me
| feel more secure in my own beliefs.
|
| There's a difference between smart and toxic. Some smart
| people are toxic. Others are smart and passionate. If you
| work to follow people like that and work harder to read
| their words with an open mind, great things can happen.
| hackmiester wrote:
| By this standard, any social group is an echo chamber.
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| Who cares? Friend groups are an echo chamber too.
| TillE wrote:
| Yeah I dunno why people on HN seem to struggle with Twitter
| so much. You choose who to follow! It's entirely under your
| control.
|
| If someone starts being annoying, unfollow them. It's really
| simple.
| robryan wrote:
| It is hard to escape, a lot of the people who occasionally post
| interesting things are also the ones that post 20 times a day.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| Sometimes I get the impression that Twitter is like an un-
| moderated comments section, where people comment on comments.
|
| Almost like an infinitely connected comments sections, bringing
| many of the challenges of the once-isolated comments sections.
| DaniloDias wrote:
| I currently look at Twitter as a destination for socially
| approved statements.
|
| Twitter is a place where you are either celebrated for having
| approved perspectives or risk professional destruction.
|
| New users can only be craven popularity chasers. Old users
| either conform or quit. Why would anyone play in that sandbox
| if you have any respect for diverse opinions?
| fleddr wrote:
| Yet the difference between socially approved on Twitter and
| in the real world is massive.
|
| I imagine that quite a few Twitter-socially approved
| statements would raise a lot of eyebrows in the real world.
| for being plain weird, nonsensical, or the listener simply
| not able to understand it at all.
|
| I imagine a subset of things said on Twitter and/or tactics
| used will make you wake up in the hospital when applied to
| the real world.
|
| This is why hardcore Twitter users tend to be so shocked when
| the election results come in and learn that a vast majority
| of people do not support their view.
| insin wrote:
| If you're using Twitter on a desktop browser, I made an
| extension which by default removes everything but what the
| people you're following are actually saying or commenting on,
| and automatically switches you back to the chronological
| timeline when Twitter tries to move you back to the algorithmic
| timeline:
|
| https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter#tweak-new-twitter
| ziml77 wrote:
| I found this extension last year and I love it! Thank you for
| making it.
|
| No more bullshit injected into by feed or forced upon my
| eyeballs from the right column and everything stays in the
| correct order. Twitter is vastly improved by your extension.
| leviathant wrote:
| Be selective in who you follow, and if you're following someone
| who shares interesting thoughts but retweets too much, you can
| turn off their retweets. That in combination with being
| judicious on the block button makes Twitter one of my favorite
| social networks.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Absolutely don't use the block button, they can tell you've
| blocked them and it can open yourself up to harassment. Use
| mute instead.
| nyuszika7h wrote:
| You can also unfollow them, or soft block (block and then
| unblock, which forces them to unfollow you), which are both
| noticeable but not as bad as a hard block.
| markdown wrote:
| > you can turn off their retweets.
|
| How does one do this?
| leviathant wrote:
| Navigate to the profile of the account you'd like to stop
| seeing retweets from. Click the circular icon with three
| horizontal dots to the right of their profile picture.
| Select the first option in this menu labeled "Turn off
| Retweets."
| duxup wrote:
| I found pruning and cultivating collections of 'good' twitter
| accounts just too much work for what it was worth.
|
| The accounts are all run by human (well I hope they are) and
| all prone to the same problems that make me not like Twitter
| ...
|
| At least most folks maintain some focus on the topic /
| decorum on their blog or in a random article. Most seem
| incapable of ignoring the attention you get from being a jerk
| or typical twitter drama and etc.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| I am careful but Twitter still shows tweets that people I'm
| following have liked. And they always seem to be the most
| enraging tweets (presumably with great engagement).
|
| Basically I want my Twitter to be a politics-free zone, but I
| can't help it if some of the people I follow occasionally
| like political tweets.
|
| Also, today it has been sending me a push notification to the
| same race politics tweet repeatedly even after I keep
| dismissing it. The author isn't anyone I follow and the tweet
| wasn't liked by anyone I follow - Twitter is desperately
| trying to get me to see it though.
| Notorious_BLT wrote:
| I believe you can add "suggest_activity_tweet" to your
| muted words under Privacy and Safety. I'm fairly certain
| this still works.
| coldpie wrote:
| Yes, I really wish there was a way to turn that off. I
| personally use Twitter almost exclusively through a 3rd
| party Android app (Twidere) which just shows me my timeline
| in chronological order and nothing else. Seems most of the
| problems with Twitter comes from it not just doing that.
| camyule wrote:
| Switch to "latest" view instead of "home" and you receive a
| chronological timeline without seeing the liked tweets. I
| can't imagine using Twitter without this. See the
| instructions on how to switch on this Twitter support
| article: https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-
| timeline
| leviathant wrote:
| Yes! I forgot to include this particular step.
|
| I've heard that viewing Twitter exclusively through the
| Lists feature also removes a bunch of cruft, but things
| aren't so bad for me that I've had to try that out.
| delecti wrote:
| Change your timeline to "latest" from "home", and you will
| stop seeing tweets liked by people you follow.
| tills13 wrote:
| I agree with you but don't all the actions you mention turn
| Twitter into an even larger, more strict echo chamber?
| leviathant wrote:
| To continue the analogy, I might say that rather than
| creating a larger echo chamber, it's moving into a well-
| tuning studio space. An echo chamber is cacophonous, a
| well-tuned room improves clarity by reducing excessive
| concentration of individual frequencies.
|
| Arguably, the curative approach lets me hear higher quality
| content from folks who have different perspectives than me,
| compared to just leaving the floodgates open.
| jjj123 wrote:
| I'm not sure you can make that assumption.
|
| Part of what makes these social networks echo chambers are
| the unconscious ways we navigate them: how long we linger
| on a post, stay in the site, etc. I'm not sure whether
| conscious decisions like being judicious with the follow
| and block buttons would pull you into more of an echo
| chamber than the algorithm does, especially if you're
| selecting for things other than "this captures my short-
| term attention span."
| browningstreet wrote:
| I add people to Lists and then let some of their tweets get
| pushed into my timeline. Another way to manage over-tweet-
| ers. Didn't know about blocking re-tweets though. Off to do
| that to a few people.
| jdeibele wrote:
| I use lists. I found https://github.com/KrauseFx/twitter-
| unfollow which moves all of your follows to a private list.
| Then move people from the private list to a topic list.
|
| I also use Tweetbot on my Mac, which allows me to filter
| retweets. That means I only see what people say. I do use
| another filter on my National Basketball Association list to
| block a certain keyword.
|
| The downsides of Tweetbot is that it doesn't support everything
| that Twitter offers (polls, probably fleets, etc.) and is about
| $10.
| underwires wrote:
| yep, I use lists and it helps a lot with this. Twitter got a
| lot better for me when I put all the hot take tweeters into a
| list and unfollowed them, then only check that list when I
| feel like going there. Which is not often
| topicseed wrote:
| I had the same issue and for me it was about "Topics" I
| followed (e.g., computer programming). They were surfacing
| nonsensical self-absorbed tweets so I unfollowed these topics,
| and since then, my feed is a lot better.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I agree. Twitter is too unpleasant (for me) to use.
|
| I know there are ways of actively managing it to reduce the
| toxicity, but that's a lot more work than it's worth to me.
|
| At least as far as what keeps me off Twitter, Fleets missed the
| point entirely.
| rst wrote:
| You're describing what the algorithm tends to promote --
| turning it off (the "latest tweets" feed) may give you a bit
| more variety.
| thallavajhula wrote:
| Twitter is great when it comes to transparency. I love how they
| included this
|
| >Although we built Fleets to address some of the anxieties that
| hold people back from Tweeting, Fleets are mostly used by people
| who are already Tweeting to amplify their own Tweets and talk
| directly with others. We'll explore more ways to address what
| holds people back from participating on Twitter. And for the
| people who already are Tweeting, we're focused on making this
| better for you.
|
| It's always nice to know why an experiment/project failed. They
| didn't have to explain it, but they did and I thought it was a
| nice touch.
| gumby wrote:
| > Although we built Fleets to address some of the anxieties
| that hold people back from Tweeting, Fleets are mostly used by
| people who are already Tweeting...
|
| That makes sense in retrospect. I have a twitter account but
| have only used it a handful of times when it was the only way
| to complain to a company (!). I read tweets only when someone
| links to them.
|
| Perhaps something even more lightweight would have attracted me
| but I'd never even heard of this product.
|
| It's a difficult problem to publicize an addition to a service
| to those non-users who aren't actively looking for features.
| riffic wrote:
| > Twitter is great when it comes to transparency
|
| Are you kidding? This is an incredibly opaque and user-hostile
| company.
| mdoms wrote:
| Perhaps people are anxious about tweeting because a single
| tweet can ruin your life?
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| That is the reason most of my colleagues and I have no
| account there, never had, never will. Same for FB, Instagram,
| etc., the only exception is LinkedIn where nobody is posting
| anything.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| This is why I purge my old tweets automatically.
|
| Nothing good has ever come from someone digging up old edgy
| tweets.
| berniemadoff69 wrote:
| archive.org scoops up all kinds of tweets - deleting them
| isn't really a safe way to get rid of it, just fyi
| thereare5lights wrote:
| Do those archive let you search for tweets?
| berniemadoff69 wrote:
| sort of - if you search the wayback machine for something
| like http://twitter.com/username/* - it will list all the
| tweets it has - and then a user can download everything
| and search locally. so, it's not as simple as searching
| by keyword, but it might be something to be aware about,
| if you are concerned for that kind of thing
| notJim wrote:
| The pseudonymous alt is the way to go for this, unless
| you're mostly using twitter for things related to work. I
| bet some of your colleagues have alts :)
| salt-thrower wrote:
| You're being downvoted, presumably because of the idea that
| "if you don't say anything stupid, you'll be fine." And yet
| acceptably edgy jokes from 10 years ago can easily become
| dumpster fires of controversy today. There's simply no reason
| to engage in it unless you treat every social media post as
| something you would say to all future employers. Including
| private chats.
|
| EDIT to add: I feel like we are have seen a shift in how
| social media is perceived by society. It used to be an
| extension of the internet forum days, where there was a
| reasonable expectation of anonymity and an employer scouring
| your online persona was considered a breach of trust. But now
| as more and more public discourse happens online, and places
| like Facebook enforce using real names, that veil of
| perceived anonymity (even if it was an illusion at the time)
| has completely fallen.
| stalfosknight wrote:
| This right here is why I just lurk on social media.
|
| There are too many examples of a forgotten offhand remark, a
| harmless off-color joke, or that one time you had a bad day
| and thought you were just venting to the handful of close
| friends who are the only people you think even know about
| your Twitter account coming back many years later to bite you
| in the ass when a future potential employer (or goodness
| forbid the media) decide to go spelunking in your personal
| social media and essentially treat that version of you from
| 11 years ago as the same person you are today.
|
| Twitter makes it way too hard to mass delete old tweets or
| otherwise exercise fine control over whats on there.
|
| With social media, the only way to win is not to play.
| josephorjoe wrote:
| Completely agree.
|
| The last warning I needed was one time >10 years ago while
| listening to a song I really liked I just posted one of the
| lines from the song on facebook.
|
| A friend of mine saw it and assumed it was a commentary on
| a political event that had happened that day (it wasn't)
| and assumed that it meant I held a certain political
| opinion because of this (I didn't) and then was suspicious
| of my claims that posting the song lyric meant nothing more
| than i was enjoying the song and felt like sharing.
|
| Since then I always assume anything I reveal online will be
| taken out of context and held against me, if not
| immediately, some day...
| dionidium wrote:
| I tweet and I really enjoy it. I get a ton of value out of
| it.
|
| But I think about deleting my account every day, because it's
| an enormous risk for normal people.
| ruined wrote:
| tweets can't ruin your life any more than talking out loud
| anywhere else.
|
| the long searchable record is certainly convenient for
| digging dirt, but public speech is public speech.
| josephorjoe wrote:
| your first point (tweeting is as safe as talking) is
| entirely invalidated by your second (long searchable record
| helps find statements to criticize people for)
|
| as for your third point, undocumented public speech (no
| audio or video recordings and no effective note taking) is
| vastly different from creating public documents (anything
| on the open internet).
| salt-thrower wrote:
| The searchable digital record is the key difference.
| Statements out loud to one or more people are often: A)
| tailored to that audience, B) carry much more context than
| a piece of text on a screen, and C) are a way of growing
| and exploring new ideas without the commitment of recording
| them to an easily searchable record for the rest of time.
| The long-term ramifications of saying something stupid in a
| conversation that isn't recorded are far less severe than
| they would be if every word you said was recorded and
| searchable forever.
|
| A tweet is really more like submitting an article to a
| publication of record with your name and face attached to
| it. But, the ease with which twitter allows people to post
| makes it seem more like an ephemeral conversation. Anyone
| who has been burned by a stupid joke tweet from 10 years
| ago learned that lesson the hard way.
| fullshark wrote:
| Easy to find "bad tweets", easy to immediately publicize
| the "bad tweets" to the entire planet almost instantly,
| easy to have it trusted that the bad thing was said as the
| twitter timestamp exists and a bunch of trusted people
| talking about a screenshot if you delete it confirms it's
| genuine, not to mention most people don't use twitter
| imaging themselves giving a rehearsed speech in a public
| square, merely as a way to share their amusing thoughts to
| the planet for some immediate validation, the dynamic is
| pretty different.
| ruined wrote:
| >most people don't use twitter [imagining?] themselves
| giving a rehearsed speech in a public square, merely as a
| way to share their amusing thoughts to the planet for
| some immediate validation
|
| and there's the problem.
|
| like any tool, speech is dangerous if you don't respect
| its power and follow some basic safety rules.
| salt-thrower wrote:
| Yup. I mentioned this in another comment but one of the
| key problems is the discrepancy between the impact tweets
| really have, and the ease with which Twitter allows you
| to post them.
|
| Any social media is designed to maximize engagement, so
| there is almost no friction between "I have a thought and
| I want validation for it" and hitting that submit button.
|
| In reality, you should think of a tweet like submitting
| an article to the New York Times op-ed section with your
| full name and face attached to it. It has the potential
| to be there forever, and for people to judge you based on
| it for the rest of your professional life. So tread
| carefully.
| px43 wrote:
| Please point to one person whose life was ruined from a
| single tweet, and who didn't deserve it.
|
| Yes, it exposes unapologetic racists and misogynists. That's
| a good thing. People who genuinely learn from their fuckups
| are generally called out, but their lives are hardly
| "ruined".
| telotortium wrote:
| David Shor - he was impulsively fired by his firm last June
| for just a tweet linking to academic research (I think by a
| black academic) that argued that violent protests following
| the MLK assassination reduced the share of Democratic
| support in the following presidential election, while non-
| violent protests increase Democratic support:
| https://www.vox.com/2020/7/29/21340308/david-shor-omar-
| wasow.... David Shor is a committed socialist and
| Democratic data scientist, but that was not enough to
| protect him from accusations of racism in the post-George-
| Floyd period.
|
| I think he's done okay for himself after his firing, but
| being summarily fired for supposed racism always poses a
| high risk of long-term negative career impact, no matter
| how trivial the supposed deed was that precipitated the
| firing - David Shor wasn't even making an edgy joke, or
| implying anything negative about minorities.
| px43 wrote:
| In the responses I read through on twitter, no one
| accused him of racism. People were upset that in the wake
| of a tragedy he seemed to only care about getting blue
| votes, which is pretty insensitive. Also, just like you
| said, he's doing fine now.
|
| The claim that tweets are ruining lives gets repeated
| over and over again, but it's a complete myth. It's a
| conflation of actual actual racists and nazis getting
| outed and ostracized, and people getting mildly called
| out for doing something dumb, but those are never the
| same people.
| fossuser wrote:
| Being able to set retention would make me feel better about
| tweeting.
|
| You can do some of this with third party tools, but it'd be
| nice to have it built in. I stopped liking Tweets though
| because it's actually impossible to remove more than 3k old
| likes. I was eventually able to do so, but it required
| contacting their DPO office and having them reset the cache
| each time so I could remove them in batches (entire process of
| reaching out, getting a response, and iterating took 6weeks-
| ish).
|
| Limiting quote-tweets would also help people since most of the
| abuse comes from quote-tweeting rather than replies (which you
| can already limit).
|
| I'm not twitter famous so I mostly only experience the good
| aspects of twitter.
|
| If you have a highly curated feed and make an effort to
| interact pleasantly with in-good-faith people it can be a
| really great place. It requires aggressive blocking and
| intentionally not following hostile people though. Some better
| blocking tools would probably also be helpful (block everyone
| who liked this tweet, etc.)
|
| I'd also love a YouTube Premium style twitter where I could pay
| $10/month for no ads.
|
| It's cool they have the culture to ship something big like this
| and decide to pivot - I think that's a pretty good sign.
| tadzik_ wrote:
| > I'd also love a YouTube Premium style twitter where I could
| pay $10/month for no ads
|
| tweetdeck.twitter.com is their first-party client that
| doesn't have ads (and also gives you an actual chronological
| feed and some other niceties).
|
| Interestingly, it also never implemented Fleets.
| chrisofspades wrote:
| Wow, I completely forgot about tweetdeck. Thanks for the
| reminder.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| > block everyone who liked this tweet
|
| It'd be more efficient to have a twitter mode where you can
| only ever tweet, and not read anything other people tweet.
| fossuser wrote:
| And also no value?
|
| I'm guessing this is primarily snark, but there are a lot
| of tweets that are pretty good signal of bad behavior. I'm
| not talking about some nuanced difference in opinion. For
| the tweets I'm talking about knocking out everyone that
| liked it wouldn't be a big deal.
|
| Sure some may use this to craft an echo chamber for
| themselves, but they're already doing that anyway - and a
| lot of people 'hate follow' to stir up abuse intentionally
| to drive traffic. These people wouldn't find this tool
| valuable because they feed off of the nastiness to drive
| engagement and grow their audience.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| I use likes to auto bookmark tweets to pinboard.
| Obviously I could figure out another workflow for this.
| But right now it's super simple. It would be nice to not
| "like" tweets I don't like myself but want to bookmark.
| Wonder if there is a low code way way around this.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| What's the state of Twitter API these days? Can some company
| really build their own app on top of Twitter feeds?
| isiahl wrote:
| You can but they heavily limit the amount of access tokens
| your app can generate, artificially limiting the amount of
| users your app can have.
| vosper wrote:
| You certainly can if you're a paying customer of their data
| services. Source: work for a paying customer.
| quaintdev wrote:
| What I do
|
| 1. Bookmark instead of liking tweet if info is worth coming
| back to.
|
| 2. Retweet if I totally agree and want to share my view with
| my followers
|
| 3. Add people to different curated lists instead of following
| them.
|
| Twitter has some excellent feed curation tools but not many
| people are aware about them.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| I second bookmarking. It's bad that they don't export it on
| the data export, and you can't scroll down after a certain
| limit, but at least it's private. And they seem to be
| planning on adding API support for bookmarks, so in the
| future we can just export it that way
| pjc50 wrote:
| > anxieties that hold people back from Tweeting
|
| Have they, like, asked people?
|
| Also, do they need more people to tweet? It's not like the
| platform is short of content. Isn't there a role for the
| comfortable lurker?
| paxys wrote:
| Twitter started off as a low-effort life blog, and is now
| almost entirely a platform for amplifying celebrities and
| politicians. It definitely needs more normal people tweeting
| about normal things.
| jl6 wrote:
| Twitter has loads of normal people tweeting about normal
| things, but they are down in the very, very long tail, and
| ~nobody follows them. Into the void they scream.
| mombul wrote:
| Also, who's going to feel less anxiety when filming
| themselves vs. typing?
| astrange wrote:
| The idea worked for Instagram, where the aesthetic for
| regular posts ended up so forced nobody wanted to just make
| random everyday posts anymore.
|
| For Twitter I didn't see the use, though posting a Fleet
| does bother people less than spamming, they're too hard to
| make without ending up ugly.
|
| I'd rather see a change where the search doesn't let you
| stalk random people by searching for what they posted 3
| years ago...
| jimkleiber wrote:
| Makes me think (and shudder) about how one could make
| filters for text. I partially regret saying this and also
| still curious :-)
| isiahl wrote:
| Microsoft already did it, it was called Word Art
| gumby wrote:
| They have to change; their market cap is much lower than the
| other "majors" and actually the usage level (and subscriber
| base) is lower too.
|
| It's like the inverse of reddit: reddit has a very high Alexa
| score yet is invisible in the public media; Twitter is
| discussed endlessly by the nattering nabobs, called before
| congress etc, yet has trouble monetizing their infamy.
| bachmeier wrote:
| I think there's a real concern on Twitter's end with the
| conversation being dominated by those who are "good with
| Twitter". That's a big problem because it's kind of a
| snoozefest to read tweets by a small in-group that you don't
| know and that won't interact with you. Twitter serves no
| purpose without interaction.
| partiallypro wrote:
| Which IMO is why Twitter allowing users to lock their
| replies is actually damaging to Twitter. Now people just
| Quote Tweet it instead of replying.
| bachmeier wrote:
| I understand the motivation behind allowing users to lock
| replies, but you don't need Twitter for that type of
| content. Twitter sucks for just about anything other than
| interaction.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| What should I use instead of Twitter to just keep up with
| what people are talking about in my topics of interest?
| manojlds wrote:
| Yes, they would definitely want more people to Tweet.
| [deleted]
| dheera wrote:
| I didn't even know about "Fleets", maybe that was part of the
| problem.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Yeah I actually really respect that they axed something within
| a timely span, posted about their thoughts, and well, lately
| the Twitter team has been killing it as far as deploying
| features and long talked about stuff, so it's all good. The
| idea of Fleets, whether it was inspired by Stories etc, was
| another way to engage users and it did have some usefulness. I
| love the 24hr disappearing thing on IG and I liked it similarly
| here.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| The glaring omission is a time limited typo edit window. Just
| ducking ship it already.
| notatoad wrote:
| They did, like a month ago. You gotta pay for it though...
|
| https://ibb.co/S6WNLvt
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| wut da duck?
| renewiltord wrote:
| It's a feature like Gmail Undo Send. The tweet remains
| unposted until the edit window has been exited.
| chmod775 wrote:
| I would think that a big problem here is to _only_ allow
| correcting typos, not changing meaning of a tweet - which
| would suck for a public, fast-paced platform like twitter.
|
| This isn't as simple as counting the number of changed
| characters, especially when you have to consider at least
| dozens, better hundreds, of languages.
|
| But then again you can already cram about ten times as much
| meaning into a single tweet if you write in Chinese or
| Japanese, so maybe they just don't care.
| saurik wrote:
| Instead of rendering it as hidden or even as an edit
| history, render it with an "inline diff" (using the kind
| of algorithm you see Wikipedia do, or GitHub within a
| line) as a cross-out of the old content and the next
| content next to it... changing a lot of text like that
| would be extremely noisy and obvious--to the point where
| it wouldn't accomplish any evil goal and would also just
| be generally discouraged by its nature--and yet would
| fully solve the vast majority of cases that we want to
| satisfy.
| kyrofa wrote:
| I don't think it needs to be that in-your-face. I believe
| an inline "this tweet has been edited" link to a revision
| history or diff would thwart most abuse.
| kyrofa wrote:
| > I would think that a big problem here is to only allow
| correcting typos, not changing meaning of a tweet - which
| would suck for a public, fast-paced platform like
| twitter.
|
| I feel like GitHub already solved that problem by showing
| an edit history on comments. Twitter could do the same
| thing.
|
| Even easier: don't actually publish tweets for 60
| seconds, during which time they can be edited.
| afavour wrote:
| Facebook already has similar edit functionality and I'm
| curious how many users click through to see the edits.
| I'll be the number is not high.
|
| The speed Twitter moves I think a lot more people are
| going to mash the retweet button than the "see edits"
| button.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| Also will all the retweets be edited as well or do you
| retweet a snapshot?
| isiahl wrote:
| Facebooks edit history is also hidden in grey text next
| to the timestamp. I bet putting a "This tweet has been
| edited" notice actually inline with the content would be
| effective.
| kyrofa wrote:
| Exactly my thought.
| zerocrates wrote:
| Having a time where it's not actually posted would work
| fine but probably not be super effective: after all, you
| already have an unlimited amount of time to look at the
| message sitting on your screen before you actually send
| it. It's just often very hard to read your own writing
| for typos. Still it would be a step forward. You could
| even make it opt-in.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| How about a preview then?
| kyrofa wrote:
| Haha, I swear every time I wish I could edit a tweet it's
| within 5 minutes after I post it. To be fair, at least
| with my incredibly limited followers, that's soon enough
| I can just delete it and post it again without losing too
| much engagement, but still. I'm just not patient enough
| to proof-read properly, apparently.
| xeromal wrote:
| No one would actually look at that though. You need to
| cater to the masses or make it exceedingly obvious
| kyrofa wrote:
| It would make it easy to call out anything nefarious,
| though.
| sg47 wrote:
| Wondering if you can implement it as a redirect. Instead of
| editing the original, the tweet redirects to the modified
| version but the original still shows up as a quote tweet or
| as a reply (with all replies to the original tweet under
| that reply)
| Gaelan wrote:
| I wonder if there are technical issues here? It wouldn't be
| too surprising if "tweets are immutable" (and therefore
| safe to aggressively cache) is an assumption baked into a
| lot of their code.
| staticassertion wrote:
| I could imagine that, though I think there are likely
| many efficient ways to implement immutable edits,
| especially if:
|
| a) You're constraining the time-to-edit b) You're
| constrained to a single edit
|
| But it could be a lot of work to ensure that it's a
| consistent experience since you'd have to untangle the
| "cache this thing for-literally-ever" expectations that
| may exist.
| dfabulich wrote:
| It's not just technical. Jack doesn't want it.
| https://www.wired.com/story/jack-dorsey-wont-get-edit-
| tweet-...
|
| > _Dorsey was unusually direct: "The answer is no," he
| says._
|
| > _"The reason there 's no edit button [and] there hasn't
| been an edit button traditionally is we started as an SMS
| text messaging service," explains Dorsey. "So as you all
| know, when you send a text, you can't really take it
| back. We wanted to preserve that vibe and that feeling in
| the early days."_
| user-the-name wrote:
| Jack really is just a blithering idiot. There are plenty
| of reasons you could give for not adding this feature,
| but that one, that's probably the worst.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| Why though? It's bad enough when online news sites edit
| their articles and a later version carries some different
| information with no or little hint that it was edited.
| user-the-name wrote:
| I mean, yes, that is one good argument for not having an
| edit button.
|
| But it is not the reason Jack gave.
| blowski wrote:
| ...and I like when people aren't constantly cynical and
| critical of everything, so thanks for finding something
| positive here.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > Twitter is great when it comes to transparency
|
| Pull the other leg.
| npunt wrote:
| I didn't love Fleets personally, the medium was mismatched to
| Twitter's niche of a public social network. Ephemeral media is
| ideally paired with a small/private network to maximize personal
| expression.
|
| The next question is will LinkedIn kill Stories? I'd guess
| they're probably noticing similar low usage levels, but
| operationally they might not be as open to killing experiments
| quickly.
| jacobmischka wrote:
| > Our Fleet ads test, which concluded as planned last month, was
| one of our first explorations of full-screen, vertical format
| ads. We're taking a close look at learnings to assess how these
| ads perform on Twitter.
|
| Glad I stopped using twitter a few months ago.
| sharkweek wrote:
| IMO this should be the default feature of Twitter.
|
| I can't think of anything I'd be SUPER embarrassed of in my
| Twitter history, but context is important and something I might
| have Tweeted 10 years ago would look bad today, maybe.
|
| Still, I make it a point to delete all my tweets after they're a
| week old or so. Not interested in my random musings living on for
| all of digital eternity.
| Zababa wrote:
| > Still, I make it a point to delete all my tweets after
| they're a week old or so.
|
| I do the exact same thing, I think it's the only sane way to
| use twitter.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| In my opinion, there are a few issues with this strategy:
|
| - Your Tweets may be archived on another site anyway
|
| - You may delete a Tweet that others hold onto for spite
| (screenshot, archiver, etc.) and then you don't have the
| surrounding Tweets to link to in order to show context
|
| - If your good Tweets get linked to/embedded from other sources
| then those links will go bad
|
| I've found the only safe strategy with social media/society is
| just to be very careful/clear/explicit with what you Tweet in
| the first place so that it can't be taken out of context.
| Perhaps that's unfortunate, but that's reality.
| vosper wrote:
| > Your Tweets may be archived on another site anyway
|
| Or in the databases of one of their data stream customers, or
| in the database of someone that customer made the data
| available or on-sold it to. If you're a Twitter customer
| you're supposed to read and apply their stream of updates and
| deletes to your database, so that when someone deletes a
| tweet in Twitter you delete it too, but in practice Twitter
| doesn't seem to care or enforce that this happens. It's also
| just a lot from a technical perspective, the volume of these
| changes is large.
|
| The only reasonable behaviour is to assume that your
| government (local police, military, whoever - probably
| multiple separate agencies) has all your tweets, forever. Not
| because they hacked Twitter or had the NSA tap the lines -
| they just bought the data from someone Twitter sold it to.
| Twitter probably doesn't even know who these down-stream
| buyers are.
|
| (I know for a fact this is happening)
| quanticle wrote:
| > _I 've found the only safe strategy with social
| media/society is just to be very careful/clear/explicit with
| what you Tweet in the first place so that it can't be taken
| out of context._
|
| Twitter, as a medium, is anti-context. The UI, the character
| limit, the behavior of the most prominent voices on the
| platform, everything encourages you to post hot takes that
| require as little context as possible to drive engagement.
|
| Being "careful/clear/explicit about what you Tweet in the
| first place so that it can't be taken out of context" is
| equivalent to not Tweeting at all.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| > everything encourages you to post hot takes that require
| as little context as possible to drive engagement.
|
| > Being "careful/clear/explicit about what you Tweet in the
| first place so that it can't be taken out of context" is
| equivalent to not Tweeting at all.
|
| No, I don't think it's the same as not Tweeting at all. In
| my experience it just requires self control (which we all
| lack sometimes and mess up as I certainly have). I _mostly_
| use Twitter to tell my friends and my small number of
| followers what I 'm working on and my opinions on things
| related to domains I have some education or experience in
| (software, economics, education, etc.). You can use Twitter
| for mostly professional and anodyne topics. Saying the
| constraints of the platform encourage you to post hot takes
| is like saying the constraints of modern working life
| encourage you to eat junk food. It's true, but it is by no
| means forced.
| mdoms wrote:
| I use Tweet Delete[0] to auto-delete my tweets older than a
| month. I see no value in keeping old tweets around, especially
| compared to the risk that I inadvertently become briefly well-
| known and some wokes decide to trawl my timeline, take some
| tweet from 12 years ago out of context and convince my employer
| that I'm racist or something. Seen it happen too many times.
|
| [0] https://tweetdelete.net/
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| deleting tweets is somewhat pointless when you consider
| existence of things like wayback machine.
| jdlyga wrote:
| Today I learned that there was a feature called Fleets.
| p4bl0 wrote:
| Same here, and I still don't really understand what it was.
| Even though I've been on twitter for almost 14 years.
|
| EDIT: it seems it was some kind of "stories" like they are
| called on other platforms, the feature was only available
| within the mobile apps (I've never used the apps I use the
| mobile website, this explains why I've never heard of fleets
| before).
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Maybe someone can correct me, but I don't recall ever seeing a
| website fundamentally change itself or evolve and grow whereas I
| have seen time and time again something entirely new coming out
| and being the thing people use instead.
|
| If you compared Twitter today to Twitter's first tweet, it's the
| same thing. Nothing's changed with the site itself; I can see
| people talk about how they ate a sandwich then and still today.
| uDontKnowMe wrote:
| Reddit started out as a text-based discussion forum for use on
| desktop and has slowly morphed into endless-scroll-of-
| images/gifs/streams on mobile.
| firloop wrote:
| Instagram copying Snapchat's Stories is the canonical example
| of this working, which makes sense that Twitter tried Stories
| as well.
| bloudermilk wrote:
| I use Twitter basically every day and never even knew this
| existed. What are Fleets?
| charcircuit wrote:
| It's at the top of your timeline. People can make tweets that
| last 24 hours.
| yodelshady wrote:
| My resistance to tweeting is a) even 280 characters isn't even
| for almost any useful content, b) hate mobs.
|
| Put simply: if you wanted the most intelligent view that opposed
| yours on a subject, would you _ever_ use Twitter?
|
| I humbly suggest social media could work better, based on a
| variant of reddit's "place" pixel art stunt:
|
| 1) you post freely and anonymously, but others can hide your post
| freely and anonymously as well.
|
| 2) if you want to restore your post, just click a button to do
| so. No one individual could hide a post twice.
|
| 3) if it's hidden again, you'll have to retype it. My bet is -
| most low-effort trolling won't go this far, but those who
| strongly believe in a controversial opinion will.
|
| 4) maybe escalate further with time delays, CAPTCHAs, etc - but
| ultimately, if you're definitely human and you really care, the
| post's visibility should become immutable.
| latexr wrote:
| > most low-effort trolling won't go this far
|
| Quite the contrary, my bet is trolls would have a field day
| with your proposed system. Why make inflammatory post when you
| can instead annoy people by hiding their posts and making them
| retype everything?
|
| It doesn't matter how "strongly [you] believe in a
| controversial opinion", having to keep fighting to keep your
| post up would tire anyone.
|
| My prediction is the outcome of such a system would be the
| opposite of what you envision: only the most boring
| inconsequential opinions would stay up.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Maybe I'd be in the target group (rarely say anything), but I
| didn't know that it existed.
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