Twitter is an optimal conduit for narcissism, trolling, harassment, mobbing, astroturfing, demagoguery, and manufacturing consent. The medium shapes the discourse, and Twitter encourages and amplifies bad behavior while inhibiting intelligent and thoughtful conversation. Even if it didn't architecturally push you toward this behavior the scale alone enables every bad behavior you would expect if you scaled a single IRC channel up to a billion people. There is no way to "fix" this. It is its nature.
It is a technology that exists because it makes a few people a ton of money and gives regular people a dopamine tweak along with heaps of suffering. It is the online equivalent of a crackhouse.
Based on my experiences with Twitter, this is totally correct, but you forgot one key part: echo chamber.
In addition to doing all that you describe, Twitter also encourages you to ignore anyone claiming otherwise - somebody has a difference of opinion? Block and unfollow!
I'm pretty anti-social-media in general, but Twitter is definitely among the worst.
Hacker News is as much, if not more, of an echo chamber as any Twitter newsfeed is. At least on Twitter you can choose your echo chamber, and if you desire, even fill it with opinions from diametrically opposite sides of an issue. You can simultaneously follow @GoldmanSachs and #OccupyWallStreet, for instance. You have no choice on Hacker News, except to subscribe to an echo chamber generated by some nebulous algorithm subject to in determinant cognitive trickery.
The reason Hacker News and Twitter enjoy such high engagement rates is precisely because they are echo chambers. Groups tend to share opinions and tastes, so naturally enjoy the same clusters of reading material. I enjoy the echo chamber at HN, because the opinions of the group that composes it are important to me. I haven't been able to hook myself on Twitter, but I imagine it's because I haven't found the right echo chamber yet.
Twitter and Facebook have been pretty effective for Yes campaigners in the Scottish Independence referendum. It's taken the No Thanks folks by surprise by how effectively it's being used.
Social media can be a force for good under certain circumstances.
"Twitter encourages and amplifies bad behavior while inhibiting intelligent and thoughtful conversation."
Ok. So, how is Twitter unique here? How often do you read an intelligent and thoughtful article in your local newspaper? Doesn't your local cable news channel choose to focus on the 'bad' instead of the 'good'? Or are you living in some alternate universe?
The 140 character limit and general focus on brevity encourages people to drop specificity and shift to bold proclamations and absolutes.[1] This is guaranteed to cause miscommunication and hurt feelings. The resulting arguments are impossible to effectively reason out at 140 characters. And even if you do work it out in another medium (email, phone call, etc) - the re-tweeting spreads the old arguments like wildfire.
[1] When the concept "some people in Philadelphia suck" hits a character limit, what gets removed? Exactly. Now someone who's just had a bad experience with a particular person is shouting to the world "people in Philadelphia suck". And having said that, in that way, the larger scope is re-inforced into the writer's brain and tied to their ego and pride. Cue screamfest.
This is a really good point. An interesting psychology experiment could measure the susceptibility of subjects to stereotype threat after they read a given newsfeed. I hypothesize that because of the "priming" effects of each newsfeed, subjects who read the same set of tweets would score similarly on the stereotype test. This would be in like with the results of the famous John Bargh study where subjects subconsciously decreased their walking speed, for instance, after reading words related to the elderly.
It's a scary thought that the opinions of society can be clustered by similarity of Twitter newsfeeds. That sounds ripe for manipulation and propaganda dissemination.
Except that "people in Philadelphia suck" isn't a shorter way of saying "some people in Philadelphia suck". It's an entirely different statement.
Why not shorten it to "some Philadelphians suck"? It's shorter and, arguably, more accurate.
>The 140 character limit and general focus on brevity encourages people to drop specificity and shift to bold proclamations and absolutes.
I disagree that the limit encourages vagueness, bold proclamations, and absolutes. Those are side effects of not stopping to think about how to effectively convey a greater-than-140-characters thought in less than 140 characters (without changing its meaning.)
Which is the point. The character limit creates miscommunication because people wind up submitting something other than what they set out to communicate.
> "Those are side effects of not stopping to think about how to effectively convey a greater-than-140-characters thought in less than 140 characters (without changing its meaning.)"
So you're agreeing that Twitter, as a medium, presents a unique challenge to how most humans communicate in most other media and requires special consideration and effort?
Beyond good and evil, the problem is actually the noise.
The simple Follow/Unfollow button is not enough since Twitter got mainstream. You have to do a lot of manual maintenance to keep your stream relevant and interesting.
I would argue that you are correct, but I wouldn't limit it to Twitter. There are many crackhouses -- even hacker news can be one (though thankfully, our junkies remain civil and politely die in a corner where no one sees them). It is never as easy to be inhuman to someone as when hiding behind the veil of apparent anonymity.
I wonder what would result out of the opposite concept - enforce a minimum of characters per post. Of course, no longer being a quick release for vapidity, such a social network would be doomed to fail, but the outcome might be interesting nonetheless.
In a completely unrelated matter, I liked the Dave Matthews Band before they were cool.
Seriously though, the revelation that the "unwashed masses" now dominate a platform is pretty much commonplace. Twitter has, for me, become a news stream and very little more.
I did an experiment where I recorded and released a song a day, and nobody really noticed; I promoted via social media and all that, but really, there's so much noise, so much of a firehose, that unless you are watching the stream when something posts, you're going to miss it.
It's neat in a way, but it's also, exactly as the author says, no longer the intimate gather place.
> Twitter has, for me, become a news stream and very little more.
It has for me as well.
I just checked and I have tweeted exactly once in the last year, it was when I was on vacation in march. Before that, it was August 1, 2013.
However I still frequently use twitter. I have a highly curated followers list which results in 70-80% of the tweets I see being relevant to me. When I am waiting in line, or waiting for my food at a restaurant if I'm eating alone, or am just bored, it is a great way to get highly curated content without having to do really anything.
I don't know if I've ever said this before, but some of the comments on the article itself are pretty spot on.
> I can´t see where is the problem with a platform in which you can choose who to follow and what tweets you ignore/pay attention to ??? works just fine for me. I devote some time to "edit" twitter, I mean MY twitter.
> The great thing about Twitter is that if your signal:noise ratio is wrong, you have no-one to blame but yourself: resolute use of the Unfollow button cures all ills!
It's kindof like reddit, if you unsubscribe all the defaults and follow topics you are interested in (some of which get crazy specific niches and have relatively active communities for how specific a niche may be) your experience will increase ten-fold.
The greatest difficulty is that you may follow someone you like, but that doesn't necessarily mean you'll like their stream, and it can be difficult thing to ascertain based on a paltry handful of latest statuses.
Honestly I'm surprised they haven't started influencing the order non-chronologically, I'd love to prioritise certain people I know IRL or bump certain hashtags.
I completely agree with you, I would love more control over tweet priority.
However, I think part of what makes twitter more unique is that you can't. With reddit and HN, I _only_ see what enough other people have upvoted to a point which intersects how many pages I'm willing to scroll through at a given time.
With twitter though, I find just as much unique (at least to my eyes) content as I do elsewhere. There are a lot of people creating a lot of great content and there are not enough upvotes to bring a sizeable portion of it to the masses. And in the end it primarily comes down to post time, title, and luck. But then with twitter I at least see an article title for a sizeable portion of it.
> but that doesn't necessarily mean you'll like their stream
There is a semi-popular programmer that I care a lot about the project he works on and think he is a tremendous developer. However he sucks at twitter. Consistently. And that's okay, I do too, which I why I so rarely actually tweet myself. But after a few days of following him I had to unfollow him because he tweeted a lot and they were driving me crazy.
Prioritizing has to be done automatically, there's no way you could do that manually. And yes indeed, this is what has to be done. A system that "hand picks" exactly the items (not the whole feed) you'd be interested in, automatically, from a cluster of like-minded users.
It's not just random people with egg icons though. I'm getting the sense too that people, even smart people doing interesting things, are taking the medium so seriously now that there's a lot of bickering.
It may be bigger then Twitter though as reaction time becomes smaller, so does the backlash.
The service purposefully limited to naturally content-light context-light 180-character quips—whose intent is to broadcast and be broadcasted to unfiltered—achieves its destiny.
The result is natural and unavoidable. I'm so happy we're beginning to realize it.
Seriously though, this is one of those unmeasurables that's difficult to nail down. Sure you could blame it on changes to the UX, or on the user-base itself, or any number of other reasons. But in the end, you've gotta look at the nature of the form of communication itself and its parameters and assumptions, and make a conclusion at face value.
It's 140' but yeah, you nailed it. Synthesis ability is a good thing. In longer constructs, that is. We don't base our lives on aphorisms alone. Sometimes we really need to be verbose. Sometimes we really need to read "à la recherche du temps perdu".
Twitter is just heading to its natural destination, a place where people share links and headlines and quick comments of little to no value.
All the "revolution instrument" narrative is plain bullshit, too. A high percentage of what you'll have on your timeline is nonsense in no particular order.
Only thing I save: lists. Useful for news gathering, but not much more.
I watched a Noam Chomsky youtube video recently, where he said something similar about TV news. The amount of time you get is only about enough to throw out some half-baked soundbite i.e. "XXX are terrorists", "All benefit claimaints are scroungers" and if it doesn't reiterate whatever the perceived wisdom of the day is, there's no way you'll get enough time to make a point.
I don't use twitter but i imagine the 140 character limit must be much worse. Facebook might be generally vacuous but at least there's enough space and persistance of thread that it's possible to have something of an intellectual discussion.
I think a character limit is a good idea, but it should be closer to 400 or something. It should force people to be concise, but not force people to divide their message in multiple posts. I don't really know where the sweet spot is, but I don't think it's 140.
I use twitter for one thing and one thing only - moaning at companies, ie. supermarkets, train companies, airlines etc. who have given me bad service. They're surprisingly responsive.
Other than that, I find twitter little to no use at all. There are better places to get my news from (RSS).
It's probably better described as the end of "small Twitter"--the time when everyone on Twitter wanted to be there. Today many people on Twitter just ended up there because that's where the celebrities are. They have no sense of community or allegiance to a "culture" of the service.
Every single popular technology goes through this phase. For example, people used to dress up to fly on airplanes. Look around the next airport you're in and think of that.
On the Internet, Usenet's "September that never ended" was the most famous of many such transitions.
"I have found that my greatest frustrations with Twitter come not from people who are being nasty — though there are far too many of them — but from people who just misunderstand."
This is not different from life outside of Twitter (or Facebook or Instagram or The Internet for that matter). It's life. A fraction of people will always 'misunderstand'. The Internet has generally attracted open and eager people to the platforms it builds, but as things go more mainstream, you're going to get some 'normalcy'. The Internet population becomes the rest of the global population.
People are growing out of things, thinking platforms are getting old but forgetting that sometimes it is simply them that are in fact struggling to adapt to fast evolving ways to use a concept as generic as Twitter.
I'm not saying that he is necessarily wrong about the recent changes in the timeline but it does sound a bit like "things were better when we were the kings of the hill"... you don't hear the Bieber and Lady Gaga fans complaining about Twitter...
>People are growing out of things, thinking platforms are getting old but forgetting that sometimes it is simply them that are in fact struggling to adapt to fast evolving ways to use a concept as generic as Twitter.
Yeah, but sometimes services, even as generic as Twitter, simply fade off too.
If the platform is designed to cluster the users based on their interests automatically, you'd have early adopters and normal people co-existing without bothering each other.
Well, HN used to be much more technical early on, so I'm sure some would argue it's already happened.
Long gone are the days of waking up to a front page full of Erlang posts in an attempt to scare off the general public whenever there was press about HN. I think it's been accepted that HN is more just general interest about startups these days.
I don't think that HN is less technical than it used to be. It has always had mixed content. Perceptions of it are perennially mixed as well—someone was just asking me why there hasn't been much startup news on HN lately.
I still think HN is full of mostly relevant discussion and a good bit of it is higher quality than you find elsewhere. I really think it's still reddit before reddit became mainstream. Reddit was technical/intellectually focused from what I remember. Now it's a bunch of trolls in most places (some sub reddits seem to avoid this). Hopefully HN is niche enough to stay about where it is now.
I don't know, as I'm writing this there are about 7-10 posts that are actually technical on the front page. The rest are product announcements or fluff tech articles from Wired. Actually, some of these technical posts (like GHC passes in Coq) are feature announcements as well.
That's not to say I don't enjoy HN, it's great, but I certainly could use less of the "Show HN" startup announcements on the front page or techcrunch articles that are about nothing.
Yeah, I guess the takeaway is that Wired and Techcrunch have been terrible for a long time ;)
I still find both of those archive grabs more interesting. They're certainly not all posts just for the neckbeards, that's not what ever drew me to HN, but they don't lean so heavy towards "Show HN: Please look at my startup".
A few years ago, it would have been "How can/should spending and saving evolve over a person's life?"
I know that's a specific and perhaps pedantic example, but there's been a definite shift in the vibe on Quora, from a place where users hoped to contribute insight, to a place where users feel entitled to receive it.
I also think it has happened already: I want to search for questions about the big bang, I'm typing lazily, expecting the system to auto complete my intent; but when I am at "big b", the suggestions are: "big brother", "big breasts", and "big booty".
The kinds of conversations I have seen on Quora and arguments about god and other things have led me to believe it's already kind of overrun with silliness.
I have never had a Twitter account, nor have I ever posted to Facebook (although I do have a page, so the press have a nice picture of me in case I'm kidnapped or something, as well as 50 or so "friends", although I have no idea who many of them are or where they came from). So I don't quite get what this guy is complaining about. How was posting to a privately owned (by someone else) but publicly broadcasted platform, designed to attract freely contributed content in order to build an advertising channel, ever supposed to be "intimate"?
You should have a Twitter account. I have a Twitter account under my real name with a keyboard smash password, just to ensure no one else can take it. Same with Facebook.
Having name providence provides some amount of deniability though. If there's multiple accounts with the same or similar then it takes deliberate effort to create mistaken identity.
I'm not a heavy user of Twitter, although I've been a member since 2008. Mostly I check in a couple times per week with a few people that matter to me. The first time I noticed just how bad the 'people just misunderstand' effect now is, I was observing Richard Dawkins argue on his Twitter about simple logic concepts, and the people that were arguing against him could not grasp even rudimentary concepts of logic. It was terrible to observe.
Or another example: I randomly ran across Dax Shepard making a point about sugar consumption and the rise of diabetes ( https://twitter.com/daxshepard1/status/498145203639685120 ). Many replies were pointing out that type 1 diabetes isn't acquired from a sugar heavy diet (which was blatantly not his point). Type 2 diabetes is over 95% of diabetes cases in America, and that's obviously what he meant. Could the audience be that stupid?
I suppose it's the MySpace'ification of Twitter; that point where mass-appeal or distribution has been reached. I don't think I've seen any mega-sized, public service that this hasn't happened to (it's a non-stop complaint on Reddit for example).
For me the benefit of Twitter is access to its social graph. I still don't personally see the benefit of Twitter as a communication channel. It is amazing for mining connections between people. In this respect I've found it an invaluable resource.
It definitely shines as an ad-hoc organizational tool - from it's original coming-out party at SXSW where we all found a new way of figuring out where the best (or shortest lines for) parties were, to massive protests in the Middle East and beyond.
The days of caring about every person's every move may be waning, but I don't see Twitter becoming less relevant. Its original Big Bang of instant information dissemination for large loosely organized groups is still hugely important. Or so it seems to me.
I'm sorry but this doesn't make sense for me nowadays. I'm not a big account (close to 1.5k followers) and I suffered serious trolling, threatening and harassment due political ideology (striking harder on electoral campaign). My notifications were full of their tweets.
First, I blocked them and report them to Twitter. I got their accounts suspended but they came back within a few days. This lead me to a different strategy and mindset. I saw their tweets but I "felt" them as what they were: noise.
Do you know that pain-in-the-ass noise that you ignore after a while? Somebody drilling, i.e. That kind of noise.
When I realized this, I didn't care about them. I just passed through them, ignoring actively. They eventually stopped harassing. They became powerless.
With this experience I developed a fine sense to detect useless discussions, allowing me to even get in one on purpose if I'm bored enough. Even if I'm in the mood I can answer them but when I do it I use to be right on the spot. They tend to stop after two or three tweets.
I think everybody should develop this kind of mindset around Twitter. Obviously, this won't work in other types of harassments beyond "intellectual" one. They should be dealt in more severe ways.
I tend to do this on Reddit. I'll try to have a meaningful conversation with people who demonstrate they want one in return, but all those little glib snarks, gripes or quips that the lazy (ie me from time to time) post get ignored, even if they really do warrant a response.
Reddit has a mechanism where you can tag individuals so familiar trolls can show up in comments like a sore thumb. Twitter needs something similar. Not Block/Unblock, but some kind of user-controlled colour-coding so the eye knows easily what to skip.
reddit's mechanism is a (third party?) browser extension (RES) - I'm sure that one already exists for Twitter... or could easily be built in a weekend/hackathon?
I follow a small number of people. The people I follow are followed by a small number of people.
This creates more of a small room atmosphere. If you piss all over the place, you're going to be back online tomorrow with the same folks.
Over and over again I learn the lesson that Twitter as a broadcasting medium sucks. Twitter as an open chat room is tolerable. More accessible than IRC.
I suspect others are coming to similar conclusions.
My conclusions are similar. My follower/following ratio has been stable at about 90/100 for a while now. Those that lose quality in my eyes or are no longer relevant to me (because I do not use their product anymore, etc.) I unfollow rigorously. Signal to noise ratio is one of the best out there IMHO, even with annoying promotions. I would really welcome any suggestions for something better. Only small thing I would improve is enabling people to answer on pms, even if they are not followed by the account that pmed them.
Twitter demands a lot of hard manual work in order to stay interesting. It doesn't have an efficient filtering mechanism. Follow/Unfollow button will not do.
I tried showing this problem from a different point of view - we get overloaded with popular stuff that we don't care about.
Twitter is useful and interesting, but your idea of rich conversation is shallow or weak if it was ever satisfied by conversations that were had 140 characters at a time.
Well, it is the only platform where "famous" people (or their agents) have personally replied to me. Nobody would even bother to read my tweet if it was longer. It is as rich as it can get.
I've found it interesting that Twitter is a completely different experience for Chinese speakers, where it acts more like a 70-word limit would for us.
Don't undersimate the power of 140 characters. It helps you convey your thoughts. Take Plato's Republic as an example, most of the conversations could have happened in twitter-form, and not much would have been lost (assuming that some replies would be two or three tweets long).
Perhaps The Republic would have been even better in tweet form, because all the bits where someone says "yes, Socrates" could have been replaced by simply favouriting a tweet.
This is fantastic news. Openness isn't inherently good; sharing everything and allowing others into our lives isn't automatically better.
Not only because of the attacks and general constant stream of stupid "content" that comes from even the most interesting of people, but since social networks make us unhappy.
Hopefully people will stop using broadcast based social networking. You heard it here first, one to one communication is the next big thing (tm)
So... FWIW, I totally don't have these problems with twitter. It's probably because I only check my twitter feed and spout out a few tweets at a time once every two weeks or so and pretty much ignore it the rest of the time.
Full disclosure: I don't use any other social network besides twitter, either. It's because it's so non-committal that I can deal with twitter...
The same frustrations (and more) are constantly levied against Facebook (as well as nearly every other platform). The reality is, however, that people are joining much, much faster than they're leaving. So even if 1 in 10 hates a platform and refuses to use it, that is negated by the 5 that are joining.
In my own limited experience, Facebook has changed less than Twitter from the perspective of conversation dynamics, to the extent that I now prefer FB, while I used to prefer Twitter.
For one thing, FB is less "flat". On FB, my updates only go to my FB friends, or optionally to "friends of friends". They are the only people who can either see or comment on them. So the size of my friend list has a large effect on discussion dynamics. That grows pretty slowly, so my FB experience hasn't changed too much. On Twitter, I could have a "locked" profile, but the norm is to post publicly, and certain things that are iconic of the platform (like retweeting) don't work if you're locked. There is also no "friends of friends" option, so you're either locked or public.
That wasn't a problem until recently, but in the past year or so, there seem to be a lot of people (sometimes called "randos") using the search functionality, and sending weird, often abusive, replies to people they don't even know, because of a tweet that came up in a search. The "virality" of retweets also accentuates that. Sometimes an offhand comment ends up read by 1000+ people because a chain of people retweeted it, and then there are all these really out of context replies by people who aren't even within three degrees of relationship to me. That can be welcome sometimes, and not welcome other times. Once in a while, if you're unlucky, something you say will get retweeted in a negative context by someone quasi-famous, which results in this weird swarm of mindless acolytes. And some of those acolytes feel the need to dig up your contact information and harass you outside of Twitter as well, even though 30 seconds ago they had no idea who you were, and still really have no idea who you are. These kinds of dynamics just aren't that enjoyable imo, and not worth the effort it takes to deal with them, so I've been using Twitter less.
If your growth is always in new markets, that might be because "they're not onto you yet". Eventually you run out of markets. If your product is unchanged yet early adopters leave because some quality you have no control over changes the experience, that could be a really bad sign.
Basically, this is just the lament of the early adopters realising that as a space gains more and more users, the more it begins to reflect the mainstream regular person. That's okay, in my opinion, and I disagree with the premise of the article. Personally, I still get tonnes of value out of Twitter. I follow a lot of people I admire, and a lot of my friends, and my Twitter feed has none of the toxic bickering that it's come to be known by, so I disagree that Twitter has crossed a precipice and can only ever be a negative force in your personal life. But, hey, that's just like, my opinion man.
I only use twitter for its nlp signal, I have zero interest in actually posting or worst still, actually reading any of it. twitter is like youtube comments, without the video. But it's great for what the aggregate signal it contains.
I was just starting to really like Twitter. Is it really the end? I have my doubts. Something is going to have replace it first, and it wont be Facebook since Facebook has conflicts family and private groups with public sharing.
It is a technology that exists because it makes a few people a ton of money and gives regular people a dopamine tweak along with heaps of suffering. It is the online equivalent of a crackhouse.