just came across an example. I saw a retweet and thought "that's self-evidently false", started looking at the replies, and then decided to mute the original author... turned out it was someone I had already unfollowed, because they were tweeting nonsense. And the curation algorithm had deliberately shown me the most provocative tweet it could find from a person I'd unfollowed... Twitter is an unethical outrage machine.
Not long after twitter started showing me algorithmic recommendations, it decided to show me some comments that were so vile I couldn't help but call them out. The person responded by asking "Who are you and what are you doing in my replies?". Which was a valid question. Why was I there? I didn't want to be talking to that person. Why did I even see that content? Was I rewarding the algorithm's choice by responding? Gross.
Is that the new normal for twitter? Do I have to wade through enraging AI content as payment for following the creators I love?
No. If thats the trade, its a bad trade to make. I deleted twitter and I haven't looked back. There's some fantastic creators on twitter doing cool things. But there's too many interesting ways I could be spending my time to waste time dealing with that.
Twitter has a machine learning algorithm that actively steers people towards political/controversial content. If you choose to see tweets "recent first" to avoid this, Twitter will accidentally-on-purpose 'forget' this every few days, and return you to the AI-generated anger maximization feed. That's blatantly user-hostile behavior that wasn't present on Usenet or IRC.
Tools like Twitter have turned into an outrage sharing machine, perhaps unintentionally. Everything is a snippet, a short context and evidence free photo or video followed by lots of anonymous outrage.
There is also this virtual lynching on such platforms of often unlucky people without any due process, very primal. It's addictive but not healthy.
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.
Twitter is largely a platform for self-promotion. This Hough lady wanted to promote her snarky attitude and encourage her followers to dunk on people who leave book reviews on GoodReads. it's a good example of 'be careful what you ask for'; if you cultivate attention in order to be toxic, you can't really complain when that rebounds upon you.
It's often not the case that people see a mob forming and jump in, in most cases. What people see is someone they know quote-tweeting an obnoxious person, or someone they already follow saying something obnoxious, and they condemn the obnoxious behavior. The more engagement an original tweet gets the more likely other people are to see it in their feed, regardless of whether it's obnoxious, funny, or whatever.
One time I replied to a sanctimonious statement from a politician with a mildly critical but also mildly witty reply, read a few other tweets and went on with my day. I don't get notifications from Twitter and was astonished to find the next day that my tweet had blown up and been quoted in a national publication. In fact all of my 'high performing' tweets over the years have been casual witticisms, but I've never seen one take off in real time because I only look at it intermittently. I suggest that rather than an angry mob, what you're seeing is simply the aggregation of multiple similar reactions. Few to none of those were necessarily invested with enormous significance by the people making them, unlike a real world mob.
This is not to say, of course, that theren't people who like going around condemning others, and Twitter does have a habit of showing you multiples of people posting about the same thing, as opposed to showing The Thing once and observing that 10 people you follow have left comments about it.
I think the problem is some people don't just unfollow when they don't like tweets, they start a flame war. Worse, they will attack people they don't follow because one of their friend retweeted something for the sake of starting a flame war.
Add to that the fact that 140 characters are not enough to put nuances and develop an argument, and you get an environment that fosters trolls. It's not limited to a specific way of thinking (i.e. SJW)
The platform itself optimises for outrage and encourages it, explicitly worsens the user experience with the “algorithmic” timeline and stuff you don’t care about like tweets from accounts you don’t follow, etc.
You must be incredibly lucky, as I carefully curated my Twitter feed to a few scientists and some baseball figures and was still overwhelmed at the hate and awfulness on display. Twitter is for the hateful and gleefully cruel.
2/3 of Twitter appears to have no other purpose than to continually identify minor differences of opinion and perceived grievances, and then invite all your followers to castigate the offender.
I think it’s intentional on Twitter’s part. It’s FOMO: you see a hot take out of context and now your brain ~~wants~~ needs to know what the hell is going on, so you reward Twitter’s algorithm with lots of tasty engagement in your effort to figure out who pissed everyone off.
As a Twitter reader, you need to (given the very limited tools) control what comes into your feed. Yes, there's a lot of retweet-based outrage, but a bit of selective removal of people or their retweet ability helps with that. Or muting certain outrage keywords.
Whereas on the other end, the various sorts of Funny Twitter and Weird Twitter and Artist Twitter live off retweets, they're an essential and beneficial part of the experience.
What Twitter have done badly though is collapsed the disctinction between "like" and "retweet" by causing things that you like to appear in the timelines of others. Where they can then also like and retweet it, keeping it alive.
It's often amazing how bad twitter understand how their site is used by its communities. I suppose they focus on the paid "brand engagement" area, which is a social desert.
"Someone I don't like did something I don't like and I'm so angry and you need to know about my anger because that will make a big difference to absolutely no one."
I've kept my profile/account up, but I've stopped participating and nuked all but a handful of tweets that I thought may be a reference for folks, and didn't want to turn them into dead ends. It's too hard (or requires too much effort) to avoid the toxic stuff that makes Twitter a hellscape. I'd like to go back to the days when people didn't think everyone else was interested in them airing their bullshit to the world.
Twitter optimises for engagement. That's not optimising for controversy, but it's close. Shiri's scissor statements[0] aren't the fault of the people writing the training data; they're the fault of the people making them.
Twitter doesn't synthesise things, but it fosters an environment where people are driven to write more controversial, outrageous, engaging things by tight-loop-feedback classical conditioning. It's not magic – the people posting such things are partly to blame – but Twitter wouldn't have half as many problems if it just showed random tweets to people. Instead, it shows people what it thinks will keep people on Twitter; short term, that works, but long-term it destroys Twitter's value (and value of everything Twitter touches, as a side effect).
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