I don't see this happening. I see the opposite. With free reign to post "anything under U.S. law", content on Twitter will become even further optimized to get the most eyeballs. You'll see things that make you so mad that you just HAVE to reply. And on and on it goes.
Surely you've seen those Twitter/Youtube/Insta ads that would show a trivially easy puzzle (like, toddler-level easy), and show a person somehow failing it. "Can YOU solve it"? the add entices. Obviously. Of course you can solve it. It's designed to be brain-dead easy to cast the widest net, and to give you just that brief moment of discomfort while you watch someone ELSE fail (as scripted). And you want to dispel this discomfort, so you click on it (or, more likely, you scroll on, but you better believe that other people click on it).
It's like cigarettes. Everyone knows they kill you in the long run. But boy do they tickle those neurons that make you want just one more.
> Right now peoples twitter feeds are[0] 49% spam, 49% rage-bait, and 2% legitimate content. If that changes to[1] 99.98% spam, 0.02% rage-bait, and 8.16e-4% legitimate content, most people will probably stop using twitter
That's assuming the spammers can't figure out how to effectively troll the people who came for the rage bait into propagating their spam, but they can, because spammers are Turing-complete.
Obviously the people who came for the legitimate content will be destroyed. Or take up spamming.
> People are leaving the site because of it, and advertisers are pulling ads”
This seems to be, arguably, where the real problems start. I doubt many people expect Twitter to host actually illegal content. However, as long as a social media site is beholden to advertisers, it's going to have an existential requirement to pull certain content, irrespective of how they or anyone else feels about those restrictions.
Until Twitter can figure out a way to fund itself other than by advertising, the idea of it being a free speech platform is a pipe dream.
> I don't even know what that systemic action would be in the case of misinformation on Twitter
The whole premise of twitter is rotten, to fix it you would need to cut out vitality and the dopamine reward mechanisms. As long as twitter exists in the present form, it will have these problems.
Trying to fix twitter is like trying to fix a lawn mower; the machine is fundamentally dangerous to fools and you can't fix that without radically changing what the machine is. Deadman switch? They'll ziptie it. Warning labels? Unheeded. Paternalistic AI watching everything you do/read and trying to intervene when it thinks you're doing something stupid? Equal parts pipe dream and dystopian nightmare. Crowdsourcing fact checks? Proven a farce years ago.
> I've made several concerted efforts over the past 10+ years to use Twitter, with various accounts on various subjects, dutifully regularly posting, following, unfollowing etc. as per recommendations in articles such as this, but all I've ended up with is the sense of having wasted an enormous amount of time and got nothing worthwhile in return
Same for me. I did try to avoid any drama and keyboard wars, but it's simply not possible with how often the algorithm pushes political topics into the trends.
I'm thinking about blocking it in my router, i don't think i'll be missing out
> This is a simple solution that should make everyone happy
It won't, though, because the best feed algorithm for increasing engagement and stoking outrage and making money off ads is not the one that is best for fostering calm discussion and building a community.
Twitter etc. want you to use the engagement one, but in order to actually fix the social problems created by their platform, people have to use something else that will make them less money.
I personally think that's fine, but I doubt Twitter will be happy with that. And I'm not sure how you legislate a requirement that your platform isn't psychologically tuned to bring out the worst in people.
> Twitter is what you want it to be, topic-wise, based on who you follow and what they like to talk about.
I've tried this. It's false. It's a myth that Twitter users tell themselves, AFAICT.
Even disregarding the trending topics and explore interfaces, all it takes is for one of the curated members that you follow to retweet something you're not interested in seeing.
> What happens when Elon's "anything under U.S. law" approach kicks in is toxic behavior and arguments will get so extreme that it will drive millions of people away, and those who are left will see the quality of their feeds decline. Then many of them will bail, too.
But that's contradictory to your claim that Twitter is what you want it to be, based on who you follow, isn't it?
Because Twitter _isn't_ what you claim it is. Twitter is optimized for outrage-oriented engagement. It _wants_ to show you things that will encourage you to engage, to return, and there's nothing quite as engaging as content that upsets you.
> Twitter seems so persistently corrosive and unhappiness-inducing. Why is it?
> These are people using Twitter with good intentions
I've seen a few good articles on the phenomenon, but I think it boils down to the fact that Twitter encourages/rewards constant conversation and anyone can pop up in any conversation. As a result, it rewards the most abrasive people who tweet the most. No sane, well-adjusted person without an agenda to push (or a product to sell, etc) has the time or energy to continuously engage in Twitter at the amount required to become a big figure unless they are otherwise already famous.
In essence, Twitter is the same 5% of insane people driving everyone else crazy. The other 95% of passive consumers don't realize that most content they read on Twitter is written by negative people. That's just how the platform works. If you are a well-meaning person trying to engage with this mob, either you'll get tired of it and leave or you'll get dragged into the negativity.
There's multiple studies showing that active posters on twitter skew more negative and more politically extreme (left or right) than the average population. It's a collection of people with axes to grind yelling at each other.
If you want to test this theory, start aggressively blocking people who reply to tweets with negative opinions. You'll quickly start seeing those same people already blocked when you read the replies to totally unrelated tweets. It's a really small universe of the same negative people generating most of the content.
>My approach to Twitter has been to aggressively unfollow anyone posting content that I don’t want to be consuming. That ranges from constantly dunking on every opportunity to people who simply tweet too many times per day.
I tried this. You end up shedding a ton of follows and mostly end up with people who say nothing. Then a week later you like something that person says and refollow, then they say something again and get unfollowed.
I think fundamentally it's like the article says. twitter is just full of anger and paranoia. I can't say if it's twitter that creates this, but it certainly enhances. Twitter is the problem and quitting is your only option.
>happens to limit messages to 140 characters and that happens to create, unintentionally, a subtlety-free indignation machine, which is addictive as heck, so this is the one that survives and thrives and becomes a huge new engine of polarization and anger.
I am glad to see someone definitely smarter than me find this opinion too. As far as I can tell the only value in twitter is network effects and the total removal of nuance.
> I wonder if it's possible to avoid that, once it gets going. Twitter already seems like it's in the "garbage site" category, and they won't be able to fix that without throwing away the network effect that they depend on.
I think the real danger to Twitter is driving out the 'good' users because they don't want to be affiliated with the brand. The pandemic had the potential to end Twitter. To their credit, they realized it and did something about it.
A secondary concern is that the good users will start to retweet stuff that's borderline because they like what it says. I think we're already seeing that. There seems to be developing an attitude of "Well, it's not exactly correct, but it's probably sort of correct, so...[retweet/reply tweet]."
> Basically everything in your life gets a bit easier, because people are more scared to piss off someone with a lot of twitter followers
This is terrifying. Status online shouldn't bleed on all those other domains. Using your influence online to get things (or else I will tweet about you and the sky will fall on your head) is petty, and one more bad thing that social media has brought to our lives. Now we have to aim to please those who have amassed followers?
>Twitter was basically unusable for a week afterwards. Can you imagine that shit all the time?
I can't, because in such a situation I would just delete my account. Spending your time responding to or blocking and reporting all of them would be maddening, for sure, but that is what gives them their "power". It's easier to click only one or two buttons and just be done with it all. Let them have their little victory. Don't let some app be the doorway through which people can try to hurt you.
> The question we need to be asking is whether we should banish certain ideas to an echo chamber that the rest of us have no incentive to enter, or whether we should allow free expression of all ideas — no matter how repulsive — so rational minds may finally have an opportunity to prevail.
I don't think the person that believes Bill Gates is trying to insert microchips into people is going to listen to rational thought from you or anyone else.
Most normal people don't want to even see this kind of crap in their social feeds. There is just too much other interesting stuff to read on a daily basis. If Twitter doesn't remove this crap and decides to show it to me (because having an audience is a constitutionally protected right or something) I'm leaving Twitter and going somewhere else.
"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.
> And if you do that, Twitter then becomes a 280 character 4chan/8kun-like platform.
I feel like it's important to note during these discussions that twitter was a 4chan-like platform until it started doing political censorship leading up to the 2020 election, and it is currently a 4chan-like platform that practices political censorship and virtually no other type (4chan is a very successful and influential platform that other platforms, like reddit, imitated.)
You can freely follow any random person and reply "you're a fucking idiot" after every tweet they make, and twitter will not be interested. You can create a #fuckingidiot hashtag and organize hundreds of people under it with the sole purpose of harassing this one person. Twitter will not be interested in it, and will not censor you.
Twitter is not censoring for civility, it's censoring for orthodoxy.
> There are interesting people on Twitter but the algorithm just works like a slot machine that tries to keep you on the site no matter the cost, it's not optimized to serve you but to make you view more ads.
Yes. I don't know if it wants us to see more ads or be more "engaged". I'm currently fascinated by generative art and find a lot of interesting posts about this on Twitter.
Yet Twitter keeps showing me posts about politics that upset me; I can't help but "liking" some of those, which feeds the feedback machine.
I never follow any political poster but liking is enough. I could certainly block or mute all of them but that feels wrong, esp. people I fundamentally agree with.
I'm not sure what to do. Not use Twitter seems the best solution.
> Twitter is basically an internet scale public bathroom wall with everyone scrawling short hot takes onto the walls. The best case scenario has always been that it shut down and I hope we are one day closer to that eventuality.
I really don't see a problem with having an internet scale public bathroom wall for people to scrawl all over. Sure, Twitter is mostly spam and garbage, but so what? Every comment, however useless/offensive/entertaining/banal/silly/poetic/helpful/etc that isn't breaking the law isn't really a problem and no one is forcing you to read it.
I don't have much trouble ignoring Twitter entirely most of the time and the main issues I have with it aren't even about Twitter itself but with how people try to use it for things it is poorly suited for. It's the "journalists" who copy/paste tweets then call that an article I take issue with. Twitter is absolutely no place for presidential records, and shouldn't be the only place for any kind of important or official notification, or the only way to reach a company to get customer service.
There are certainty far better platforms for blogging, but lots of people like Twitter and find it useful. I don't see why Twitter should go away.
I don't see this happening. I see the opposite. With free reign to post "anything under U.S. law", content on Twitter will become even further optimized to get the most eyeballs. You'll see things that make you so mad that you just HAVE to reply. And on and on it goes.
Surely you've seen those Twitter/Youtube/Insta ads that would show a trivially easy puzzle (like, toddler-level easy), and show a person somehow failing it. "Can YOU solve it"? the add entices. Obviously. Of course you can solve it. It's designed to be brain-dead easy to cast the widest net, and to give you just that brief moment of discomfort while you watch someone ELSE fail (as scripted). And you want to dispel this discomfort, so you click on it (or, more likely, you scroll on, but you better believe that other people click on it).
It's like cigarettes. Everyone knows they kill you in the long run. But boy do they tickle those neurons that make you want just one more.
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