About the only thing you can do when someone says (or retweets) something totally idiotic on Twitter is either unfollow, or, of course, reply. In other words, there is no way to register disapproval without simultaneously calling attention to the very thing you disapprove of.
One of the absolute best features of HN is the downvote button and the way it is implemented. Downvotes are stronger than upvotes, and the downvoted content gets buried. A community that lets anyone join has to work hard to maintain a high standard. Downvotes don't kick people out, but they kick bad content off. Twitter has nothing like this, so the worst content gets the most attention. You can choose who you follow but users get no negative feedback on inappropriate tweets. So the norms shift towards whatever creates engagement, which is often outrage, fear, and strongly negative emotional content, with or without any rational foundation.
If Twitter wants engaging and constructive dialog, they need a way to take out the trash.
Unfortunately, Twitter's problem is that their potential for social good and their potential for revenue may never align. Since they are failing at turning a profit, it is unsurprising that they seem to be giving no consideration whatsoever to social responsibility.
Twitter is a little different because of its scale and the nature of its social graph. HN is a big room where everyone hears everyone else, Twitter is a giant switchboard where you plug in to choose your own mix.
Reddit seems to be something else, but I don't participate there so I don't know much.
Absolutely you are right that HN has a more mature mix of participants, but how does that situation continue? It cannot be solely by the direct efforts of the admins, however heroic, because the site is already too big for that.
The technical Magic has to complement the characteristics of the community.
I'd be interested to hear about what are the reasons and ways people find Twitter useful/interesting.
The thing I like about Twitter is who you can follow. Where else can you engage with Obama, Trump, etc. in a public forum? Without the big name political users, the press, the public intellectuals, Twitter would have nothing. The way the big shots are effectively equal to ordinary users is very democratic. I can @ the POTUS and at least in theory get a reply. There's nothing else out there that enables that kind of communication.
It's a shame that Twitter has done so little with so much. Think of the great newspapers of the past and how seriously many of them took their civic responsibility, and how they crowed about it in their editorial pages. They understood their role in society and the responsibility that came with the power they had. Yet here Twitter finds itself in possession of an unprecendented opportunity and they totally squander it. Completely oblivious to their social responsibility, they chase after ad dollars, and even there they fail.
The point of Twitter & other social media is empowering the user; they can encourage community members to step up and take civic responsibility, but Twitter's responsibility as such is to provide the platform rather than to run the show. I guess they could openly declare Twitter to be part of the DNC platform, but that would lose a ton of users (although not so much in terms of content). They're better off following a policy similar to Facebook of attempted neutrality.
Big trending hashtags are always going to have a large proportion of garbage in. Report the spam and pick out the gems with RT; it's even possible to make friends this way.
I don't think it's actually appropriate to just decide what random people who haven't @-ed you and are talking among themselves is inappropriate. If it's one person harassing another, then sure step in and/or report. The big problem is when a celebrity turns their followers on someone.
This Chrome extension worked perfectly for me: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/twitter-unfollow/m...
I've unfollowed everyone (eight years worth of following!), and have been slowly rebuilding the timeline. Strangely cathartic, and the FOMO fades quickly.
It's also nice to start from zero again, rebuilding your interests and filling your universe with thoughtful people in a deliberate and considered way. I wish more social networks made un-collecting as intuitive and organic as following/collecting.
I don't think users attempting to moderate others is a solution. It would reduce the diversity of opinions. The largest group would just push out unpopular opinions.
Instead you need tools that allows users to give themselves peace without punishing others. Maybe with the help of the followed/followers, i.e. some assistance from the social graph.
Downvoting on Twitter would need to have very different characteristics for the reasons you mention.
On the other hand, you actually do need users to moderate other users if you want to maintain a civil community. The alternatives are heavy moderation, which doesn't scale and introduces an institutional bias, or a free-for-all, where emotion drowns out thought, which is roughly where Twitter is today.
I absolutely agree the social graph should be leveraged. What if downvotes only by people you follow affect your feed? You already see retweets only from people you follow, so the idea that your followees influence what you see is part of the platform today. This just extends that influence into the negative direction.
Posters absolutely need to see the downvotes they are getting, the point of the feature is to moderate behavior, not just to create a filter bubble.
Obviously it's not a trivial issue and rolling out new features at Twitter's scale isn't easy either. However I'm pretty confident, with all the engineering talent they have, they could make progress if it was actually a priority.
I haven't seen this mentioned before, nor does it match with my observations of behavior on the site, though I admit the calculations of how down/up votes contribute to dimming is not transparent. Do you have a reference of where the relative weighting of up vs down votes is discussed?
Totally anecdotal, it's just my perception that a few downvotes are enough to grey something out, a few more and it gets killed and people stop seeing it. The first-order effect is that the worst content just disappears. This is the best possible outcome for things that you just don't want to see. Of course there are community norms about what gets downvoted and so it works as well as it does partly because we have a pretty good crowd here that values rational, constructive discussion.
The second-order effect is that people don't post things that are going to get downvoted, and even delete or edit posts in response to downvoting. This is the dominant effect and the main reason why the system works so well, because really toxic stuff just doesn't get posted very often. The users that don't care about downvotes can still get banned.
The best thing about downvotes is they represent the community policing itself, so they don't generate the resentment that admin activity tends to. They are inherently democratic. They also scale, which direct moderation obviously does not.
The best thing about downvotes is they represent the community policing itself, so they don't generate the resentment that admin activity tends to.
Agreed!
A post at (+1,-0) is a very different thing from a post at (+6,-5) and treating these equivalently will tend to favor heat over light.