The problem isn't that there are assholes on Twitter. They've always been there. Dealing with abusive people who want to shout down things they don't agree with has always been a downside to social media, especially if you share or talk about any remotely "controversial" topic. Twitter's lack of tools to help manage that problem didn't help but no amount of tools will completely fix the issue. It's a fact of life that a minority of people are just not very nice. The real problem is that there's no benefit to being on Twitter any more. The upside has vanished. The genuine conversations and fun side of Twitter has been lost. It's become a crowd of people all broadcasting without wanting to engage with their followers.

I suspect it's simply a network size problem - once Twitter hit a threshold of users it got too noisy. It's ironic that Twitter's value is considered to be the size of its audience whereas that might actually be the exact thing that's killing its usefulness.

Yes, technology has removed any limits to reach large audiences in the world. Combine this with zero consequences for abusive behavior. The solution in the past has been to move to a new forum relying on the trolls to take a while to figure it out.

On the other side is the FB model where one is forced to use real names and a single account. That in turn exposes people to bullying in real life and forces the freedom of speech on a kinder-garden level.

Then there are models where identity is tied to commercial assets (Amazon, Apple) where banning has potentially devastating economic side effects.

Free anonymous accounts that cost nothing and are all powerful are not helping civilized discourse. Commercial accounts are not simple either. But what are the alternative?

How does FB expose people to real-life bullying? I'm not seeing that connection. (Or are you saying that bullying still occurs on FB using real names?)

I still find it a convenient way to follow interesting people - including Paul Graham...

If Twitter had an interest addressing abuse, Twitter would strive to make it easier to report abuse than to create it. Instead, retweeting is one touch and amenable to botting while reporting is convoluted and a linear.

Is this similar to perverts calling random women on the telephone? Now that I think about it, wouldn't it have been easy to detect the callers and punish them? Did that ever happen?

Twitter has become what comment section at Yahoo News once was, which ultimately what YouTube became. The crowd has just shifted over to Twitter now. Nothing anywhere is any different, when it comes to unmonitored platforms.

LOL imagine the userbase of the internet has increased by a thousand thousand billion times since then. Thats what you apologists don't get: It's not about a single Dick on the Web. It's about a mass of Dicks. Its a problem, get that into your head.

A mass of dicks? You mean like when second Life was invaded by pink flying dildos and it was considered funny, not "problematic'.

Damn Second Life, has been a long time since I heard anything about that.

Threatening others with physical violence after posting pictures of their kids, shit like that, isn't quite the same as a flying dildo though, right?

Yes, sure. Like back in the good old times in the Stone Age when unwashed brutes would hammer their heads in with clubs and considered that a civilized discussion. How I long to be back there, we lost so much when we adopted civil manners.

You mean the old days where the main form of access to the Internet was through your university and pissing off your news admin could result in academic discipline being applied?

Yes, I do remember those times, but I suspect some snot-nosed brats are only affecting to.