Twitter is the closest thing to Orwell’s “Two Minutes Hate” in 1984. Scroll through your feed for two minutes and build up a righteous anger about how stupid the leftists/NRA/FBI/reactionaries/whoever really are.
That's a great analogy. I almost tweeted this. Almost.
#wholesomeHN
Edit: <(^_^)>
That's what I think of the top popularity celebrity accounts. They show us some message, millions of people see it and then some of them post agreeing/disagreeing tweets. There's no new information in them. It's just shouting into the void, where someone/something sometimes responds with a knee jerk, not because they want a conversation specifically.
It's two minutes of hate with people hating for/against the idea sitting in rooms separated by a thin wall so they can hear each other.
I guess this means that Orwell was too much of an optimist. If we only could reduce Twitter usage to mere two minutes a day...
Reminds me of this William Burroughs excerpt
At any given time recording devices fix the nature of absolute need and dictate the use of total weapons--Like this: Take two opposed pressure groups--Record the most violent and threatening statements of group one with regard to group two and play back to group two--Record the answer and take to back to group one--Back and forth between opposed pressure groups--This process is known as "feed back"--You can see it operating in any bar room quarrel--In any quarrel for that matter--Manipulated on a global scale feeds back nuclear war and nova
It's nothing that will be novel to you after that Burroughs quote, but it's still awfully poignant to be the one making it happen.
Which is ironic because, not long ago, people were praising Twitter's character limit as a means of enhancing civil and intelligent discussion, believing it would force people to carefully think about and utilize each character, and eliminate wasteful verbiage.
But it turns out brevity is only the soul of wit for those who have their wits about them. Go figure.
Unfortunately, Twitter has no concept of "but no simpler." And I'm not sure there are any meaningful insights on controversial topics which can be expressed in <140 characters. Certainly there are none which can be conveyed to a hostile audience, since hedges and caveats are the first things sacrificed for concision.
Social media already rewards brevity with attention, we don't need maximum lengths. The good conversations should have happened on Facebook (but it's for people who already agree with you), Reddit (but it rewards pandering to the masses), or Tumblr (but it's designed to connect you with people who will threaten to murder you).
#onlyMe! #notYou! #myProblemsMatter! #yoursDont! #killYourself! #killEveryone! #etc
Twitter rots the brain. With every doubling of the message length, they will reduce the harmfulness of the product, bur also remove its addictive appeal at the same time. So every business metric they have tells them not to do it.
I would extend this to most of modern Western civilization. The world is an incredibly complex place, but it's pretty hard to find anyone on either side of the numerous partisan debates that realize it.
Unsurprisingly, the latter party is more comfortable with the idea that there aren’t simple solutions to important problems, while the former nominated a demagogue who for the most part can’t escape his soundbite politics.
Unfortunately, looks like I've been given a time out again, I guess to reconsider if it's appropriate to hold the opinions I do.
In discussing a topic with someone back and forth, the conversation devolved quickly into insults from the opposing end, which in turn fueled my discontent for “their side”. However I usually don’t ever engage conversations of this sort online, so my mere participation surprised me more than anything. However, it took a short “cool down” period for me to reassess my feelings and humanize this person in my head more than I had previously. I’m not happy about my participation, but it certainly speaks to your point.
Edit: To add to this, as I realize I didn't address Twitter directly, I strongly believe it was the character limit and short messages that prevented both parties from offering a longer, thought out discussion with more source-backed statements. I'm fully aware that perhaps this means Twitter isn't the platform for discussing "hot topics", but it happens a lot nonetheless so it's certainly an interesting conversation.
Who in his right mind would conduct meaningful conversations in such manner... no wonder that even plain email ends up so many times misunderstood, even if I pack it with smiling emojis, there's a good chance that the other party attribute this to cynicysm (or vice versa).
At least in the "old times" snail mail made you sit down and think, you could not fire and forget a message because you had to sit down, write it down, put it into an envelope, go to the post office, buy the stamp, write the address and then go back home.
― Mark Twain
That quote is a good indicator of what the quality of the average quick insta-message will be.
On twitter, I also see:
- people helping each others
- people apologizing (yes, it happens)
- people sharing creations, ideas and news
- people encouraging each others
It's not all flowers and rainbows, but let's not forget about the good parts of it.
Twitter is not a hate machine.
People have a lot of hate in themself, and they just use whatever convenient medium there is to express it.
I would actually more complain about twitter being riddle with bots, advertisers and scammers.
But every platform amplifies certain behaviours more than others. The question is, which way does Twitter lean, on balance? Think about all the times you've seen people disagree. After interacting on Twitter, how often do they grow together vs. further apart? Come away holding each other in respect vs. contempt?
People on the road, queing at the bank ?
And IRL, the system is a safe gard because being a jerk can lead to worse consequences.
But that's not twitter's fault.
to a first approximation, all the good kind people you talk about simply do not tweet that often. they mostly spend time with their families, read books, go on vacation, do research, write papers etc -thats where the good stuff they share so infrequently comes from. good stuff takes a while to germinate, it doesn’t pour out of you.
whereas the high frequency impressions generated by 24/7/365 vitriolic hatemongers, the nra & their supporting bots who have the gall to tell the classmates of the kids who died “they couldn’t care less” - those impressions and their likes and rebuttals go straight to the bottom line. Hate needs to be fed. I don’t particularly care if you like or retweet a happy incident I posted. I am already happy, I am just sharing that happiness. Theres no revenue model there. You will actively bankrupt yourself if you believe in the goodness of strangers like me. Whereas if you give a megaphone to the hatemongers, you will be flooded with bots and viral clicks and hate filled imagery and millions of impressions in a few minutes.
i will leave you with a rather strange yet true observation- some of the people whom I’d vouch for without question, incredibly nice and honest approachable engineers, tweeted exactly twice - once when they joined the org, and then on the day they quit.
I agree. It's an amplifier. And the unfortunate thing is that many people are so different that it mostly amplifies distrust, dislike, misunderstandings, etc. -- and turns those things into hate.
Most of the stuff i encountered were very self centered, but not hateful.
I know a lot of people (typically young, like me) for whom this kind of discourse is normal. Shouting people down is normal. Shunning them if they in any way disagree if normal. Especially online, it's impossible to hold even a slightly different point of view than someone without being considered an immediate mortal enemy.
I've been reading books more, including reading things I disagree with. It's difficult for me, but it's getting easier to look at things calmly and rationally. I'm working through a book now by someone who has a different (but valid!) view than I do, and instead of getting upset, I'm taking notes and trying to faithfully represent their argument, as well as trying to take the arguments apart and evaluate them. I think I'll still end up disagreeing with them at the end, but it's helpful to know the counterarguments to something you support and to be able not only to faithfully represent them, but rationally argue them.
1. Notification throttling
The experience when you receive a bunch of replies is terrible. Even if those replies are good (but especially when they're negative), you're still dealing with your phone filling your notification screen. It leads easily to feeling dogpiled, especially if the character of the replies isn't positive. They quickly become too many to read and deal with.
Notifications should stop after around 5 to 10 replies to the same tweet, user-configurable.
2. Conversation muting
It's all too easy to wind up in a long conversation you don't want to be in anymore. Since tweet chains use direct @uernames, the only way to get out of the conversation is to block the offenders (which is a nuke where a knife is needed), or ask nicely for people to drop your username and hope they comply.
There should be a way to opt out of further notifications in the same chain of tweets.
These two things alone would do wonders to improve the user experience.
The ⌄ menu on every tweet has "Mute this conversation"
Well said. You could hardly build a better system to discourage thoughtful and productive dialogue if you tried.
Twitter can be what you make it. You can follow a small group of tweeters who are balanced, post infrequently and have attitudes that work for you. Or not.
Thinking that your life on twitter is defined almost entirely by Twitter and that you have little responsibility guarantees that you will be buffeted about on a stream, not of your making. Self fulfilling prophesy.
Twitter can't measure even the things that matter to you, specifically, let alone get measurements close to your own.
They can try to put together a "good default" mechanism that does better, BUT the real contribution they can make is to better help those who can know what they want. Better enable people who want to control it for themselves.
If we end up there, this RFP, could do good.
Social media has a problem in that everybody wants to participate, but the vast majority of people have nothing of value to add. So the signal:noise ratio is going to inherently end up very poor. If you look at message groups with significant barriers to entry you rarely if ever get this sort of 'Twitter-effect'.
For instance, I have little other alternative than using Twitter if I'd like to see comments from Elon Musk. And then in looking for his comments within his tweets (as Twitter decided to remove the ability to simply click on tweets + replies when logged out, thanks Twitter) it's full of complete trash. People begging for money, scammers trying to get people to send them eth, people making inane comments, and then some 1% or so actually half interesting comments. e.g. see: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/968614419784613888
There's no real solution other than adding a barrier to entry, but of course the reason people like Elon post on Twitter is because of its userbase size. It's a free marketing tool. Which goes back to the problem mentioned that on Twitter the users are not the customer, but the product. And so Twitter has no incentive to fix its idiocracy since that's what's driving its success.
But the experience is not under your control. Anyone can choose to take something you say, screenshot it, and try to brigade you. A sarcastic remark to a friend or an in joke or one part of an ongoing conversation is ripe for this, and people on Twitter are actively looking for opportunities to do it.
Humans were racist, misogynistic, selfish, hateful, road raging shitheads before social media.
Columbine was before all of these things
Kent state
Beltway sniper
Jonestown
Hate crimes everywhere
What’s different is how visible Twitter makes it
My money is on this being more of a nationalism thing. Buried or purposefully hidden xenophobia and anxiety over being in each other’s faces suddenly
Especially with the older crowd that grew up and lived mostly isolated
These attitudes were more visible during GW’s time in office too
It’s disconcerting seeing a community of “smart” people ignoring a lot of variables and insisting on demonizing Johnny Come-lately
It was less work to find a hateful clique before Twitter. Just walk around town and find the right group of people
I remember that the shirt was designed by a female friend of his and he wore it on TV to help her get some exposure!
That's not to say that they don't have a problem with hate, or that they shouldn't be working much harder on it. But I disagree that it's an essential property of the platform. Humans have a very long history of people of different perspectives hating each other even in person. For example, look at the Nadir: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir_of_American_race_relatio...
In the US, after the Civil War, we had the Reconstruction, a period of significantly increased racial harmony. Many people of goodwill worked hard to integrate America, with a lot of African-Americans moving into white towns. But within decades the tide turned, leading to a wave of anti-black ethic cleansing that left many places all white for many decades. This is extensively documented in Loewen's Sundown Towns: https://www.amazon.com/Sundown-Towns-Hidden-Dimension-Americ...
Nobody needed short messages or engagement metrics to do that.
Jack: "We have witnessed abuse, harassment, troll armies, manipulation through bots and human-coordination, misinformation campaigns, and increasingly divisive echo chambers. We aren’t proud of how people have taken advantage of our service, or our inability to address it fast enough"
So the ceo himself disagrees with you there.
You could take your personal gun to the shooting range and diligently hone your sharpshooting skills. That doesn't excuse what the majority of the planet uses guns for. The platform is definitely culpable. It was precisely engineered for low latency quick trigger back and forth responses which give you zero time to think. Think of it like HFTs. If you charge 20 cents per order, your order book would frankly evaporate, instead of being stuffed with fake orders, you wouldn't even need L2. You could artificially delay each tweet so it gets posted a half hour after you hit send. The dynamics will be quite different, I guarantee that. The dopamine rush will dissipate rapidly & so will the impressions & clicks.
As an aside, the latency in Twitter conversations is 1-3 orders of magnitude slower than real-life (or on-TV) conversation, so you may need to rethink your belief that it's uniquely bad.
[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/08/...
Blaming Twitter is akin to covering your ears and eyes and saying there is no hate in society at large. Twitter doesn't generate hate. Its users do. Twitter isn't broken; we are.
Unfortunately, I can't see how this will change.
Bowen: When you get a collection of young, nerdy, socially awkward people together and they're emotionally invested into a website you're going to have those types of problems.
Kyanka: So I said to myself, "OK, what's a way we can get rid of idiots like this? Because I don't want to sit here babysitting the forums nonstop." So I said, "If you want an account, PayPal me ten bucks and I'll register you an account." And he immediately went away and those issues immediately went away.
Bowen: When [Rich] started charging for forums accounts registrations, he wasn't doing that to make money. He was doing that because he was sick of banning people from the forums and then having them just come back immediately with a new account.
Hendren: When Rich put the paywall in effect, it kept idiots out to an enormous degree. It was probably the smartest decision he ever made in regards to the website. You have to put in a little investment if you want to participate and if you're a real shithead you're going to end up paying Rich like $150 because you keep buying accounts, which is good for the site and it's also kind of funny to watch really, really bad people shell out a lot of money.
source: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/nzg4yw/fuck-you-a...
The market-based way to fix this would be for there to be lots of social network platforms, with different features, trying lots of different things out, competing with each other, so that eventually we're get ones good for civil discussion. (And also we'll get ones good for other things, for people who want those other things).
Building a twitter-like platform is not a particularly complex thing to do. Indeed, it's so simple that tutorials for web development frameworks often use it as an example!
So why isn't there a massive amount of competition in the social network space, with users having lots of high-quality options to choose from? And why do we often see complaints from users fed up with how Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/etc work?
The answer is network effects. If I started a competitor to Twitter/etc my site would (initially at least) have few users so there would be no interesting content that would make people go there. Incumbents have an enormous advantage.
One solution to this would be to require that all such sites, once they are a certain size, have an API (e.g. something like RSS) that allows others sites to download and re-use the content that their users put on them. This would break down the walled gardens that the internet is increasingly becoming and permit more competition. This solution however requires lawmakers to be both clueful and desirous of increasing freedom on the internet, factors that make it unlikely to be adopted.
It's not just network effects. As the OP describes the outrage is also generated as a means to keep people glued to their screens. This is a staple of the 'attention economy' that has been growing around social media.
The problem is obviously that attention is a zero sum game. Instead of technology bringing humans closer together and fostering genuine interaction and making us more productive, this form of economic activity wants us to waste more and more time, creates addictive mechanisms, artificial anger and so on.
It's the very opposite of what technology should exist for. Market solutions aren't going to fix it I'm afraid. If anything they're like a big megaphone that even make it worse.
Yes, that's true as well. I'm reminded of PG's essay on addiction: http://paulgraham.com/addiction.html
I think that it takes time for new social norms to evolve that counteract the new forms of addiction that technology throws up. But it is happening. Just look at all the people who complain about Facebook, for example.
Facebook had this same issue -- pissing users off with echo-chamber news articles was very engaging. But because Zuckerberg has control, he was able to make a decision to move away from those addictive feelings of rage. It's bad in the short-term for Facebook, but will be good in the long-term.
This is entirely by design. The emotions that generate engagement with social media are outrage, jealousy, gloating, fomo, loneliness. Even if the people running it didn’t consciously decide (tho’ I bet they knew) the algorithms would have figured it out. The entire concept of social media is toxic. And all to show you more ads.
Social media funded by venture capital, maybe. Most Mastodon instances big enough to need outside funding run on a few Patreon or Liberapay contributions. The main one gets enough for the developer to work on it full time.
Social media doesn't have to be the way Facebook and Twitter convinced people it has to be.
So, what are the successful, alternative models that I can use today with like-minded people, family, or friends?
Media has gotten increasingly vile with every new iteration of attention absorption.
People and human brains are the issue.
Yes and no. As a human you have certain behaviours or reflexes or instincts that have been programmed into you by evolution. They operate without conscious thought, because they have to. They mostly are about the tribe or the pack if you will; straying too far from that tribe would compromise your survivability, being ostracised by the tribe meant certain death. Those instincts have been weaponised by Twitter and Facebook, they carefully set things up to push the buttons that trigger the urge to form a mob, or the terror of being left out or pushed out. They trigger the serotonin rewards of feeling like one of the tribe when you do what they want (engagement) and they keep you in line with threat of punishment if you don’t participate, retweet this, like that.
We’ve been hacked in other words.
The most frustrating part is the tendency of these companies to frame their callous and destructive business model in terms of Orwellian positivity. Everyone who is making a new app to record and share the sounds of your pet taking a shit is “changing the world.”
No it's not and it's frankly insulting and factually baseless to suggest Twitter is deliberately sowing discord in order to sell more ads. Ever thought comments like yours are part of the problem too ?
The fact is that Twitter and Facebook are reflections of who we are as people. We are the ones who chose to encourage celebrity culture by engaging with it. Which of course in turn has a whole raft of negative side effects. We encourage loneliness and intolerance by our xenophobia, racism etc. We are merely taking what happens in the schoolyard into the digital realm.
Just think though. Are Twitter and Facebook to blame when we walk past the homeless and do nothing ? When we never listened to sexual abuse victims of people like Weinstein and Trump ? How about our politicians behaviour ?
Through its core design—short messages, retweets, engagement metrics—Twitter incapacitates the safeguards necessary for civil discussion. It eliminates context, encourages us to present each other out of context, prevents us from explaining ourselves, rewards the most incendiary messages and most impulsive reactions, drives us to take sides and build walls.
If Twitter is going to foster healthy conversation, it will have to change fundamentally. It won't be a matter of tuning some filters and tweaking some ranking algorithms. A big part of it will involve making us the customer, not the product (Zeynep Tufekci: https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/965937392942305280).