1. Bob quotes a tweet from Alice he thinks his followers will find enraging

2. Bob's followers reply to the tweet with predictable outrage and abuse

3. (present system) Twitter becomes unusable for Alice as she is flooded with mentions from all of the angry and abusive replies to Bob's quote

3. (proposed system) Alice is not shown any of the replies to Bob's tweet. Bob's followers scream into the void.

4. (proposed system, cont'd) Bob's most clever followers know replies will not be seen by Alice, so they @ her directly. However, Twitter is even more clever and has a super-advanced algorithm that goes "if you follow someone who quote-tweeted someone else in the past 48 hours, @-ing the quoted user will not show up in their mentions." New accounts (less than 48 hours old) are also unable to @ anyone at all.

There, I fixed Twitter. Jack, I'll even write out some Jira stories for a very reasonable fee.

Look at how people on Reddit, 4chan and elsewhere manage to identify Twitter accounts from anonymized screenshots in mere minutes in order to have a constructive discussion with the author.

I don't think technology can fix a community as large and diverse as Twitter, 4chan or Youtube. The problem IMO is that it's not even a community anymore, it's more like an amalgamation of thousands of communities with vastly different opinions and mindsets. You can try to isolate the communities as you propose and you end up with something like Reddit with mostly secluded communities. Look at how well it's working for them...

That's why I prefer smaller communities like Hacker News where there's still an actual sense of communities. We all see the same articles, we probably have vaguely similar interests etc... You don't default to assuming that whoever you're disagreeing with is a literal fascist/communist/whatever.

"people on Reddit, 4chan and elsewhere manage to identify Twitter accounts from anonymized screenshots in mere minutes in order to have a constructive discussion".

I assume you mean doxing and stalking. These are the instigators and manipulators... maybe they're the dangerous harassers, but most of the mob can't be bothered.

Yeah, I think I've seen a few of those. Nothing says constructive discussion like death threats.

> 3. (proposed system) Alice is not shown any of the replies to Bob's tweet. Bob's followers scream into the void.

The problem of online harassment is not (mainly) that the service UI becomes cumbersome to use for the victim. It's that everyone else can observe they are harassed and the victim loses control over their online presence. Your proposal would actually make this effect worse, because the victim wouldn't even notice anymore they are harassed.

There's a perspective where this is a good thing, but I think I know where you're coming from. I've seen people on the receiving end of these attacks who say they still want to know about it so they know about any tangible threats.

I think the "shitstorm" dynamics are more complex and there are different motivations for people to take part in one. E.g., it could be simple venting, virtue singalling to peers in your brigade or you sharing the tweet to others in your circle - nothing that needs any perticipation by the original author.

In extreme cases, an author might not realize what is going on until they find outraged articles about themselves in the news.

See the comparable problem of cyberbullying for an example. There, it's often completely irrelevant whether or not a victim knows about the messages that are written about them. Indeed, they can be bullied on online platforms where they don't even have an account. All that is required is for participants in the bullying to know how to access the messages.

Of course, harrassing PMs are a different issue. Here, you can be sure the messages are exclusively directed towards the author and the harm is being done by having the author read them. Blocking those kind of messages would stop the bullying action itself and could work. But then again, this is not so much different from the oldfashioned blocking we already have.

A few Tweets are quoted to give the impression of widespread outrage.

Tweet embedding is a negative value feature that’s helping to corrode regular journalism, and that seems to be of very limited value.

But this is probably me trying to salvage twitter for the non-toxic purposes and its probably a losing battle. The fact that what you propose is necessary is a terrible state of affairs.

I just wish someone else would come along and eat their lunch already.

Done well and taken in context, it's funny?

Context-free humor is extremely hard but somehow twitter has managed to evolve that too. @dril may be the most well known example.

Using the internet for "debate" is pretty difficult outside of fairly homogenous, heavily moderated environments. It just about works on HN and even here it only works on certain subjects.

Besides, the entire premise of "debate" runs out for certain subjects: "we're taking away your rights because you didn't argue convincingly enough that you should get to live in peace" is inherently a disaster.

Quite simply they're playing to the crowd. That's what gets a reaction, so they do it more. Skinner box conditioning at its simplest.

Same outside the hardest moderated groups on Reddit. Threads that form a distinct pattern every time. For internet points, or twitter followers, or chasing meaningless numbers. :)

Sarcasm and smart works best if used judiciously.

How do you design a system to encourage quality debate? Going on the few places that have had quality debate (Here on HN mostly, Usenet prior to the inrush, well managed forums, Livejournal if you were careful), I'd suggest assembling an audience interested in discussion. Forums used to manage it.

Heavy moderation, not limiting post length and minimising buttons for gathering the lynch mob (I mean buttons for engagement) seems like it helps too. :)

Are there still some places left on Internet for high-quality discussions? Reddit recently ramped up "moderation" and now feels like a mob mentality everywhere with prolific ban give-aways if one's opinion doesn't align 100% with the one of moderators (who sometimes fight with each other); alternatives are full of extreme content that got banned on the mainstream ones, and *chan was always a stable full of manure with some pearls hidden very very deeply for one to waste time finding them.

Web forums. There are good ones. They are independent of one another. Most forums I visit are centered around some subject, so people are bonded enough to be reasonably civil even if they disagree. Most aren't big enough to require much moderation. The best one have zero rules and very little trolling, but those are usually completely devoid of political stuff, since no one wants to spoil the good thing.

I think web forums are the best discussion medium developed so far. They support long-format content. They support hypermedia. They allow for offline conversations that don't get "dated" in 2 hours. They don't put thread authors on pedestal, unlike blogs.

I've heard there are mail/news groups out there too. Haven't used one aside from newsgroup for D Programming Language, though.

I guess maybe forums feel a bit too heavy duty with all of the additional user stuff built into the stream of replies instead of having to click them.

What if HN didn’t show a number of votes and all the topics ranked based on invisible votes? I wonder if a system that’s more simple like that would carry over to forums to make them feel more modern but true to their roots?

Voting systems create a lot of bad incentives. They encourage groupthink and filter bubbles. They discourage long-running conversations. I haven't felt that boards are "slow" if there is reasonable amount of new threads and posts per day.

The usual trouble with forums is that a lot of admins don't understand how to split one up into boards. They either create way too many, and those sit empty, or not enough, and then it's hard to keep track of conversations.

Maintaining the optimal number of boards and optimal average thread size are keys towards a healthy forum that doesn't seem empty, or overwhelming.

Twitter is full of hatred. People who disagree with you will threaten you and try to publicly shame you. Someone takes something out of context, then shares it with hundreds/thousands of other like-minded people and attempts to get them all to target you.

Facebook is full of ignorance. Doesn't matter what you say, some ill informed person will speak over you and refute your points. FB is absolutely the worst for this. The public posts about controversial issues is loaded with ignorant people spouting nonsense over others.

Reddit is full of downvote and report abusers. If someone disagrees with you, they and their friends will downvote your comment until it collapses due to the negative vote threshold. The more extremist ones will report every single thing you say and attempt to get you banned.

These sites also have no recourse for abuse. Once you are banned, it is next to impossible to get it overturned.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/31/17801404/mastodon-harassm...

Media Preview: Off

Reduced Motion: On

Video Autoplay: Never

Increased Contrast: On

I also mute lots of accounts. It took a few months of muting anyone who replies with animated GIF or says negative things like “thanks for lecture” etc and I’m back to a well tuned information machine.

(in fact they should remove retweets and keep likes for the vanity crowd, as long as those are not interfering with my timeline whatsoever)

Or you can do it en masse in the browser: https://lifehacker.com/how-to-disable-all-retweets-on-twitte...

I prefer individual control over central control. Maybe they should make the "Turn off Rewteets" feature more visible.

Because giving users control of their own content frankly seem to fix many issues on social media.

"You're holding it wrong."

I use the "like" button for bookmarking interesting things. It would be unfortunate if I had to lose that because people on the "other side" of Twitter can't handle that responsibility.

Everything can become a culture war on Twitter. I follow a somewhat abstract modernist composer’s Twitter, which so far has been entirely about music and performance dates, and now it is up in flames because someone has decided to drag this artist into MeToo movement polemics.

It has also been pointed out that a lot of discussion forums for the arts and literature are pretty quiet these days compared to years past, and activity is only boosted when someone posts something politically provocative. We live in an unhealthy society where people are looking for a fight, and that desire might outweigh their interest in talking about anything besides politics.

Then unfollow the guy. Seriously, it's that simple. You have the power to curate your own experience, that's my point.

> It has also been pointed out that a lot of discussion forums for the arts and literature are pretty quiet these days compared to years past, and activity is only boosted when someone posts something politically provocative.

Unfollow

I can't tell you how to cure your favorite subcultures of their bullshit, I'm telling you how to have a pleasant experience on Twitter. If that means your Twitter timeline becomes emptied, you'll have to find new people to follow.

> We live in an unhealthy society where people are looking for a fight, and that desire might outweigh their interest in talking about anything besides politics.

No, that's actually just what your slice of "society" is like. Mine isn't like that, because I curate it not to be like that.

It might be the hint that maybe sometimes people are at least somewhat responsible for their problems.

If you don't want the "like" button on Twitter, you're not allowed to press the "downvote" button on HN.