I should temper my above comment (my own sort of mea culpea :) ). You're right, given that I don't work for Twitter, I don't know whether there is an explicit desire not to reduce toxicity due to revenue concerns. I will say whether I am right or not, there at the very least does exist the incentive especially if they ignore the long term issues as you mention. Some evidence that at the very least they don't have an incentive to detoxify is that twitter has been toxic for years, almost a decade at this point. One of the most often cited essays on twitter toxicity from a leftist perspective was written in 2013[0] but the opening discussion sounds like it concern today.

All in all, I think you're quite correct about how the toxicity is a long term risk, but perhaps people there need to realize how much of a threat it is for the platform.

Finally, I think your article was really great, as I said before. I came with a negative perspective but you convinced me otherwise. I still believe that certain cultural and mindset issues need to be addressed that might be beyond design but I definitely feel you're right that the UX design could help reduce toxicity.

[0] https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/exiting-vam...

Thanks, I enjoyed our exchange. Your concerns resonate with many people here because there's real truth in them.

People in companies like Facebook and Twitter debate and disagree all the time about features and their effects, and that has a real impact on how culture and ethics are defined in organizations. Part of the goal of this project was to empower them with ideas to advocate for and drive change. I'm a strong believer in thinking about value over longer time horizons (ala Warren Buffett) and find short-termism a real cancer on our society, and I hope we as a society can come to realize incentives need to be more aligned around long term value and effect. This does require a different mindset than some companies take, but if we can get people to think longer term, it will trickle down to individual product and design decisions that I think can have big impact.

I'll take a look at this article, I hadn't read it before. Cheers

> I don't think twitter is not allowing de-escalation as much as they haven't figured out how to do it.

I think what they are doing is perfectly in line with their mission statement.

"Give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers" lacks functional constraints such as "let the better ideas propagate more", "put some barriers around good judgement, rationality, relevance, factuality" etc. If a human mind operated through twitter algorithms, it would be equivalent to some sort of psychosis, every voice in one's head valued equally without due discrimination on reality checks, uncontrollable, irrational, amplifying irrelevant viewpoints, unable to conform to reality. Unsurprisingly at times our collective behavior fueled by twitter (and any other social media that operate through such filtering/amplification functions) resembles mass psychosis.

I find twitter to be friendly and helpful. It depends on who you follow what experiences you get.

You can have real or filtered experiences. Twitter is going in the real.

The problem is twitter brings in so many people to the discussion tribes form. I would elimate tribes by removing identity.

When you reply it is no longer in your name connected to your profile, the identity is a secret. This allows users to go back and continue the discussion but not follow users around the platform.

What stops people from "signing" their opinions and tribal behaviours arising purposefully?

People Be Having Just amazing creativity when it comes to working around imposed restrictions.