Most people are followers and that’s ok. You can get off your soap box now.
The second difference is that Reddit and HN are organized by topic. HN only has a single topic, but there's moderators to enforce that posts be somewhat on topic and retain a certain minimum of civility. Twitter is not organized like that. Even if you're just interested in programming, Twitter will try to get you to engage in political topics, and if you do engage, you might get responses from random people Twitter also pulled from other discussions who have very little context, and you'll get to exchange with this random set of people through responses that are limited in length. If a famous person happens to strongly disagree with you on Twitter, their hordes of fans will start to attack you.
So yes, all social media platforms have more active and influential users[0] , but no, these platforms are not all the same, and a lot of the difference is structural.
This is a big reason I can't stand the culture of twitter. When I interact with someone on Reddit, the two of us are on equal footing. There are many other strange Reddit specific cultural details to keep in mind when commenting, but the two of us are just two mostly equal users.
I once disagreed with someone on twitter that I didn't realize had a huge following and was easily upset. They retweeted my response and called on their tens of thousands of followers to back them up in our disagreement. I deleted twitter that day.
This is far from true. If you interact with a user who is a mod and you piss them off they have every ability to ban you from subreddits they manage. It’s common enough on Reddit for a user to be mods of multiple subreddits or have friends who mod multiple subreddits.
Mods can also create scripts to specifically ban people who participates in specific subreddits.
Reddit’s block feature can make it so that when a user blocks you , you won’t be able to comment on the same sub thread. I don’t believe I don’t have to spell out the nefarious abuses this can wreak.
Reddit is one the last places I would say users are equal. The only difference is that Reddit opinions aren’t centralized like Twitter but it gives far more power to the worst person than Twitter gives to worst person on their platform.
1. It has a free speech problem. The defacto public town square doesn't believe in free speech!
2. It has a political problem. Twitter bends the knee to the loudest activists and is sympathetic to a specific political party. The town square has been captured by a political party. It doesn't matter which one because being captured by any party is a problem. The town square must be neutral. Free and open debate is paramount for society to progress.
3. It has an anger problem. Twitter rewards anger and fear.
4. It has a transparency problem. How does the algo work? Who are they shadowbanning and downranking and why? What topics do they remove on trending? Which do they boost?
What else?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...
I'd say the first and only rule is that there aren't any rules that everyone must follow. There will be subpockets with different subcultures, with each one building and enforcing their own set of rules, but no single centralized style of enforcement.
No commercial network with a company backing it could ever offer a space like that, because they are liable to monitor and moderate the worst content that goes through their property, thus creating a single centralized culture based on the company's values.
That sounds like a free market. A government provides a minimal container and you’re free to create your own sub-pocket with your own rules inside of that structure. If you don’t like the rules of sub-pocket A (ex. Twitter), you can go create sub-pocket B (Truth Social). And they have no centralized style of rule enforcement because they are their own unique private enterprises.
Maybe the problem isn’t Twitter. Maybe the problem is expecting Twitter to act like an unbiased government when they’re not. They’re a for-profit sub-pocket with their own subculture. Just like Reddit, YT, FB, TikTok, etc. They’re all competing for eyeballs and ad dollars while independently enforcing their own rules.
The different 'subpockets' will be competing for expansion as organisms in an evolutionary environment, but describing it was a market would be using the wrong model. The trend of simplifying every free organizations as markets is harmful to rational analysis, and I'd say it comes from over-reliance on a set of values that see it as the only valid tool for solving every problem - i.e. an irrational prejudice. We should do better in our analysis of the evolving world, since society is going through never-seen changes and applying old recipes will limit our understanding.
Twitter is not “the defacto (sic) town square”. The claim that it is is most typically deployed as an argument that it should be regulated. The rest of this comment continues apace. These are standard talking points in the (right wing) drumbeat to try and curtail free speech by regulating Twitter (and other social media companies).
Government mandating tech companies to censor information is supported by a far higher percentage of Democrat voters:
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/10/18/glenn_gre...
I hope you don't complain about this ever in the future and just accept that Elon is allowed to pressure Twitter to change it's moderation policy to support the principles of open discourse more.
Why? Does an ad get contaminated by association?
Or it's a minority who gets to call what's "hate speech" and what's not, and pushes advertisers to not want to risk this (who wouldn't give a fuck otherwise)?
People buying ads certainly think so. Or more specifically they think their brand or product denoted in the ad will be associated with the context in which it appears.
And they are the customers.
As there are left wing people tweeting away (AOC). what’s the point here? We going back to trying to stifle right wing speech?
Random Joes that have no voice will not be banned. Make a name for yourself and start gaining followers and you most certainly will unless it’s too damaging to twitters reputation. Their sporadic treatment of these types of people are what allow you to hide behind this reasoning, they keep you guessing on their procedures.
You're literally in the middle of a discussion about how Twitter isn't the "de facto" public town square, because nearly nobody actually authors original tweets.
In any event, fuck the public town square. That's where slaves were sold, that's where gay men were stoned, that's where people were hanged for all manner of terrible reason that had nothing whatsoever to do with justice.
Twitter, as awful as it is, is many orders of magnitude better than the town square. May we never return to those times again.
[Free speech and the open town square is how we got away from the atrocities you outline. There is no societal progress without free speech, which twitter is actively clamping down on. It's regressive and taking us back to when dominant ideas couldn't be challenged.]
[No, we got away from the practices I mentioned above through discussion that did not take place in a "public" town square. Basically anywhere else, but certainly not the "public" town square. One reason, among many, is that a "town square" is not nearly as ubiquitous as you seem to believe, historically. Dominant ideas can easily and are frequently challenged on Twitter and in modern discourse generally, it's just not tolerant of the racist, awful ideas that some might want to discuss. It's not going to lead to progress to continue to discuss how one race is superior to another, for example, and yet that's all some groups seem to want to talk about.]
There's also a cultural aspect that can't really be solved by Twitter, like petitioning someone to be fired for making a gay joke ten years ago.
[0] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/ok-dude-twitter-susp...
“ CNN typically utilizes loaded emotional words in sensational headlines such as this: Trump pounces on Justice Department report findings.”
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/left/cnn-bias/
So are we gonna be biased or call every guilty party out?
Or was your statement made such that only the right wing makes such headlines?
Or are you russian and just trying to sow division?
Which is it?
Also you still didn’t change what I said, just avoided it by trying to claim “whataboutism”. Fight it all you want, it’s not going to change the truth.
That's also how you get slaves fred, labour laws passed, and so on. Most revolutions started on public squares (and public cafes, and such). And further progress was created by open dialogue, in books and other discourse spaces. Which people thinking like the above wanted to stiffle.
And, no, the "public square" wasn't what brought slavery for example.
It was more the discussion in the "polite"/"good" upper echelons of society, for their own benefit. The same people who run and profited from that racket. And the same, good, rich and aspiration class people who wrote diatribes against gays, or intented scientific racism, eugenics, and other such novelties.
In other words, by the same kind of classes who today dictate what the unwashed masses should talk about and what not, now.
I would further love to hear what you think would happen if you did that while committing the "crime" of being black.
Getting made fun of on Twitter seems like a substantially less severe consequence than what would happen if you proposed radical ideas in the "public town square" throughout history.
I would love to hear how you think the idea of giving up slavery was discussed and eventually won over in the North itself (who kept slavery well after the revolution).
I would also love to know why you think the public square means addressing everybody (like giving a lecture or declaring some platform), as opposed different people being able to discuss things with others in a public space.
>I would further love to hear what you think would happen if you did that while committing the "crime" of being black.
The same thing that would happen if you commited what is considered a crime against today's order on a modern public space.
>Getting made fun of on Twitter seems like a substantially less severe consequence than what would happen if you proposed radical ideas in the "public town square" throughout history.
That's only because 99.999% of it is of less consequence - compared to people discussing the abolition of slavery or setting up a revolution back then.
Try something that the current establishment considers threatening and equivalent to the above, and see how far you stay (a) on Twitter (b) in a job, (c) out of jail.
...and you want more of that? Gotta start to question your motives here, friend. Not seeing any real upside to this, and I'm starting to wonder if the goal is maybe to take the voice away from the people who are, for the first time, finally getting a say in how the world is governed, because you don't like what's being said.
No, but nice strawman.
I only accept (rather, I know, don't have to "accept" or not "accept" as hand given) that the public square was at the main representative of the general sentiment, but also the space to discuss and break from it.
It hasn't been always and/or globaly "consistently violent, and oppressive to people of minority racial groups". Often it was more progressive than the elites towards those groups, who had more of a chance to discuss their ills and suggestions in the public square than in the "englightened" spaces of the rich, the government/powerful, and the upper-middle class, which peddled more in the conformist ideas of the time, were the ones who actually profitted from slavery - and of course the ones that owned plantations...
>Not seeing any real upside to this, and I'm starting to wonder if the goal is maybe to take the voice away from the people who are, for the first time, finally getting a say in how the world is governed, because you don't like what's being said.
You got it backwards. You don't like things being said. I don't like things not allowed to be said.
Just logistically, how did these "public" town squares function? Were they periodic meetings? Did people just walk to the center of town and start shouting? Who spent their time in these town squares, when they could be working/providing for their family? Since they didn't actually exist in history, there's nowhere I can look this up, and I'm curious about what you think happened historically.
Setting aside this made-up "town square" concept for a moment, you really seem to want to allow some speech, but to not allow other speech, and that is really the problem here.
If you want to allow all speech, then you necessarily must allow for speech that (successfully) calls for the "cancelling" of people who speak, as well.
In other words, either you support Twitter's ability to express itself through the banning some users for their speech (which it does exceedingly sparingly to begin with, people are not banned for ideas, but for specific expressions of those ideas), or you only selectively support free speech. You don't get to have it both ways.
Only one side of the argument wants people to say anything they want, once you realize association is a form of speech. The side that supports Twitter’s expression of speech is closer to “everyone gets a say” than the side forcing Twitter to publish content it doesn’t want to.
You still get to speak, just not on Twitter. You don’t get to trample on Twitter’s rights. That’s anti-speech.
Certainly not in public squares. If I think about it , Black freedom and black rights came from not from discussion but action. Forcing Everyone , everywhere to look at the issue it was by hitting the hearts and minds of Americans brought the newspaper and television that allowed Civil Rights movement to propagate that it did.
It was Media , not the public square that won our rights. Not white men who suddenly found a guilty conscience and talked about it. Hell the discussion had to forced.
We're talking about these platforms in relation to "free speech". This implies it's used by the masses for speech, but that isn't the case.
We also call it our "digital town square". It isn't. The square is empty and has a handful of people with a megaphone.
Politicians, media and businesses consider the narratives on social media to reflect actual culture and political views, but this couldn't be further from the truth.
This matters because Twitter has an outsized cultural and political influence, which is not the case for all the other networks you mentioned.
Have you ever been to a real town square? Its a handful of people with Megaphones trying to rally a crowd - and a bunch of people having private conversations around it. Thats twitter + DMs.
Not on Facebook, for one.
>You can get off your soap box now.
Why the uncalled for tone?
Fixed.. Even though it's no real difference.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/jul/20/guardianw...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule#:~:text=2%20Particip....
- Reddit has endless communities, and long text forum posts and comments. Most people lurk in the top subs, but almost everyone has a niche subreddit they have actively posted in, or has an alt just for that purpose
- I find it hard pressed to find someone who purposefully creates an Instagram account and does not, at the very minimum, share photos with friends and family. I use the app daily, and even the boomers that are finally coming onto the platform regularly post photos.
Most people are followers in the broad sense, but on a community level, especially with their friends, families, and communities, are sharers. That's the difference between twitter versus facebook, instagram, and reddit. You are making the fallacy of applying the influencer syndrome across the entire platform. The majority of users are not remaining on the platform because of influencers. These other platforms are primarily about individuals communities and friends. They start by joining the platform because of a friend, a family member, or to join a niche community of likeminded folk, and then they are gradually exposed to the platform-specific SEO junk food. Twitter on the other hand, is demonstrably, provably, about certain power users. It's about following the "right" people to get the most out of it. There is no community in the organic sense of the term on twitter, except by pure happenstance ("tech twitter", "black twitter", and so on, but even then it's at best, a loose association).
So before you tell someone to get off their soap box, maybe make sure you have a clearer understanding.
Endless communities yet the top ones are run by a tiny percentage of power-mods who have outsized influence (Six power mods control 118 of the top 500 subreddits [1])
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/WatchRedditDie/comments/gkkfg5/upda...
Reddit is VASTLY more hostile to the average user than twitter. On twitter, all I have to do to stay in good standing is abide by community guidelines. You might disagree with those guidelines, but they're there and are generally easy to follow.
On reddit? Not only does each user have to pay attention to the reddit guidelines, but each subreddit is its own fiefdom with an absolute monarch (head mod) who can ban you at any time, for any reason, without repercussion and there is no appeals process. I know because I've done it. There were people causing trouble in a sister sub to one I run, and I did not hesitate to permaban them when I saw what was going on. And from all the other subs I run. They cried, complained, bitche and moaned to reddit admins, and nothing happened. Mods don't owe users platforms.
Because on reddit, you are free to start your own subreddit. You are not free to just post whatever you want, and there have been many subs that have been banned for not abiding by the rules.
1. My wife and I have been joking for a couple of years about the large number of old acquaintances & family members that follow us that haven’t posted in years. They still watch every story we post though!
2. IG just re-introduced the ability to sort your feed chronologically. When I first looked at my chronological feed, it was immediately clear that they took it away because there wasn’t enough new content anymore. I follow between 250-300 accounts and there is consistently less than 20 accounts posting a day (and those are mostly meme or ‘influencer’ accounts).
It is possible that I’m just following boring people though.
Do... you not have friends or what? I'm even too old (35) to be in the IG niche generation but my IG is active and lively... no meme accounts, no brands followed whatsoever.
I dunno, some people I’m friends with do post regularly, but a lot of them have become mostly lurkers over time.
This is just to say that I don’t think IG is different than Twitter in that way, a smaller percentage of people post the majority of content now.
It’s all garbage or gold depending on how you self curate, this is true of all platforms going back to BBS.
The irony.
Reddit users lament quite often that there are subreddits that will ban you for saying things against the viewpoints of those subs (r/(white|black)peopletwitter, r/the_donald, r/latestagecapitalism, etc). Sure, one can just make their own sub, but Twitter users can follow different people too.
Instagram users (the Gen Z ones) often have zero posts and use it mainly for its group or individual chat features, as everyone in their friend group has an IG. It's often preferred to not share photos on there as it's more private for them than having anyone who follows them to see their photos.
Twitter is not special in its toxicity, all social media is the same.
25% is actually really really good. Its just above the 80/20 pareto principle. Prices law probably makes more sense here but the point is still the same, pretty much all platforms where you are publishing you'll see a similar distribution.
Pretty all the users except a few contribute little to nothing and a very few contribute the most highest value output and accumulate a lot of value (followers/influence).
Usage (consumption is what you are looking for).. like monthly active users..
[0]https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/new-study-shows-that-2...
I disagree. I was a twitter user before the retweet button appeared. We all got creative to effectively RT others without the need for a button. The button appeared because users organically developed the retweet and the button just made it more convenient.
What does that have to do with the impact such mediums have on the masses? Twitter is a read-heavy broadcasting platform. Just because the masses don't publish there, that doesn't mean they don't consume it and aren't impacted by it (embeds, story pick-ups, cultural influences, and on it goes). There's a reason nearly everyone that's anyone uses Twitter to broadcast to their public still to this day, despite Twitter being an aged platform at this point; that spans from famous musicians or athletes, to politicians.
The war in Ukraine? You can follow it on Twitter from official sources; in many cases better and faster than you can get it from any other mediums. Zelenskyy's Twitter account is one of the most important broadcast mediums that he has access to.
> If the retweet button were to be removed, the platform would collapse.
There's nothing interesting about that premise. If you removed the same feature from tumblr at the height of its popularity, it would have collapsed as well. If you remove integral features, it's usually bad for products.
Most people are mimics, not originators. There is no scenario where a platform is going to exist that is both massive in scale and is primarily original content produced by the masses. Most content on massive platforms will be cloned, copied, retweeted / reposted content. The sole exception is photo posting, in which the masses post photos from their lives (which are going to tend to be technically unique and generally require zero creativity to originate, point and shoot).
This is significantly higher than I expected, and I think Twitter would be proud of that.
You also need to consider how much of that is bots.
I'm sure there are more retweets than replies, but still. 10% of users (is that the math? probably not.) are actively posting original tweets, and even more are replying to them. That's alright I think.
That's completely untrue - there are certain types of expression unsuited for twitter, but it's far from impossible to express oneself.
If not, why are you using an analogy to it to attempt to show something negative about twitter?
never going to change--the most intolerant win as taleb has demonstrated formally. If anything is to change Twitter must go to the limit of constitutionally protected speech (dont @ me with `twitter is a private company`)
This is fine and "good actually"
Consider a traditional PHP forum. How much of the discussion is the "OP" post in a thread, and how much is all of the discussion afterwards? It's the same on twitter.
Or HN, for that matter.
Conversations on Twitter are bad, but Facebook's are so much worse. Just finding a reply in an FB thread is near-impossible. Even finding the same post on FB twice is challenging.
My local journos, politicians, favorite webcomic artists, bands, podcasters, city councilors, are all accessible and engaging on twitter. That's the value proposition. It's no coincidence that twitter was Trump's preferred platform - it just works well with that use-case.
Nobody cares about my tweets of "hey look at this cocktail I had at the bar". That's where FB or Insta are better.
It has some bad incentive issues that lead to outrage and dumb hostile retweets driving increased engagement/follower count, but it's also possible to just ignore and block all of that stuff.
You can find high quality accounts to follow and interact directly with interesting people doing interesting things. When used well and filtered properly it is the best source of high quality real time information available anywhere. There's just a lot of noise so filtering well can be tricky (and most people like the noise because it plays into tribal human nonsense).
The reason most people don't participate imo is because there's a lot of competition. It's hard to be interesting when competing on a truly global scale, it's a lot more competitive and the 'easy' ways to get attention are also often the worst. Most people would be tweeting into a void without anyone paying attention.
My issue with the speech thing is not Twitter's flawed moderation (which is an exercise of their speech), it's that we're trapped in a local maximum where massive centralized companies end up with a responsibility they shouldn't have that's effectively impossible for them to do well. The issue here runs deeper and isn't something we can escape without some serious changes to the computing stack we're operating in. Things can be tweaked and improved as they are, but can't be truly fixed with our current stack - it's a problem of incentives and capability.
Ideally it's not the responsibility of a CEO to moderate billions of people (or to establish teams to do so). The promise of the world wide web was a decentralized system of individuals controlling their own distribution. In that world speech is free, but people decide who they listen to absent incentive issues around engagement and platforms having to make decision about users they give service to.
The centralized services are trapped in an impossible situation and there is no good option in the current situation: https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/06/16/mark-zuckerberg-and-f...
That's on Twitter. They actively designed the product to do so.
> "You can't express yourself on Twitter due to the character limit, so all you can do is witty superficial takes. Threading and replies are a disaster making a structured discussion impossible. These two things alone make the platform useless for most speech purposes."
My reply was pushing back against this - it's too strongly positioned. I don't disagree with the issues that exist at the macro level, but people can and do express themselves in ways that make the service useful and valuable.
Most public speaking has more listeners than speakers. There is nothing at all wrong with that.
Somewhat related:
I recently found the feature where you can go through your contacts and ignore the retweets of them individually. I don't know how long this feature has been around but it's great!
(public broadcast platforms, I mean — presumably e-mail has more parity in participation between consumers and creators)
Anyone who thinks Twitter is an accurate representation of the general population is building houses on a sand beach.
E.g. So called "cancel culture" works because companies routinely assume that Twitter outrage translates to real world outrage. Would be nice if companies could recalibrate their response.
It's part of the reason why I'm against companies, especially media ones and fandoms, from dealing with their "fans" through SM. Even in general, doing so means loss of differentiation between your fans and tens of millions of random people.. some of whom might have other reasons for giving input. But this is a whole other issue of its own.
So much this! It's hard to understand how so many people and businesses could actually believe it is.
Not Twitter has the problem, society has. Twitter is growing fine on its own, there is no end in sight. But the platform is more and more influencing the rest of the world, and usually it's more of the toxic than healthy kind of influence.
Not true. Maybe most don't bother but anyone can. And it's kind of unique that I as Joe Public can tweet to @JoeBiden or whoever. I don't know any other platform like that.
Maybe no one will bother reading my tweet but it's a free world and that's their choice.
Twitter's most important aspect is watching ideas spread, even if it's misinformation, even if it's a cat video, even if it's a big game of telephone and the meaning gets corrupted in transit, you get to see what resonates with people. And that is very valuable.
What is your point?
Read-only is still using it.
> It's not a "speech" platform for the masses as no actual speech happens by the masses themselves.
The masses are willingly choosing to use the app in this way. If anything, many people are afraid to post because of cancel culture.
> It's not surprising that the masses don't post. You can't express yourself on Twitter due to the character limit
Contrary to what you might think, you don’t need long-form text to express yourself. Most people don’t care enough about you and prefer a TL/DR
> the culture is terrible.
This depends on how you use the app.
> I think Twitter has a far bigger problem than a free speech problem.
Of course you do.
> Read-only is still using it.
Sure, but that's a separate thing. Lots of people don't use Twitter at all. Then, there is a smaller but huge group that uses it purely to read. Then, there is a smaller but large group that writes. Then, there is a tiny group that writes a lot.
And some 80% of that are retweets or replies, not original tweets.
Most people do not use Twitter at all. When they do use it, it is mostly read-only. When it's not read-only, it's most retweeting stuff.
You can't deny that Twitter has an outsized cultural influence, but the underlying reality is sobering. It's not a "speech" platform for the masses as no actual speech happens by the masses themselves. If the retweet button were to be removed, the platform would collapse.
It's not surprising that the masses don't post. You can't express yourself on Twitter due to the character limit, so all you can do is witty superficial takes. Threading and replies are a disaster making a structured discussion impossible. These two things alone make the platform useless for most speech purposes.
And let's not forget the sour atmosphere of extreme hostility, permanent outrage, bad faith discussions, smearing, doxxing, cancellations, the culture is terrible.
Back on point, I think Twitter has a far bigger problem than a free speech problem. There is very little speech and it excessively rewards the most unreasonable speech.