It's not just twitter... the whole profit center around online communities is based on active communities. Most topics are cyclical - once the Superbowl is over, it's hard to keep a football community active. Only so many people are interested in the draft, in coaching changes, etc.
But throw in some controversy and all of a sudden everything lights up again.
The problem, or _a_ problem, is that people can only handle so much controversy. They have lives to lead. They _need_ to be happy. But as more and more profit centers are tied to active online communities, and as people who run those communities strive to keep people active, and since controversy is as easy a tool to use as there is in the toolbox... Well the end result is that online interaction shifts from being something that brings people together into something unhealthy.
Don't get me wrong, Twitter is a great tool for getting up to the moment information out there and for consuming it. I just wonder what there bottom line would look like if Trumps Tweets weren't making headlines 3 times a week.
The social health issue is one for all companies that compete in the social media space to figure out.
> The problem, or _a_ problem, is that people can only handle so much controversy. They have lives to lead.
You're so spot on. You know how everyone says, "Seinfeld is a show about nothing!" It wasn't about nothing, but what did make it different is that the characters never changed. They didn't have these huge arcs and defining life moments. They just went about their lives and we watched.
People say "it was about nothing!" in shock, as if its incredulous that a show without drama in the characters lives could be so popular.
But that was why it was popular -- because most people's lives, most of the times, are not filled with drama. They just go about their day.
> It wasn't about nothing, but what did make it different is that the characters never changed. They didn't have these huge arcs and defining life moments. They just went about their lives and we watched.
> This is very common to American TV shows both live-action and animated, particularly from The '60s through The '90s in part because programming directors like to have the luxury of repeating episodes in any order, and in part because (prior to the advent of the internet) watching or catching up on a missed episode could be nearly impossible for viewers.
See anything from Gilligan always ruining the rescue attempt to JD always screwing things up with the current romantic interest on Scrubs. There's a long history of shows trying to make baby steps against this (resolving a 'will-they-won't-they' situation, for instance) and the show basically dying as a result. Exceptions like Babylon 5 where major things changed were rare.
Seinfeld was "about nothing" in that the things the reset button applied to were so minor that you basically didn't even notice the reset button most of the time - you wouldn't expect them to majorly change the characters. That, and that it wasn't super-location-centric in the way that Newsradio is "about a radio station" - I mean, it isn't, really, it's about the characters there too, but 99% of the action takes place in the radio station.
Escapism. We like vicariously experiencing drama that is more than we want to personally experience. We love watching violent movies but don't want to experience or commit violence. We love stories with convoluted romantic intrigue and yet most of us just want to settle down with our partner. We love a view into a life we're too scared to live.
Surrogate drama. We like drama, but we don't like it in our own lives. It results in anxiety, uncertainty, and other negative feelings. But when we watch it on TV, we can interact with it like real drama, but it stays at a safe distance from our own lives. e.g. "OMG, did you see what Meredith did last night on Grey's? I can't believe she did that, what was she thinking?" We can partake in the drama, but no matter what she did, it doesn't really have any bearing on us.
> But that was why it was popular -- because most people's lives, most of the times, are not filled with drama.
A lot of the story arcs involved situations that people loved to gossip about. Like the woman who wouldn't wear a bra, or the whole "regifter" episode.
Put another way; Seinfield was about how people react to a breakdown in social conventions, and really small ones at that. The types of things that happen in Seinfield were the types of things you would go home and talk to your spouse about. "Someone at work today was standing really close to me!" "I was driving through an exit ramp and two cars tried to merge into the same space!" etc.
This is such a good way of putting it, and despite having watched every episode two or three times, I had never quite thought of it this way. I think this is best captured by the moment (which I think about all the time) is when George gets so mad at the person hogging the phone at a Chinese restaurant and yells, "you know we're living in a SOCIETY!". After reading your comment, I realize that complaint could be applied to most of the story lines in the show.
I have a different perspective: Twitter is a digital Public Sphere, and Public Spheres are always noisy. "Controversy" is just another name for clashes of opinions that have occurred since the beginning of humankind and will likely continue to occur until the extinction of our species. These clashes occur within discursive spaces, and Twitter is one such space.
This is why I'm bullish on Twitter. It's a space for conversation, and people want to converse. (Also, it occupies a unique middle ground between message boards and real-time chat.) The other two spaces I can think of are Reddit and Facebook, and there's enough differentiation to allow all 3 platforms to peacefully co-exist.
The parent comment was not about Twitter Reddit Facebook coexisting or not peacefully, but about the logic of all of them competing against our public health.
IMHO we should regulate the hell out of them each time a significant harm on society can be proved, like we did for any other things that humans ever invented. But tech evangelists will say that time is different because 0 and 1 are being exchanged
Tech evangelists will say that not because "it's different" but because we never agreed with regulation so we've built tools and platforms that embrace free speech. That's the entire point of something like Twitter.
Or at least it used to be until the politics of the employees shifted to be more mainstream.
The end-goal for a lot of us is a fully decentralized internet that is technologically impossible to regulate.
Fully decentralized internet lol.
The internet economy is much more centralized that the old world ever was
There is no problem at all identifying the big players that have too much power
There is nothing more centralized than the government. They have a monopoly on violence. I (and many others) want them as far away from our industry as possible. I'll take Google over government intervention any day.
Centralization isn't bad; often, it's welcome, as by its nature it's more efficient. Bitcoin is a good example of how not to do tech.
Beyond that, you're under the mistaken impression that government=centralized, private=decentralized. The reality is, governments and markets are two sides of the same coin. They both strive centralize control.
> Bitcoin is a great example of exactly how to do tech. I'm pretty sure we probably fundamentally disagree on most things :)
I disagree about that, but I don't really think we have that many fundamental disagreement. For instance, I get why many honest people like the decentralization and censorship-free ideas in Bitcoin. I share some of those values, too, but I put a different priority for them; for me, in case of Bitcoin, all those benefits are heavily outweighed by the energy footprint.
> None of the technologies I listed are private enterprises.
No, but that part was referring to the second part of your comment, about "taking Google over government intervention any day". Maybe I worded it too strongly, though.
Look, everywhere there is power, there is abuse of power, it does not matter what source of power it comes from. The only thing that helps is having another power that checks it.
Yeah, controversies are natural, but they're not the only reason for discourse, and if controversies crowd out everything else because they're addictive or because they're encouraged to keep activity high, then that's a problem.
> clashes of opinions that have occurred since the beginning of humankind
> This is why I'm bullish on Twitter.
Fuck Twitter. Its roles and permissions structure is a disaster to effective and FAIR communications and there is little reason by Twitter to disallow the more viral concepts circulating within its web. Time to deploy active measures to give humanity some means by which education on these concepts can occur.
Twitter is a digital Public Sphere, and Public Spheres are always noisy.
When in human history have public spheres like Twitter existed? The public sphere up until about 50 years ago for most people was strictly local. You could not broadcast dumb narcissistic ignorance for free to millions of people. It wasn't possible.
Twitter is not good at what it does. It does not elevate public discourse. It's the equivalent of all the newsteams beating the hell out of each other at the end of Anchorman 2.
If you're bullish about Twitter, maybe we should be bearish about our chances as societies and as a species, because Twitter is full of examples of some or our worst behaviors. It's no surprise Trump loves it.
Just as an example, check out this tweet and its thread:
What if the size of the sphere is the determining characteristic about the level of discourse? I just read Geoffrey West's book, "Scale", and it is interesting to think of a sub-linear relationship, with "quality of discussion" on the y-axis and "number of people participating" on the X.
It's possible the current state of "bad" affairs is a natural consequence of the democratizing power of the internet itself. Reduced friction means anyone can participate; more participants means lower quality of discussion.
Just a theory as I try to synthesize West's ideas.
Yeah, I agree with you. It's very Eternal Septemberish. Many of the political discussions about the flaws of democracy are probably relevant here, too.
This is then applied to America to argue that the increased democratization of American society and culture is what has caused the perceived failures of the government and governing elites.
We have a tendency to see size and democracy as obvious goods, but there are certainly some limits there. It's funny how around the time Digg got going, all the talk was about the "wisdom of the crowds". Not sure anyone wants to make that argument today after 15 years of social media.
Eh, I think it may come down to Dunbarr's Number more than anything else. People can only have a certain number of truly close friends/connections at any one time, and when you get beyond that, you see clashes and the social structure breaks down. Maybe Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc are simply too big, so people break into separate tribes rather than get along with each other.
Usenet was better because it was before the Internet was interesting to the general population. Twitter sucks for the same reason YouTube comments and /r/all suck - regular people.
There clearly are some problems with the Internet, but nobody is forcing me to use Facebook or Twitter.
But there are some things I emphatically do not miss about the late '90s: Slow modems; even with ISDN, the Internet was painfully slow. Also, no flat rates - in Germany, the phone companies charged for dial-up connections by the minute. No mobile Internet. No Wikipedia. No YouTube. 10 MiB-sized mailboxes. TFT displays cost more than the entire PC I was using at the time (with a crappy CRT display). PCs with less RAM than todays HDDs have in cache. Windows 95 and 98. I could go on and on.
About the only thing I miss more and more often is that I was twenty years younger.
The tweet is in fact excellent, and the phenomenon predates Trump : stock markets will go down on good macro news in fear of interest rate hikes. This has been going on for at least 5 yrs, if not 10.
I'm not sure that's relevant to the OP's point - it's the arguing beneath the tweet they were referring to, nothing to do with the content of the tweet itself.
I find the concept of "elevated" public discourse to be very questionable. Elevated to what? Your standards? Your opinions?
That tweet gave 32k people a chance to voice their opinion on the topic. You may not want to hear it but I bet they appreciated the platform that gave them a voice.
I'm really glad we live in a society that gives people more tools than a voting booth to express themselves.
Reddit has become very much the same as Tumbler and Twitter became. It's no longer a tool for expression and conversation. It's an echo chamber with separate factions occupying separate areas... downvoting and banning every opinion that goes against the "reddit circle jerk".
Hacker News has become the only place I can have reasoned conversations about science, politics, etc without so much of an issue. The requirement of quality comments eliminates the karma farming from memes and nonsense and the inability to downvote until you are somewhat established prevents mass downvoting of opinions. It's a quality model IMHO.
I found HN aggravatingly hostile to freedom of thinking and open discussion. There are several hypocrisies/arbitrary taboos about what ideas you're allowed to mention on here. Even some anti-science taboos. Usually agreeing with everyone else is good and disagreeing with the majority will get you downvoted or shadowbanned. People are very afraid of specific political ideas so even getting accidentally misidentified as a member of some popular hateable group gets you penalised. People see hints of "bad-thought" hidden behind innocent or open-minded words.
> Usually agreeing with everyone else is good and disagreeing with the majority will get you downvoted or shadowbanned.
Isn't this the inherent nature of a fact-based platform? And most HN posters are probably quite rational and fact-based?
I wouldn't come to HN if it was a place where people could air stupid, non-fact based opinions and have them treated without criticism or derision. people can hang out in their Facebook group if they want to assert the world is flat.
The thing is people can be very rational and fact based and still be out of their league in various topics or have strong biases that they do or don't realize.
Here's a thread where someone is getting downvoted for asking a question because people don't like the implication of that question, it doesn't fit the biases of the audience. That's not rational and fact based, its suppressing views we don't like.
There are many examples like that, and one of the dangers of "rational" communities is we assume we're rational and can't mess it up, when really we aren't any different.
Surely fact-based and conforming to group belief are pretty opposite concepts aren't they? I'm not talking about false facts, but ideas that are outside the fairly clearly delineated (as I found by testing various boundaries and seeing others do so), but arbitrary scope of what's acceptable on HN.
No community is perfect. HN has some groupthink too, but honestly, it's an order of magnitude better place than anything else I've seen on the entire Web[0], so myself, I'm sticking to it.
--
[0] - except maybe LessWrong of old, but I was (and still am) too dumb to be able to contribute anything of value on that site.
Reddit is insta-community. Here's how I use Reddit: I pick up a new hobby, say knitting. I go to reddit.com/r/knitting and suddenly I have a bunch of experts there who I can ask questions, exchange ideas with, or brag to about my accomplishments. There is an instant community already existing on Reddit for pretty much every activity I can think of.
Where this gets dicey is politics. If you are suddenly a black libretarian baptist who believes in evolution, but not gravity, there's probably a /r/blbwbiebng already waiting for you. And if any of those gravity believing scum show up, the mods will ban them.
My ex used to study these little fish from Alaska who evolved in basically tiny separated ponds as the water level dropped and they all got separated. This is what's happening with Reddit. Silos where evolution happens completely independently of anything in the outside world.
I don't think reddit does a good job of dealing with academic subjects or discussions either. Any /r/{academic_topic} is usually filled with undergraduate-level discussion. I think that is a direct consequence of reddit being an insta-community though - it prevents the development of actual-expert communities.
There are some good expert communities like /r/askhistorians, and their model certainly works for something like history, but I don't think the same format would really work for something like machine learning or mathematics.
Only communities with expert-level moderators, who are capable of recognising layman speculation, can become expert communities. Unfortunately, unless you're a historian, most experts have better things to do than moderate online communities for free.
I use Reddit the same way. Whenever I want to explore a new interest, I start with /r/[that interest] - almost always there's a high-quality community there, full of domain experts and often lots of useful resources collected in the sidebar. I stay away from general and political subreddits.
HN tends to avoid hot button political issues issues. I guarantee that if it started posting climate change/evolution/abortion/political articles on a regular basis the troll brigade would show up.
Arstechnica is another tech oriented news aggregator/comment section and the ideological trolls on that board are a well oiled machine. They're on top of any relevant article before the bits are dry; pushing their agenda and gaming voting system until it finally falls off of the front page.
i do notice that a lot of demographics in twitter is changing. its starting to become a place you can network yourself for careers and such. I'm not saying thats its primary purpose, but now its being used for that more oten
While I expect a lot of people to not agree with what I am going to say, I believe this is much more linked to the political moment than to Twitter having a problem with "handling controversy". This just feels like an excuse to find a way to filter human communication, at this point.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a Brazilian and the latest years' politics headlines have been flooding Twitter around here too, but spurious political tweets tend to be much more boosted by people who don't agree with them -- they just feel that urge to answer it or create a hashtag against it -- than by people actually supporting said tweets.
> This just feels like an excuse to find a way to filter human communication
Interesting. I've modded a fair amount of communities and the censorship argument to moderated discussion comes up frequently as new rules are implemented.
From an online discussion point of view I don't think it holds merit at all. If I run a football board and have a rule that says "no basketball talk" that's my prerogative.
As long as it's not government driven, censorship is perfectly fine (if you don't like the rules of my service, you are free to use someone else's). When it is government driven, censorship is murky territory at best, but not immediately bad and illegal/unconstitutional. The FCC in some form or another has rules against broadcasting certain types of content. You can't swear, you can't show nudity (or certain types of nudity anyways). That's government driven censorship, and its largely accepted.
Slashdot had a hands off approach for a long time. I couldn't go to their site without seeing a n-word reference in the comments because their approach was abused. If you go to reddit, facebook, twitter, snapchat, instagram, or any other major site you run into astroturfing campaigns. We've grown to accept that Microsoft is good at it and Sony is bad at it. But somehow when AT&T does it, it's evil.
I don't know what the solution looks like. I just know that we need to evolve. Filtering communication is part of it. A bigger part of it would be finding ways to drive healthier habits.
"As long as it's not government driven, censorship is perfectly fine"
This is sort of begging the question though, since the question at hand in a way is precisely whether that is still a good manifestation of the free speech ideal. A good case could be made that scale critically matters; your tiny football forum of like a couple hundred people can make whatever rules it wants, and anyone who doesn't like it can easily just go somewhere else.
On the other hand, if Level 3, the internet backbone provider, hypothetically started censoring based on the content of what was going through their network, we'd have a free speech problem.
I don't think it's that shocking an idea that Facebook and Twitter are now large enough that they should be obligated to take a very light hand, basically the minimum the government permits, on the grounds that free speech is not something that should be killable by the simple expedient of making as much communication as possible flow through commercial entities, then freely applying arbitrary censorship to the communication because it's a private entity. It isn't even that far of a trip before the government "requires" things of the companies that produce this result with some clever plausibly-deniable requirements, and thus free speech is just mysteriously suppressed even though it's nobody's "fault". If free speech is that fragile, it's materially ceased to be free speech.
I'm pragmatic about free speech, not legally deterministic. I want the effect of free speech, not a legal form of free speech that yet somehow lacks the effects.
The "evil" associated with censorship scales with the social importance of the medium. Xbox and PlayStation? Those communities could turn in to or do essentially anything and nobody would really be that worried. The entire internet? Now, that would be terrifying.
So, people don't depend on the Xbox network to regulate the social position of Microsoft. We have those discussions on other forums. But, if AT&T started censoring, what would stop them from working with other telecoms to standardise on a CoC where you couldn't criticise them? If you say, "because that would be wrong and people would stop them," then you're back to believing in limits on what it's right for a private corporation to censor.
So, the question is, where should we draw the line? Well, I'd propose that it should be deeply frowned upon to limit any discussions that server any social purpose; pressure release, activism, anything that connects society together and keeps it in sync. Unfortunately, those discussions sometimes use bad words.
By the way, there actually is an important (progressive even) social purpose served by individuals being crude. The bystanders watch, and depending on how the crowd responds to the bad behavior, they adjust their idea of how wrong it is to engage in the behavior. If you were to take bad words and hate entirely out of the information diet of everyone, we would all loose our socal resistance to seeing them. (Note: this is a great argument against filter bubbles as well.)
> From an online discussion point of view I don't think it holds merit at all. If I run a football board and have a rule that says "no basketball talk" that's my prerogative.
I think this is absolutely true. But things get murky when you're talking about sites like Facebook that are a primary means of communication for a significant part of the world's population. Because there's no "public space" online, large social networks become the de facto public space. But because they're not truly public they can do things like censor speech that would normally be allowed in the town square.
I think that's what the top comment was trying to say. High profile controversy like that prompts many people to react (either to disagree or to agree), which generates traffic and therefore helps the platform.
In addition, just the huge media coverage of Twitter (in the slipstream of Trump) is like a massive free ad campaign.
I've been on Mastodon for a week now and loving it.
But it's a different beast from Twitter. I find it much more socially engaging and interactive. On Twitter, I mostly just followed people and consumed their posts the way I consume an RSS feed. I re-tweeted, but never really posted much on my own or engaged in any kind of dialogue with anyone else.
On Mastodon, I don't really follow anyone. I post a lot of random thoughts on my mind, watch the local timeline and jump into impromptu conversations with people about whatever is striking our fancy at the time. I use it more like an threaded IRC channel or a very ephemeral/rapid-fire bulletin board.
I've been really engaging with Mastodon lately and having a similar experience. I find it's also changing the way I behave on sites like Twitter and HN as well.
I don't really get this point about Twitter, as often as it's said. On my account I don't follow anyone I personally know. I only follow some infosec/tech people who consistently have stuff to say about infosec/tech that I find at least a little interesting. Maybe occasionally they'll make a slight political tangent, but a great majority of what I see is on topic because I only follow people who stay on topic (John Carmack for instance usually geeks out on there about stuff related in some way to VR).
How has it ever been a problem? Create a new account on a new server, post a message on your old account "hey I'm moving to <url of new account>".
Conversations are usually only a day or two old before going stale, who cares whether or not toots from a year ago are linked to your account.
What I gain over facebook: no ads, not being tracked across the internet via 'like' buttons, not contributing to a massive dataset exclusively available to potentially evil corporation, and interacting with interesting strangers.
As a counter point, I think maximizing controversy is a short term optimization that reduces the number of users over time. Most people drop things at one point or another, and people are more reluctant to go back if their memories are stressful instead of fun.
It's definitely a short term thing with unfortunate long term consequences. Indeed, I've seen tons of communities founded on drama and hate for something else, and the vast majority will die in a matter of weeks or months. That's because people get bored with bashing the same things all the time or trying to kill each in other in an online flamewar, and the community will need to either build a real focus or accept its defeat.
Also, the more drama a site or service attracts, the more good members it'll inevitably lose. People with the kind of personality you want in a community aren't the kind to get into cat fights or attack people for months on end, and those you do attract with such 'content' tend to be the worst kinds of people.
So yeah, it's definitely a short term optimisation which can blow up in their face further down the line.
I don't think this is an explanation for the current status and gains of Twitter. Trump has been president for over a year, and has been a prolific tweeter for far longer. If anything, Trump tweets are less novel and more common place then they've been to date.
I think the activity on twitter being referred to is about Trump's presidency, not (mainly) about Trump's tweets. Same reason why cable news is raking it in.
> The social health issue is one for all companies that compete in the social media space to figure out.
Our traditional media organizations haven't figured this out in millennia. I'm not that hopeful. It's a fundamental conflict of interest between selling ads and creating informed citizens.
Some will tell you that's why they have the "church and state". I don't know. I'm not sure it's an effective policy and with native advertising the point is moot because they've given up on even the pretense.
A number of Twitter holdouts that I know finally created accounts this year. While they don't explicitly credit Trump for it, I think the constant barrage in the news made them feel like they were missing out.
Seems like a lot of out of context clips to push a narrative, standard project veritas stuff.
Like the clip about banning certain groups of people: the engineer says "it's going to ban a certain way of talking". You might take from this based on the video that he's talking about inadvertently banning right-leaning users. Well, what if he's talking about banning racism or messages that use ((subtle dog-whistles)) instead of overt racism?
Also, not many people like Trump, especially not in left-leaning areas (like where Twitter is based). Are employees not allowed to voice their dislike of a very dislikable man, while drinking at a social event?
I did, and it's just longer out of context videos that cut off at convenient points:
> Journalist: "Would you say the algorithms block liberal or conservative users?"
> Engineer: "I would say the majority of it are for Republicans, because they are all from Russia and wanted Trump to win"
> Journalist: "So you would mostly just get rid of Conservatives?"
> Engineer: "Yes"
> Immediate cut.
Woah, what a compelling argument. The guy is saying they are using machine learning to block Russian bots masquerading as American conservatives that are influencing the narrative in favor of Trump (that totally don't exist btw because we love Russia now and they would never attempt to meddle in any other countries elections). The video attempts to twist that into him saying they block conservatives.
Being hated on the basis of something one says is a good heuristic for me, as a free speech advocate, to decide whether or not I respect someone for their courage. So long as someone says something they think is important. Perhaps you do not agree with their journalistic methods but you're attacking the messenger and not the idea presented.
Their "journalistic methods" are fraud, full stop. It's fabrication. Nothing they've ever released has been true, it's all either lies or heavily edited footage that draws a conclusion that is the exact opposite of the truth.
Unsurprisingly, Twitter is not a single person with a single opinion that can be reduced to a few words.
Twitter’s shareholders love the fact that Trump uses Twitter in the way that he does. Many users love reading and discussing Trump’s tweets, precisely because they despise him.
It's not just twitter... the whole profit center around online communities is based on active communities. Most topics are cyclical - once the Superbowl is over, it's hard to keep a football community active. Only so many people are interested in the draft, in coaching changes, etc.
But throw in some controversy and all of a sudden everything lights up again.
The problem, or _a_ problem, is that people can only handle so much controversy. They have lives to lead. They _need_ to be happy. But as more and more profit centers are tied to active online communities, and as people who run those communities strive to keep people active, and since controversy is as easy a tool to use as there is in the toolbox... Well the end result is that online interaction shifts from being something that brings people together into something unhealthy.
Don't get me wrong, Twitter is a great tool for getting up to the moment information out there and for consuming it. I just wonder what there bottom line would look like if Trumps Tweets weren't making headlines 3 times a week.
The social health issue is one for all companies that compete in the social media space to figure out.