What the fork is wrong with Twitter???
Posted: Tue Nov 23, 2021 10:33 am
People is what's wrong with Twitter.
People is what's wrong with Twitter.
I disagree there. People are capable of being cooperative and respectful. But the environment they are in matters enormously. Twitter resembles a high tech version of a 60s psychology experiment in which the professor created the worst environment possible and then waited to see how long it took before the participants started attacking each other.
A more considered response now I have a moment: Twitter brings out the best and the worst in people.Woodchopper wrote: ↑Tue Nov 23, 2021 1:07 pmI disagree there. People are capable of being cooperative and respectful. But the environment they are in matters enormously. Twitter resembles a high tech version of a 60s psychology experiment in which the professor created the worst environment possible and then waited to see how long it took before the participants started attacking each other.
The environment people create can encourage and discourage certain behaviors.
Yes, of course. But it's so complex and relatively new and so fast moving we don't really know how to manage it yet. Social media is a very odd way of communicating (including things like this forum) and the rules aren't at all clear.Woodchopper wrote: ↑Tue Nov 23, 2021 1:29 pmThe environment people create can encourage and discourage certain behaviors.
Yes, indeed. My point but with more swearing.Fishnut wrote: ↑Tue Nov 23, 2021 1:39 pmThis isn't about people being arses. Some people are arses, that's an unfortunate fact of life. But Twitter has rules. It said the account has violated those rules. Normally if you break an organisation's rules you get sanctioned and if you don't rein in your behaviour you kicked out. But the problem with Twitter (and other social media platforms) is that they have rules, they acknowledge when people break them and then they do absolutely nothing about it.
Is it any wonder that people are emboldened to act like c.nts when they get told by Twitter they've broken the rules but they can carry on regardless? What is there to stop them acting like c.nts? The system is set up to reward them for being c.nts - they get more attention, they trend more, they get more followers, they get more financial rewards. Twitter has, with its algorithms and its inability to enforce its own rules, created a system that encourages people to be as big a c.nt as they can be.
The answer is actually very short. Twitter have chosen not to try too hard to enforce the rules they point at when criticized for enabling violence and abuse.
Only to the extent that the actual answer is that they need to open some proper monitoring centers and pay the people working in them properly, and to be prepared to defend their decisions under political pressure.plodder wrote: ↑Tue Nov 23, 2021 1:58 pmSure, but isn't this another way of saying that, for whatever reason, Twitter's rules don't quite work? There's presumably a reason why they aren't enforced, and I bet it's more complex than "they need to open a few more misery monitoring depression fast-track centers in Manilla".
Yeah but presumably you've seen the documentaries about these places? The people working there have to deal with awful, awful stuff. There's a more fundamental problem than just "constantly root out all the appalling things people are encouraged to share with each other".dyqik wrote: ↑Tue Nov 23, 2021 3:11 pmOnly to the extent that the actual answer is that they need to open some proper monitoring centers and pay the people working in them properly, and to be prepared to defend their decisions under political pressure.plodder wrote: ↑Tue Nov 23, 2021 1:58 pmSure, but isn't this another way of saying that, for whatever reason, Twitter's rules don't quite work? There's presumably a reason why they aren't enforced, and I bet it's more complex than "they need to open a few more misery monitoring depression fast-track centers in Manilla".
yeah, the existence of people who make the appalling stuff in the first place.plodder wrote: ↑Tue Nov 23, 2021 3:29 pmYeah but presumably you've seen the documentaries about these places? The people working there have to deal with awful, awful stuff. There's a more fundamental problem than just "constantly root out all the appalling things people are encouraged to share with each other".dyqik wrote: ↑Tue Nov 23, 2021 3:11 pmOnly to the extent that the actual answer is that they need to open some proper monitoring centers and pay the people working in them properly, and to be prepared to defend their decisions under political pressure.plodder wrote: ↑Tue Nov 23, 2021 1:58 pmSure, but isn't this another way of saying that, for whatever reason, Twitter's rules don't quite work? There's presumably a reason why they aren't enforced, and I bet it's more complex than "they need to open a few more misery monitoring depression fast-track centers in Manilla".
It is harder to moderate a large community.Stephanie wrote: ↑Tue Nov 23, 2021 3:50 pmI think it's both - it's easier on smaller sites like forums to make rules and have a community that is invested in those rules, and motivated to keep the place (relatively) nice. On sites like Twitter, it's much harder as there are vastly more people, and far less resources to moderate the the nasty stuff that does end up on there. If you do report, you often don't hear back for ages, it's unclear what action has been taken, and when you go and check the account, you see it's tweeting away merrily as if nothing has happened. That can make people feel as though the site doesn't care, so then they don't care, and may not bother reporting posts in future - thus adding to the general misery of the place.
I dunno if Twitter has anything similar to what Facebook did (they had a VIP list of people who barely got moderated, because they didn't want influencers and celebs whinging to the press about having a post removed) - but people often complain about celebs and big accounts not getting modded nearly enough as tiny accounts.
Yes, that's an interesting point. I've read Reddit for years and don't think I could name a single user. I also like having a choice of algorithm, some of which are fairly transparent. And many of the subreddits are much more heavily moderated than e.g. here, so they can crowdsource a lot of high-quality discussion.Woodchopper wrote: ↑Tue Nov 23, 2021 7:35 pmBut Reddit has a similar number of users (within the same order of magnitude at least) and at least in my experience its users are far more cooperative and far less prone to antagonism and aggression.
That's partly because each subreddit is moderated, but also IMHO, because Reddit is set up so that interesting content is presented to the user and the identity of the person who posted it isn't very important, whereas on Twitter the design of the site rewards antagonistic people who use aggressive posts to build a personal following.
Yes, same here. Twitter is a very good medium for sharing links to articles etc. But its really bad for complex arguments or opinions.Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑Tue Nov 23, 2021 11:34 pmThat said, I only use twitter for work stuff and my feed is generally a blend of "here's a paper/blog I wrote" and "here's a photo/video of some cool wildlife thing", with a bit of silliness thrown in. It still strikes me as a hopeless and frustrating medium for discussions, even without the ubiquitous toxicity.
I'll need to think about that. I think that digital communities are very different. But some some ways of having a successful community are common to both.Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑Tue Nov 23, 2021 11:34 pmIME internet communities work better the closer their functioning is to natural meatspace ones, and places that are 99% curated by black-box algorithms are about as much fun as you'd expect.
Thanks for that, and interesting that Reddit scores highly, so its perhaps not just my observation.Stephanie wrote: ↑Wed Nov 24, 2021 9:21 amThis is an interesting group I've come across who are looking at the qualities of public spaces and seeing how they can be applied to digital spaces https://newpublic.org/signals