Yes. I was actually just looking at some articles to reply to another post about dunking. This one has some interesting insights about twitter behaviourplodder wrote: ↑Sat Jul 11, 2020 5:48 amDifferent online platforms reward (and don’t reward) different social behaviours. This funnels everyone doing it down particular routes. For example, I think twitter hate mobs are an inadvertent result of design decisions at twitter hq.Tessa K wrote: ↑Fri Jul 10, 2020 11:10 amWhat do you mean by funnelled in this context?plodder wrote: ↑Fri Jul 10, 2020 11:03 amLovely stuff. I mentioned upthread about the structures of different types of social media and the way that these will drive certain sorts of discourse and what you've said here chimes with that. Communication is being democratised, which is great, but also funneled, which is more problematic.
Addressing the funnels is why I think existing social media should be scrapped, broken up and made open-source. This will allow for multiple competing cross-compatible platforms which will help solve the "funneling" problem.
https://www.vox.com/2019/3/8/18245536/e ... incentives
My objection to a "like" button here was partly for that reason.There’s also Twitter’s brevity: Tweets are limited to 280 characters, which can limit space for a more nuanced discussion. And Twitter’s algorithms also promote tweets with lots of “Likes” or retweets. As we’ve learned from Twitter dunks, those aren’t always a signal that something is healthy.
In a separate study still under review about how news stories are passed around the internet like a giant game of telephone, Melumad and her colleagues found that as stories get further from their initial source, people know fewer and fewer details about what actually happened. So they offer up their opinions instead.
“In the face of fewer details, people seem to be writing summaries that are increasingly opinionated, and they’re increasingly negatively opinionated,” she said of her findings. “They have this sort of desire to fill in this void with something, and they’re filling it in with something that they do know, which is their opinions about the information that’s presented to them.”
In other words, Twitter’s brevity lends itself to emotional tweets, while its virality breeds legions of opinionated, less-informed tweets.