I read Twitter almost exclusively via my custom personal news reader that I developed like 5 years ago. It allows me to do a variety of things to increase the signal/noise ratio of tweets. For example, it aggregates tweets by person in chronological order [1] - making the daily aggregate of a person's tweets into a single post akin to David Winer's original blog. What I also did is stop following non-humans except for rare instances. Both helped me cut through the noise by quite a lot.
Then recently, I excluded all retweets. It's quite amazing how little actual new thoughts and opinions are shared on Twitter - getting rid of retweets cut out easily 80% of the tweets I'd see. And I'm OK with that - I think too many people retweet reflexively, without real thought and it ends up being a waste of time.
I was wondering why someone would feel this way until I got to that line! Why would you follow thousands of people if "noise" bothers you? I think most people like their social media a bit more curated than that to start with, could be wrong though.
I don't have problems with retweets, I usually just stop following people who retweet non-interesting noise.
Twitter however now also displays tweets people I follow have liked and that has been the worst change for me. People seem to use retweets more sparingly (and may even think if followers are interested before retweeting) than likes. So now my feed is full of cat pictures and memes users have liked instead of just the content I really subscribed for.
... including those annoying favourites-as-retweets (.tweet-has-context:not([data-retweeter])). It really grates that they introduced that without allowing you to mute that like RT's, or a way to stop your own tweets showing up like that; and surprising that the feature survived after Ted Cruz's nsfw 'like' showed up that way last year.
> Twitter however now also displays tweets people I follow have liked and that has been the worst change for me.
I rarely go on Twitter but I've noticed that the "X liked this" are usually the worst of all on my newsfeed.
But there's a fix for this: click on the "..." menu -> "I don't like this tweet" on a few of them, and then you shouldn't see any more of the "X liked this tweet"
The only one I see now are "X and Y liked this tweet from Z" but in that case I follow both X, Y, and Z.
This has improved the quality of the feed dramatically.
Agreed. You can configure twitter to not add retweets from particular accounts you follow, and that's great, but unfortunately, you cannot prevent it from adding tweets that have been liked.
At this point what is the difference between "like" and "retweet"?
I would not be surprised if Twitter is one day regarded as a poster child for the dangers of blindly optimizing for engagement. I'm sure all their features do increase engagement, at least in the short term. They wouldn't release them otherwise. But it is a sort of engagement that burns out users and ultimately sends them away.
Seems like most social media is going that way now. Facebook in particular. I thought Snapchat would be a break from this since the content is temporary, but I've read news articles from my home country about kids having to get "Snapchat-sitters" to maintain their streaks while they are offline for more than a day. So they post random images to each other to keep their streak number increasing, which is total nonsense with regards to both engagement and content.
If you follow media criticism much, that's pretty much precisely (one of) the argument(s) being put against Twitter (and Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, and other forums) here and now.
Tim Wu, danah boyd, Clay Shirky, Robert McChesney, Jonathan Albright, Tristan Harris, and others are among those critics. Several have direct experience with TwitFaceGoogTube et al.
I don't know if the author uses Twitter as much as I do, but I love RTs and Quotes, and serve a central point on what Twitter is, a sharing network of short messages.
Making people copy & paste is an 90's mindset. If you think too much noise is being published, ask the author or stop following him. Or make add him/her to a list so you can watch his/she's messages without RTs.
I want to know news, and I want them FAST. Twitter does an amazing job on this field, because when something is really important a lot of people are gonna share it. RTs are also is very important for Trending Topics!
imho not wanting RTs on Twitter is not fully understanding Twitter.
I'd really like to see his proposal as something you can toggle when you navigate to someone's twitter profile, since when I do that I'm usually only interested in things they wrote themselves, not things they retweeted.
This article irritatingly mixes up the ß (eszett, or ss ligature), the italic version of the same ligature and the greek letter beta (or it's math-unicode alternative).
[edit: Originally I falsely accused the author of doing this, but the equation was actually originally written in terms of eszett. This is silly.]
Also I imagine if everyone started blocking real retweets like this people would just go back to the oldskool copy-paste method.
> Also I imagine if everyone started blocking real retweets like this people would just go back to the oldskool copy-paste method.
Yet, other networks where retweeting (reposting) requires copy-paste has a much lower percentage of this. Anecdotally, almost nobody in my instagram feed are reposting other people's photos or text. There are applications to do so, or one could just copy-paste a screenshot. Yet, most people post only their own photos. On twitter, almost half of the posts I see on the first page are reposted retweets. How does it look for you?
Also, Raising the bar very little would make a huge impact due to the amplification of the network effect.
I use a userscript [1] to toggle display of retweets and likes which Twitter's algorithm decides should act like retweets, to make their extra "engagement" opt-in.
It also highlights these tweets when displayed, so it's a bit more obvious when your timeline consists of someone else's retweet spree or Twitter's algorithm.
The author praises Snapchat and Instagram and makes a compelling point for their anti-shareable features.
I myself have begun to think that a higher standard of friendship is needed in social media. Something like Twitter, where you can follow anyone unless they actively block you, makes more sense where engagement is limited, like how selecting a TV channel to watch is largely a one-way experience.
I would love to see a social network demand a higher standard of friendship from a user before other users are allowed in their network - based on something more than reciprocal button pushing, so kind folks don't feel compelled to accept a friend request out of politeness. Snapchat may be on to something here, as you actually have to know the person exists before you can add them.
I don't know exactly what the answer is - ask compatibility questions, quiz the user about their history, analyze their current social networks for positive engagement - but I'm extremely curious about the possibility of a social network that purposely limits its own network effects.
>I would love to see a social network demand a higher standard of friendship from a user before other users are allowed in their network - based on something more than reciprocal button pushing, so kind folks don't feel compelled to accept a friend request out of politeness.
Like Facebook?
There is no one type of "social network" out there.
The solution is for people to learn how to use various social networks effectively. Facebook is for keeping some sort of connection with people you know or once knew. Twitter is for content, be it about activism or entertainment. Instagram is for people to boost each other's self esteem so they collectively feel better, at least for some time.
For personal connections, what we really need are small, immutable communities like a small town or a school class. People who talk to each other on a daily basis. This is the only way humans are accustomed to live and judge their own worth and the progress they make.
This effect can best be observed on Instagram. By wiring very carefully curated moments of a top percentage of millions of people to our brains, we're only making ourselves feel worthless and put ourselves under enormous mental stress.
A lot of this era speaks about equality. As if everything should be flat and free to go in and out. But I very often feels that only "hills" matters. People overcome them when they do want to perceive what's at the top, and often make something of it. Instead of just wandering around without efforts or care.
I wonder if other people feel like this about this flat vs hills thing (sorry for that very badly name analogy)
Twitch provides a good solution to this in someways.
It's highly interactive, especially with IRL channels, and the options for interaction are following, subscribing (which is following but with a $$ donation per month + perks), and chat.
Many streamers have links in their chats automatically blocked, and there's a good variety between small streamers with sane chats and streamers with hundreds of thousands of viewers who's chat is much more similar to Twitter's reactionary dynamic.
I definitely think something like that would have potential for virality; something where maybe in order to add someone, you have to be in physical proximity with them when adding.
I could totally see that becoming kinda gamified, the objective being to collect as many of your friends' on it (by actually physically meeting them) as possible (like Pokemon Go, lol)
> my office mate, who happens to be a skilled programmer, wrote a script for me that turned off retweets from everybody
if you also want to do this, here's a small hacky tool I made that uses the Twitter API to turn of retweets for people you follow. http://turn-off-retweets.glitch.me
As a Twitter reader, you need to (given the very limited tools) control what comes into your feed. Yes, there's a lot of retweet-based outrage, but a bit of selective removal of people or their retweet ability helps with that. Or muting certain outrage keywords.
Whereas on the other end, the various sorts of Funny Twitter and Weird Twitter and Artist Twitter live off retweets, they're an essential and beneficial part of the experience.
What Twitter have done badly though is collapsed the disctinction between "like" and "retweet" by causing things that you like to appear in the timelines of others. Where they can then also like and retweet it, keeping it alive.
It's often amazing how bad twitter understand how their site is used by its communities. I suppose they focus on the paid "brand engagement" area, which is a social desert.
I don't think retweets are trash in general. They are one of the main ways for me to find new, interesting accounts on Twitter. I follow people because I like the things they tweet, i.e. find them interesting. Chances are they are going to retweet content that I appreciate too. If someone starts retweeting random, uninteresting content I just unfollow (or disable retweets for them, like the author mentioned). Problem solved. Maybe I don't have the same problems with noise because I follow fewer than a hundred accounts, since I treat Twitter as a source of information first, and a social network second.
What is HN if not a stream of "retweeted" links. The author of the article seems to think the act of Retweeting is bad, yet xir touches on the real problem - the one of amplifying simple emotions rather than promoting thoughtful content. On HN, most links, like the one in this post, are intended to amplify our thinking . However on Twitter, Instagram and many other social media, almost every post is intended to evoke an emotional response.
Not all emotional responses are necessarily bad. The problem I have with most forms of social media is most encourage short posts, which almost always is devoid of thoughtfulness, which then begets responses of similar kind. This is why I personally think Twitter is such a terrible platform.
A stream of links upvoted by many people. No retweeting happens, which is why you don't see the same link every time someone votes it, only when someone resubmits it (after months or years usually).
There is nothing wrong with emotional response targeting. Rather, as the author pointed out, targeting anger or outrage. He might have missed that other platforms, even Instagram, have outrage responses (atleast this is what the text seems to imply) but as he rightfully points out, they are significantly muted compared to Twitter.
Hackernews too has a culture of outrage, at times. Some articles stay on the frontpage for an entire day with very active comment sections. Most of the time outrage (though sometime the joy of a productive discussion).
Mastodon also seems to have less of a problem with retweeting (called boosting in masto), users seem to prefer their own content and boost only a few toots (though also from experience, less active users tend to boost more, me included a few times a week).
1/ Author's a dude.
2/ The singular (gender-neutral) they has existed since the 13th century in informal contexts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they). Just use that.
What is the intent of using "xir" against the author's wishes if not to provoke an emotional response, then? The author is very clearly identified as "he". I can only conclude that you are trying to start a flame war.
I'd report your comment to the moderators but I don't know how.
Thoughtful content is good when I want something to mull over in a car ride or when I'm actually feeling curious. When I'm worn out and just want brain candy thoughtful content is effectively trash. It's not as simple as thoughtful content good and emotional content bad. Feel good memes are a perfect example of this.
Personally, I do not want to find new people to follow, because the majority of the time they will not follow me. This system leads to an awful feeling of asymmetry, where anything I post gets almost no interaction while I am constantly seeing a few hyper popular accounts. I think I just don't like the consumption model of social media, I want interaction with peers, not the latest hot take from a celebrity account.
I don't think my Twitter account will make it to the end of 2018.
I would like the opposite - hide all uninformative and boring nonsense some people tweet (but not often enough to unfollow), and just get the retweets. These usually have high information and are of relevance (i'm only using twitter for itsec news).
> But social-media platforms don’t have to be organized around shareability. Instagram, for instance, doesn’t allow links, except a single one in each user’s profile. This dampens self-promotion and slows down the spread of information from the rest of the internet on the platform. It doesn’t have native reposting tools, either. And it is, by pretty much all accounts, a nicer place to spend time online.
I'm not convinced that dampening self-promotion and discouraging reposting are sufficient conditions for considering one platform to be better than the other.
What I like about retweets is that they simulate the behavior of neurons to some extent. Neurons trigger each other to fire and transmit information from one node to another. The closer we can get to a giant hive-mind with millions of linked up human brains working together, the sooner we can solve the problems that plague society.
Readme App has made a huge difference the quality of stuff I see on twitter. No retweets, no random reply chains, literally just the tweets from the people you follow. It doesn't even allow you to tweet or reply. -
https://readmeapp.stream/
[+] [-] russellbeattie|8 years ago|reply
Then recently, I excluded all retweets. It's quite amazing how little actual new thoughts and opinions are shared on Twitter - getting rid of retweets cut out easily 80% of the tweets I'd see. And I'm OK with that - I think too many people retweet reflexively, without real thought and it ends up being a waste of time.
1. https://photos.app.goo.gl/kdQyqzWXDIvV0VfR2
[+] [-] rahul003|8 years ago|reply
This looks really cool. I wish they were flexible about organizing our feed.
[+] [-] atomi|8 years ago|reply
I think adding links to user profiles might be a good addition if I wanted to see a all of a specific users tweets but I rarely do.
[+] [-] ksrm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pythonaut_16|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] token_throwaway|8 years ago|reply
I was wondering why someone would feel this way until I got to that line! Why would you follow thousands of people if "noise" bothers you? I think most people like their social media a bit more curated than that to start with, could be wrong though.
[+] [-] AHTERIX5000|8 years ago|reply
Twitter however now also displays tweets people I follow have liked and that has been the worst change for me. People seem to use retweets more sparingly (and may even think if followers are interested before retweeting) than likes. So now my feed is full of cat pictures and memes users have liked instead of just the content I really subscribed for.
[+] [-] bazzargh|8 years ago|reply
... including those annoying favourites-as-retweets (.tweet-has-context:not([data-retweeter])). It really grates that they introduced that without allowing you to mute that like RT's, or a way to stop your own tweets showing up like that; and surprising that the feature survived after Ted Cruz's nsfw 'like' showed up that way last year.
[+] [-] vmarsy|8 years ago|reply
I rarely go on Twitter but I've noticed that the "X liked this" are usually the worst of all on my newsfeed.
But there's a fix for this: click on the "..." menu -> "I don't like this tweet" on a few of them, and then you shouldn't see any more of the "X liked this tweet"
The only one I see now are "X and Y liked this tweet from Z" but in that case I follow both X, Y, and Z.
This has improved the quality of the feed dramatically.
[+] [-] dorfsmay|8 years ago|reply
At this point what is the difference between "like" and "retweet"?
[+] [-] rb666|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] montrose|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] runeb|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jxub|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|8 years ago|reply
Tim Wu, danah boyd, Clay Shirky, Robert McChesney, Jonathan Albright, Tristan Harris, and others are among those critics. Several have direct experience with TwitFaceGoogTube et al.
[+] [-] la_oveja|8 years ago|reply
Making people copy & paste is an 90's mindset. If you think too much noise is being published, ask the author or stop following him. Or make add him/her to a list so you can watch his/she's messages without RTs.
I want to know news, and I want them FAST. Twitter does an amazing job on this field, because when something is really important a lot of people are gonna share it. RTs are also is very important for Trending Topics!
imho not wanting RTs on Twitter is not fully understanding Twitter.
[+] [-] oneeyedpigeon|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pandalicious|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] granitosaurus|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Y_Y|8 years ago|reply
[edit: Originally I falsely accused the author of doing this, but the equation was actually originally written in terms of eszett. This is silly.]
Also I imagine if everyone started blocking real retweets like this people would just go back to the oldskool copy-paste method.
[+] [-] draugadrotten|8 years ago|reply
Yet, other networks where retweeting (reposting) requires copy-paste has a much lower percentage of this. Anecdotally, almost nobody in my instagram feed are reposting other people's photos or text. There are applications to do so, or one could just copy-paste a screenshot. Yet, most people post only their own photos. On twitter, almost half of the posts I see on the first page are reposted retweets. How does it look for you?
Also, Raising the bar very little would make a huge impact due to the amplification of the network effect.
[+] [-] jwilk|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] insin|8 years ago|reply
It also highlights these tweets when displayed, so it's a bit more obvious when your timeline consists of someone else's retweet spree or Twitter's algorithm.
[1] https://github.com/insin/greasemonkey#twitter-engagement-min...
[+] [-] padobson|8 years ago|reply
I myself have begun to think that a higher standard of friendship is needed in social media. Something like Twitter, where you can follow anyone unless they actively block you, makes more sense where engagement is limited, like how selecting a TV channel to watch is largely a one-way experience.
I would love to see a social network demand a higher standard of friendship from a user before other users are allowed in their network - based on something more than reciprocal button pushing, so kind folks don't feel compelled to accept a friend request out of politeness. Snapchat may be on to something here, as you actually have to know the person exists before you can add them.
I don't know exactly what the answer is - ask compatibility questions, quiz the user about their history, analyze their current social networks for positive engagement - but I'm extremely curious about the possibility of a social network that purposely limits its own network effects.
[+] [-] ckocagil|8 years ago|reply
Like Facebook?
There is no one type of "social network" out there.
The solution is for people to learn how to use various social networks effectively. Facebook is for keeping some sort of connection with people you know or once knew. Twitter is for content, be it about activism or entertainment. Instagram is for people to boost each other's self esteem so they collectively feel better, at least for some time.
For personal connections, what we really need are small, immutable communities like a small town or a school class. People who talk to each other on a daily basis. This is the only way humans are accustomed to live and judge their own worth and the progress they make.
This effect can best be observed on Instagram. By wiring very carefully curated moments of a top percentage of millions of people to our brains, we're only making ourselves feel worthless and put ourselves under enormous mental stress.
[+] [-] agumonkey|8 years ago|reply
A lot of this era speaks about equality. As if everything should be flat and free to go in and out. But I very often feels that only "hills" matters. People overcome them when they do want to perceive what's at the top, and often make something of it. Instead of just wandering around without efforts or care.
I wonder if other people feel like this about this flat vs hills thing (sorry for that very badly name analogy)
[+] [-] aantix|8 years ago|reply
This way you're fairly certain that you're only interacting with your close neighbors.
[+] [-] jasikpark|8 years ago|reply
It's highly interactive, especially with IRL channels, and the options for interaction are following, subscribing (which is following but with a $$ donation per month + perks), and chat.
Many streamers have links in their chats automatically blocked, and there's a good variety between small streamers with sane chats and streamers with hundreds of thousands of viewers who's chat is much more similar to Twitter's reactionary dynamic.
[+] [-] krrishd|8 years ago|reply
I could totally see that becoming kinda gamified, the objective being to collect as many of your friends' on it (by actually physically meeting them) as possible (like Pokemon Go, lol)
[+] [-] twtw|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jvns|8 years ago|reply
if you also want to do this, here's a small hacky tool I made that uses the Twitter API to turn of retweets for people you follow. http://turn-off-retweets.glitch.me
[+] [-] pjc50|8 years ago|reply
Whereas on the other end, the various sorts of Funny Twitter and Weird Twitter and Artist Twitter live off retweets, they're an essential and beneficial part of the experience.
What Twitter have done badly though is collapsed the disctinction between "like" and "retweet" by causing things that you like to appear in the timelines of others. Where they can then also like and retweet it, keeping it alive.
It's often amazing how bad twitter understand how their site is used by its communities. I suppose they focus on the paid "brand engagement" area, which is a social desert.
[+] [-] dEnigma|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] draugadrotten|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bahamut|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|8 years ago|reply
A stream of links upvoted by many people. No retweeting happens, which is why you don't see the same link every time someone votes it, only when someone resubmits it (after months or years usually).
[+] [-] zaarn|8 years ago|reply
Hackernews too has a culture of outrage, at times. Some articles stay on the frontpage for an entire day with very active comment sections. Most of the time outrage (though sometime the joy of a productive discussion).
Mastodon also seems to have less of a problem with retweeting (called boosting in masto), users seem to prefer their own content and boost only a few toots (though also from experience, less active users tend to boost more, me included a few times a week).
[+] [-] elgenie|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] na85|8 years ago|reply
I'd report your comment to the moderators but I don't know how.
[+] [-] EggsOnToast|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elcapitan|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anotheryou|8 years ago|reply
The empty-state is a big problem for the onboarding of new users on social platforms, especially less personal ones.
[+] [-] TACIXAT|8 years ago|reply
I don't think my Twitter account will make it to the end of 2018.
[+] [-] dobin|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] platetone|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paladin314159|8 years ago|reply
While it may have that going for it, wasn't Instagram recently considered the worst social media app for mental health? https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/19/health/instagram-worst-social...
I'm not convinced that dampening self-promotion and discouraging reposting are sufficient conditions for considering one platform to be better than the other.
[+] [-] douglaswlance|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dingaling|8 years ago|reply
I concur with the author that retweets are lazy noise. And quite often they reveal aspects of a person's character that I'd rather not know.
Maybe Twitter would be better if it had a technical means of enforcing only original thought. Perhaps some day in the AI future...
[+] [-] Peroni|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Veen|8 years ago|reply