Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve

[anthropodie]

I am seeing so many posts here about Twitter and it's possible alternatives. People are going on and on about

- What could be the next big thing

- What they want from new platform

- What tech stack they would use and so on

It's like there's fire in the house and all of us are discussing how to improve fire extinguisher design. The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve. No amount of algorithms can improve human behavior on any platform. It's good that we at least see the issues that have surfaced because of Twitter and other platforms. We now know people

- can have extremely polarized views

- feel the need to defend their polarized but flawed viewpoint at any cost

- are virtue signaling others but refuse to take any accountability whatsoever

- have less and less attention span

- only consume the content that aligns with their views

I can list another dozen issues but you get the point. Instead of trying to fix Twitter we need to look into why these things are happening. It does not seem like a technical problem that the HN crowd wants to solve. It's more of a personal, interpersonal and a social problem which needs extensive research, surveys to find the "why" and how we might be able to fix it or avoid it from happening again.

[mFixman]

I used to agree with you until I created a new Twitter account from scratch.

I'm not American and I specifically put non-political things in my interests. Yet, the second I signed up I got the following:

1. A notification about a smug reply a rando made to a Republican Congressman.

2. Posts from a meme page with a Pepe the frog avatar showing homeless people fighting in San Francisco.

3. Somebody I don't follow accusing another person I don't follow of being a nazi.

The problem with Twitter is that it needs high engagement, so it strongly recommends posts that are low on quality but high on emotion. This gets people to post the most smug and controversial takes they can handle.

I recommend everyone creating a new social media account every once in a while to see what the rest of the world see. It's as enlightening as browsing the internet with Adblock disabled.

[noxer]

Everyone takes shortcuts these days so by Godwin's law directly calling the other person on the internet with which you disagree a nazi is peak optimization /s

On a serious note I think the problem is actually the heavy moderation and algorithmic bubble creation. Then you had certain famous and controversial people who operated above all bubbles and the different bubble started clashing.

The only way I see to fix this is if the "middle" is one bubble. And no, that's not a middle ground fallacy, I dont think the middle position is the correct one but rather that a strong middle bubble is required to separate the majority from extremist bubbles.

Unfortunately a middle bubble required people to be tolerant. But many people lost the concept of disagreeing but supporting that someone should be able voice their opinion anyway. Musk actually understand this so I'm not overly optimistic but I'm curious to see what he will do.

[legitster]

> 3. Somebody I don't follow accusing another person I don't follow of being a nazi.

I cannot believe how much of Twitter is exactly this.

[tobyjsullivan]

"Welcome to Twitter. We'd like to introduce you to the 'vibe' here with a few select tweets..."

[Brakenshire]

The AT protocol I was looking at the other day has a concept of choosing your own algorithm to aggregate content. I think that’s an important option in order for a dominant platform to be useful to society.

I think the submission is exactly wrong, the culture of an online space is heavily linked to the technology of the platform, interlinked with its business model.

[paulusthe]

That's definitely the problem, but the answer isn't to change Twitter's algorithms. We must ask why Twitter's algorithms ended up where they did, and the answer is that it's more profitable to do what Twitter does than the alternative.

It's not like Twitter's creators maliciously set out to become the flaming hellscape it is now. It responded to market forces and user behavior. Neither of those factors have changed, so why would we expect any for-profit public square to do it any differently?

[uptown]

My interface to Twitter is through Tweetbot. So I’m not subjected to the algorithmic nonsense that Twitter thinks I should see. However I am obviously influenced by the echo chamber of the accounts I’ve chosen to follow. I think the experience of users who view Twitter’s view of what to see is vastly different from users that use 3rd party clients. If Twitter wants to increase engagement they’d probably be best to kill off the 3rd party clients.

[layer8]

And the main motivation for maximizing engagement is selling ad space. It seems that ads have become a major net negative to society.

[graycat]

> so it strongly recommends posts that are low on quality but high on emotion.

Yup.

In the 1930s movie "Meet John Doe", see how a newspaper can try to increase circulation by (a) publishing something, a continuing narrative, emotional (in the movie, a poor person frustrated with the economy and politics and writing a FAKE letter to the newspaper on their decision to commit suicide), (b) creating controversy, (c) encouraging arguments to start, should he or should he not, etc.

The continuing narrative idea was to encourage the controversy to run for some months. The idea of such a narrative was formulated by E. Bernays, as I recall, also in the 1930s. Later Bernays was an ad executive in the US.

Sooo, an old, 1930s or before, idea to create strong emotions, headaches, stomach aches, upchucks, anger, frustration, stress, depression, various individual psychological problems, various political and societal problems, was for the media to create long running, continuing controversy.

Net, whenever start to feel emotions from what see in the media, guess that 90+% of the time you have just been fooled, manipulated, exploited, jerked around by the media looking for eyeballs for ad revenue.

Recall the old characterization of media values, "If it bleeds, it leads."

My old description has been the media just wants to grab you, by the heart, the gut, below the belt, always below the shoulders, never between the ears.

Objective, credible, important information? Nearly never. Brainless, groundless, manipulative emotionalism? Nearly always.

Sooo, I deeply, profoundly, bitterly hate and despise the MSM (mainstream media) -- they want to deceive me, steal my time and energy. So, for some years, I've flatly refused to pay any attention to the MSM.

Solution for the MSM and the old techniques of journalism? Easy. People just ignore the MSM. That will cut off their supply of eyeballs and ad revenue and they will go out of business.

I posted more at

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33417798

[hunter2_]

> see what the rest of the world see

If using a new account is so atypical that people need to be prompted to try it, then is it really what the rest of the world sees? I'd assume the vast majority of the rest of the world highly curates their accounts by utilizing the Follow feature; the effect of moving beyond the randomness should be similar regardless of whether they are a relatively new user following only a few accounts or a seasoned user following thousands.

[pj_mukh]

Here's the uncomfortable question though, can a social media platform achieve sufficient scale, so its more useful for discoverability than your group chats, without optimizing for engagement?

Discord is a happy medium (just, really large group chats).

[enos_feedler]

Agreed everyone should do this. I created a burner facebook account just so I could sell things on Marketplace and the feed of clickbait I see is pretty awful. Its eye opening to see what kind of shit the platform shoves on you when they have no data to go. However I bet even small bits of info would be enough to strongly change things for the first few bits. Haven’t tried though! Giving em nothing

[OJFord]

And why is it that whenever curiosity gets the better of me and I actually do click on one of the 'Trending now in the UK' 'hashtags' wondering what it's about... it's about absolutely nothing? Seemingly everyone's using it to talk about something completely different, none of which is 'trending' at all. Just a naive algorithm not delivering anything useful at all. Just random crap in various languages, nothing to keep me on the platform and 'interacting' at all.

(Of course I can't remember many examples, but earlier it was '#confirmed'.)

[dawnerd]

I’ve tried this the other day and besides an insanely difficult captcha that made me add up faces on dice, I had the same result as you. Overnight got spammed with low quality notifications from troll political accounts.

[andrew_]

If you haven't checked out Farcaster (farcaster.xyz) I highly recommend it. There is none of that nonsense, and it's a twitter-like community for builders that reminds me of Twitter ala 2010.

[amatecha]

Conversely I signed up for Mastodon and saw a ton of awesome technical content, geeky chatter and exactly zero hostility or toxicity. Has been that way for the past few years. (Though, a smaller instance, not mastodon.social)

[rgrieselhuber]

It is also related to the social engineering that has occurred over the last few decades. If the people running the show can get the plebes to focus on hating each other, they get to keep running the show.

[mbesto]

> The problem with Twitter is that it needs high engagement, so it strongly recommends posts that are low on quality but high on emotion.

Which is not a technical problem and is exactly the OP's point.

[Scea91]

When I first registered on Twitter I didn't understand how anyone finds it useful and left my account idle for ± 3 years.

It only became useful when I copied a highly curated follower list from a coworker. Since then I have onboarded several people to Twitter this way. They start by copying my follows to get it to a useful state.

Its quite clear there is lots of improvement space here.

[kyleyeats]

That seems like a pretty good cross-section of the discourse the week before election day. Not sure if it's worth extrapolating.

[tootie]

I signed up out of necessity because I work for a media site that gets a lot of traffic from Twitter. Loads of media orgs (good and bad) spread news via Twitter. A lot of really good journalists have very positive presences. A lot of independent journalists are probably heavily reliant on it.

[matchagaucho]

It's unfortunate that Twitter primarily only has 280 characters of text to infer intent and sentiment. AI has overfit engagement around hate and polarizing text.

TikTok, and really any video-content feed, noe has deep AI signals to infer a person's true hobbies and interests.

[cmh89]

When I first joined Instagram in ~2014, after a little bit I started getting tons of incel/RW suggestions in explorer and I couldn't for the life of me figure out why. I mostly followed my IRL friends, some environmental groups, and a couple of musicians.

One day I was messing around and learned you can apparently favorite/save (I can't remember anymore what they call it), and I had saved a post praising Vladimir Putin. I couldn't remember ever seeing it much more favoriting it, but as soon as I got rid of it, the algorithm slowly stopped suggesting far-right content.

The actual technology plays a major role in creating polarization

[tmaly]

have you looked at the home page for YouTube recently? Tons of stuff trying to drive a emotional response.

[zozbot234]

Maybe you're just getting a random sample from all possibly relevant tweets.

[PM_me_your_math]

Give it time. There is a lot of backend trash that needs to be taken out by new management.

[edent]

I disagree. Your points aren't necessarily wrong, but they ignore one big factor. Twitter chooses what content to promote to people.

I could use Twitter quite happily not knowing about the latest "scandal" in, say, the knitting world. But Twitter actively promotes that content to me - either with the "trending" sidebar or by showing me content that it thinks will increase my engagement.

That is a technical problem. How do you surface engaging content without also surfacing harmful / polarising / abusive content?

If a specific Tweet got a million likes, a "neutral" algorithm might choose to promote it. But unless that algorithm knows that the Tweet is deliberately inflammatory, it can't choose to de-prioritise it.

So, yes, there is a problem with human nature. But it is being exacerbated by deliberate technical and policy choices.

[Herbstluft]

Until not that long ago I was a pretty happy Twitter user. I curated my follows (keeping them between 150 and 200), only followed people posting interesting, creative, or scientific things. When anyone started tweeting or retweeting low quality material, I simply unfollowed.

Unfortunately, the devs at Twitter hate the way I use it. Nowadays ever 5th post or so on my timeline is from someone I do not follow, either "people you follow follow this" or "might be interesting to you" crap.

It's almost always drama, politics, provocations, people screaming at each other, or a mix of those things.

I can vividly imagine what the timelines of casuals users look like...and it becomes obvious why social media are such hubs for hatred and perpetual drama.

There is little "to solve", because the biggest problems of social media are explicitly created by social media companies.

Or as someone would call it whose business it is to manipulate you and to make you miserable (like the devs at Twitter and Facebook): "creating engagement".

Allow users to properly curate their timelines. Then we can at least take the claim that social media companies actually want anything to improve serious.

[iinnPP]

I ran an official fan site once, for an EA title of all things. Doing this I learned some neat tricks to limit the amount of administration required. One thing that stuck was that there is a huge benefit to maintaining a specific section for garbage posts.

Sticky threads existed titled: Potentially offensive/spam? Post it here.

Everyone used it and followed the very few rules of the spam board. I rarely had to move anything. People would even use links to their rants as replies to regular threads, clearly identified so that people could avoid it if they wanted.

I also did the same for another hobby forum I ran in highschool. With 3 mods and one other admin we were able to keep a forum completely clean for years with ~2 million monthly unique visitors.

I do believe Twitter is about to do something similar.

[phailhaus]

Agreed. The problem with Twitter is in its design. It's in what it allows you to do, and what it doesn't. I'll repeat what I raised in the other post:

1. People are high-variance, and yet we're only allowed to follow individual accounts. That's a problem, especially because network effects mean that one person's voice gets amplified exponentially with the number of followers they have. Consider the six degrees of separation: applied to Twitter, we realize that it only takes 6 retweets to reach basically everyone. Following "Topics" is close but not good enough, because you cannot voluntarily opt into topics or really understand why a given tweet is within a topic; Twitter uses its Computer Magic to categorize tweets and makes all the decisions in a black box.

2. The only negative feedback is unfollowing. This is a problem because it means that practically all forms of engagement are treated equally. Oh, this tweet is getting a lot of comments, let's boost it so more people see it! Whoops, it was about space lasers. We are stuck repeatedly fighting Bad Takes because they have to be argued against every time, always gain nonzero traction. They are never put to rest. There is very little negative incentive against being a garbage human on Twitter, especially if you're anonymous.

We're never going to change core human behavior, but the design of a platform can guide that behavior. For example, the HN and Reddit model of posting means that your previous karma has no impact on your post's reach. That has serious implications for the kind of conversations that become popular on the platform. Another example: Facebook's commenting model is not nested and therefore doesn't allow you to have conversations with other people. So what do you get? Everyone screaming into the void, vaguely in the direction of other people.

Everyone talks about "changing the system", and yet all the suggestions are mostly cosmetic like charging for accounts. That doesn't change the fact that every time Elon tweets, it's automatically shunted to a million people no matter how bonkers it is.

[hackyhacky]

Hacker News has a great community, features informative discourse, and doesn't suffer from the ailments that you list (or suffers from them much less than Twitter).

Therefore we should invite all Twitter users to join our healthy community. Everybody wins.

Edit: I hoped it would be obvious, but the second sentence of this comment was supposed to be sarcastic.

[onion2k]

No amount of algorithms can improve human behavior on any platform.

You can definitely make human behavior worse using an algorithm just by pushing content that provokes negative reactions in as many people as possible. I don't see why the opposite wouldn't be true. If the algorithm pushed uncontroversial content into people's timelines and didn't reward hateful crap they might get happier. Maybe Elon will give that a try!

[paulusthe]

They wouldn't use it as much. The profitability of the site would suffer and it would cease to exist.

It's not like Twitter set out trying to create an outrage machine. Their algorithms learned what people respond to - because responses, interaction, and time on the site is Twitter's goal - and gave them what they want.

People don't want happy, good news. They don't want uncontroversial content. That's the problem, not Twitter, or its algos

[bckr]

With utmost curiosity, how can making people happy get money for investors and SWE salaries?

[jklinger410]

In a tangentially related note. The value in a social media network is the viral momentum, not the cool engineering tricks or fundamental features.

Virality, like any success, involves being in the right place at the right time. This is largely unpredictable.

The problems that social media networks have need to be sorted out on the platforms themselves. The graveyard of dead projects is full of clones of popular softwares with slightly different features. I'm sure many of them were fantastic ideas.

[Swizec]

> surveys to find the "why" and how we might be able to fix it or avoid it from happening again

A 2-party system will always create polarization and lead to black/white thinking in all aspects of life I think.

As a European moving to USA, the part I miss most about back home is the willingness to think of all issues as “Well there’s 5+ sides to this, let’s discuss”. I think that outlook stems directly from our multiparty system where you usually have more than 5 parties in power who need to debate and come to a conclusion.

In Europe, even the fringiest of movements (like the pirate party) often get at least 1 seat in parliament. This may be more symbolic than practical, but it does lead to there being at least someone, somewhere, who says “Yo, this has an impact on fair use! We should discuss”

edit: To expand on why I think this is the why, I’ve found that non-US Twitter is a lot less polarized. There’s the occasional hot button issue that a politician brings up to start a fight, yes, but on US twitter everything gets polarized.

edit2: Perhaps the easiest solution is to ban politicians from Twitter. They’re the ones usually starting shit and trolling for a ruckus.

[ThereIsNoWorry]

> It's more of a personal, interpersonal and a social problem which needs extensive research, surveys to find the "why" and how we might be able to fix it or avoid it from happening again.

Changing human behavioural patterns that emerged after millions of years of evolution? This seems incredibly naive to me. We can build our technology around the fact that we humans as a species are as we are. Limit this kind of toxic behaviour by various means, e.g. moderation and developing algorithms that detect such emergent patterns and then change recommendation types. Things like these. But changing how we biologically work goes into a direction that is filled with moral and ethical landmines.

[rrwo]

I'm really sympathetic with this. I don't think another "improved" social media or blogging platform is the answer.

Even if you have a perfect way to fix the social problems with social media, it's still a massive time and productivity sink.

I don't have enough time in the day to read every interesting article and blog post, let along engage in debate or add a meaningful comment.

Nor to I have enough time top write thoughtful articles about things that I am thinking about, let along ready any comments people might have.

This reminds me that I should be disengaging from even more websites (this one included).

[wayne-li2]

All the problems you listed can be solved though. In fact, HN is a good demonstration of it. Its policy decisions have largely led to one of the last bastions on the internet that still seem sane.

The issue is how a social media product can solve the problems above and be a growing, profitable company. HN does not have a direct profit motive nor does it need to grow exponentially to satisfy investors.

Personally I don’t believe it’s possible because as long as engagement is optimized, extremity will always be preferred.

[fullshark]

Subreddits solve I think the big problem of twitter, namely political flamebait leaking everywhere. Compartmentalize and quarantine that stuff and maybe you can get a healthy message board going, but I think people will never be as open and naive as they were in the early days of twitter / FB again.

[dcist]

I don't know that Twitter actually needs to be fixed. It's very good for what it is - a microblogging platform that provides instant, timely updates on news and current topics.

I think Twitter could, however, capitalize on its platform and offer additional, successful features. Twitter could offer Patreon and Substack-esque features where users could subscribe to additional, richer, and more in-depth content from content creators. Twitter could also re-explore a live broadcast feature with associated live chat (similar to YouTube and Facebook live broadcasts). Twitter is a huge platform and has plenty of opportunity, but I don't think it suffers from inherent problems like Facebook (which has an aging userbase, users abandoning the platform, and a big spam problem).

[nico]

> It's more of a personal, interpersonal and a social problem which needs extensive research, surveys to find the "why" and how we might be able to fix it or avoid it from happening again.

You are right about it not being a technology problem, but what you are describing there is how you approach a technical problem.

You are never going to solve it that way. In fact it might never be solved, because the issue is politics, it’s people intentionally wanting to game the systems to influence masses and get their way.

No amount of research and surveys to “find the why” will allow you to “fix” it or “avoid it from happening again”.

[Dracophoenix]

If you want my opinion, you're not going to "solve" people, especially in the manner you desire. No has, no one is, and no one ever will. There are no philosopher-kings. Twitter is simply today's canvas for social and parasocial interaction. It is no different than the printing press, the landline, the radio, or the television was during their heydays. Throughout the history of the aforementioned mediums, there has been propaganda, polarizing politics, rumormongering, scandals, censorship, public feuds, self-righteous moralizing, pandering, and a bevy of other controversies.

Twitter as a "public square" will solve itself. It may become the greatest thing since the Athenian Agora. It may become another Usenet, WELL [1], or AOL/Compuserve. Or it might join thousands of other no-name services as it barrels into the trash-heap of social media history with its only distinction being a louder thud than all the others as it reaches its final resting place.

In the future I expect the social media or morality wars of the VR/AR era, should the Metaverse become real, to play out in a similar fashion, that is if seeds haven't already been sown on VRChat.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL

[BeefWellington]

What I want is pretty simple (and isn't for everyone): I just want a spot I can keep tabs on the broader goings on of other people in infosec.

[edude03]

> only consume the content that aligns with their views

And for this reason I believe social media is fundamentally harmful to society.

[mikkergp]

Say more about this, I’ve sort of come to the opposite conclusion, especially in social media. Generally speaking, the _way_ people express their views in social media has distancing effect for me. In real life? With people talking about their life stories, sure, I may learn more about people and open my mind, but I think better echo chambers in “hot take” spaces online would open my mind and make me more tolerant of opposing views.

[lambic]

I think this might be partly a generational thing. My son and my younger friends follow a wider variety of people and aren't so easily sucked into the echo chambers.

The networks are also partly to blame with their recommendation systems.

[jojosbuddy]

"can have extremely polarized views" usually results when people want [extreme] attention in a sea of chatter.

"feel the need to defend their polarized but flawed viewpoint at any cost" usually results when people want [extreme] attention in a sea of chatter.

"are virtue signaling others but refuse to take any accountability whatsoever" a tactic typically used when people want [extreme] attention in a sea of chatter.

"have less and less attention span" Time is money, and it's better to waste your time reading/bickering about your tweet for ads that wasting time writing a meaningful tweet that'll be obsolete in 10min.

"only consume the content that aligns with their views" usually results when people want [extreme] attention and creates an echo chamber.

Conclusion: we got a lot of narcissistic people on twitter. The ultimate digital soapbox.

[staunch]

> It's like there's fire in the house and all of us are discussing how to improve fire extinguisher design.

It's more like there's a problem with a new technology and people are discussing how to improve the technology.

Twitter is just a technology product that some few people created a few years ago. It's not a discovery like fire where we have to learn to adapt to its nature. We can change its nature radically.

Of course there are social problems that won't be resolved by technology but there's no reason to believe this is one of them. Twitter is a technology that created and exacerbated specific social problems. It's entirely plausible that it can be improved to eliminate and mitigate these same problems.