[braythwayt]

If you take a moment to look around, you’ll realize that a lot of socially progressive people are saying the exact same thing about Twitter, that the “professionally offended” are becoming too influential.

Mind you, they’re talking about what happens when a woman criticizes video game culture and winds up with death threats and snuff porn choking her mentions.

I am not saying this to suggest that one “side” or “the other” is right or wrong or has it worse than the other, but just making the general observation that Twitter does have a problem, and it seems to provide a terrible experience for all sorts of people with all sorts of social views.

We blame it on the people dogpiling, or brigading, or whatever, but that shouldn’t prevent us from recognizing that Twitter is doing a terrible job of providing an environment for anything except “Interacting with Brands” and sharing low-emotional-content memes.

[TheOtherHobbes]

I don't think Twitter is making things worse than they used to be.

Society has the problem. Twitter just makes it public.

Remember, the US used to have anti-communist witch hunts in which people were forced to give up their careers, it had actual physical lynchings, and it still has a culture where the police can do more or less whatever they want with limited accountability.

People being disrespectful or even stalkerish on a social network isn't good news, but it's a long way short of the very bad things that happen regularly offline.

If anything Twitter's problem is more that it works well for promoting celebrity vapidity, but less well for providing a mass audience for the stories of ordinary people.

You could argue there's not much interest in the latter, but then we're back to society having the problem, and Twitter being a medium for a certain expression of it.

I think Quora does a much better job of dealing with real stories and relatively civil debate - but I'd guess it's much less popular than Twitter.

[yummyfajitas]

Remember, the US used to have anti-communist witch hunts in which people were forced to give up their careers,...

Actually we still have those, and twitter often plays an important role. C.f. Pax Dickinson, Justine Sacco or Brandon Eich.

Luckily we've moved beyond lynchings and other such political terrorism in the US. It still seems to happen in Europe, however: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/26/french-taxi-dri... http://www.theguardian.com/business/live/2015/nov/12/greek-g...

[ZeroGravitas]

Your prison system has been described as a slow-motion Holocaust and the new Jim Crow. Does that not count as political terrorism?

Or is this the same linguistic problem where 3000 dead in an intentionally collapsed building in NYC is terrorism, but two million killed by intentionally collapsing a middle-eastern state doesn't really have a word that we can use, so it seems harder to grasp somehow.

[braythwayt]

> Society has the problem. Twitter just makes it public.

Every tool, every medium, has some effect on its content. It makes something things easy, others difficult. It amplifies some channels, squelches others. It speeds some things up, slows others down.

Society has all sorts of wonderful things and terrible things. But we humans choose which tools to build and which media to promote. We can observe this and criticize choices accordingly.

[askafriend]

So you would prefer to build tools to mask society's problems instead of uncovering them so that we can stare them in the face and have some type of discussion about them?

(Just playing devil's advocate here)

[braythwayt]

That's not playing devil's advocate, it's constructing a false dichotomy.

As a counter-example, are you saying that the best way to have a discussion about Young Earthers is to give them equal space in every geology textbook?

I don't think you're saying that, and I don't think I'm saying that we as a society should mask our problems.

[askafriend]

Twitter isn't a textbook though. It's goals as a communications platform are completely different.

It's like saying, would you rather design SMS around masking Young Earther's ideas?

In the 20s, you would have had these services designed around not conversating about alcohol. Is that right? Is it wrong? I don't know if it's for the communications platform to decide.

However the communications platform can provide the user tools to control what/who they hear from so that they can make those decisions themselves.

[braythwayt]

> Twitter isn't a textbook though. It's goals as a communications platform are completely different

Twitter is a company. Its goals and the way it tries to achieve the are as subject to discussion and criticism as any other company.

As for the rest of your comment, you keep talking about “masking” when I never used that word. I conclude that you have a preconceived idea of what I am saying, and are arguing with that. Since it isn’t what I’m saying, I have no obligation to defend it, or even explain why when you put words in my mouth, the difference between your words and my words are.

When you begin an argument with “So what you’re saying, is...” I need go no further than to say “No."

> However the communications platform can provide the user tools to...

And now you are talking about how Twitter could change its offering to improve the lives of its users. Which is what I was talking about. Seems like a good place to break off.

[lmm]

I think Twitter by its very nature promotes that kind of thing. The 140-character limit inherently pushes towards zingers and outrage. Nuance is stripped away by the medium.

[potatolicious]

Exactly - it's too easy to say that Twitter is simply a reflection of society itself, technology is not a completely neutral pass-through filter.

The 140-character limit strips all nuance out of conversation, so it's no surprise that when it comes to controversial topics everyone is an asshole. It turns out we need more than 140 chars when talking about complicated, important topics.

More than that, Twitter's choice of how users relate to each other also contributes to the nastiness - it's a medium specifically designed so that a single message can traverse a huge portion of the user graph, and this causes a lot of problems.

On Facebook, if you post something stupid, insensitive, or generally moronic, at worst you'd have your friends (or friends-of-friends) telling you off, it almost never goes beyond that simply by nature of how friending works. FB's privacy settings (by default at least) literally prevents anything from being shared past N distance from you.

Ditto on old-school web forums - if you post something stupid, insensitive, or generally moronic, you'll at worst be dogpiled by the forum's own users, but that's it. The link may be spread around, but few people will sign up to some new phpBB webforum just to yell at your stupidity.

On Twitter though your tweet goes viral and traverses many, many different communities, each of which get to layer their own outrage on. More than that, they are all free to respond to you, without filters. The pile-on effect is the scariest we've seen from any social network in existence.

Reddit also suffers from a similar problem - communities cross into each other almost too easily, so brigades are common. At the very least though most subreddits are moderated, whereas Twitter is really a free for all. We've seen how well Twitter's abuse team handles overt death threats and other far-beyond-the-pale abuse (read: lol).

This might not be particularly insightful coming from someone who never really got into Twitter, but their whole model of user interaction is fundamentally defective.

[Loughla]

Honest question here - if you believe the issue is that information is too readily available, what is the solution to avoid brigading and the like? Segregating spaces? Safe speech spaces?

Pandora's box has been opened in social media and the internet, and it's not going to close again.

I believe what we're seeing is the happy crossroads of cavemen tribal thought that we got so used to before instant communication, and the, in my opinion inevitable, world-culture many years in the future.

I just don't buy that the issue is that too-much information is available. The issue is that taking offence to information is just so much en vogue right now for exactly the reasons you state. We used to only be able to pile on our family and friends. And to do that we had to really watch what we said, or else they'd be pissed at us for no good reason.

Now that communication is across the world, it just doesn't matter anymore to the individual (especially those who were raised to be self-centered, as I would argue we are currently being raised). So, I can threaten you with a bombing, because I'll never actually meet you. So it doesn't really matter to me.

Combine that with the NEED FOR FAME that we are fed by media. Everyone wants to go viral. Everyone wants to be part of something famous. Everyone wants to be on the cutting edge of the next big movement. So, we yell and we kick and we scream and we insult and we don't think about consequences. Because something new will be along in the next ten minutes; so there are no consequences.

I love watching humans figure out new technology. It seems like we never really do it that well. I'm mostly just pissed that I was born too early for what we know should be possible, but can't figure out how to make happen.

[potatolicious]

I think casting my view as "information is too readily available" is a vast oversimplification.

Information being readily available isn't the issue, the issue is the ease in responding too it - more specifically the ease in responding thoughtlessly and flippantly, and the empathy gap that entails.

IMO the empathy gap is the problem we face socially as we move into the Internet age, and solving must in some part involve system design - this seems to be something Facebook has been aware of, but that Twitter hasn't.

> "Pandora's box has been opened in social media and the internet, and it's not going to close again."

Ehh, this isn't a complaint about social media in general, it's a complaint about Twitter's model in specific. Many social media services are working just fine without creating the epic shitstorms that seem to surround Twitter on a weekly basis - and I think the demographics of these services are leading indicators of who's succeeding and failing.

Facebook for example has largely solved this by defaulting things in such a way that limit post virality. They've also avoided a lot of abuse problems by clearly delineating ownership of spaces (if you post something abusive on my Wall, I can delete it). As opposed to Twitter where they've steadfastly maximized user ability to invade others' spaces but minimized ability to defend one's own (i.e., you can insert yourself into any conversation anywhere without any say on the part of the participants, and they can do it to you).

The adoption of Snapchat is also indicative - those who don't use Snapchat like to attribute its rise to teenagers sexting each other, but in reality a huge driver of their success is that people got tired of posting things for the judgment of the peanut gallery. The ability to share things with exactly the people you want (outside of the realm of direct messaging) is useful, and those who grew up under the pervasive pall of Facebook and Twitter are saying no to the old model. There is an overt rejection/separation of the "broadcast" mode of social media that those of us in the slightly-older set have gotten used to.

The most promising risers in social media aren't broadcast-style affairs, and they resemble a much more complex form of IRC/group messaging than anything else.

> "We used to only be able to pile on our family and friends."

This is really key - and drives at the heart of the problem. The issue right now isn't that people are being offended - a lot of that shit really is offensive. It's disingenuous to pretend that Twitter outrage is entirely synthetic by people who enjoy being offended (the whole concept of a "professional victim" is IMO reductionist and woefully inaccurate).

The issue is that responses to people saying offensive, ignorant shit is no longer proportional to the ignorant shit itself. There is a virtue to proportional response, and we're witnessing what happens when proportional response goes away - every thing, big or small, is automatically a nuclear war.

The structure of the system has a great influence on this. On Facebook because of the adherence to a voluntary opt-in social graph, responses are in general pretty proportional. If I say something racist in a post, I'll get called out by my friends and family, and none of them are going to SWAT me. On the other hand, if I say something vile on Twitter, I'll likely be receiving death threats.

It's even true in this specific case - IMO Stephen Fry's comments were shitty, and I think he ought to be called out on it - but a million-user pileup?

> "Combine that with the NEED FOR FAME that we are fed by media. Everyone wants to go viral. Everyone wants to be part of something famous."

I actually think this is becoming less true over time. One thing I've noticed is that there's a pretty big generational gap between my "generation" that grew up without social media (basically late 20s and beyond), and those who grew up in it (mid 20s and earlier). The "everyone wants to go viral" thing is IMO stronger in our generation than it is for younger people, and part of it is that they've internalized the downsides more so than the rest of us.

I mean sure, I don't think we'll ever fully rid the human race of the need for validation and fame, but it honestly seems like the younger generation is exercising a lot more care in who and how they associate with others.

[iBzOtaku]

Thank you for your lengthy reply. I'm a CS student and usually attend meetups and workshops, mostly related to startups and entrepreneurship. Nearly everyone there introduces themselves with their names and twitter handles. I have heard this "advice" again and again that if you want to make connections, get active on twitter. How true is it? Is twitter really the place to get in touch with people more so than Facebook?

[Touche]

This should be upvoted more.

Also I'd say the stream is part of the problem. Your tweet disappears from the stream quickly. The more noticeable it is, the more likely it is to have a life > 5 min.

[monksy]

> Remember, the US used to have anti-communist witch hunts in which people were forced to give up their careers, it had actual physical lynchings, and it still has a culture where the police can do more or less whatever they want with limited accountability.

Which twitter has and encourages. It's called "bluelisting."

[volaski]

> Society has the problem. Twitter just makes it public.

Yes. Thereby making things worse than they used to be.

[jacques_chester]

Yes, it's a human dynamic. In other spheres of interaction we've evolved mechanisms to cope.

I wrote about this a few years ago[0]. But for the day to day situation, Stephen Fry has made the sensible choice. There's no point drinking from a well people keep re-poisoning.

[0] http://chester.id.au/2013/03/22/why-the-law-is-slow-imperson...

[lhnz]

A problem I've noticed is that offensive content seems to float to the top. Outside of Twitter I rarely see the kind of hatred I'm about to refer to.

For example, the other day Trump RT'd a tweet by an account with a name like 'White Genocide'. I kid you not. Anybody that clicks this is going to find very unpleasant material about 'the end of the white race' including photos of blood-covered Swedish women, etc. Not very nice. Another day, people were tweeting a Business Insider article on GitHub which directed me towards a series of tweets by some employee ranting about how white people 'cannot be taught empathy' and therefore should not be allowed into positions of power.

These are both very extreme political positions which ultimately revolve around hatred and dehumanisation.

It's just not a good user experience for this kind of thing to constantly be spotlighted by either Twitter, the 'professionally offended', or the 'professionally offensive'. I'd love to be able to tick a box which just says something like "just don't show me things that are going to cause me to lose hope in the human race". Seriously.

This level of hatred doesn't seem to appear on Facebook or on the front page of papers. I don't see why it should be such a big part of my Twitter experience.

I believe in freedom of speech and I'm anti-censorship but in advance I'd like a setting which would help me to avoid having to consciously decide not to see this material.

[blhack]

>"just don't show me things that are going to cause me to lose hope in the human race". Seriously.

How could twitter determine things that are going to make you lose faith in the human race?

[lhnz]

I am way less sure of how to do that and can only hazard a guess.

Do not show me controversial accounts, tweets or tags not 'generally liked by the people one degree of separation away from me'?

I'd experiment to see if that helped, but if it doesn't try more things.

[Nr7]

Interesting. I have a complete opposite experience. I see a lot of disturbing stuff on Facebook but virtually none on Twitter. I guess it just depends on who you follow on these social medias.

[ksk]

Luckily, Twitter is a private company and does not have to offer a platform for anyone to say anything. They are free to limit speech as they see fit. That includes people from the so-called SJW community. Its not even PC vs non-PC, because that itself assumes there is an obvious 'correctness' in the language one must use. The whole "that's offensive/that's X-ist" crowd is annoying as hell.

[colllectorof]

The notion of "professionally offended" implies making money off the whole thing. If you don't, than you're merely an amateur offended.

Also, saying that Twitter has a problem is like saying that fires can cause property damage. Twitter is a problem. It's designed for propaganda, whether corporate or political. There is very little else to it that an RSS feed can't do. You cannot use it to run a community or have a real discussion. 140 character limit dumbs things down. Retweets encourage mob mentality and echo chambers. Embedded pictures server to spread stupid memes (think 21st century propaganda posters) and also as an ugly workaround for the character limit. You can't even link to stuff properly, because... uh, reasons. (URLs really shouldn't have counted towards message length.)

If people thought things through, it wouldn't have taken off in the first place.

[niccaluim]

I prefer "recreationally fragile."