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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Yeah, this is really Twitter's saving grace, and also why as much as it is a raging dumpster fire, it is still valuable.
Facebook curbs abuse by basically making sure no one can bug you unless you opt-in to it (friending them), and limiting how viral your posts can go. The flip side of this is that this is a really poor way to talk to people you don't already know.
Twitter is the complete opposite - complete strangers can contact you, read your writings, and do whatever. This is wonderful for networking, but obviously has pretty tremendously large downsides. Because of this there are actual "communities" on Twitter in a way that basically doesn't exist on Facebook, because associating with new people is just so easy.
The existential-scale problem facing Twitter now is that abuse has gotten so out of hand, and that the power-users are far more susceptible to abuse than everyone else due to their visibility. More than that, shutting off abuse in the ways we know how basically means converting to Facebook's social model, which is pretty much the anti-Twitter.
Maybe there are ways to curb abuse while helping Twitter stay Twitter? This is the big outstanding question, clearly I'm pessimistic about it - the two big reasons why Twitter succeeds (vast reach and free interjection) is precisely why it's also a shithole.
> the two big reasons why Twitter succeeds (vast reach and free interjection) is precisely why it's also a shithole
The same could be said for 4chan and it's still here after 15 years and shows no signs of going away. Can't we assume that twitter will continue to exist as it is right now? But then again, twitter and 4chan are different platforms. People get hurt on twitter and by 4chan. I guess twitter is going to become the next MySpace.
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.
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.