[throwkeep]

Twitter is a particularly well refined mob machine. No room for nuance, distribution at the speed of light directly into your feed and/or Trending, participants immediately rewarded for generating and spreading outrage.

I get that a lot of this was unintentional, but the dynamic has now been known for a decade and has only gotten worse. Why has Twitter the company and its employees not taken action to deal with this? Instead spending their time creating tools and methods to censor non-mob participants? (e.g. those who were exploring the lab leak hypothesis) Why isn't the mob a top priority?

[qsort]

> Why isn't the mob a top priority?

Part of that is the incentives going in the opposite direction, as other commenters have noted.

Even assuming they are in good faith, though, I believe it is an extremely difficult problem. Building and maintaining large scale communities is next to impossible, you can't just turn off a switch and make the mob go away, a mob is, by definition, out of control.

Historically, we have solved this problem by effectively limiting access to large scale communication, with small elites acting as gatekeepers. Social media tore down the metaphorical wall, allowing any random person to talk to anybody who will listen.

This is, by and large, a good thing. However, those elites did play a role, because they could keep each other in check and enforce standards of behavior that would prevent the worst abuses.

So the question is not how we go back to the 70s or something (yet again, the change is overall in the right direction), but how we can replace the missing piece. Needless to say, I don't even know where to start.

[beaconstudios]

Large-scale community is an oxymoron, and I think the sooner we realise that the better.

Communities are built on trust and relationships, what happens at social platforms is that people with "large communities" are just creating followings the same way that celebrities always have, which are a weird modern corruption of the idea of a community (or if you want the academic term for it, a parasocial relationship).

[sharken]

I think of Hacker News as a community, but it's still large enough that you don't really notice who is posting.

What makes a difference to me are the insights you get here combined with thoughtful answers, as in rarely the lowest common denominator type of discussions.

For that there are all too many forgettable social media sites.

[beaconstudios]

Hacker News isn't a community in any meaningful sense. I have had interpersonal interactions with maybe half a dozen people from here, all very positive but I don't know these people like I know my neighbours or my friends or even the people who work at the local shop.

Hacker News is a very large and impersonal forum. You can have interesting conversations on a forum, but the degree to which they are a community is the degree to which you develop relationships with the other people. I wouldn't call /r/videos (or any other massive subreddit) a community either, and they have the same level of social intimacy.

[Multicomp]

> Hacker News is a very large and impersonal forum

Agreed. Aside from recognizing some familiar usernames[1], unless you know someone from IRL or via another social media platform, the posts all 'pseudo-anonymously' blend together. The standardized comment formats, fonts, and command bar next to each comment help make it so, even if you perform per-page custom styling.

[1] my personal list OTOMH is tctpateck(sp?), dragonwriter, doreenmichelle, dang(ok thats a gimme), sklabnik

[lurker619]

Exactly. Many times I've typed out a comment and at the last moment refrain from posting, because I feel it doesn't really add to the discussion. I'd rather there be less higher-quality comments, than many comments like mine justing adding +1. Ironically, I almost deleted this comment.

[OJFord]

It took me years, (I don't mean that to sound like I was trying) but I have actually started recognising quite a few usernames. Not even particularly prolific/high karma users, or at least not only them, just people with some common interests so we're frequently reading/commenting on the same things I suppose.

[anigbrowl]

People with huge followings are just e-celebs, but one can be a (shallow) part of a large community of people with similar interests in a particular topic. To the extent that you have somethin gin common with other people, and to the extent that that thing is unusual or costly in some fashion, you'll typically going to feel a sense of connection to someone you hear or read about without necessarily knowing them.

[beaconstudios]

Yes I think there are two things that are needed to form bonds: small numbers, and common context. Having a common interest in motorcycle repair or horticulture or something works, but HN's common interest is just commenting on the Internet and probably being a programmer, which isn't significant to bond over even disregarding the huge group size.

[gjhh244]

You're definitely right. If you don't personally know and somewhat trust other people in your community, chances are it's not really a community at all.

[bckr]

> This is, by and large, a good thing.

I don't agree that social media (qua social networks) has moved us in the right direction.

Web forums and blogs were better.

I don't think we need to find the missing piece. I think we need to remove the unnecessary, super profitable poison.

Something like private, self hosted forums with universal log in, but no cross-contamination of "likes" and comments, and no algorithmic attention management.

I think I need to write my senators.

[qsort]

> Web forums and blogs were better.

I don't think they were inherently better. And don't get me wrong, I have a mostly positive experience with forums and blogs and an extremely negative experience with social networks, eventually I deleted every single account I am not required to have for work-related reasons.

However, I believe the underlying reason is that pre-Facebook communities were more "selective". Being part of those forums or reading blogs was more of a deliberate choice rather than the societal average, something like HN, early Slashdot or early Reddit. This resulted in user bases that were not cross-sections of the general population.

In the alternate universe where forums and blogs became the mainstream, I believe we would have seen the same problems.

Algorithmic feeds are literally evil incarnate and I'd love nothing more than to see them nuked out of existence, but I don't think they are the root of the problem, at least not in this particular case.

[mattgreenrocks]

I think I can break your point down into two smaller facets:

* the notion of voluntary association. How many social media users use social media because they think they're supposed to? Voluntary association facilitates the perception of good faith on the part of others by its nature.

* the type of user, e.g. an enthusiast vs otherwise. A lot of social media's problems stem from it's crazy scale, which, as a byproduct, increases the amount of bad apples and their visibility.

Forums and their ilk had similar problems with cabals and such, but the fact that they weren't the single destination to be made the stakes lower. I can see a future where we cede current social networks to the very online crowd and let them continue to play their power games in their own little sandbox while the rest of the world moves on.

[akomtu]

Better for whom? Most people out there aren't able to produce their own thoughts and have an attention span of a frog. They wouldn't know what to write in a blog. Bursts of primitive emotions is the only thing that distracts them from dull reality. Social media is great for these people: it's a stadium where they come, shout at each other and go home, feeling fulfilled and morally superior.

[vlunkr]

What could be changed about twitter to make this better? The entire design feeds right into this. I've heard it said that it was intended to be a place for good discussion, but I really don't believe that. Good discussion isn't had 140 characters at a time. The whole point of the site is to give everyone a megaphone.

[throwkeep]

A good start would be:

Remove the algorithmic feed

Remove the Trending bar

Increase character length

Ban witch hunts

[prawn]

Use https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ - normal chronological feed and no trending anything. Then prune your following. I don't see any witch hunts; my feed is generally very positive.

[anigbrowl]

I have tweets come up in chronological rather than selected order, and it's still crap on a regular bases because people are crap. There's not much you can do besides unfollowing people who are consistently annoying or vapid.

I think retweets/quote tweets are a bigger problem. I can understand why a large number of people I follow might tweet about the same thing, but I don't need to see that thing reproduced 10 times.

[Jorengarenar]

> I've heard it said that it was intended to be a place for good discussion

What? No. Where had you heard that? Twitter was meant to be SMS in the Internet - for quick comments, quick news, quick updates, short notices, short etc.

[Domenic_S]

When everyone has a megaphone you only hear the people who are screaming next to you.

[jonfromsf]

because it makes money. Why would they want to stop it? People have a weird mental model where they think private companies are the government. They're just a group of people getting paid to make money for investors.

[randphys]

Is it really only the job of government to make ethical decisions? Surely companies and employees can and should try to be ethical. Just because there is profit involved doesn't mean that we should throw out our humanity.

[qsort]

The point is, there are a lot of conflicting ways to be 'ethical'. It's not like we have a universal loss function we should minimize.

Any moral dilemma slightly more complicated than 'is killing wrong' is a tradeoff, and sometimes you can't blame people if they prefer a point on the curve different from the point on the curve you like.

Maybe in this case they are just wrong -- I have no sympathy for Twitter either. But I'd rather companies, in general, not try and play God. Even more so, I really would rather the government not try and play God.

[bluGill]

> Any moral dilemma slightly more complicated than 'is killing wrong' is a tradeoff

Even killing is a trade off. Every country has a military of some sort. Every village has some form of police that can kill (some are much more likely to kill than others, but eventually all police forces can bring on death if the situation is bad enough). There have been cannibal societies in history (not very common from what I can tell, but they did exist) that would give a different answer as to what killing is moral than most of us.

[qpwoeirut]

In the end, the government answers to the people and companies answer to shareholders. Of course I agree that companies should be ethical, but they currently have no incentive to do so other than their own morals and I'd imagine those are pretty quickly squashed in the face of shareholders looking for profits and an "everybody else is doing it" argument.

Companies like Twitter and Facebook exist and thrive because they have taken the less ethical route.

[parafactual]

They should, but they mostly don't.

And I don't think it's easy; I suspect corporations do bad things despite the good intentions of employees. Each one, driven by subtle incentives, makes a somewhat less ethically sound decision than they would otherwise. And the effects of those decisions are often abstracted away from the decision-makers. The status quo gradually becomes worse and worse.

[kryogen1c]

> Is it really only the job of government to make ethical decisions?

one of the theoretical principals of capitalism is that free markets allow people to use their money as a proxy for ethical support and ethical decision making.

this principal is theoretical because of straight up apathy - people just cant be fucked. there are other minor contributing factors like information asymmetry, but the real issue with capitalism, like any politcal/economic system, is the people. PEBKAC.

if people cared and the market was free enough, ethical companies would simply put others out of business.

[splithalf]

Work requires compromising ourselves. We do this for survival. There is no way to make most tech ethical. It’s an economic reality that is quite evident in the historical data. When was the last time we had an ethical tech company? We have apple, facebook and google, all evil in slightly different ways, all taking more from humanity than they give back.

[slightwinder]

> Why has Twitter the company and its employees not taken action to deal with this?

They did. They tried many things, still do. But it's hard to fix without wasting the whole platform and becoming another reddit. What makes Twitter great is also what makes it aweful.

[cvwright]

Just goes to show how the fundamental design decisions guide how the system as a whole will behave. Short messages and no coherent threading makes for a perfect breeding ground for snark and hot takes. It's hard to say something thoughtful in 280 characters, but it's easy to say something nasty.

You can spend tons of money on trust & safety, tweaks to the UI, whatever. But a bad system design is still a bad system design.

It's kind of like trying to make an old C codebase secure by throwing in lots of calls to strlen() and changing some sprintf()'s to snprintf(). It may help a little, but it's not enough to turn the ship.

[bluGill]

Facebook doesn't have the same 280 character limit, yet it suffers from similar problems.

[cvwright]

Good point. Another hypothesis then: The real problem is the ad-driven "curation" that selects for drama and outrage to keep users "engaged" so they stay on the site for longer to view more ads.

This would explain why "social media" like FB and Twitter are so much worse than their predecessors (blogs, forums, email, sms, ...). All of the previous media could be bad too, but this is different.

[anigbrowl]

Twitter is largely a platform for self-promotion. This Hough lady wanted to promote her snarky attitude and encourage her followers to dunk on people who leave book reviews on GoodReads. it's a good example of 'be careful what you ask for'; if you cultivate attention in order to be toxic, you can't really complain when that rebounds upon you.

It's often not the case that people see a mob forming and jump in, in most cases. What people see is someone they know quote-tweeting an obnoxious person, or someone they already follow saying something obnoxious, and they condemn the obnoxious behavior. The more engagement an original tweet gets the more likely other people are to see it in their feed, regardless of whether it's obnoxious, funny, or whatever.

One time I replied to a sanctimonious statement from a politician with a mildly critical but also mildly witty reply, read a few other tweets and went on with my day. I don't get notifications from Twitter and was astonished to find the next day that my tweet had blown up and been quoted in a national publication. In fact all of my 'high performing' tweets over the years have been casual witticisms, but I've never seen one take off in real time because I only look at it intermittently. I suggest that rather than an angry mob, what you're seeing is simply the aggregation of multiple similar reactions. Few to none of those were necessarily invested with enormous significance by the people making them, unlike a real world mob.

This is not to say, of course, that theren't people who like going around condemning others, and Twitter does have a habit of showing you multiples of people posting about the same thing, as opposed to showing The Thing once and observing that 10 people you follow have left comments about it.

[Syonyk]

> Why has Twitter the company and its employees not taken action to deal with this?

Because it's not their job to moderate this stuff.

Angry, pissed off, outraged users are, from the perspective of social media companies, the best users. They refresh constantly (so more ad views), they come back constantly, and if they've gone away for too long, you can just figure out what's likely to piss them off the most, send them a notification, and they're right back into the ad delivery mill, engaged and outraged.

And all that means more money for the company. Which is their interest.

YouTube's guiding goal (at least some years back, as I heard it) was to increase hours watched. Period. Hours watched was the metric they optimized for, above all else. And it showed in the various recommendations that looked very broken from the outside world, but those tended to add hours watched.

I don't think the algorithms were nearly smart enough to know that they were recommending some conspiracy theorist gateway video, or extreme political content, or such. They simply knew, "If we get people to watch this video, they will then spend a lot more time on YouTube." So, the more people that watch that video one way or another, the more hours watched, problem improved! It's very "paperclip maximizer" seeming sort of algorithm.

Given that it's been known for years how to "drive your users nuts to keep them coming back" and social media companies have refined this to near perfection (it's Vegas in your pocket, without any of the regulations and rules Vegas casinos have to abide by), I'm in favor of some regulation on this sort of stuff, but I'm not at all sure it will actually matter. :/

[1234letshaveatw]

"So what if our AI is becoming self-aware and making questionable decisions? Or job is to win government contracts" - skynet employee, August 3rd, 1997 :)

[commandlinefan]

> Because it's not their job to moderate this stuff

And I'm not sure it would be better if it were. I don't care if a bunch of people I've never met are talking about what a horrible person I am (well ok, I do, but that's more of a me problem than a them problem). I do care when my employer joins the mob and ignores any evidence I might present of my innocence. What we need are for the people who can mete out the consequences to start thinking longer and harder before they capitulate to the outrage mob. A little less "better him than me" and a little more "I'd hate to be treated this way myself".

[AndrewUnmuted]

> it's Vegas in your pocket, without any of the regulations and rules Vegas casinos have to abide by

> I'm in favor of some regulation on this sort of stuff

You really nailed the problem but I am not so sure about your solution. The gambling industry's regulations do not do very much to reduce the volume of lives ruined by the gambling industry.

We've been gambling since the paleolithic period, and like other vices, its regulation serves largely to hide it from public view, rather than actually fix any social problems. Regulating social media in any meaningful way will do the same; compliance with these regulations will force the issue further into the corporate depths and away from public view.

We already know the social media firms collude with governments around the world in secretive tribunals to deal with issues of "national security." We don't want to encourage further developments on this front.

[Syonyk]

> The gambling industry's regulations do not do very much to reduce the volume of lives ruined by the gambling industry.

No, but if I walk into a casino, there's at least some chance I can come out with more money than I went in with.

Consider a slot machine app. Not only do you have no idea what the payout is, you're guaranteed to lose money if you pay for any coins in that game, which I assure you, people do. For reasons I don't understand, but I've seen it happen.

[listenallyall]

Not defending online casinos, but there are some people who enjoy playing slot machines even without the possibility of winning money, just like some people like playing Candy Crush -- or Call of Duty, for that matter.

[AndrewUnmuted]

A lot of people strike gold on social media, as well.

The list of people who had their 15 minutes of fame on social media platforms is endless and constantly growing.

[dwaltrip]

Companies have moral responsibilities. Societies must incentivize and regulate companies such that they strive to meet these responsibilities.

In addition, individual citizens (not “consumers” or “users”) matter immensely as well. Companies are aggregations of individuals and the behavior of each of us determines the behavior of companies. The cultural, legal, biological, and environmental factors that affect all of us individuals determine the macro behaviors of companies and governments. We can and must strive to improve these factors and thus improve the macro dynamics.

Obviously, the details of this will involve endless debate and there are many ways to approach the problem. But if we don’t try, we are asking to live in a shitty world.

P.S. These are rough thoughts that I quickly typed up and could definitely use some polishing. Some other time…

[edmundsauto]

> Angry, pissed off, outraged users are, from the perspective of social media companies, the best users

In the long term, these users make a community toxic and less viable in the long run. People don't come back after a long enough time.

[corndoge]

Engagement