[fanso99]

I think a big part (if not the most critical one) of this deterioration is the addition of algorithmic feeds. As soon as a company starts prioritizing content, it breaks the natural flow of a conversation we have in real life. This leads to group mixing, polarization, emotionally-charged content prevalence, etc.

I have never really used Twitter until very recently. It was shocking to me how much the algorithmic content insertion drives the conversation. E.g. I click on a link to read an individual thread: right in the middle of it, with almost no visual indication Twitter is inserting completely unrelated but "high engagement" content. It's brutal.

Edit: imagine group chats sorted by engagement... a pile of responses in a disconnected sequence. Someone said something funny that got 10 likes? Push it to the top for the next 2 hours! (I am tempted to build this as an experiment just to see how awful—or effective?—this would be like.)

[llbeansandrice]

This is it. It’s algorithms to drive “engagement”. Anger is easy to generate and match the algorithm to.

[raffraffraff]

And you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist who thinks that the heads of Twitter cynically tuned the algorithm to reward anger. If it's human nature to love a good fight, then unguided ML would generate a black-box model that promoted angry posts.

[llbeansandrice]

I never really got those conspiracy theories. The big secret is they're tuning it to make money. Money in the ad-tech age of the internet means eyes on content and engagement. Anger and clickbait and such are all incredibly easy to tune for. Plus it's not just the algorithms that are tuned for it, people, including the "creators" on any platform, change their behavior to do "better" on the platform.

It's just a feedback loop optimized for "engagement" which is the metric these companies are using to make more money from the companies buying ad-space. Occam's razor and all that. It's just about money.

[molasses]

I struggle reading threads on Twitter, just as I do on HN. If I could watch the thread grow organically perhaps possibly via a visual map, I'd stand a chance. Fork a thread on Twitter and content can end up totally buried. It's useless.

HN is far more simple in approach, but you only really stand a chance if you monitor your own thread. Kind of. So you just end up glancing this and that. Or trying to read something and then give up. Threads only get traction for about a day and people fall off reading them precisely because engagement requires a silly cognitive leap.

Natural conversations are a bit all over the place, but the brain is quite good at forming some kind of narrative. Despite participants sometimes have wildly differing interpretations. These aren't even apparent in the moment. Ruminating delays, and going back to conversations from yesterday doesn't much happen, unless you have quite an intimate relationship with someone, or you are very topic focused.

Throw many disjointed feeds into the mix, and how on earth do you navigate them, let alone participate in them.

About the only thing that kind of works for me when thinking back is something like newsnet, with basic topic threading. With well considered posts.

Apologies for adding to the noise.

[manholio]

The insane thing are the second order effects, people are actively tuning their content for maximum toxicity because they know the algorithm will reward them with likes, followers and perhaps real life clout, votes, money etc.

So the service social networks offer to their power users is a way for them to profit from the public discord they instigate.

It's everyone personal tabloid they can publish with zero barrier of entry or friction and an already hooked global audience.

[zztop44]

I think I remember Facebook was pretty toxic even before it had an algorithmic newsfeed. Maybe not as wild as now, but people being mean to each other and saying awful things was very much a thing. Same with oldschool forums, too.

[molasses]

People kind of go through a contrarian phase. I read something the other day, probably on Twitter, that to get the answer you want, you deliberately put out the wrong answer. And leach out the bile to get results.

I think there are still lots of people that are on-boarding. And over time they simmer down. Much is poor etiquette unwittingly forced, as we have finger fumbling interfaces.