Twitter Will Start Hiding Tweets That 'Detract From the Conversation' (slate.com)

Yesterday, Twitter announced several new changes to quiet trolls and remove spam. According to Slate, the company "will begin hiding tweets from certain accounts in conversations and search results." In order to see them, you'll now have to scroll to the bottom of the conversation and click "Show more replies," or go into your search settings and choose "See everything." From the report: When Twitter's software decides that a certain user is "detract[ing] from the conversation," all of that user's tweets will be hidden from search results and public conversations until their reputation improves. And they won't know that they're being muted in this way; Twitter says it's still working on ways to notify people and help them get back into its good graces. In the meantime, their tweets will still be visible to their followers as usual and will still be able to be retweeted by others. They just won't show up in conversational threads or search results by default. The change will affect a very small fraction of users, explained Twitter's vice president of trust and safety, Del Harvey -- much less than 1 percent. Still, the company believes it could make a significant difference in the average user's experience. In early testing of the new feature, Twitter said it has seen a 4 percent drop in abuse reports in its search tool and an 8 percent drop in abuse reports in conversation threads.

Comments

Re:The Noisy 1%

[apoc.famine]

One time on one forum that I kick myself forever for having forgotten, they did group shadowbanning for trolls. Big PSA not to feed the trolls, and then shadowbanned a whole lot of them.

What happened? The trolls essentially got their own forum, trolling each other, and it appeared to them that the PSA was amazingly effective. Normal users didn't reply to them, but other trolls did, and they did all sorts of trolling of each other. Because they still got replies, and didn't know who was shadowbanned and who wasn't, it took awhile for some of them to figure out what was going on. So underneath this quiet, sedate forum, a frothing troll fest was lurking, and if you were too much of a troll on the surface forums, you'd suddenly find yourself sucked into the cesspool.

The problem was that the cesspool was vastly more entertaining than the surface forums, which rather defeated the point.