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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.
Awww. Poor snowflake. You’re perfectly free to stay on your alt-right shithole Gab.
So I was thinking.. where have I seen this before? What does this remind me of? OH YEAH, the Ultima Online forums about 15 years ago.
I remember taking note that there's a lot of people bitching about the game's problems. Then I dunno where I came across this, but something to the effect of "The people posting here are the disgruntled ones, a very small percentage of our users, maybe 1%, they're the ones making all the stink, everyone else either doesn't care, doesn't know the forum exists, or has nothing to say."
The same can be applied to Twitter, in my opinion. A lot of tweets, and I'd wager a vast majority of them are from a fairly regular noisy selection of the entire service, and when you tally up that selection, they'll be probably about 1% of total accounts. 1% of the users making 99% of the noise. And you're gunna censor these people? Good luck. For starters, these are people who have an axe to grind, they want people to read their tirades and toxic posts. They will find a way to make enough noise to drown out everyone else. They always do.
So in short, Twitter is dealing with a problem the "online community" has known about for many many years. There exists a very vocal but definitely minority that is disproportionally prolific in their dissent.
It's not even unique to any particular platform, forum, service, or anything else where messages are written and others may read what's written. It always happens. Even right here on Slashdot, I bet the percentages are about the same too, 99% of those visiting this site never post anything, it's almost certainly that 1% that is prolific that's doing all the posting on this site.