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:Cool

[another_twilight]

One of the most effective ways to enforce group think is to introduce user moderation, and slashdot was basically the place that invented it. Just sayin.

I disagree.

The way user moderation is implemented at Slashdot seems to allow contrary opinions to exist. Nothing is modded below -1, so dogpiling is mitigated and even -1 comments are sometimes replied to. Nothing is modded over +5, so positive comments all top out to the same amount - there's no fighting for 'most votes'.

You'll still see strongly differing opinions with positive moderation in threads - something that doesn't seem to happen to the same degree on other sites.

I've yet to see evidence of collusion or deliberate suppression of ideas. I've seen mods that looked like '-1 disagree' but more often I see negative moderation for posts that are flamebait, offensive, trollish or offtopic. If you have an unpopular opinion, stating it in a way likely to attract criticism is a great way to play the victim. Rather than taking care to express yourself clearly and risking being unsuccessful in convincing people to change their minds, it's easier to be deliberately confrontational and then claim any negative response is part of 'group think'.

Re:Cool

[apoc.famine]

There are two major issues with /. modding. Or three. The first is that sockpuppeting still happens, although the random mod point distribution does help with that. The second is that it doesn't seem like many people metamoderate, and that system is broken and showing me unmoderated posts 3/4 of the time when I go anyway.

The last problem is that it seems that a lot of bad mods get done by the twitchy tweeters and redditors who dive into an article shortly after it's posted, and then hack and slash, close the tab, and move on. Over the next few hours, days and even weeks those mods get reversed into what seem more sensible mods, but it takes the thoughtful slow old folks some time to get to it.

During all that time, the modding is slowly going from frothing angst towards reasoned discussion, but the earlier people hit an article, the worse the moderation tends to be. I think if the metamodding was fixed and people actually took the time to do it, that would go away somewhat faster.