Slashdot Mirror
Twitter Plans To Remove 'Like' Button in a Bid To Improve the Quality of Debate, Report Says (telegraph.co.uk)
Twitter is planning to remove the ability to "like" tweets in a radical move that aims to improve the quality of debate on the social network, UK news outlet The Telegraph (paywalled) reports, citing CEO Jack Dorsey's comments at a recent company event. From the report: Founder Jack Dorsey last week admitted at a Twitter event that he was not a fan of the heart-shaped button and that it would be getting rid of it "soon." The feature was introduced in 2015 to replace "favourites," a star-shaped button that allowed people to bookmark tweets to read later. Update: In a statement, Twitter neither confirmed nor denied the report, adding that it was indeed in the process of rethinking "everything." It said, "As we've been saying for a while, we are rethinking everything about the service to ensure we are incentivizing healthy conversation, that includes the like button. We are in the early stages of the work and have no plans to share right now."
Wonder if the bookmark option will come back. That made more sense to me anyway.
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell
Such voting systems tend to let every discussion platform devolve into something as low as politics. And by that I don't mean real world politics, but what politicians tend to do when conversing with each other or the public.
It's like to be able to say 'like' or 'don't like' or 'funny', 'sad', etc, similar to what Bookface do. Add more option, don't take the option away. Learn from how your users want to use your product, don't dictate.
The feature was introduced in 2015 to replace "favourites," a star-shaped button that allowed people to bookmark tweets to read later.
You don't have enough time to read a tweet now, but you do have enough time to realize that you should read it later?
After you've banned all the dissenting voices?
Or, as a certain ideological orientation is wont to do, are we redefining debate to mean obedient agreement?
Let's face it, Twitter debates look like this, removing a 'like' button will do little to improve the situation.
(that's all) -- seriously removing like could jest result in lots of comments like "yes", "agree", or "ok"
Gimme a break. Twitter sells rage while attempting to maintain a certain agenda.
Check your premises.
Indeed. Or just enforce decent standards of discourse in the first place. Allowing 'personal opinion' posts which are horribly bigoted is a big problem, especially as platforms like Twitter tend to encourage echo chambers of people egging each other on to become more extreme, and also result in these people isolating themselves away from other viewpoints (unlike, say, going to a bar or pub and spouting off, which may result in 'corrective community action' (a fist in the face, say) being applied).
It's not an easy solution. Sure, automated content monitoring can go some distance, especially if kept up to date with the latest extremist terminology and fads (red X icon in username, for example), and network connectivity graphs in conjunction with this can identify groups of vile scum, and so on. Stopping these people bullying and threatening other people on the platform would be a good start. No-platforming absolutely works.
In the end however, it's education, or lack of education, that leads to this.
Doesn't say anything about retweets going away. Essentially you can still cast your vote in support of a tweet, but you have to out yourself to your followers as having done so.
You do realize that you are just as much as a judgmental bully as anyone you are pointing your finger at, right?
People who speak proper English can't have a productive debate and always keep to 140 characters or less. People who "excel" at Twitter are why Youtube stars are soon going to be running the world.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
> It may work out well, if most of the community is sensible and there's impartial moderators that do their job. But I've seen the opposite happen often enough, where dissenting opinions which are factually more correct than the simplistic bullshit get 'downvoted into oblivion' while the simplistic bullshit stays on top (using standard sorting).
That's a problem on Slashdot.
Somebody will post "the boss / execs will never go to jail!" and that's instantly plus five. I point out that the boss was arrested a few months ago and is looking at ten to twenty years, and provide a link, that gets modded to -1.
Very often what's modded up the most is the opposite of the plain facts, while a link to thr actual facts gets modded down because it doesn't fit the narrative.
Twitter is often not used as a simple social media platform, it's a publishing platform that enforces odd behaviour in terms of limited tweet sizes, threads of tweets, and so on.
Pretty much this. Twitter is a publishing platform for already famous people to stroke their egos by posting short quips of drivel, and every response is either circle-jerking over it or yelling into a void.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
You need a "smiley face" to indicate that you "like" something? Are you functionally illiterate? Mentally challenged? A child under the age of 4?
I don't respond to AC's.
Every social media platform tries to eliminate the "like" button lately. You see, if there is a "like" button and no "dislike" button (which can be abused by the internet thought patrol to silence dissidents), all voices will be heard and most importantly their impact will be assessed (to a degree). Which isn't good if you are progressive CEO of a "hip" tech startup who believes in political bullying and the silencing of "non-progressive" voices.
(that's all) -- seriously removing like could jest result in lots of comments like "yes", "agree", or "ok"
Right. So? Does clicking a little "smiley face" or a "thumbs up" indicate something deeper than "yes", "agree", or "OK"?
I don't respond to AC's.
Every browser that I'm aware of already has bookmarks. You should try that feature. It works really well.
I don't respond to AC's.
I agree, Slashdot's mod system is better than most.
Perhaps it would be helpful to have a "-1 I disagree" or "-1 fuck this guy", along with "+1 I believe this too" that are decoys - they don't actually do anything. Lol
I've thought along the same lines, maybe adding a -1 dafuq? and +1 Brutal.
But yes - Slashdot's mod system should be adopted by others. It isn't perfect, but I haven't seen anything better.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Don't forget the leftwing nutjobs too. I drive a Prius, I recently got cut off by a large pickup truck with a bumper sticker saying they will cut off Prius. I live in a rural areas, Pickup Trucks are common, because they are often needed for their livelihood. My Livelyhood requires me to commute 30 miles to work, so I got a car with the best gas mileage that I could afford at the time. The pickup truck driver sees Prius owners as a threat because Prius Owners has/had a tenancy to be preachy and he probably fears that if we have our way we will push him to get rid of his truck that he enjoys and uses for his livelyhood, and get the same little car that I have. Now that he was clearly targeting me, I no longer like that particular driver, but I always need to be cautious around larger pickup trucks because I know they see me as a threat. This sounds stupid, but it is a sign of our times. We see our differences a threat vs a benefit.
You need a big rear window sticker that reads, "Prius Owners for Second Amendment Solutions to Traffic Problems"
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The minority in every context has to face the results of peer pressure. It's subjective as to how horrific that pressure may be. You special isolated snow flakes might freak out over relatively nothing. You also might be anti-social and need that popular peer pressure to trigger EVOLVED emotions so you either adapt to function in the social group or you leave and try to survive alone (which is easy in our modern disconnected abstracted society.)
The majority power sets the guidelines... unless authoritarian, then the power is disproportionate... which to the minority perspective looks like almost the same thing since the way such things are carried out are not by seeing the whole majority crowd acting as one-- they are almost always represented in some way by a few entities.
Up/Down voting is NOT bullying. Peer pressure / social pressure can seem similar to bullying but are not the same; although, depending on how you define it and the situation it can be the same. Bullying can be a parent forcing rules upon a child; trying to define it so it can't apply to that but also applies everywhere it's used is not so easy. Question is then, is all bullying bad? or do we play legal games trying to define it so it allows stuff we approve of? (like terrorism for example which ends up being subjective hypocrisy because that approach doesn't work.) The reasonable end position is that bullying is not always bad (by far better than accepting hypocrisy-- something we now seem to be doing instead.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
The only winning move is not to use twitter. :)
Because it is the perfect medium for twats.
L'Idiot
It's a horrible place where the most horrible people are given soap boxes. I changed my password to something I wouldn't remember, logged out and never looked back. Facebook is in the same boat. Never got instagram. Seems to be just people posing and pretending to have lives, when in reality they spend most of their time trying to show that they have lives.
Any bets one whether the button replacing this button will be a yellow moon or a green clover?
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
who would've(off) thunk.
We need a -1 Fake News AND a +1 Fake News.
Except for the fact I hate Bumper Stickers. Have you ever met a person who wen't. Look I changed my outlook on life because I saw that one clever bumper sticker.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Hmm....it seems to me the radical statements like YOURS above, are a problem too....
It illustrates how there are fringes on BOTH sides. This is some of the first we've seen that is this egregious from the radical fringe 'right' side of the spectrum, but you do also need to acknowledge how much of this type of hate and violence has come from the radical and fringe 'left'...remember the shooting at the congressional baseball practice that almost kill Mr. Scalise? How about all the many ANTIFA and similar riots in cities and colleges in the western and northwestern US ?
Those were not a pretty picture, and also the suppression of conservative speakers on college campuses by threats of violence/rioting from those on the left?
There are no clean hands on the extremes of either political spectrum.
I think most normal level headed folks condemn those acts.
I think politicians on BOTH sides need to condemn this and call for order on both sides.
I will admit, I'm a bit perplexed by Waters and other democrat elected officials have been calling for active intrusions and confrontation of any of those public officials on the right tho.....THAT is something that needs to be shut down immediately, and I'm surprised this has not happened from the leaders of the Dem side.
Protest and demonstrations of your views and disagreements are part of the US, but any violent act or intrusions on the rights and lives of those you disagree with have NO place in our society.
So, please.....try to take your blinders off, and see the truth out there. MSNBC spews out as much vitriol and misinformation as Fox does.
There's plenty of flavors of Kool-Aid out there, and it appears you are heavily sipping from one of them too, just as much as those you are speaking about on the other side.
Remember, when you point at someone, you have 3 fingers pointing back at you.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Twitter it seems will not stop until the company is dead.
The fact is that Twitter can never reconcile that to have a popular social network, they will have to allow for people of differing views to make use of it. They keep dancing around that basic fact yet will not embrace it, even though any time they get close it leads to more users.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Except for the fact I hate Bumper Stickers. Have you ever met a person who wen't. Look I changed my outlook on life because I saw that one clever bumper sticker.
I hate em too. But the suggestion is to let the Truck driver with an attitude about People who drive Priuses understand that possibly killing a Prius driver or annoying them might end up with a similar result to him. Hopefully it would be a jolt that lets him know that assuming anyone who drives a Prius is not necessarily an anti gun transgender gender issue major looking to implement communism and kill the unborn demoncrat.
I had an acquaintance a few years back who drove a Prius. So far right wing he wanted summay execution a whites only America and martial lawto acheive that goal. He happened to be a gun nut, and crazy as well. Fortunately he passed away before he killed someone. You could just tell he was looking for an excuse.
Me? I just have my Jeep outfitted with cameras, and if someone annoys me enough, the SD cards go to my buds in law enforcement and they'll take care of the problem.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Master Debater. :)
[($)]
The funny thing in this topic is that red states have prisons with the least amount of racial segregation and race wars; blacks, whites, and latinos, mixing and just living it out, while the "progressive" blue states like your western regions have the highest amount of racial friction and prisons being racial war-grounds. So it's not the Department of the Interior making it so, it's your dumbshit politics which does and in an ironic manner, it's BLM which does. Surprise surprise, people who twist their lives about preaching race create more trouble than solutions, much like Jim Jones.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgrha6vij1I
Slashdot
A very smart person told me that, if Twitter is not an agora for you (an enjoyable one), then you're not doing it right. I think he is right and it's harder than I seemed like it would be. It's kind of hard to curate a set of folks to follow that remains interesting and reasonably free of mindless trolling/counter-trolling/r99999. Especially in the political arena.
TIL Twitter has debates.
/s (?)
--- Keep the choice with the user..
I can't help but read this as increasing the rate in which people readily agree with whatever ideas their blue checkmark agitators tell them they are supposed to agree with.
Even North Korean elections aren't this disingenuous.
I've thought for a long time that there needs to be a Sarcasm option. I often mod Funny when I sense sarcasm, but it's not the best option, as sarcasm is usually a dry, wry, witty comment.
No sig for you! Come back one year!