Is It Time To Rethink the Fundamental Dynamics of Twitter? (techcrunch.com)

At a TED conference, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said the social media company needs to rethink how they incentivize user behavior to combat abuse and misinformation. "He suggested that the service works best as an 'interest-based network,' where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who posted it -- rather than a network where everyone feels like they need to follow a bunch of other accounts, and then grow their follower numbers in turn," reports TechCrunch. From the report: Dorsey recalled that when the team was first building the service, it decided to make follower count "big and bold," which naturally made people focus on it. "Was that the right decision at the time? Probably not," he said. "If I had to start the service again, I would not emphasize the follower count as much ... I don't think I would create 'likes' in the first place." Since he isn't starting from scratch, Dorsey suggested that he's trying to find ways to redesign Twitter to shift the "bias" away from accounts and toward interests.

And while Dorsey said he's less interested in maximizing time spent on Twitter and more in maximizing "what people take away from it and what they want to learn from it," TED's Chris Anderson suggested that Twitter may struggle with that goal since it's a public company, with a business model based on advertising. Would Dorsey really be willing to see time spent on the service decrease, even if that means improving the conversation? "More relevance means less time on the service, and that's perfectly fine," Dorsey said, adding that Twitter can still serve ads against relevant content. In terms of how the company is currently measuring its success, Dorsey said it focuses primarily on daily active users, and secondly on "conversation chains -- we want to incentivize healthy contributions back to the network."

Comments

He's come to the right place

[Anonymous Coward]

Asking a certified look-we-are-so-SMRT echochamber cult for advice on how to keep the goodthink in and evict the badthink out from your "social media platform"? Exactly the thing I would do!

Re:He's come to the right place

[Voyager529]

I have good karma on slashdot, and because of this, I have the choice to disable ads. Maybe twitter could employ some sort of "karma" like slashdot did, and use it to enable or disable certain aspects of twitter.

The problem is that Karma on Slashdot is generally capped, and the reach of Slashdot is relatively low. It's entirely possible for me to have a similar level of karma to Wil Wheaton on Slashdot (if he's still around). Both Wil and I have had comments modded +5, the highest available. On Twitter, it would require some bizarre viral share situation for a tweet of mine to have the same number of likes and retweets that Wil gets on a bad day. I will never have the same reach as Cardi B on Twitter, but if she were to join Slashdot, we would likely reach similar levels of karma.

Twitter would be betting the farm on the sort of shift that allows for the sort of egalitarianism which Slashdot's system is intended to provide. Moreover, there's no way Twitter is allowing anyone to disable ads, except maybe if they're some sort of influencer like Katy Perry or Ellen Degeneres...and by time you get to that level, ads aren't seen by the individual because those Twitter accounts are managed by social media teams. Also, if the threshold is set to even 500 followers, that would make that option unavailable for 96% of Twitter users.

Even if somehow that problem was solved, what would be able to be changed? Besides ad removal, the addition of extra filters? Accounts that can only be followed once you have a certain amount of reach? Even if they came up with a dozen different achievements that allowed customization of the experience, wouldn't that make the issue that much worse as people on the cusp of that sort of popularity would start begging for followers to reach it, making Twitter worse for lower level users?

Slashdot has its issues, but it's clear that preventing the existence of a 0.01% of accounts and limiting the reward of groupthink has been a fundamental component from the get-go, which has helped it avoid some of the pitfalls of Reddit and other straight upvote/like ranking systems. Such a system would alienate the Twitter audience, and Twitter knows it.

Re:He's come to the right place

[Can'tNot]

Slashdot and Reddit could both be vastly improved by making 1 up-vote cancel out 5 down-votes.

This would make moderation mostly useless for any controversial topic, every post would be at +5. Moderation only works when some posts are elevated above others.

That said, reddit's system is absolutely terrible. I can't understand why slashdot's system hasn't been copied more broadly, the mod system here has its flaws but it's the best I've seen anywhere and it's been around forever.

Insane noise and screaming is NOT a dynamic

[shanen]

I'm going to watch this discussion to see if anyone can provide a sane definition of what the "dynamics of Twitter" are supposed to be. Near as I can tell, it is a peculiar form of insanity driven by some sort of theory that if you can get enough eyeballs looking in the same direction, you must have created some value there. I'm not seeing the value.

Part and parcel of the insane worship of corporate cancers? Of course if stock prices become completely detached from reality, then the only question is which company can do the best "job" of creating an illusion of shareholder value, eh? I'd still bet on the Chinese, whose stock market has risen 30% recently for no reasons I can detect.

By the way, the original idea of extremely short messages was really dumb. Twice times dumb is still dumb. I used to believe the expression that "Brevity is the soul of wit" until I saw Twitter in action.

Re:Insane noise and screaming is NOT a dynamic

[Anonymous Coward]

The "dynamics of twitter" is that Jack has created a giant pub, people hang about with their mates talking about stuff, they talk to the people next to them, who the generally know by sight at least, and are perfectly capable of shouting across the bar is someone says something particularly stupid. If someone tells a particularly good joke then it does the rounds and everybody laughs, and if someone drops their pint everybody stops what they are doing to take the piss.

What Jack has thus far neglected to do is find a way to sell these people drinks, and thus make any money from these people who turn up in his establishment every day for a chat, or a rant, or a fight.

Lipstick on a pig.

[geekmux]

Twitter is basically pointless and rather worthless in the big picture.

Yes, it really is. Don't give me that freedom/privacy/have-to-fight-tyranny bullshit. Wars were never won with Tweets, and the last humans attempting to convey meaningful messages in 140 characters or less were cavemen smearing pictures on rock walls. The early days of Twitter were essentially learning just how often humans was bored enough on a toilet to tell other humans about it, and assume they gave a shit.

And no, you're not going to convince greedy shareholders demanding infinite growth these days that less eyeballs and less time in front of your ad-driven revenue model is somehow a good thing. You would need to fix the greed problem first.

But this isn't how Twitter (and people) work

[Opportunist]

What people, at least those using Twitter to broadcast, want is publicity. They want to be heard. They want followers who read their stuff, retweet it and make them feel important. What people want is that their opinion matters. If you have a million followers, everything you say will be taken in by a million brains and they will probably believe it. If, and only if, it supports their already pre-formed notion of what is "true".

Because that's how people work.

Now, of course you could achieve this also by providing insightful information. You could inform the world about flaws in software you discover, you could have the (actual) news before the local outlet brings them. But this is hard. What's way easier is is to provide some conspiracy-laced fringe theories that find some fertile grounds with those that feel slighted by "the system" or somehow disadvantaged, which is a pretty big hunting ground in the western world today.

Re:This is not an echo chamber

[AmiMoJo]

Presenting a reasonable overview of views and conversations is a very difficult nut to crack. How do you select posts that are representative, in a way that can't be gamed?

If you do somehow manage to do it you will be accused of bias anyway, because people think that their fringe view is actually way more popular than it is.

Re:This is not an echo chamber

[DarkOx]

You all know the flat earthers are making fun of YOU right. The joke is to troll people who think they are informed and an educated. I won't pretend there might not be some crank out there that still actually thinks the earth is flat but the flat earthers certainly don't think so. Most of them are really really smart guys and gals who are amused by coming up with the math porn to explain all the observed evidence and still conclude a flat earth.