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

Nothing has changed

[e0b521bb9d0246d0b619]

> "log in and see content relevant to your interest"

That sure as hell sounds like creating echo chambers to me - which is exactly the opposite of what is needed for meaningful discourse. The latter is what Twitter *should* be promoting if it actually cares one iota about abuse and misinformation, but of course it doesn't; it just cares about talking the talk so it can continue raking in ad money.

This is not an echo chamber

[aepervius]

"Content relevant to your interrest" normally include stuff you agree or disagree with, but on a particular subject. I don't care about twitter but when I want stuff about a certain theme, I want the stuff for the stuff against, and a way to weight where the consensus is (e.g. flat earth, globular earth, and where the consensus is). On the other hand if I want a flateartH/globular earth discussion and i get served content on java programming I am getting pissed off.

You are mistakenly reading "content relevant to yourself" with "content you agree with". A common error but a fatal one in such type of discourse.

Re:He's come to the right place

[BringsApples]

But hey, maybe they could take in one point from this here, echochamber...

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.

Re:He's come to the right place

[AmiMoJo]

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

You see a lot of comments both here and on Reddit with huge numbers of both up and down votes. Slashdot is particularly prone to the Insightful Troll mod.

Of course it will result in some actual troll posts being modded up by other trolls, but it's worth putting up with to give useful but somewhat unpopular posts a better chance.