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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."
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."
Literally. Focus not on accounts? No reporting of inactive user count to your investors...
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!
> "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.
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.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
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.
"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.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Echo chambers in fair part were created by trying to increase user engagement. The thought being that by providing more of what the user liked, they could in turn provide more and more meaningful ads.
The problem is that as people engaged more with certain things they started seeing less of other things. In other words they stopped getting exposed to competing and conflicting ideas. Over a period of time it can readily get to the point where users only hear things that agree with them. Good intentions can readily inadvertently create echo chambers.
The problem is that the user can readily come under the impression that their algorithmically defined world view is normal. Because this same process occurs concurrently across any platform of note (ad dollars) the echo chamber effect is comprehensive. Everywhere a user turns idea X is good and idea Y is bad! The result of this is increased hostility and society becoming increasingly polarized. Sooner or later this will inflame tensions to the point where civil wars start to break out.
Save the Internet. Kill the echo chamber.
Their economics were basically other people get engagement by posting stuff, and they ride the coattails to make money off of it.
Years ago, when the service was moderately popular, they could've just implemented a system by which people who have a *lot* of followers have to pay money to tweet to them.
Set up something like people get 100k points a day, and you can store up to 1M points. If you have 10k followers, you can send 10 tweets a day for free ... anything over that, you pay for. And you can tweet for free to 1 million followers if you're only tweeting every 10 days.
But those people paying for bots to follow them *also* have to pay twitter for the right to send messages to those bots. Corporations and people getting paid as 'influencers' have to give some money back to twitter for using their network to send messages to their followers.
I'm just throwing out some numbers here ... maybe you don't have a hard cap, but you have it so you can carry over a percentage from day to day. The basic idea is that those people who profit from your service have to pay in ... and those people still trying to build a following get to participate free 'til they hit some threshold
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
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.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The first time I tried Twitter, I couldn't make any sense out of it, and I gave up after a few days.
The second time, I added ~50 people to my feed and started following them. After some months, I realized that it was making me jittery, and I stopped.
The third time, I cut my feed down to ~5 people (only 3 of whom post regularly). Now I check it once or twice a day (more if I'm bored). I read back until I get to tweets that I've seen before, and then I'm caught up.
Maybe a year ago, I'm reading my feed, and after a while I realize that I'm...lost...disoriented...out of context. I'm seeing tweets from people that I don't follow. I'm seeing tweets from long ago. I'm finding myself dropped into the middle of threads I that never saw the start of. I have a nagging feeling that I'm missing things, so I keep reading. And it just keeps going: I never get caught up.
Eventually, I start looking around, and I find that Twitter has switched me to "Top Tweets" (also called "Home"), which is some kind of algorithmic mash-up of my feed, and things linked to my feed, and things maybe sort-of like my feed, all presented in a pseudo-non-chronological order.
Twitter tries to gloss this as tweets relevant to my interests, but its primary effect it to annoy me, and disorient me, and--crucially--to prevent me from engaging with Twitter in a directed and goal-oriented fashion. I can't just read what's new and get on with the day. Instead, I'm stuck in this endless scrolling morass of...twitter stuff...
I crawl around in Twitter's configuration screens and eventually find where they've hidden the Top/Latest setting. I switch it back to Latest Tweets (my feed only, strict chronological order). I catch up on my feed and then I'm done.
But the next time I look at Twitter, they've switched my feed back to Top Tweets, and I'm lost, and they also moved the setting somewhere new and I have to go hunt it down and switch it back again.
Eventually, the setting migrates to the little star icon at the top right of the front page and stays there, but to this day Twitter periodically switch my feed to Top tweets and I have to switch it back.
It seems obvious to me that this is all about increasing user time on the platform. Twitter really, really, really does not want me to just read what's new in a directed way and then get on with my day. They want to create a morass--a tarpit--that can put me into a fugue state and keep me forever scrolling down to read just one more tweet.
It's hard to jump in with an insightful comment if your moral compass has forgotten what the words originally meant; in that condition, at best you're chasing your own tail.
Interest:
1) something that arouses attention
2) advantage, benefit
3) business, company
Behind door number two, our "interests" are succeeding in life: becoming competent in our professions and avocations; achieving financial security; having family you enjoy spending time with—who all enjoy the best possible health.
The shell game performed by the advertising industry is to substitute "interests" with "irritations".
* You're irritated when your dish soap fails to cut through grease.
* You're irritated when you laundry soap leaves ring around the collar.
* You're irritated when your TV has 500 channels, and the only channel with something good on is the premium channel for which you have yet to subscribe.
———
What the mindfulness literature teaches is that our emotions are structured so that petty irritations flare up. Ideally, you stop and shake the tiny pebble out of your running shoe. Problem solved. However, if you sit for five minutes and actively stare at the cigarette, your desire to smoke the cigarette will actually subside, because this entire class of impulse is transient.
The purpose of advertising is to belay the transience. But the effect of each individual advertisement is also transient, and so the battering "belay" baton can only work if the advertising is unbelievably persistent, to the point of ubiquity in the human physical environment. This project is now complete to such an extent, that many people no longer even track the different between their irritations (and the surrounding micro-decisions) and their long-term interests (larger goals in life).
There's this meme that the Internet knows everything about you. And this is true, if you define your self as your exposed bundle of irritants, through which you can best be manipulated during micro-decisions. (Purchasing a $50,000 pick-up truck qualifies as a large micro-decision; whereas purchasing further education from the most appropriate graduate school would be a small macro-decision.)
———
I have my personal computer rigged so that I receive almost no advertisement. (Low financial profile, obscure software environment, combined with many plug-ins, and hundreds upon hundreds of ad hoc User CSS fragments.)
YouTube this morning tried to force me to watch a Grammarly ad. (I turned down the physical volume control and attended another screen for 60 seconds; if the ad blinks too much, I attend to another screen moved to a different desktop.)
The Grammarly ad featured an example of how the program can assist the writer in turning large woolly sentences into short, punchier sentences. Problem: I don't write large woolly sentences in the first place. I write large sophisticated sentences, because large sophisticated sentences are better at conveying attitude to readers who put in the mental effort to read between the lines.
———
I would have more readers (I'm pretty sure), if my writing was less cognitively demanding. But I'd communicate less over all.
Laszlo Bock's book Work Rules: Insights from Inside Google (2015) says that productivity is governed by a Pareto distribution: the amount you communicate goes up exponentially with the intelligence and sophistication of the readers you reach. Nothing communicates more effectively that feeding a smart reader a smart idea. Here's the problem (part II): smart readers have already read all the short, pu
["Content relevant to your interrest" normally include stuff you agree or disagree with, but on a particular subject.] - You'd think that, but that's not how people are.
But Twitter shows that is EXACTLY how people are.
Because so much of twitter is filled with people in a bubble, bringing in contrary stories from outside that bubble to complain about, and to have others complain about as well.
A flat earther wouldn't find stuff on Globular Earth within their interest
Yes they absolutely would because they would want to bitch about that on Twitter, and call the group to flood the comments on any globular Earth story. That is exactly what happens today, everyday, all the time.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I use Twitter to follow my local transit agencies that tweet system status updates so I can be aware of them and take steps to mitigate transit issues. I can also ask questions or complain at them --- and actually get responses within minutes. I also use it to get in touch with companies' customer service --- and also actually get responses within minutes. And I can do all of this without having to call some number, navigate a phone-tree, and remain on hold for 20 minutes --OR-- send e-mail and likely have to wait "one business day" for a response.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.