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.

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.

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.

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.