28
votes
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey admits platform not a place for 'nuanced discussion' as top New York Times reporter quits after abuse
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- Published
- Jul 22 2018
- Word count
- 910 words
Twitter seems like an example of a site that has a decent idea at its core, but grew far too much in scope and size and is now just a festering ruin of anger and hot takes. Unfortunately I don't see it reverting to a text-only microblogging site anytime in the future, since that would be even less profitable than the current model.
Twitter would need such a massive overhaul it would likely bleed even more money then before.
Correct me if I’m wrong, IIRC Twitter has yet to turn any kind of net profit and is basically running on venture capital.
Apparently they posted a profit in February, so they're not fully out of the woods, but they aren't wasting away VC fumes like they were before.
Eternal September hit Twitter and it's worse than any other Eternal September; the mods basically walked away.
When they haven't got the power and the tools to make a difference, that's usually what happens.
This place needs to be different, and never be in that position.
Haberman's piece in the NYT is worth a read as well.
This rang particularly true for me, both applied to Twitter as well as Reddit:
Because the people in charge of the platform simply don't want to put in the effort to maintain it's quality. They want scalable solutions, able to do as much work with as little people as possible, and to reach an audience as large as they can. The fact that it degrades and becomes a noxious pit of lost potential is accepted collatetal damage as long as the advertisement money comes in.
I know people here like to dump on reddit, but many subreddits are still fairly decent. I think that's mostly due to strong intervention from certain moderators, though, which lends credence to what /u/clerical_terrors is arguing.
I'd say that reddit will remain useful for smaller communities until the changes to the platform alienate enough users such that the small communities lose members and look to relocate.
I will say there is an ever growing pool of defaults that I no longer belong to.
As mod and owner of several small, quality subs, I'm openly looking to exit.
No. As a moderator of a couple of decent subreddits, I've found it harder and harder to maintain standards over the past year or so. Part of that is just the inevitable decline of subreddits as they grow larger, but part of it is the general worsening of the wider Reddit environment which, as you rightly point out, can't be kept entirely out of any subreddit existing within that environment. No matter what walls one might try to put up, the toxicity still leaks through.
I've been gradually decreasing my involvement in Reddit over the past few months, focussing just on the small bits I care about, even before Tildes came along.
If you're going by "top 5 in class popularity" then you might already be shooting yourself in the foot somewhat. These platforms are the most popular by standard metrics of pagevisits or user interactions because they fully build themselves on the notion of attracting as much of that as possible, no matter what.
The only practical use I ever found for Twitter was as a source of monitoring for Internet outages, sourced via 3rd party use of APIs (e.g. downdetector.com). 200 characters doesn't encourage nuance or accuracy.
Is it reasonable for everyone everywhere to be able to communicate with one another with essentially no limits aside from their own sense of decency instilled in them by their parents and their local educational system?
This situation of mass conversation is very very new to each of our societies; there's no one global society and we've traditionally had gatekeepers and translators that separate the signal from the noise (with whatever biases they may have) and facilitate information transfer between societies.
The platforms that we have, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube only mirror the local society rules and never impose their own. They take the moral relativist route and essentially refuse to place any sort of judgement on content. They then give the content a signal boost and a lot more weight.
For example, all the tinfoil hat conspiracy shit was only discoverable if you took the time to really look for it. I read about the face on mars and the mystical magical power of pyramids, but I had to go out of my way to do so and then it was never backed up by a group that looked like it had thousands of members. It was also just a lone website or small ring of websites. I had to go to the local library to discover books about remote viewing and the library sure as hell didn't go out of its way to prominently display the book.
But now, with Facebook groups and Twitter and YouTube and Reddit, conspiracy theories are just as elevated as science and documentaries that are grounded in real facts. The only game to play is the SEO/ranking algorithm game. The idea doesn't matter; all ideas and thoughts are equivalent. The only difference is who is gaming the ranking algorithm the most. I don't know whether it's because of the influence of ads, but I think at their heart, the moral relativist and aloof stance of these platforms is detrimental to each society and to the idea of a global society.
I'd say it's the infiltration of Reddit by a certain type of user.
One of the biggest conspiracies on Reddit in recent history was "Pizzagate". In earlier times, as you say, this sort of thing would have been laughed off. However, this theory gained traction in a very large and very influential political subreddit, and therefore spread quite widely. That's how someone in the real world ended up walking into a small innocent pizza shop with a gun to rescue some non-existent children from a non-existent basement where they were being held by non-existent paedophiles.
This subreddit came to prominence by supporting Donald Trump during the U.S. presidential election campaign. It is now one of the biggest influences on Reddit. It's a haven for bigotry and trolling - and conspiracy theories. Its subscribers are emboldened because Reddit is doing nothing to stop them. They do not restrict themselves to this subreddit and its affiliates. Even though many of them signed up to Reddit just for this one subreddit, once they're on Reddit, they subscribe to and participate in lots of other subreddits - taking their behaviour and attitudes with them.
Lack of intellectual self-defense mechanisms? It feels like everyone has finally seen that there's a huge amount of ideas out there, but they have no idea how to parse them and how to figure out what's viable/factual. They're missing some kind of method for reasoning about all these ideas and don't have a good way to separate signal from noise. Perfect targets for conspiracy theories and for scams.
I would have thought this was inherent in the design of the platform itself. You can't actually get much nuance into 140 or 280 characters.