This is to me seems like a very counterintuitive “feature” — at least on paper. Hiding tweets seems akin to telling the whole world, “here are tweets from my critics I dislike so much I’m going out of my way to suppress them”. At least when you report, block, or mute someone, no one else knows that you were bothered (or, as trolls like to say, “triggered”).
It’s not the same like being downvoted on HN or reddit, where the vote to suppress is a community/crowd decision. If Taylor Swift hides a tweet, you are inherently curious to know what rando’s tweet managed to hurt or anger Swift (or her social media minder).
That said, while Twitter seems to be incredibly slow at introducing new features, the trade off is that what they do push out often ends up being a good thing. The survey evidence cited in the article seems flimsy, but I give Twitter some benefit of the doubt that they wouldn’t push an obviously destructive feature.
> That said, while Twitter seems to be incredibly slow at introducing new features, the trade off is that what they do push out often ends up being a good thing.
I find most new Twitter features to be worse than useless:
• "Like" was turned into "algorithmic retweet". Now I can't like a tweet without some percentage of my followers seeing it. This is also a problem when I follow others. I can disable seeing their retweets but I can't disable seeing their likes. I've had several people tell me that they unfollowed me because of tweets I liked. I've done the same to others.
• My timeline now shows tweets from people I don't follow. Above the tweet is something like, "Tim Urban and 8 others follow...", and then there will be a tweet by someone who I really don't want to follow (such as Ben Shapiro). There seems to be no way to disable this feature.
• Quote retweet is a great way to encourage flamewars. Long ago, people could not retweet with a message. That meant that people were less likely to retweet something they found inflammatory because their followers might think they agreed with it. Quote retweet means they can preface it with, "Look at what this terrible person said." That's a great way to encourage the Toxoplasma of Rage[1].
Overall, the effect of these features has been to reduce my Twitter usage. Now I mostly go there for a couple of group DMs.
Twitter is an interesting case where I feel that they found their ideal feature set by around 2011 or so. They had chronological tweets, likes and retweets worked logically, everything was great. Unfortunately, they never made any money this way and needed to increase "user engagement" to show us more ads. So they abandoned the chronological timeline for what they thought was best, they started randomly showing stranger's likes. At least they've finally given back the option to switch to "Latest Tweets", but it's pretty telling that the site 'forgets' that setting every month or so and tries to show you what they think you want again.
> "Like" was turned into "algorithmic retweet". Now I can't like a tweet without some percentage of my followers seeing it. This is also a problem when I follow others. I can disable seeing their retweets but I can't disable seeing their likes. I've had several people tell me that they unfollowed me because of tweets I liked. I've done the same to others.
G+ had this too, and I also got threats of being unfollowed if I didn't stop liking things. (I could turn it off in my settings, though, but I liked to use reshares to add comments and +1 to reshare without comment.)
Ultimately what the social networks never delivered on were the true concept of areas of interest. You should be able to follow someone's interest in a certain subject, and then like things in that context. That way if someone is following you for your programming content, they don't have to read the anime reviews that you like, or whatever.
It never happened. I think social media is a dead thing now. You can use it to snipe at political figures and promote products for money. That's about it.
I hate those first two a lot. It has definitely caused my Twitter usage to decrease. What metric could Twitter possibly be optimizing for, and why not at least give people the opportunity to disable them?
> I can disable seeing their retweets but I can't disable seeing their likes.
You can stop seeing "likes" (in general, not from a specific person) if from the official client you mark the tweet as "I don't want to see this" (I don't know the exact message in English) and after giving this negative feedback several times about likes, the client stops showing them.
First, I think most of the time the hidden content is going to be very low-quality (and thus not gratifying to explore), rather than "juicy", and users will quickly learn that.
Second, it puts a huge damper on the gratification of stirring sh#t and getting a bunch of activity, notifications, and subs as a reward. Instead, when you stir the pot, you find yourself ushered to a closet by yourself. It's not locked, but you're definitely not the life of the party anymore.
The result is a social force– an adjustment to incentives— that keeps conversations on-topic and civil. Really, I think it's missing the point to frame it as a tool for silencing critics with dissenting opinions, instead of a tool for silencing people who want to call you an ${inflammatory_statement} in your thread about a cake you baked today.
As I understand it, as your follower count goes up on Twitter, the latter problem gets almost untenable to handle because the strategy of coat-tailing high visibility accounts by sh#t-stirring in their threads is currently so unambiguously effective.
Time will tell what effect this has, but I am hopeful that it will have a large positive impact. (I think the problem demands action no less decisive and significant than this).
> The result is a social force– an adjustment to incentives— that keeps conversations on-topic and civil. Really, I think it's missing the point to frame it as a tool for silencing critics with dissenting opinions, instead of a tool for silencing people who want to call you an ${inflammatory_statement} in your thread about a cake you baked today.
If that's really what it is, let's disable it for accounts representing government entities and elected officials. Seem like a good compromise?
I'm coming at this from the other side, but as you note, it'll be very interesting to see how it plays out. As a consumer, I don't care what the original poster thinks I should see - they may not even be someone I follow if I click a retweet for example, and if anything, seeing what someone wants to hide is much more interesting. It's a net negative from my end because now I have to click more to see the actual content but I am far to cynical to assume that's anything more than an attempt to drive engagement metrics!
Given the number of steps required to hide a single response, if a tweet ends up with 50 abusive responses, whether genuine or bot generated, who is going to put the effort to hide them? That’s not going to stop twitter from being anything else than the dumpster fire that it is now.
I think that this is kind of a good thing. If you abuse the "hide tweets" feature to block people giving fair criticism, you'll probably get called out on it. But if you use it only to hide true garbage replies, then no one will care. The fact that other people can see what you've hidden adds a sort of accountability to the system, which to me seems like potentially a good thing.
It seems like a good compromise between entirely open discussion (where people can troll without consequence) and a Facebook-like system (where people can silence all dissent on their page). But who knows -- we'll have to see how it actually works in practice.
Hide truly garbage replies first and no one will scroll past them. SMM will generate lots of garbage to themselves to bury real damage under kilometers of junk. “Sorry for that, we recently managed an attack by unfair competitors.”
That's a good point. I'm only thinking in terms of Twitter celebrities (both the real-life and only-on-Twitter variety). But for more average users who regularly tweet and discuss controversial (or otherwise troll-attracting) topics, and get a moderate number of good and trash replies, this feature would likely be a good quality-of-life improvement for their followers.
People will use it differently. If you use it to tune out noise, nobody will bother to check in yours. If you use it to quell rational dissent, then it will be the go to place for the juice.
> At least when you report, block, or mute someone, no one else knows that you were bothered (or, as trolls like to say, “triggered”).
That’s not really anonymous. For example when someone reports a tweet, Twitter also sends a message to the concerned person to let them know someone reported them, even if they didn’t take any action. In case of cyberbullying, the abusers can use the Twitter report as a tool to add more drama and pour oil onto the fire.
First thing I do when I see "more replies" is click on it, knowing this is where the juicy stuff or counter argument is.
Like in HN, when it says [dead], I have to read it, to see whether I agree with it being [dead] or not ;-)
So there is certainly psychology there, at least to me, that makes me dig further. By hiding stuff behind a click you actually make me want to read it more!
> First thing I do when I see "more replies" is click on it, knowing this is where the juicy stuff or counter argument is.
Exactly, which is why I don't understand this feature. If you can't really hide replies, only instead call attention to the replies you've "hidden", what is the point of it?
I did that — vouched for comments that I thought were on-topic and dead only because people (sometimes including me) disagreed — and promptly lost the ability to vouch.
There's a lot more to trump than twitter, and a lot of discussions have been ruined through trolling, both by individuals and bots. This provides a way for people to clear their own front yards of what they consider trash, but there's an abundance of yards. If Trump hides all dissent, so what? It will be more than apparent, and right behind a single click!
This might go down the wrong way in India. We see a lot of misinformation, propaganda and often messages inciting mob violence floating as tweets. Reporting these tweets does not do anything immediately, if ever it does anything at all.
We used to post a reply linking an article with correct facts and some context. See https://www.altnews.in/
Russian state propagandists are going to love this feature. Right know they're constantly fact checked and called out on their hypocrisy in the replies but soon they'll be able to peddle their "death to Navalny/Ukraine/Europe/America/homosexuals" rhetoric unchecked.
Politics about any specific country or group aside, this would be a win for Twitter. Extra engagement from both sides. People who write crazy things return to moderate comments. People that comment write more comments because old comments are hidden. After comments are hidden, someone will probably start their own tweet about how that other tweet is full of garbage.
It's just more gasoline for twitter's business model: Drive engagement through flamewars.
I don't see a single person in the top comments speak about this. This feature is going to allow people to hide legitimate non-trash responses that criticize the tweet, and it will be very convenient going into the 2020 elections. Dissenting voices WILL be silenced.
I can't imagine why anybody would consider this controversial in the least. Id we are living in an attention economy where anybody is allowed to make a small debit from your account at will. Giving people more tools to manage those debits should be lauded.
Kinda like a website that is limited to 160 characters. Never fell in love with Twitter and looking at the top trends I often feel like wasting time on that platform.
But I agree that Twitter is basically an attention distributor. I get the impression that Twitter focuses its ambition to pander to self-expression and many topics that could have been interesting degrade to something that feels even worse than cheap PR.
Sadly, however that happened, Twitter became a platform to advertise political positions. That is probably why so many people see such features with mixed feelings.
I disagree that people make debits by replying, even if it is done in bad faith. If you put something out there, you are likely doing that yourself and nobody takes anything away. By hiding something you take something away from readers.
What would you think of spam? Isn't that clearly an attention debit? I would say that all replies, wanted and unwanted, take at least a small amount of attention. And if the fraction of useful to not useful replies decreases, that's the SNR going to crap.
Readit News
It’s not the same like being downvoted on HN or reddit, where the vote to suppress is a community/crowd decision. If Taylor Swift hides a tweet, you are inherently curious to know what rando’s tweet managed to hurt or anger Swift (or her social media minder).
That said, while Twitter seems to be incredibly slow at introducing new features, the trade off is that what they do push out often ends up being a good thing. The survey evidence cited in the article seems flimsy, but I give Twitter some benefit of the doubt that they wouldn’t push an obviously destructive feature.
I find most new Twitter features to be worse than useless:
• "Like" was turned into "algorithmic retweet". Now I can't like a tweet without some percentage of my followers seeing it. This is also a problem when I follow others. I can disable seeing their retweets but I can't disable seeing their likes. I've had several people tell me that they unfollowed me because of tweets I liked. I've done the same to others.
• My timeline now shows tweets from people I don't follow. Above the tweet is something like, "Tim Urban and 8 others follow...", and then there will be a tweet by someone who I really don't want to follow (such as Ben Shapiro). There seems to be no way to disable this feature.
• Quote retweet is a great way to encourage flamewars. Long ago, people could not retweet with a message. That meant that people were less likely to retweet something they found inflammatory because their followers might think they agreed with it. Quote retweet means they can preface it with, "Look at what this terrible person said." That's a great way to encourage the Toxoplasma of Rage[1].
Overall, the effect of these features has been to reduce my Twitter usage. Now I mostly go there for a couple of group DMs.
1. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...
G+ had this too, and I also got threats of being unfollowed if I didn't stop liking things. (I could turn it off in my settings, though, but I liked to use reshares to add comments and +1 to reshare without comment.)
Ultimately what the social networks never delivered on were the true concept of areas of interest. You should be able to follow someone's interest in a certain subject, and then like things in that context. That way if someone is following you for your programming content, they don't have to read the anime reviews that you like, or whatever.
It never happened. I think social media is a dead thing now. You can use it to snipe at political figures and promote products for money. That's about it.
For 3, sometimes people simply need to be made fun of. The QRT is a great way of achieving this.
First, I think most of the time the hidden content is going to be very low-quality (and thus not gratifying to explore), rather than "juicy", and users will quickly learn that.
Second, it puts a huge damper on the gratification of stirring sh#t and getting a bunch of activity, notifications, and subs as a reward. Instead, when you stir the pot, you find yourself ushered to a closet by yourself. It's not locked, but you're definitely not the life of the party anymore.
The result is a social force– an adjustment to incentives— that keeps conversations on-topic and civil. Really, I think it's missing the point to frame it as a tool for silencing critics with dissenting opinions, instead of a tool for silencing people who want to call you an ${inflammatory_statement} in your thread about a cake you baked today.
As I understand it, as your follower count goes up on Twitter, the latter problem gets almost untenable to handle because the strategy of coat-tailing high visibility accounts by sh#t-stirring in their threads is currently so unambiguously effective.
Time will tell what effect this has, but I am hopeful that it will have a large positive impact. (I think the problem demands action no less decisive and significant than this).
If that's really what it is, let's disable it for accounts representing government entities and elected officials. Seem like a good compromise?
It seems like a good compromise between entirely open discussion (where people can troll without consequence) and a Facebook-like system (where people can silence all dissent on their page). But who knows -- we'll have to see how it actually works in practice.
An account reposted a tweet as their own and then hid all the Replies flagging it as stolen content.
That’s not really anonymous. For example when someone reports a tweet, Twitter also sends a message to the concerned person to let them know someone reported them, even if they didn’t take any action. In case of cyberbullying, the abusers can use the Twitter report as a tool to add more drama and pour oil onto the fire.
First thing I do when I see "more replies" is click on it, knowing this is where the juicy stuff or counter argument is.
Like in HN, when it says [dead], I have to read it, to see whether I agree with it being [dead] or not ;-)
So there is certainly psychology there, at least to me, that makes me dig further. By hiding stuff behind a click you actually make me want to read it more!
Exactly, which is why I don't understand this feature. If you can't really hide replies, only instead call attention to the replies you've "hidden", what is the point of it?
I'm skeptical this will have the civilizing effect they hoped for.
And if you don't, vouch for it :)
We used to post a reply linking an article with correct facts and some context. See https://www.altnews.in/
This feature would make this fight a lot harder.
It's just more gasoline for twitter's business model: Drive engagement through flamewars.
But I agree that Twitter is basically an attention distributor. I get the impression that Twitter focuses its ambition to pander to self-expression and many topics that could have been interesting degrade to something that feels even worse than cheap PR.
Sadly, however that happened, Twitter became a platform to advertise political positions. That is probably why so many people see such features with mixed feelings.
I disagree that people make debits by replying, even if it is done in bad faith. If you put something out there, you are likely doing that yourself and nobody takes anything away. By hiding something you take something away from readers.
#iAmAgainstEverythingThatHappensOnTwitter