Twitter to remove ‘like’ tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2018/10/28/twitter-remove-like-tool-bid-improve-quality-debate/

by liketweets • 8 years ago

261 255 8 years ago

telegraph.co.uk

VBprogrammer• 8 years ago

pmlnr• 8 years ago

There must be a non-paywalled version of this announcement on some other site.

adrianN• 8 years ago

How can debate on Twitter be good when they limit the length of the arguments that you can make to two or three sentences?

sbarre• 8 years ago

Agreed. Discussion and debate should be more than hot takes..

That said, most people won't read a wall-of-text from a stranger - HN being the exception ;-)

aloisdg• 8 years ago

Reddit can be quite good for that too.

coldtea3• 8 years ago

That said, most people won't read a wall-of-text from a stranger - HN being the exception

Then most people need better education (and not just vocational training).

blhack• 8 years ago

It can't. Twitter makes people unnecessarily simplify arguments.

Unnecessarily simple arguments -> People get upset because you're misrepresenting them -> essentially screaming at each other instead of discussing.

The fundamental nature of the platform is bad. It's basically arguing in clickbait form.

hliyan• 8 years ago

Speaking of which, I've found this particular platform the best for rational debate: https://www.kialo.com

We once actually used it to have an internal debate about development processes and effort estimation techniques.

zarriak• 8 years ago

This doesn't happen. Most of the time people either:

1. post something where you can understand what they mean but they didn't spend the time (not that you should have to) to refine the point and people are pedantic

2. post something so absurd that has no basis in reality.

I agree that the end result is screaming at each other but nobody is on Twitter to engage in debates in the first place. Nobody can present a valid discussion that was hampered in any serious way by twitter's character limit.

threeseed• 8 years ago

Actually you can just use multiple tweets. It's what people have been doing for quite some time to get around the 280 characters limitation.

And I have seen many insightful discussions on Twitter. Not everything has to page long retorts.

Theizestooke• 8 years ago

These are horrible to parse, and make me want to remind everyone that blogs still exist.

dmos62• 8 years ago

In the pre-internet era, Chomsky said the same about TV. To paraphrase, you are crippled by the length constraints imposed by the talk show/debate genre. In other words, the length of the message already imposes an agenda on the communication. Of course there the hard limit was somewhere around 5 minutes, not 5 sentences. Twitter is good for anecdotal communication. Anecdotal, as in conveying casual observations. It's not for meaningful discussion, simply because of the length constraints.

I'm not really a Twitter user, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you can form a thread containing multiple posts. I don't think that changes much. Suppose you use a post to hold a paragraph of what you're writing. That means that now you have an unlimited (if the thread is unlimited length) size text, but the paragraphs are limited in length. Somehow that sounds even more wrong. What's more, since you're sending paragraphs off in a fire-and-forget sort of way (you can't edit them later, right?), you're essentially entering a sort of flow, no-looking-back type of writting, which is conducive for anecdotal, quick-think, social communications, but, again, not conducive to intellectual discussion.

For example, I'll reformat above text to fit into 280 character buckets, which actually won't even be a good aproximation of what I would have written on Twitter, since I refelected on the text, restructuring it and editing it through out. Here it goes:

In the pre-internet era, Chomsky said the same about TV. To paraphrase, you are crippled by the length constraints imposed by the talk show/debate genre. In other words, the length of the message already imposes an agenda on the communication.
Of course there the hard limit was somewhere around 5 minutes, not 5 sentences. Twitter is good for anecdotal communication. Anecdotal, as in conveying casual observations. It's not for meaningful discussion, simply because of the length constraints.
I'm not really a Twitter user, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you can form a thread containing multiple posts. I don't think that changes much. Suppose you use a post to hold a paragraph of what you're writing.
That means that now you have an unlimited (if the thread is unlimited length) size text, but the paragraphs are limited in length. Somehow that sounds even more wrong.
What's more, since you're sending paragraphs off in a fire-and-forget sort of way (you can't edit them later, right?), you're essentially entering a sort of flow, no-looking-back type of writting...
... which is conducive for anecdotal, quick-think, social communications, but, again, not conducive to intellectual discussion.

By reading that, you can tell that the rhythm of the text doesn't match the rhythm of the divisions. The text is too wordy for the constraints, sentences too long. Last sentence had to be cut into two paragraphs. It's almost giving you indigestion, a feeling like you're taking too large bites too fast.

pjc506• 8 years ago

Twitter is of course not a debate site but a content marketing site. Ideas are just one kind of thing being marketed.

mxstbr• 8 years ago

That's a radical departure from their 2015 stance[0]: “The heart is more expressive, enabling you to convey a range of emotions and easily connect with people. And in our tests, we found that people loved it.”

I wonder when they're going to start testing this and what the results are. I hope they share what they learn, this could be an interesting experiment given how core a part of Twitter the like/favorite button has always been!

[0] https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2015/hearts-on-twi...

jobigoud3• 8 years ago

But removing a feature doesn't have the same weight as adding a new one. Most probably the people that got accustomed to it will be very vocal about the removal, while nobody ever cries over a new feature they don't like, they just not use it.

thrower1232• 8 years ago

So I guess I'll have to retweet things now to bookmark them.

It'd be nice if Twitter could reconcile it's shitty RSS replacement and crazy-drunken-uncle-shouting-into-the-void halves into something coherent.

caw2• 8 years ago

There’s actually a “bookmark this tweet” option under the more options menu for the tweet.

tenryuu3• 8 years ago

I don't have this option on tweetdeck, only a add to collections, gives me a popup with no content. Nice.

thrower1232• 8 years ago

Ah, I basically only use the Android app, and this is hidden under the button that one expects would launch the confusing and awful Android sharing dialog.

tom_• 8 years ago

Bizarrely, this appears to be missing from the main site...

mayankkaizen2• 8 years ago

This is kinda useless. You can bookmark a tweet. But when you undo this bookmarking, all other bookmarked tweets also go.

roadbeats• 8 years ago

I recommend to use a real bookmarking service like Kozmos (https://getkozmos.com) or Pocket instead of Twitter’s bookmarking tool. You can’t search and organize anything on Twitter, and you’ll lose them when you delete your account like I did.

P.s: I’m the founder of Kozmos, but honestly would promote any bookmarking service over Twitter features.

tenryuu3• 8 years ago

is that all twitter is now? a debate site? Starring items has been a stample of both bookmarking content, as well as showing appreciation for anything on the platform.

But as well as when they started merging liked posts into the content feed on the main apps, it did remove the critical thing if it being an option for feedback to a post, without sharing the content to your own timeline (a retweet).

I don't understand any logic behind this change at all, and if there is, there's a paywall. But twitter is for everything, not just politics. If you're using politics to drive your platform, it's a shitshow for anyone else that uses the platform for more recreational purposes

k__2• 8 years ago

I think it's a good thing if they get rid of it and not just replace it with another symbol as they did with the favorites.

Either people like your stuff and want to share it, or they don't.

dev_north_east• 8 years ago

Either people like your stuff and want to share it, or they don't.

Eh not really. Consider my use case. I don't tweet, retweet or anything. My profile is set to private. I mainly use Twitter for updates on the local public transport (and sport scores). Last week for instance the metro system had a really bad failure. At the end of the day, their Twitter account posted a big apology and you could see whoever was manning it had played a blinder by helping as many people as they could. So I "liked" it as a form of appreciation. I do that a lot.

I don't think I'm alone on this either. I know lots of people who use Twitter for practical things (traffic updates etc.), I honestly can't think of anyone who actually tweets though.

If like goes, I'll just use retweet as a replacement to show the same emotion. Except I'll be retweeting to an empty audience deliberately.

mherrmann• 8 years ago

Whether this is good or bad, I think it's cool that Twitter are still willing to make profound changes to their service. The last was switching from 140 to 280 chars. Kudos!

pornel• 8 years ago

I don't think quality of "debate" on Twitter can be salvaged. Everything was designed for "engagement" and turned out to be rage-inducing machine.

Quote-retweet is used to send followers to harass the person responsible for the awful tweet. RT is choir-preaching (you're a monster if you don't RT that kicking babies is bad), and replies to twitter-celebrities' tweets give everyone their 15 minutes of fame to post the most idiotic meme.

And the only time when someone tries to make a coherent argument, it's a "Tread (1/50)" with a total mess, and every single sentence has buttons for taking it out of context.

They've optimized for engagement, and they're getting a lot of enragement.

meredydd• 8 years ago

"Every single sentence has a button for taking it out of context" is the best single-sentence summary of Twitter I have yet seen. Thank-you.

chrisseaton• 8 years ago

People seem determined to write things on Twitter that are absolutely begging to be taken out of context. Sarcasm, inside-jokes, rhetorical hyperbole, assumptions that everyone is following the same story they are, and so on. I don't know why they do it.

sdeepak• 8 years ago

Completely agree. The day they decided to go with ads there was no coming back. It's a public company now and they have an obligation towards their shareholders. Ads -> grabbing eyeballs -> evoking reactions. It's quite impossible to balance the interests of your customers(advertisers)vis users if one of them is not paying. They are too far along to do that.

ElectronShak• 8 years ago

For a long time i thought the idea that my reply, not a quote, just a reply, to a tweet gets posted to my main timeline / follower's timelines...is also a bad idea, but I guess this also was designed for 'engagement' too

slouch• 8 years ago

Your followers will only see your replies if they also follow the account to which you're replying or if someone they follow retweets the parent or your reply. Otherwise, users will have to visit your profile and slide over to the Tweets & Replies tab.

buboard2• 8 years ago

sure it can. the higher the effort the better. they should remove retweets too. i cant remember how many people i have unfollowed because they keep retweeting their political nonsense.

(in fact they should remove retweets and keep likes for the vanity crowd, as long as those are not interfering with my timeline whatsoever)

disprove• 8 years ago

You can hide retweets of a specific user by pressing the "Turn off Rewteets" button in the dropdown menu.

Or you can do it en masse in the browser: https://lifehacker.com/how-to-disable-all-retweets-on-twitte...

I prefer individual control over central control. Maybe they should make the "Turn off Rewteets" feature more visible.

zeroname6• 8 years ago

You must be part of some sort of culture war on Twitter. My experience is completely different. I don't follow people engaging in these battles and I don't post things that would be an engagement. It really is smooth sailing from there. Or, in the words of Steve Jobs:

"You're holding it wrong."

I use the "like" button for bookmarking interesting things. It would be unfortunate if I had to lose that because people on the "other side" of Twitter can't handle that responsibility.

hugg• 8 years ago

As others already have mentioned, there are actual bookmarks in Twitter, that is not the "like" button (click the share button in the Android app, for example)

radmuzom• 8 years ago

Upvoted - not sure why a perfectly reasonable comment is greyed out. My experience is same as yours - I only follow data scientists and data visualization specialists and my experience is absolutely brilliant. I also discovered some really great technical posts on R using Twitter.

Mediterraneo10• 8 years ago

"You must be part of some sort of culture war on Twitter."

Everything can become a culture war on Twitter. I follow a somewhat abstract modernist composer’s Twitter, which so far has been entirely about music and performance dates, and now it is up in flames because someone has decided to drag this artist into MeToo movement polemics.

It has also been pointed out that a lot of discussion forums for the arts and literature are pretty quiet these days compared to years past, and activity is only boosted when someone posts something politically provocative. We live in an unhealthy society where people are looking for a fight, and that desire might outweigh their interest in talking about anything besides politics.

yannis7• 8 years ago

Twitter is built short-burst/high-speed communication - the kind that works great for machines but not for humans. The result is that it has turned the world into one massive Medieval village; flash-spreading of rumours, hysteria, bigotry in-between maniacally virtue-signalling and choir preaching.

bitL• 8 years ago

Due to debate getting worse and worse I left both Twitter and Facebook (they both became completely useless and just a waste of time); now it looks like most of low-quality "I am here too doing trivial things, applaud me!" posts moved over to LinkedIn, so I put my account to "passive" state there as well and am considering removing it altogether.

Are there still some places left on Internet for high-quality discussions? Reddit recently ramped up "moderation" and now feels like a mob mentality everywhere with prolific ban give-aways if one's opinion doesn't align 100% with the one of moderators (who sometimes fight with each other); alternatives are full of extreme content that got banned on the mainstream ones, and *chan was always a stable full of manure with some pearls hidden very very deeply for one to waste time finding them.

ognarb• 8 years ago

I'm on mastodon in a tech instance and for the moment I love it.

gambler5• 8 years ago

Are there still some places left on Internet for high-quality discussions?

Web forums. There are good ones. They are independent of one another. Most forums I visit are centered around some subject, so people are bonded enough to be reasonably civil even if they disagree. Most aren't big enough to require much moderation. The best one have zero rules and very little trolling, but those are usually completely devoid of political stuff, since no one wants to spoil the good thing.

I think web forums are the best discussion medium developed so far. They support long-format content. They support hypermedia. They allow for offline conversations that don't get "dated" in 2 hours. They don't put thread authors on pedestal, unlike blogs.

I've heard there are mail/news groups out there too. Haven't used one aside from newsgroup for D Programming Language, though.

Rotdhizon• 8 years ago

As far as the high profile sites are concerned, civil discussion is dead.

Twitter is full of hatred. People who disagree with you will threaten you and try to publicly shame you. Someone takes something out of context, then shares it with hundreds/thousands of other like-minded people and attempts to get them all to target you.

Facebook is full of ignorance. Doesn't matter what you say, some ill informed person will speak over you and refute your points. FB is absolutely the worst for this. The public posts about controversial issues is loaded with ignorant people spouting nonsense over others.

Reddit is full of downvote and report abusers. If someone disagrees with you, they and their friends will downvote your comment until it collapses due to the negative vote threshold. The more extremist ones will report every single thing you say and attempt to get you banned.

These sites also have no recourse for abuse. Once you are banned, it is next to impossible to get it overturned.

ajcodez2• 8 years ago

I find Twitter delightful again but I needed the following settings:

Media Preview: Off

Reduced Motion: On

Video Autoplay: Never

Increased Contrast: On

I also mute lots of accounts. It took a few months of muting anyone who replies with animated GIF or says negative things like “thanks for lecture” etc and I’m back to a well tuned information machine.

eksemplar• 8 years ago

Can you remove comments from your twitter posts and block users from commenting if they spam?

Because giving users control of their own content frankly seem to fix many issues on social media.

ai_ia• 8 years ago

This makes a lot of sense. Someone had earlier posted about the design of Mastodon which uses boosts instead of Retweet Quote. I think the issues are inherently with design. It is a good first step towards that direction.

DrNuke• 8 years ago

Is the tool, any tool, guilty for its misuse then? It’s always the people, never the tool. It’s you too, if you are unable to make your Twitter the useful environment you want.

collyw2• 8 years ago

It pisses me off when a Twitter storm is reported as "news". Lazy journalism.

dilap• 8 years ago

this is all true, but there's also so much good stuff. babies & bathwater & all that.

agumonkey• 8 years ago

Seems like a lot of people only see the rage storm side of twitter. Most of my stream was peaceful. That said I had the intense joy to get some quote-retweet angst, it's at best half-pleasant.

josefresco2• 8 years ago

Not sure about likes but Twitter without retweets is a much better place. The people I follow rarely say something with their own voice, and I was tired of the "outrage" tweets for every new social issue. my feed is not much quieter, and when my Tweeps do say something, I pay attention.

jobigoud3• 8 years ago

Are there stats about original content vs RT? I would be curious to see the ratio. It also feels like 80% of the timeline is retweets.

It's like a curation engine where you can manually select curation sources.

Phee7the• 8 years ago

When you're following artists reetweets can be useful to discover their fellow artists. Not all of twitter is about debating current political events.

cousin_it• 8 years ago

Discovery works fine if you can view the friend feed of your favorite artist manually, without it showing up in your friend feed. Livejournal worked like that for many years and there was a ton of discovery happening. In fact I much prefer the livejournal model, where you can post your own content or write comments on other people's content, but cannot like/share/retweet. People whose only contribution is point and grunt shouldn't be allowed to contribute, they only make the site worse for everyone.

josefresco2• 8 years ago

True. It's why I'm happy they allow it per-user. Some users retweet great stuff, it's the political/social outrage of the day I'd rather not have rammed down my throat every day (I'm perfectly happy with pulling my doom and gloom)

wafflesraccoon2• 8 years ago

People retweeted things before retweets were an official feature, ie ".RT <quote they are retweeting>". Twitter adding retweets was something the community wanted.

nurino• 8 years ago

The fav button was a useful tool back when it meant "fav" as in "bookmark" and not "like". Maybe they should go back to that? I know they've recently added a "bookmark" button as well, but I hope they don't keep it hidden the way it is now.

On the other hand: Twitter does not have to be a debate site. You can surely debate using it, but it's just a website where you can post short messages and follow your friends. They shouldn't screw it just to cater to a certain part of their user base.

p2detar• 8 years ago

I've always been confused about this change. I was using the "fav" exactly to bookmark tweets rather than approve their content.

mato• 8 years ago

+1. I've since switched (grudgingly) to sending myself DM's of Tweets that I want to "save for later". A poor substitute, but easy to reach for from the UI.

shady-lady• 8 years ago

Good.

Please remove retweet count as well.

Maybe Twitter can become a social network without herd mentality.

And then facebook(incl. instagram) can also remove their 'reaction emojis'

fiblye• 8 years ago

If that happens, then the herd will just move on.

mattdeboard• 8 years ago

And nothing of any value is lost

Horseshoe• 8 years ago

Yep. It was kind of fun when they first added it, but now it is overused to the point where nearly every post has a heart sign, angry/sad face, etc. Even when there is hardly anything to love or be angry or sad about. I became so tired of it that I modified my F.B. Purity add-on to just not show them to me anymore.

Chazprime• 8 years ago

If Twitter genuinely wants to improve the quality of debate online, perhaps they should consider shutting it down.

gambler5• 8 years ago

Pretty much. Their design isn't just bad, it's perfectly bad.

No content structure. No context. No sense of "discussion spaces". No way to post longer, more nuanced messages. Encourages garbage in messages. (Tags, emojis, @something should be external. The more stuff like that you put in message, the less they look like actual statements made by people. This dehumanizes authors in subtle but extremely important ways.)

People always underestimate the extent to which UI design and content structure drive communication tone. Sure, just because some website is messy doesn't mean it will immediate make everyone a jerk, but this stuff has cumulative effect. As a way of example: try to write a long paper letter to someone by hand. You will immediately see how that changes the way you think.

Also, people should check out Jaron Lanier's talks on why everyone should delete their social media accounts. He doesn't talk about UI, but he makes some great points about economic incentives, behaviorism and emergent properties of ad-driven online economies.

danso10• 8 years ago

I think Twitter's move to 280 characters led to a massive improvement in overall quality -- I rarely find myself bumping into the limit, and I find that threaded tweets can read as well as short articles. A good use of the format can be found in the BBC's "Anatomy of a Killing" investigation into a military killing in Cameroon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18060709

I enjoy and have learned more from the discussions on HN than on any other platform. But what Twitter lacks in quality it more than makes up for in diversity and quantity. There's no where else I can get into a discussion/argument with anyone from Elon Musk to randos in Indiana and India all in the same thread. As crappy as the discussions can get, I have a hard time imagining how much better any such service could be without making tradeoffs on audience and ease of engagement. Mastodon, for example, seems to have limited scope and scale inextricable in its design. Which is not to say that that makes it a worser service -- just one that is inherently different from Twitter's model.

pjc506• 8 years ago

Reposted every time it's relevant: https://twitter.com/actioncookbook/status/684515262712967170...

"USERS: we love twitter but it has problems

TWITTER: great we'll fix them

USERS: do you want to know what they are

TWITTER: absolutely not

USERS: you're alienating the people who actually use your product

TWITTER: likes are now florps

USERS: what

TWITTER: timeline goes sideways"

(The irony is that likes used to have a clear, simple use: bookmark something for your own reference while also telling the poster that you liked it. Twitter ruined this by injecting "liked" tweets by people you follow into your timeline, collapsing the distinction between like and RT.

Retweet is actually a user-originated function, people used to manually retweet by pasting and putting "RT" at the front.)

nothis2• 8 years ago

Here's what I'm thinking when companies remove votes or scores or whatever: They're just hiding the problem. Like, people still like the stuff, it's just no longer tracked. They sure as hell won't stop tracking views or whatever. Which are likely (heh) just a factor removed from "likes".

The problem is that you're giving fake news the power to dominate million's of people's twitter feeds if you're just ruthless enough.

testudovictoria• 8 years ago

This isn't a sarcastic question nor an attempt at snark: have you ever moderated a message board, forum, subreddit, facebook group, etc. with decent post traffic? It's tough. Even something that has a hyperfocused topic (e.g. a subreddit for dogs with sunglasses riding skateboards) will have naysayers of what should and shouldn't be allowed. Someone posts a pic of a dog. It doesn't have sunglasses, but it does have on yellow-tinted glasses for reducing eye-strain on monitor. Oh and it's not riding a skateboard. This dog is on a self-balancing scooter.

Most of your users won't care. They'll enjoy the content. Someone chimes in that the sub or forum is no longer pure. The content is similar, but it's off-topic. The board is going to devolve into just pics of dogs (which is a legitimate concern). Other people defend that the board needs content, and that computer glasses and a scooter is similar enough to be inclusive. So where do you plant you flag? Will there be a zero-tolerance policy for anything that isn't a dog wearing sunglasses riding a skateboard (OMG mods are literally Nazis!!!), do you allow users to flag posts for review on a case-by-case basis (need more mods), or do you relax the content restriction (this board is trash since it lost its focus!)?

Twitter has no focused topic. The platform is for anyone to communicate whatever they want within reason. With disparate cultures than span every corner of the globe, how do you stop the problem from existing in the first place? Not everyone has the tolerance for scathing, brutal honesty. How do you draw the line between that and bullying? How do you differentiate between well-intended people who are misinformed and people spouting propaganda? I don't have the answer, but my time moderating forums about topics that have no impact on society has taught me that it's pretty much impossible to create a perfect platform that appeases everyone.

Kye2• 8 years ago

> "Twitter ruined this by injecting "liked" tweets by people you follow into your timeline, collapsing the distinction between like and RT."

There's a furry eSports person (https://twitter.com/SonicFox5000) who likes a lot of gay furry porn on his main account. Many people were surprised when Twitter started doing this.

madeofpalk3• 8 years ago

God this is exactly what I thought of immediately. Also, “How is Twitter supposed to know what we want?” https://theoutline.com/post/4936/what-do-twitter-users-want

rtkwe2• 8 years ago

That's exactly how I use likes it's an archive of all the cool art I've seen so I can go look again later! Guess I'll finally go find a plugin or tamper monkey script to download them now since twitters interface makes it impossible to right click save images if there's more than one image in a post?

Really 90% of twitter for me is either liking great art or getting depressed by the news/US politics. Take away the art and twitter gets a lot less appealing.

pjc506• 8 years ago

DOM inspector! Also useful for saving videos.

danso10• 8 years ago

I disagree that Likes had that "clear, simple use" case. I for one didn't use it as a bookmark, simply because I used it so often for the other case you cite: "telling the poster that you liked it" -- including for tweets that were relatively trivial: e.g. "I appreciate that you replied to my tweet".

I follow several thousand users so I guess the timeline algorithm doesn't bother showing me Liked activity. However, I do see "[some user] and 5 others liked this tweet" when I do a search for tweets, and I find that note to be more helpful than not, to be honest.

gdulli• 8 years ago

Same thing, different day https://twitter.com/innesmck/status/1056891672548855809

My curated collection of "likes" is one of my most valued possessions. 1000+ tweets that each made me laugh or smile or think in a powerful enough and unique enough way that I needed to save it. And I've spent a lot of time enjoying them after the fact. I wrote a slack command to show me a random one whenever I need to be picked up.

Granted, those 1000 tweets came buried in a lot of noise, but the diamonds on Twitter make it not only worthwhile but by far my favorite social network or online experience.

Of course, that's despite everything Twitter has done in the last several years and not because of it. Like a lot of Google products it's attracted that air of frequently making you believe they must not actually use it themselves.

dang2• 8 years ago

Reposted every time it's relevant

Please don't do that. Repetition lowers the signal/noise ratio of conversation and the last thing we need here is people repeating the same things over and over.

zapnuk• 8 years ago

1. You cannot argue faithfully with 140 characters. 2. Isn't a "like"/upvote tool necessary for debates? There isn't a formal judge to rate comments/arguments. Who "wins" is decided by the (very) biased community. This is obviously a bad idea as most communities aren't open to unpopular ideas. However, if you trust the community as a whole you can expect general consensus about sensitive topics such as gay rights, immigration etc.

If you would throw out any evaluation tool then extremist options have the same visibility as any other comment. Meaningful rejection would then be only possibly by 'spamming' a similar counter argument.

I think it's pretty much impossible to create a meaningful rating system because of the said biased 'judges' - removing the like functionality doesn't seem like an improvement though.

empath75• 8 years ago

You cannot argue faithfully with 140 characters.

Most people couldn’t make a coherent argument even if you gave them 100,000 words.

2sk21• 8 years ago

I simply use Twitter as a news feed now and mostly ignore any replies to posts.

mcintyre1994• 8 years ago

I've seen some interesting uses of this where eg. liking a specific Westworld tweet would have them message you about new episodes, and liking an Apple event ad will have them message you when it's about to start. I wonder whether they'll have a replacement for that sort of use case.

Ptyx2• 8 years ago

Reminds me that Kierkegaard seems to have written about social media:

"Man, this shrewd being, ponders day and night how he can invent new means to amplify the noise and how he can spread the sound and the empty talk as hastily as possible everywhere. What one achieves in such a way is probably soon the opposite: the message is soon brought to its lowest level of fullness of meaning, and at the same time, conversely, the means of communication in the direction of hasty and all-flooding distribution have probably reached their maximum, for what is more hastily circulated than gossip?"

chosenbreed• 8 years ago

Reminds me that Kierkegaard seems to have written about social media:

Interesting. Where did you get the quote from? I might add it my reading list :-)

jonnydubowsky• 8 years ago

I love Kierkagard even more after reading this. I can't find the quote after a few targeted searches, where is it from? Thanks for sharing

Ptyx2• 8 years ago

It's a quote I read in German translated here via DeepL with slight changes. Seems like it is part of this work from 1851:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Self-Examination

From this chapter:

http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/zur-selbstprufung-der-gegen...

Couldn't immediately find an English version of the text.

hugh4life• 8 years ago

I'm guessing this was about newspapers/journalists which probably isn't the message people around here would like.

"The lowest depth to which people can sink before God is defined by the word 'journalist'. If I were a father and had a daughter who was seduced I should despair over her; I would hope for her salvation. But if I had a son who became a journalist and continued to be one for five years, I would give him up." - Soren Kierkegaard

malvosenior• 8 years ago

Given the extreme anti-tech sentiment and inaccurate reporting pervasive in among journalists. I think many here would totally agree with this statement.

jmngomes• 8 years ago

Do you mean Soren Kierkegaard, the philosopher who lived in the 1800s?

kamaal• 8 years ago

I've been using the 'like'(heart symbol) to bookmark tweets and tweet threads.

Sigh, I would be losing a lot of my book marks.

koolhead17• 8 years ago

Sigh... It was my bookmarking tool. :(

miki123211• 8 years ago

Paywalled. If HN had downvotes I would give one.

federicoponzi• 8 years ago

I was wondering why the throw-away account, this could be a reason

jobigoud3• 8 years ago

They should do like HN: keep the button but remove the counter visibility. I would like to see this generalized to all social networks actually. You still get to do an appreciation gesture but without entering the popularity contest. Maybe the author of the post could still see the total.

YouTube "dislike" button on comments also works like this, you can dislike but it's not counted. In this case it's a bit stupid since the likes are counted, but I feel it's still an improvement.

buboard2• 8 years ago

basically use it as a squishy toy

xylophoner• 8 years ago

try it out now: https://bengrosser.com/projects/twitter-demetricator/

mrhappyunhappy5• 8 years ago

This is awesome and I like your logic. Metrics should be off for every social network by default. All metrics do is breed heard mentality.

TangoTrotFox2• 8 years ago

I'm still not entirely convinced this vote based filtering is really more effective than the basic old chronological threading it 'improved' upon. It opens itself up to extreme gaming and the threaded nature often results in what are, more or less, the exact same conversation chains happening multiple times in different places in a topic. Threaded + votes also results in a very artificial selection of top posts. Posts that are more viewed, and aren't awful, are more likely to get more votes further reinforcing their prioritization.

And maybe the most important thing of all. The vast majority of people do not check out new threads. So you get a very artificial selection of topics that end up making it onto the front page, since it's selected by the tiny minority that do view and vote upon the new topics.

donatj5• 8 years ago

I’ve often thought only being able to down vote with a comment would be a positive. There have been times where I have had posts down voted to hell, and legitimately have no idea why.

I think having to tell someone why you were down voting would be an improvement.

Maybe even work at so down vote comment doesn’t count if it it self has negative karma.

avip2• 8 years ago

That's a very interesting idea. Force constructive feedback.

pjc506• 8 years ago

Slashdot had, 20 years ago, different types of upvote and downvote, so you could say things were "insightful" or "off topic". You could even alter the weightings attached to them so "Funny" would be negative rather than positive.

Of course, slashdot was also where I first encountered trolling and regular attempts at posting racial hatred or obscene images into conversations...

madeofpalk3• 8 years ago

Based on all the people commenting “f” on Facebook to subscribe, I don’t think this would actually change anything.

accnumnplus12• 8 years ago

Careful - the rules say you're not allowed to complain about downvoting. I've made this suggestion myself on a number of occasions in the past, probably different accounts. The quickest approach to problem fixing - the hn approach - have a rule saying don't complain about the problem.

craftyguy2• 8 years ago

lobste.rs makes you select a reason, visible by the author, for downwoting a comment.

city41• 8 years ago

I think this stems from downvotes being abused. If a comment is well written and constructive, you should not downvote it just because you disagree with it. The real intent of downvotes is to flush away off topic and low effort comments.

dsfyu404ed• 8 years ago

There have been times where I have had posts down voted to hell, and legitimately have no idea why.

It happens when you've struck a nerve but nobody wants to try and refute you because engaging in debate comes with a risk of you actually being right and them actually being wrong and some part of their ideology hinges on the correctness of whatever you're challenging.

appleiigs• 8 years ago

For HN, I think up-votes and down-votes counts should be shown individually. The comments with no up-votes and lots of downvotes would go grey - universally considered bad. The comments with lots of up-votes and down-votes, but with net down, indicates controversial opinion but with some support/validity.

acoye• 8 years ago

So if you want to interact, you have to formulate a thought in an elegant message? Most wont pass the barrier of having to think hard about something. (ie. thinking fast and slow / switching from system 1 to system 2 is _hard_)

sodosopa2• 8 years ago

I use the “like” button a lot but mainly because Twitter doesn’t have a read later or save function. I don’t necessarily like because I enjoy the content, I like because I want to digest it at a different time

andrepd3• 8 years ago

It's a tweet. How long can it take to read that you have to save it for later?

sodosopa2• 8 years ago

If you think it’s only a tweet, you’re naive. It’s the discussion and mainly it’s also links to the content. Just because it’s 140ish characters doesn’t mean it takes an instant to read and move on.

cujo• 8 years ago

People love to rail on twitter, but where's the movement to leave? It's hardly a necessity for life in 99% of use cases, They're a company with arguably questionable morals, and their current resurgence is predicated almost entirely on Trump (make of that what you will).

Just quit it already.

mwill• 8 years ago

I don't think likes are the problem, I think twitter surfacing tweets based on likes is the problem. Replace them with a bookmark button that doesn't effect timelines at all, and imo that's a real improvement right off the bat.

nickik• 8 years ago

Twitter is just not a platform for discussion. It was (and is) useful as a smart link finder because interesting people post about stuff.

village-idiot• 8 years ago

Honestly, I gave up on twitter. Changed my password to something random and long and locked myself out.

At this point I have 0 faith that Twitter can or wants to clean up the mess they’ve made. It’s been obvious for years that Twitter is trending in a dark way, yet it seems like corporate likes to pretend that they’re back in the happy early days.

sayrer• 8 years ago

they could add some filters to prevent randos from appearing in your replies

ctdonath• 8 years ago

"Like" was ruined when Twitter made it republish tweets, making it practically identical to retweet. It had been useful to mark posts for later review. Without it at all, there will be no way to "save" a tweet.

orasis3• 8 years ago

You can now turn off likes-as-retweets in your timeline.

fosco• 8 years ago

I do not have twitter but based on this HN discussion here of the article it seems a lot of people are not aware of this functionality. I would say they have poorly advertised their settings and functionality which I believe is deliberate to obfuscate privacy settings as well.

conscion• 8 years ago

There's an option to bookmark tweets. They then show up in your bookmarks section.

https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/product/2018/...

ihuman• 8 years ago

Wasn't "Like" originally bookmark? Have we gone full circle?

Edit: I was thinking of favorites. I used favorites as bookmarks, so I got it mixed up.

aranw• 8 years ago

Awesome hopefully stop seeing random "liked" tweets in my feed. Now if only they fix tweets resurfacing when replied or retweeted then I might actually enjoy standard Twitter apps

kumarvvr• 8 years ago

What 'debate' are they talking about? It's a free for all shouting match.

mayankkaizen2• 8 years ago

I never used 'like' button in the sense of upvote or 'like' in Facebook. I always used it for 'bookmarking' purposes.

Though Twitter added bookmarking feature, it is somehow useless for me as I can't undo this bookmarking operation for individual tweet but I can simply unlike a tweet.

Personally I think Twitter is just not suitable for debating. I mean you can't articulate your view in 280 charscters. Facebook is better suited for this.

donatj5• 8 years ago

This seems like a massive mistake to me.

I have 300ish followers. I’ll spend 5 minutes or so crafting a Tweet. If it gets one or two likes, that’s positive reinforcement, it feels worth my time.

It’s rare I’ll get replies unless I said something someone else vehemently disagrees with. So you’re leaving all my reasons not to use the platform, while removing my reasons to use it.

So now best case scenario is a retweet? Meh. This feels like a huge miss-step from a company that doesn’t understand why people use their platform. Honestly, this seems like how you kill a platform.

fabricexpert2• 8 years ago

Why bother with only 300 followers? It feels like twitter is only useful if you have several thousand followers, otherwise there's so much noise that you're just talking to empty room.

webninja2• 8 years ago

Everyone with several thousand followers had 300 once.

donatj5• 8 years ago

There’s a sense of community, particularly around my programming languages of choice. I don’t need 1 million people to read my tweets to feel community. Just knowing that one or two people read it and appreciated it is enough.

dwighttk2• 8 years ago

I have about 200* followers and only about 5 or 6 that actually interact with me with responses or likes. I also block followers who don't seem like they are real people.

*edit... Originally said 300.

dwighttk2• 8 years ago

Twitter doesn't even know the difference between RT and Like anymore... Like just means "RT, but lower chance it will show up in your followers timelines"

danso10• 8 years ago

If you follow enough active users, it seems you never see the Like notifications -- I hadn't in the past 5 years even known Like notifications existed until I recently created a new test account.

jamiethompson• 8 years ago

It would be interesting to see how well upvote/downvote would work.

orasis3• 8 years ago

Just like here, it would quell community taboo opinions.

If you want to be downvoted to oblivion on HN, just try pointing out potential moral issues with a new technology.

orasis3• 8 years ago

...and the above was instantly downvoted. Communities that use downvotes become blind to self-criticism.

4684499• 8 years ago

IMO, "Like" is just one of the ways for users to express themselves, you remove this tool, they'll find other ways, e.g., flood with one-word replies.

Account with huge number of followers that can block counter accounts could create an echo chamber, which is rather poisonous to a healthy debate.

That being said, I don't think twitter should be used as an debate platform, and there are some online tools trying to solve the problem already, like Kialo. They perhaps are not good enough, but still better than twitter.

brilee• 8 years ago

Twitter suffers one simple problem: it conflates engagement with quality, and rewards people who create "engaging" content, rather than people who create "quality" content. So the problem isn't in what the users do; it's how Twitter filters the algorithmic feed to bring quality content to the top.

TangoTrotFox2• 8 years ago

Unfortunately in the ad age this is the same for everything. It's the reason you see posts like "Have scientists discovered proof of an alien megastructure?" instead of "Light dimming from distant star system defies conventional explanation." even though I think the later headline is also still quite enthralling.

Things that get people clicking and active is what makes the money and so it's what gets optimized for.

nathan_long• 8 years ago

You're not wrong, but...

Distinguishing "quality" content from "engaging" content does not sound like a simple problem at all. It sounds like one that involves a whole lot of heuristics and opinion.

If it were easy, "clickbait" wouldn't be a thing.

I would say it is our own human inability to separate "engaging" from "quality" that causes this mess.

bedhead• 8 years ago

Twitter is like a free lifetime supply of the alcohol of your choosing. Yeah, some people can handle it just fine and not turn into full-blown alcoholics, but for many people there's just no way to not give in and have their lives ruined. People are really the problem more than Twitter, but man Twitter sure does enable mental dysfunction awfully efficiently.

rawTruthHurts• 8 years ago

Not that one can have much of a "quality debate" in 280 character bites, anyway.

dorfsmay2• 8 years ago

The feature was introduced in 2015 to replace “favourites”, a star-shaped button that allowed people to bookmark tweets to read later.

I have been using "favourite"/"like", like a bookmark, so am I going to lose all those now?

awkward• 8 years ago

Isn't there a documented phenomenon that attaching praise or compensation (likes) to a behavior people would do anyway (tweeting) will essentially grind that behavior to a halt if the compensation is removed?

Intuitively I can't imagine twitter's numbers are going to fare well if they're handing out a third of the dopamine hits that they were previously.

dharma1• 8 years ago

It's curious such a simple thing (a heart or like button) causes addiction. Social acceptance must be deeply wired in to our reward system

Finnucane• 8 years ago

When we get to 'Twitter to remove "Twitter" in a bid to improve quality of debate' then we might get some progress.

Jenz• 8 years ago

I think it’s a great idea, but maybe not for Twitter.

TekMol• 8 years ago

I always thought that the dismal number of likes tweets usually get is a sign that nobody actually reads tweets.

On Twitter, I regularely see accounts with tens of thousands of followers. Yet their tweets get less then 10 likes. So a like to follower ratio of 0.1% or so.

On Instagram the situation is pretty different. Like to Follower ratio is more in the 1% range.

What is the reason for this difference?

dorfsmay2• 8 years ago

Twitter doesn't work if you want to know what's hot out there, because lack of threading, awkward interface, no possibility to organise by subject. Finally the need and concept of "following" people, but by default you don't follow them since you only see a subset of their tweets, only the ones that are popular. If this is what you are looking for, use reddit.

Twitter works fine for it's original purpose, follow a few people and wanting to know what they post. You have to tweak a few settings:

  • Disable "Timeline: Show the best Tweets first" (in "Account")

  • disable "Quality filter" (in "Notifications")

  • "Turn off retweets" for people you follow who tweet interesting stuff but retweet garbage

  • stop following people who tweet more than a few times a week (nobody has that much interesting stuff to say!)

wafflesraccoon2• 8 years ago

I use Twitter a lot (90k Tweets, 2.1k followers, my account is 8 years old), the best thing about the like is being able to end a conversation without saying anything. Liking a reply to is a great way to say "I've acknowledged your tweet with a positive connotation". I think Twitter forgets that the vast majority of content on the site isn't heated political debates but instead small communities of people who treat the website as a microblog.

tomatotomato37• 8 years ago

Does a platform originally developed to post every random witty thought you come up with on the loo really need to improve the quality of debate? I feel like it would be better to acknowledge the fundamental design is incompatible with serious debate and try to steer it back towards the place for frivolous shitposting

partiallypro• 8 years ago

Jack constantly and consistently proves how out of touch he is with his own company and has listens to the worst advice from those activists he meets.

accnumnplus12• 8 years ago

I use 'like' as a sort of bookmark, rather than to tell someone I like their tweet. For that reason it's rare that I 'like' a tweet. I can review my likes as a refined timeline, greatest hits. Guess I'll have to use the bookmarks.

clarkmoody• 8 years ago

There is no way to have a meaningful debate, much less a quality one, in a completely public forum. Half the time, participants don't even agree on the definition of words. Think "privilege" and "rights" for easy examples.

Then quality goes out the window when anybody from the mob can jump into your thread at any point, quibbling with words, accusing you of being Hitler, etc.

To have meaningful debate, you also need people who are seeking truth and are open to having their minds changed. Twitter (or modern politics in general) does not incentivize changing your mind, since anyone can screenshot some old Tweet, and now you're a flip-flopper. As if you're expected to emerge onto social media with a fully-formed worldview.

But it's not like politics has ever been a thoughtful, measured process. There are no good ol' days. The ballot box is a proxy for the musket and bayonet. When you vote, you are literally making an attempt to force the other half of society to do what you want. Life, liberty, and property are on the line, so politics will never be anything but conflict.

lazugod• 8 years ago

Everyone is just accepting the article's weird premise that the purpose of Twitter is to argue and have debates?

craftyguy2• 8 years ago

Top comments here don't accept that, so I'm not sure who you mean by 'everyone'.

IB885588• 8 years ago

Seems like they should add a visible toggle switch that allows user to decide if they want the timeline algo to weight likes or not.

Hey Twitter, it's not bad to give users a little choice.

rad_gruchalski3• 8 years ago

What does that actually mean. I use likes for kind of a reading list. Will I have to use an external tool now to manage that? Without likes, twitter is useless to me.

/edit spelling

rad_gruchalski3• 8 years ago

Ah, I see the bookmarks now. But it’s two taps instead of one :(

rad_gruchalski3• 8 years ago

And, there is no API for bookmarks. So better to back likes up ASAP.

strictnein3• 8 years ago

I had no idea it existed until this HN discussion, and I have a feeling a lot of other people are in the same boat.

yahnusername• 8 years ago

I wrote a firefox plugin that removes likes/follows/upvotes/hearts style vanity counters from a bunch of websites. It absolutely makes them better to use. This is a good change.

I had a middle-of-the-road idea in this area too, which is to replace the number with the magnitude. So you still get the feedback from the vanity metric, but it happens with logarithmic decay.

A more detailed write-up (and repo for the plugin) for those interested: https://github.com/a13o/disengaged/wiki#replace-vanity-count...

dcre2• 8 years ago

This story is not true.

https://twitter.com/TwitterComms/status/1056913093471670273

strictnein3• 8 years ago

Where does that say it isn't true?

"As we've been saying for a while, we are rethinking everything about the service to ensure we are incentivizing healthy conversation, that includes the like button. We are in the early stages of the work and have no plans to share right now."

dcre2• 8 years ago

They are not removing the like button.

mrhappyunhappy5• 8 years ago

As a person who never uses twitter, I tried using it one time and found all of the functions very confusing. Do people really find twitter useful?

yogthos• 8 years ago

I'm pretty sure the 240 character limit and the way Twitter handles threads precludes any quality of debate.

tombert• 8 years ago

Yeah, removing a "like" button will really improve the "communicate-by-fortune-cookie" quality of academic discourse on Twitter.

I'm not a huge fan of Twitter, so I'll admit bias, but 140/280 characters really isn't enough to construct a proper argument, but it's the exact space to come up with some some witty truism. I seriously doubt that the "likes" were the problem.

andrew-dc2• 8 years ago

I was going to suggest that anyone interested in quality of debate unplug from Twitter entirely and go meet up with some folks for coffee. Or Tacos. Or go on a hike together. Or have them over for board games. Bonus if these are folks you don't entirely agree with on everything.

heartbreak• 8 years ago

That doesn't scale at all.

andrew-dc2• 8 years ago

Tough sell for investors.

ianamartin• 8 years ago

The idea that you can have a quality debate in 250 chars or less is fundamentally what's wrong with the quality of debate.

The format itself encourages people to gloss over nuance, ignore complexity, and simply declare a position which anyone who disagrees is at least wrong and very possibly evil, depending on the topic.

Twitter is a great platform for shooting the shit, rapidly conveying breaking news, and snappy one-liners. It's actively bad for any kind of in-depth analysis. Twitter should focus on improving the patform's natural strengths, not trying to make it into something it can only ever fail at.

dang2• 8 years ago

There's some doubt about this:

https://twitter.com/TwitterComms/status/1056913093471670273

http://fortune.com/2018/10/29/twitter-like-button-staying/

danso10• 8 years ago

Yeah, there's no reason to believe that the Telegraph would have the exclusive scoop on this. Even in the few sentences shown in the paywall preview, it's clear how thin the sourcing is:

Founder Jack Dorsey last week admitted at a Twitter event that he was not a fan of the heart-shaped button and that it would be getting rid of it “soon”.

That's the only news or "fact" in the lede -- the content that immediately follows is boilerplate:

The feature was introduced in 2015 to replace “favourites”, a star-shaped button that allowed people to bookmark tweets to read later. Similar buttons to “like” or show appreciation of people’s status updates, pictures and videos have become a central function of every popular social media service since Facebook introduced them.
But psychologists have suggested that they may be causing social media addiction.

SyneRyder2• 8 years ago

To save others a clickthrough on that tweet from Twitter - it's not quite a denial, more of a "Not yet":

"We are rethinking everything about the service to ensure we are incentivizing healthy conversation, that includes the like button. We are in the early stages of the work and have no plans to share right now."

joering2• 8 years ago

Imagine how better Twitter would be have they had a "downvote" button like Hacker News!

I mean how many times getting downvotes taught you how to behave on HN?

Long time ago I once posted a joke; it was good and funny joke even somewhat related to subject. I got downvoted into oblivion. I scratched my head for a while but then realized I do the same thing - even if I chuckle at someones good joke, I cast my vote of thumb down to remind them in order to keep quality engagement on HN, don't post jokes! I eventually figured out it was a venue thing. You may be the funniest guy in the word, but if you go to church people expect you to remain in silence and/or pray, not make jokes.

Twitter used to be really great and then few months ago I just gave up on it. I follow few people that spew hate rhetoric. I watched them posting their stuff about Clinton's emails over and over again. Sometimes getting stupid answers, sometimes being ignored and sometimes actually seeing people putting time and effort to answer and explain. These individuals were not interested in your response! They were there just to post their rhetoric like a contest who scream louder in empty echo chamber! I know that HN downvote button would help cleanse Twitter because with few thousands posts per second, obviously nobody will decide manually how valuable the tweet is.

Being downvoted on Twitter would mean first your posting frequency goes down. Then it could mean your post is sliced to 210 char (half of original 420). Finally you could be jailed automatically for 3/7/14/31 days. I mean there is so many ideas to get folks post quality content or GTFO that its surprise management allowed Twitter to slide this low. I am sure I am not the only one who gave up on Twitter, or perhaps to Twitter bottom line (ad $), it doesn't even matter.

rchaud2• 8 years ago

Honestly, I can't think of any suggestion coming from Twitter execs that would actually solve its usability issues, because they are still approaching it from the POV that Twitter is "bringing humanity closer" or serving some other kind of higher purpose.

When all you have to do is spend 10 minutes on Twitter to realize it's full of political bots, crypto scam bots, humans with short fuses, and celebrities shilling their snake oil products.

dorkwood• 8 years ago

That’s a shame, because I use it as a “save for later” function.

I’ve got hundreds of links to side projects, tips, advice, and inspiration stored in there. Hopefully they give us some warning before it happens so I can scrape them all.

Twitter to remove ‘like’ tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate

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