Twitter's Fucked
I know this sentiment will be unpopular here. But so am I (to the point where moderators have &quot;rate limited&quot; me until such time as I stop speaking on SJ issues) so... I think it&#x27;s no surprise that suddenly the previously pro-twitter and &quot;pro freedom of speech and welcoming spaces for all even if they&#x27;re unpopular&quot; folks are mad at twitter.<p>This article is hot on the heels of twitter banning Milo Y for cheerfully orchestrating yet another race baiting campaign against a black woman in cinema, and just a few months after Degoes himself got a lot of heat on Twitter and lost nearly all corporate sponsorship, having to rely on the businesses of friends for reduced funding for LambdaConf. This is a &quot;hot take&quot; in the Twitter parlance. And of course, banning Milo and shunning LambdaConf didn&#x27;t fix the root causes or stem the tide of harassment of other behaviors that make the twitterLeft continue to be mad.<p>To directly address TFA&#x27;s content, it&#x27;s not possible in the modern era to be &quot;non-political&quot; because the definition of &quot;non-political&quot; varies so radically. More on this in a moment, but being &quot;non-political&quot; is neocon code for, &quot;not offending me&quot; (in the same way that &quot;safe space&quot; is actually code for &quot;inoffensive space&quot;) and that&#x27;s a rather complex and customized product to deliver.<p>It&#x27;s very interesting though. We&#x27;ve all ended up in a place where the platform sort of holds us hostage. We feel compelled to share our bite-sized rhetoric chunks and then castigate people for being &quot;unfair&quot; and banning &quot;rational argument&quot; without considering that (and I stress, <i>all sides</i> of every issue has these people) a nearly unending torrent of ill-considered hate vomits at everyone involved in even the minutest controversy. _It&#x27;s totally irrational to demand people remain rational under these circumstances._ The neurotypical human simply cannot be expected to handle the way Twitter amplifies negative data.<p>And yet, we cannot possibly deny the pivotal importance Twitter (and in abstract, media like it) has had on rapidly disseminating information that I think most people here would absolutely agree should get out. For example, Twitter rapidly spreads media and information about social unrest worldwide, has laid bare many abuses of official power in the West, and has been incredibly important for disseminating viewpoints during the current American election.<p>This conversation <i>is</i> valuable even though it is &quot;political.&quot; It has value in every case where it brings raised awareness about the human experiences that define political conflict, social unrest, and violence worldwide.<p>The key difference is that in every case where twitter is used for news reporting and rapidly sharing personal perspectives, it trumps every other media. Twitter simply outshines every other media sharing design we&#x27;ve ever seen for news. Degoes is dead and demonstrably wrong that it&#x27;s only cute and tidy tweets that get huge sums of retweets.<p>Many of the most successful tweets in the sphere of &quot;politics&quot; are just raw information. &quot;Donald Trump said this.&quot; &quot;Egypt&#x27;s government is doing this.&quot; &quot;This is happening in Libya.&quot; The same 140 character limit that quashes all but the most clipped conversations and promotes media actually severely limits the spin one can actually craft around any given fact and strongly favors media delivered so fast that any substantial working or processing has to be automated. That&#x27;s probably to the platform&#x27;s overall credit.<p>If Twitter has a future, it&#x27;s as a news platform that makes everyone into a journalist. If Twitter is doomed, it&#x27;s because it forces everyone into a common scrum of a debate where even if we could type more to more eloquently debate, it wouldn&#x27;t matter because the overwhelming pressure of people tossing out quit hate fastballs would erode the conversation.<p>Those of us who are opponents of Degoes worldview overall are still in violent and absolute agreement that the platform needs more tools to curb &#x27;harassment&#x27;. While we may differ on the subject of what harassment is in this case, we agree that ultimately Twitter needs to develop sophisticated tools for managing incoming content and filtering it.<p>They&#x27;ve refuse to do so. Maybe 2-3 years ago, we could argue it wasn&#x27;t feasible at scale, but I think the industry has progressed to the point where we don&#x27;t believe that anymore. It&#x27;s entirely feasible to do even basic bayesian classifiers at &quot;twitter scale&quot;. It could be done client side, even!<p>Ultimately, there have to be trapdoors in this for news and shocking information. A social conservative may not like it if we bring up some of Donald Trump&#x27;s more outrageous turns of phrase, but if it&#x27;s timely and corroborated data then it probably has value, and I suspect most people would appreciate receiving it even if it&#x27;s only from one wing of their social graph.<p>Twitter&#x27;s successful future isn&#x27;t in some clever blocklist as Degoes suggests. I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s about longer formats or an emphasis on rich media, either. It&#x27;s in deeply understanding the content of tweets and finding a way to push timely, critical information to you via an amenable arm of your social graph. If you need to hear about the Muslim Spring through Pat Robertson to digest that information, so be it. That is you. If you need to hear about it through your favorite liberal pundit Colbert, that too is you. This is semantic analysis and machine learning in an unprecedented level of ambition, but I don&#x27;t think anyone doubts it can technically be done.