Comment by warcher | Hacker News Reader

Comment by warcher | Hacker News Reader

There are a few camps of people using twitter, which want different things and are mostly being badly served.

1) Trolls love twitter. The legion of racist eggs sowing destruction for no other reason than their own nihilistic enjoyment is an existential threat to the business and must be culled. The company and the trolls cannot live together in peace. One or the other will die. It feels like twitter hasn't figured out it's them or you. There can be no 1st amendment compromise here. These guys are ruining you for fun. They gotta go.

2) Public figures. It's a good platform for them. Cull the trolls and they'll stay, bringing an audience of

3) Regular people, who need a nice feedback loop of people interacting with their tiny little voices. Twitter is pretty shitty at this right now-- if you don't have an audience, you're shouting into the void and are eventually going to figure out you're wasting your time and quit. This is shitty for engagement and it's sinking twitter. Facebook figured this out already. Just copy them.

4) The last group is "brands" and for-profit companies who are your actual customers, but who would like to free ride on the platform, soaking up the attention of the regular people for free. If they want access, they gotta pay. No free riding for non-people. Facebook also figured this one out. If you're not a human, and not a public figure, and you want the attention of humans, pay up. Twitter is also slowly figuring this out.

There's a virtuous cycle of engagement here, and Twitter is slowly getting it straight, but they gotta cull a lot of trolls, spammers, and free riders, and that's going to hurt their monthly usage numbers. The management of that haircut is probably over my pay grade, but it seems like they're slowly getting it together with the algorithmic timeline. Had to be done. Livelock is a real thing for people who don't tweet professionally.

>1) Trolls love twitter. ... They gotta go.

I've been hearing this since trolling was invented on Usenet. No one is going to rid the Internet of trolls unless all of the big players enforce RealName™ and we all know how well that ended. "Culling the trolls" means different things to different people, and probably almost every one of us has at some time in our internet lives posted something that another group would consider trolling.

> they gotta cull a lot of trolls, spammers, and free riders, and that's going to hurt their monthly usage numbers.

From the handful of times I've clicked on a link to a tweet and then wandered around, I would bet that the trolls, spammers, and free riders make up something like 98% of their users, so I'm not sure this would really solve anything, since presumably their gross revenue is driven by the numbers of users.

You'll never get all of them, it's true. It's a never ending war.

And you're right-- there's a haircut that's got to happen at twitter. I don't know whether they'll survive it, but it's going to happen either way.

Revenue is driven by usage. Actual usage. They sell eyeballs. They can defraud their customers (the purchasers of said eyeballs), but only for a time. I think, as an article of faith admittedly, that you're better off being straight about it, but I've never piloted a ship that big, so what do I know?

This never has any numbers to support it, which is unfortunate.

Also, in a world of bubbles, how is a less free an open Twitter better? Is a Twitter with no controversy, with no argy bargy, really worth visiting?

I think Twitter's problem with trolls is minuscule compared to the problem of making it more entertaining, and easier to switch in and out of thoughts. If I like the NBA, cricket and South African politics, how do I switch between those three interests when, say, there is an NBA finals and a local election on? That is a problem much more so than trolls.

I think the trolls attack the public figures, which make the public figures less likely to attract the little fish, and the little fish are your audience, who need to be both entertained and interacted with, lest they decamp for a more robust social network like reddit or facebook. Both of which are far, far harder on trolls, bots, and spammers than twitter, not coincidentally. They recognize the fight to the death they're in, and are by and large winning.

Twitter was fine and good and groundbreaking at one point, but the naive implementation of a social network they cling to as a moral stand is obsolete for a billion dollar company. One who is more than large enough to game for profit or lulz.

They're going to adapt or they're going to die. Possibly both.

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