Twitter’s Retweet Button Is ‘Loaded Weapon’, Says the Man Who Designed It

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13 points·NeonTiger1992··8 comments

It’s a catch-22 for Twitter, really.

You have the means to spread information very quickly in a beneficial manner - like natural disasters etc - but also false information equally as efficiently.

How do you regulate and stem this?

There are just too many arse holes using Twitter. It's a haven for trolls.

What is the alternative though? Realistically.

Gamergate must seem like a walk in the park compared to the garbage the platform has to contend with a moderate now.

Twitter should have taken their own philosophy of constrainment much further: limit not just the number of characters, but also the number of allowed tweets and retweets a day. If you were allowed to do only three retweets a day, you would think twice about hitting that damn button.

You would probably think twice, I agree with that.

However, if restrictions like that were to be introduced now, for example, I think there would be an almighty mess for Twitter and Dorsey to clean up.

Seems like a good way of losing your traffic to sites/services that don't have said limitations. Would Twitter have become so big in the first place with them? Doubt it.

And if they tried to implement it now, they'd just give both competitors (like Gab) and decentralised alternatives (like Mastodon) the best free advertising of their lives.

This^^

Plenty of competitors that are more than willing to cash in on any changes. Can twitter afford to lose out in this regard..?

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