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Comment by sirbetsalot | Hacker News Reader

of course the author misses the biggest reason twitter sucks. Abuse, fake accounts, and trolling cause more "authentic" real name users to leave every day. Twitter does nothing to punish people who can just grab a picture of you from the net, create and account and start ruining your reputation instantly. And we all know you can't win against a troll unless you out troll them with your own bots. Twitter is the stained toilet bowl of human interaction. Twitter would instantly better if it forced real names and banned people for abusive comments outright. Until then, Twitter is unusable.

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http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/29/surprisingly-good-evidence-...

"In 2007, South Korea temporarily mandated that all websites with over 100,000 viewers require real names, but scrapped it after it was found to be ineffective at cleaning up abusive and malicious comments (the policy reduced unwanted comments by an estimated .09%)."

http://www.wired.com/2014/08/forcing-commenters-to-use-real-...

"The better thing to do is to verify what someone knows, not the name someone goes by. Our fear of anonymity is an extension of our fear of the unknown. Without a recognizable name, these commenters could be anyone! But if we could associate an internet history, even a brief one, to that handle, the human connection becomes instantly apparent. A great example of this is Disqus and its universal login, which creates a history of comments (and flags) across all sites."

https://twitter.com/REALsirbetsalot

The idea of an everyone-can-talk-to-everyone social network is initially appealing. You can write (and there were) thousands of articles about twitter extolling the virtues of the "internet community" or "the conversation" and "personal brands." It was all very 1995 internet enthusiasm with a new coat of paint. Then everyone tried it, and it turns out nobody wants to hear from everybody.

Trolls/abuse/whatever aren't the problem. They're the most extreme manifestation of the real problem: everyone wants to broadcast themselves to as many people as possible but nobody actually wants to listen to anyone but a subset of the people they've already decided to hear from.

But twitter can't restructure as an RSS reader for worthless thoughts (and links to worthwhile thoughts) for those with short attention spans. Maybe they can clamp down on abuse, it might give the flash in the pan a few more years of life.

This is very true, not just in Twitter but in real life as well. Most people just want to talk, they don't really want to listen to what you have to say.

So lets see. in about 30 minutes I can deck into the Twitter API and create about 100 accounts and cron job your Twitter account for a post and then inundate you with thousands of crazy insults from random accounts. I can do all of this because you said you didn't like blue cheese and I for one sir think you are an IDIOT and should be taught a severe lesson for not liking blue cheese. ~Twitter Reality.

I'm sorry, but I don't think I understand what your post is trying to say.

I just see a non sequitur about twitter abuse. Did you interpret when I said abuse is not THE problem with twitter, that I meant I don't find abuse on twitter to be A problem?

That wasn't what I was trying to say, but otherwise I'm confused as to how your post is a reply to mine.

Satire is not your strong point?

Just in case you don't get it. This is the typical train of thinking on Twitter. You say something intelligent looking for conversation, and eventually you are going to run into the crazies on the platform just looking to broadcast thoughts that have nothing to do with the original point and then quickly turns into negative, abusive slop. (the blue cheese remark should have clued you in.) I understand fully what you are saying, but respectfully disagree. Clearly tales of abuse and outright ugly human behaviour turn millions upon millions of core users off the platform. This has been said a dozen times by Dick Costello himself. That being said, I can see your point, and will pontificate on it.

Good, fair, well-explained banning for abuse policies would be great. Real names would destroy it, because a lot of the most interesting stuff on "Weird Twitter" is from bots, joke accounts, parodies, shared accounts (e.g. @sweden), people who daren't post under their real name, activists, etc.

Unusable? I'm sure there's a lot of noise for people that have a decent following, but I think most people don't have these problems. Certainly not to the extent that the entire platform is unusable.

personally I couldn't care less about Twitter, used it once or twice and bailed, but usually when the CEO tells you its a BIG problem... http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/4/7982099/twitter-ceo-sent-me...

Examples of this actually happening? Genuinely curious, as I've never heard of this phenomenon.

I think you can simply google Dick Costolo and hear him say it directly about 100 times.

That search actually turns up nothing of the kind, but googling for Twitter impostors and Twitter impersonation resulted in scads of relevant stories. I was totally unaware of this behavior. It's kind of fascinating, and sad, and infuriating.

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