Guy Who Built Twitter's Retweet Button Admits Maybe That Was a Really Bad Idea (gizmodo.com) 98
The man behind Twitter's "Retweet" button -- which is pretty much the foundation of the whole site -- now thinks he screwed up big time, telling BuzzFeed News in an interview that he recalled thinking, "We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon." From a report: "That's what I think we actually did," added Chris Wetherell, the developer in question. Wetherell, who helped build the now-defunct Google Reader platform before he joined Twitter in 2009, told BuzzFeed that at the time, adding the function seemed like a simple way to streamline the process of spreading another tweet. Before the retweet button, users had to manually copy other tweets. According to BuzzFeed, Wetherell said that Twitter staff working on the feature in 2009 were more concerned about its utility in situations like "earthquakes" and fully unprepared for how it would change engagement on the platform: "Only two or three times did someone ask a broader and more interesting social question, which was, 'What is getting shared?'" Wetherell said. "That almost never came up." After the retweet button debuted, Wetherell was struck by how effectively it spread information. "It did a lot of what it was designed to do," he said. "It had a force multiplier that other things didn't have."... "We would talk about earthquakes," Wetherell said. "We talked about these first response situations that were always a positive and showed where humanity was in its best light."
it's funny (Score:1)
it's funny/scary how little the people who build social media platforms actually know about human nature. oh well, at least jack got rich.
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Many of those who came up with social media are people on the autism spectrum at various degrees. So it's not very surprising.
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FWIW, most science fiction authors got it just as wrong.
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You obviously didn't read the report if you actually believe what you wrote.
The entire Mueller report is "We thought this specific incident might be collusion, We investigated it, we found out that it wasn't collusion".
That is the entire report, a long list of all the things that were investigated and what the result of each section of the investigation was.
At the beginning, the report CLEARLY states that NO AMERICANS were found to be involved in ANY RUSSIAN COLLUSION.
The Mueller report was in English, it's
Old people (Score:5, Funny)
I get the feeling that only old people use Facebook and Twitter now. The kids and the hipsters use Instagram. The ultra-cool people use Slashdot.
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The kids and the hipsters use Instagram.
Which means they are still using Facebook.
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Kids are on snapchat, certainly not FB and less and less IG
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I'm not sure about that. I think Snapchat pretty such died out last year.
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Yo, thanks binary man!
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I've always said you are as cool as I am!
The problem is not the feature (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is not the feature, and it is not the platform itself. The problem is social media as a whole, which thrives off of mob rule and a shoot first, ask questions later attitude.
Why engage with ideas when it is so easy to find an angry (or enraptured) mob that already agrees with me? Retweeting is just a small piece of that puzzle.
Re:The problem is not the feature (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is social media as a whole, which thrives off of mob rule and a shoot first, ask questions later attitude.
I think at least part of the problem with social media is caused by the barrier to entry being so low. It's trivially easy to respond without thinking, so people get in the habit of firing from the hip and then going about their day without actually thinking much about the topics they're spouting off on.
One thing that, lately, has really annoyed me about Twitter is not the platform itself... it's the lazy "writers" on various websites who seem to think an easy way to meet their article quota is to just copy a bunch of people's Tweets on a topic. I don't know how many times I've seen a headline that looks potentially interesting, only to find out the story is simply a copy of a bunch of vapid Tweets made by people who obviously didn't invest even five seconds of thought before posting. And, unfortunately, it seems to be an increasingly common practice.
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The problem is social media as a whole, which thrives off of mob rule and a shoot first, ask questions later attitude.
I think at least part of the problem with social media is caused by the barrier to entry being so low. It's trivially easy to respond without thinking, so people get in the habit of firing from the hip and then going about their day without actually thinking much about the topics they're spouting off on.
Which is why the problem is the whole Twitter platform, which was designed specifically to squirt brief thoughts at the masses with the minimum of effort. If they did not create the retweet button, users would simply have gone elsewhere, because they would have been irritated. And there would be user scripts to implement it, not that any large percentage of users use those. Probably there would be a popular browser extension to add one to the page.
One thing that, lately, has really annoyed me about Twitter is not the platform itself... it's the lazy "writers" on various websites who seem to think an easy way to meet their article quota is to just copy a bunch of people's Tweets on a topic.
That's irritating, but nothing compared to the fucking night
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It needs a countdown timer - a timer that starts when you his send and counts down five minutes before the post is actually sent, giving impulsive big mouths time to reflect on their spewings, and in which time the post can be withdrawn or modified.
Technology solving people's personal inadequacies which have been exacerbated and magnified by technology (social media).
That would be a start.
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I think the purpose was to rapidly spread tweets. So if there was an earthquake, and someone you followed retweeted it, you would see it. You could retweet it again so everyone who followed you saw it too. You wouldn't need to follow the original account.
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Who cares? (Score:2, Insightful)
I hate all this panic about how speech can be treated like it's somehow more damaging than speech. A person reacting to speech is still responsible for his or her personal actions. People are free to say anything they want - provided it does not cause a public safety issue. Further, it's completely unfair to say 'triggering' a person purposely online is a public safety issue in the same way shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater creates a safety issue.
Slashdot has worked the same way for more than 20 years..
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I hate all this panic about how speech can be treated like it's somehow more damaging than speech.
This isn't about speech, this about amplifying misinformation and ignorance.
A person reacting to speech is still responsible for his or her personal actions.
In a perfect world, everyone would take responsibility for their actions. We don't live in a perfect world.
We don't need some complicated algorithm to go through and treat it like it's somehow going to cause widespread societal collapse.
That's funny because you clearly don't realize just how close to the brink the US has been pushed. People have been killed as a result of disinformation, misinformation and ignorance. Should everyone sit idly by while people are murdered?
On Facebook, I feel like I should decided who's posts I see.
Feel any way you want but that's not your choice. You are a product, not a consumer.
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Let me ask you a question: how are you so sure the traditional means of spreading information (newspapers, television) wasn't based on misinformation and ignorance?
"Should everyone sit idly by while people are murdered?"
Not sure what you mean, but people have been doing that forever.
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"how are you so sure the traditional means of spreading information (newspapers, television) wasn't based on misinformation and ignorance?" - Fact checking of the basic variety. NEXT STUPID QUESTION?
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That's funny because you clearly don't realize just how close to the brink the US has been pushed.
The US isn't close to "the brink," that's just silly.
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"This isn't about speech, this about amplifying misinformation and ignorance."
You mean it is only legitimate speech if you agree, right?
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
The proper way to stop amplifying misinformation and ignorance is to inform people so they are no longer ignorant. Trying to stop it by squelching free speech puts you on the path to intimidation, censorship, and authoritarianism (some authority has to decide what speech is "correct" and what speech is "misinformation"). Either you believe in democracy and trust that given free will and free choice, most people will make the correct decision when faced with conflicting information (the U.S. and Western Europe model). Or you don't believe in democracy, and believe that people are too stupid so that these decisions need to be made for them, thus justifying an authoritarian model of government (the Chinese model).
Nothing about what is going on in social media is new. There has always been gossip, there has always been groupthink, there have always been a mob mentality. Nothing has fundamentally changed. The only thing the Internet has done is increase the speed at which these things happen. What used to take months or years to get around via word of mouth, now only takes days. But the factor governing what percentage of people will believe a bad idea remains the same - how well you educate them. If you believe in freedom and democracy but dislike the spread of misinformation, that's the only solution you should be supporting. Advocating controlling how information is disseminated puts you in the position of justifying and supporting the tools of authoritarianism.
It's ironic that they discussed how the feature might have been used in earthquakes, because it's actually analogous to what's going on here. Fracking got blamed for causing earthquakes. But that's impossible - the energy pumped into the ground to fracture rocks isn't anywhere near the amount of energy released in a subsequent earthquake. The energy released in an earthquake is energy that was already stored in the rocks due to tectonic motion. Fracking can trigger an earthquake, but blaming it for causing earthquakes is misguided. Stopping fracking won't stop earthquakes. All it'll do is make the next naturally-occurring earthquake that much more powerful - the energy that wasn't released via a fracking-induced earthquake (because you stopped fracking) will just be released during the next natural earthquake.
In the same way, social media doesn't cause ignorance and the spread of misinformation. Like naturally-occurring earthquakes, those things already happen, have always happened, and would continue to happen even if we banned social media. The retweet button didn't cause these problems. All it did was trigger these behaviors, exposing our failure to teach people to think critically so they can appraise rumors and hearsay rationally and reject them as nonsense. Banning retweets or social media doesn't make the problem go away, it merely hides it from view.
If you want to solve the problem, it needs to be done via education. But that's hard, takes a long time, and costs a lot of money. So people (reflecting the general state of poor education) grasp at what appears to be the quick and easy fix - banning retweets. Seemingly completely ignorant to how that plays straight into the hands of the people who would wish to take our freedoms away from us.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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Either you believe in democracy and trust that given free will and free choice, most people will make the correct decision when faced with conflicting information (the U.S. and Western Europe model). Or you don't believe in democracy, and believe that people are too stupid so that these decisions need to be made for them
Yeah... I agree with Plato.
Nothing about what is going on in social media is new. There has always been gossip, there has always been groupthink, there have always been a mob mentality. Not
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Copy/pasting would be much worse, as people could edit the content.
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Slashdot has worked the same way for more than 20 years.. and some dumb fuck posts the same GNAA post.. and then it gets moderated down. We don't need some complicated algorithm to go through and treat it like it's somehow going to cause widespread societal collapse.
This only works (and it mostly does on /. at least for now) only as long as the GNAA chuds aren't in the majority or even significant minority. If that ever happens, then every story suddenly will have half a dozen upmodded trolls designed to "own" the normal slashdotters.
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Slashdot has worked the same way for more than 20 years.. and some dumb fuck posts the same GNAA post.. and then it gets moderated down.
No, it hasn't. Weev et al and the GNAA posts were one reason why the lameness filter was created.
Lol (Score:1, Insightful)
Remember when Obama won and the media crowed about how wonderful Twitter was, how it was the future of democracy, and would liberate the middle east by bringing free speech?
Then they found out the whole world doesn't agree with San Francisco dogma, suddenly it was the WORST THING EVER and we need to silence everyone who isn't in the established media.
Get fucked, Buzzfeed.
Twiter is toxic to society (Score:3, Interesting)
So if you are working at Twitter, you are no different from shysters that were repackaging subprime mortgages or dumping waste into rivers until they caught fire. Just following orders, right?
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I agree. All information and opinion should be filtered by experts first, like opinion sections in newspapers, and CNN and FoxNews.
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False dilemma. You can avoid a burning dumpster fire that is Twitter and still have access to media not curated by malicious gatekeepers.
What makes Twitter toxic are two key things - a) it rewards mob behavior with likes, follows, and re-tweets; b) it discourages nuanced and considered conversation by limiting characters and making multi-statement conversation hard to follow.
For example, this discussion would not be possible on Twitter due to its format. It would likely end up with one of u
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Bullshit!
Society is toxic to Society! Twitter, like a butter knife, is just a tool. It is not all of a sudden evil just because someone is stabbed with a butter knife instead of it being used to spread some butter!
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not how we want society to function.
I get it. Most sane people do not want society to function in that way. How do we make people behave the way we want without taking away their freedoms?
We can't. That is the price of Freedom.
We can encourage "positive" behaviours and we can discourage "negative" behaviours, but once we starting forcing certain behaviours, we have stepped over the line.
Shutting down Twitbook is a forcing and, it doesn't even stop the behaviour, it merely makes it less easy to find/see. Closing your eyes to a problem does not
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Blaming Twitter is just blaming a symptom.
It drives polarization, discourages nuance, and encourages mob behavior.
The same can be said about journalism these days. It's a much bigger issue.
Then take it out (Score:2)
"The man behind Twitter's "Retweet" button -- which is pretty much the foundation of the whole site -- now thinks he screwed up big time"
Well then take the fucking thing out. No one is going to die.
Or just admit you screwed up and that now you're making a conscious, deliberate decision NOT to fix it.
It's the old Simpsons headline with a twist (Score:2)
censorious lefties (Score:1)
People might share outrageous memes!