Computing Blog

The media has been awash of late with suggestions that Twitter is dying, because its user base has stopped growing and the share price has fallen. It’s true that it’s nowhere near the size of Facebook. But people were predicting the imminent death of Facebook years ago, but it doesn’t seem to gone away. Twitter’s problem is unrealistic expectations; it’s failed to displace Facebook as the world’s number one social network. But it’s still become something substantial in its own right.

Twitter has probably plateaued now, but has enough of user base to ensure that it’s going to be around for a long time yet. Though not as big as Facebook it’s got a big enough network multiplier effect that people are going to use it in preference to smaller competitors who will struggle to break out of their niches.

Twitter’s biggest problem is that it’s still terrible at dealing with harassment, especially the pile-on attacks you get when someone with a substantial bully pulpit sets their followers on some poor nobody who’s got in their way.

Twitter does need to address this, but there are differing opinions as to exactly how they need to do it.

David Auerbach has called for a radical rethink on how Twitter handles conversations. Meanwhile Kasimir Urbanski suggests that the sky is falling, the authoritarians are taking over and it’s time to create a free speech alternative.

Twitter really has three options

• Do nothing on the grounds that any solution will cause more problems that it will solve.
• Publish much stricter terms of service, and throw a sufficiently large number of human moderators at the problem.
• Do what David Auerbach suggests and devolve moderation to the user level.

The first of those is almost certainly not an option. Despite the protestations of noisy libertarians, Twitter does have a real harassment problem, and it can’t all be dismissed as the whining of bullies who dish it out but can’t take it. It’s true that some activists have a very subjective and highly politicised definition of harassment. It’s true that not all victims are women and not all perpetrators are men. But there is enough evidence to suggest that women pay a far higher price in terms of harassment for expressing remotely controversial opinions. If you still think that’s not a problem, I refer you to the word “privilege” (I dislike the term and it’s often misused, but there are times when it’s still appropriate. This is one of them). And no, third-party block lists are not the solution, they have too high a cost in false positives.

Twitter seems to be going for the second option, and it’s the one place I agree with Kasimir Urbanski, it’s not going to work. Human moderation can work very well for community sites, but only where there is a level of trust between the moderators and the community. Twitter is not a single community but many, many overlapping ones, most of which have few shared values in common. The failure modes of a mass human moderation approach are easy to imagine, and we’re already seeing worrying signs of this. We’ll see high-profile figures perma-banned “pour encourager les autres” because they’ve offended some other high-profile person or group with whom Twitter wants to curry favour. There will be no transparency, and who does and doesn’t get banned for near-identical behaviour will depend on who has the right friends or the right politics. Trust will evaporate.

Which leaves the third option, as proposed by David Auerbach. It’s not actually as radical a change as he suggests it is. It’s just a matter of applying some kind of reputation ranking on who can appear in your notifications, based on who the people you follow have either followed or blocked. They could have some kind of “traffic light” system; Green people are those who plenty of your friends follow and none have blocked. Red people are those many of your friends have blocked, or have accumulated many blocks relative to their tweet and follower counts. Amber people either those for whom not enough information is available, or your friends are divided over whether they follow or block them.

It’s not necessarily perfect, and there is a danger of echo chambers, which have their own problems. Whatever algorithms they use need to be designed to short-circuit anyone who tries to game the system by mass-blocking people they don’t like for reasons other than harassment, and that’s probably easier said than done.

Twitter has again been the centre of controversy following their removal of verified status from a prominent but notorious right-libertarian journalist with a reputation for setting packs of followers on people who have incurred his displeasure. Arguments rage over whether this is appropriate punishment for a serial bully, or whether it signals Twitter is publicly taking sides in the increasingly ugly culture war.

As I’ve said before, Twitter needs to get a handle on the mobbing and abuse that’s blighted the network for a long time. But when Twitter has taken on the role of a public square, it’s dangerous for them to impose top-down speech policing in the service of anyone’s political agenda, and they are currently sending out very mixed messages on the subject.

If Twitter is to impose any kind of rules, which they need to, they do need transparency in how they’re enforced. With the best will in the world it’s difficult to know precisely where to draw the line between harassment and speaking truth to power, so much is subjective and dependent on context. It would not be a good thing if every long-established Twitter user risks a permanent ban for crossing some invisible line at the same time as a relatively junior moderator is having a bad day. If you can’t imagine that even happening to you because you’re one of the good people, I refer you to the famous words of Pastor Niemöller.

Despite some of the wilder claims, it doesn’t look as if the sky is falling on freedom of speech, at least not yet. But there is a danger of ceding so much of our virtual public square to one private business. It’s a single point of failure, and there is always the danger it may pivot and allow powerful political or corporate interests to suppress conversations they don’t like for reasons which are not in the wider public interest.

Twitter is allegedly going to introduce 10000-character Tweets, and a lot of people do not like the idea at all.

As the old saying goes, The Devil is in the details, and a lot depends on exactly how they implement this and how people subsequently use it.

A lot of people are assuming a worst-case scenario; that Twitter are simply going to extend the maximum Tweet length and clumsily shoe-horn the results into the existing user interface. That would have the effect of destroyed a lot of Twitter’s unique identity and make it indistinguishable in many ways from Facebook or Google+. The user experience will be degraded a lot if you end up having to click “more..” on every other Tweet just to see that last two or three words. Or worse, if your entire screen is taken up by the sort of rambling poorly-formatted stream-of-consciousness screeds you frequently see on Facebook.

A better and more likely scenario might be a space for occasional longer-form content along the lines of a native rival to Medium, something that can be attached to a Tweet and displayed when you expand it much like pictures are handled now. James Worrad explains why he considers that could be a good thing; there is a place for longer-form content, but not everyone has the time and inclination to set up a blog especially for it, especially if they only post to it occasionally. It’s not something I have any need for, since I already have a blog. Anything I can’t express in 140 characters goes here rather than on Twitter.

But ultimately the brevity and succinctness enforced by Twitter’s existing 140-character limit is fundamental to Twitter’s identity. The user experience and the user interfaces of the various apps are built around a stream of small bite-sized pieces of information, and that’s actually what the bulk of the user base loves about the service. It’s not something that should be messed with lightly.

140-character Tweets and longer-form blog posts are really two quite different things. They have very different life-cycles; it’s common to see links on Twitter to blog or Medium posts from months or even years before if the content is still relevant. In contrast, the life-span of most Tweets can be measured in hours if not minutes.

Nobody knows precisely what Twitter are going to do. They’ve done unpopular things before, most notably the way they cut off so many third-party clients that had been crucial to Twitter’s early growth. They’ve done things that have had unforeseen longer-term consequences to Twitter’s culture before; I still think the worst toxicity of Twitter was encouraged when they introduced the Retweet. They’ve done things that degraded the UX before; look at the way inline images have encouraged mindless sharing of low-quality but emotionally-appealing content generated by sleazy meme-farms at the expense of intelligent conversation.

Those things are the reason why so many people are willing to imagine the worst and don’t trust Twitter not to screw things up.