Comments on: Fixing Twitter

By: Tim Hall

Tim Hall — Sun, 28 Aug 2016 17:45:33 +0000

Yep, Twitter is something you dip in and out of. The way it threads conversations mean you can backtrack up to follow interesting conversations where you missed the start.

Sometime it does feel as though Twitter is slowly dying at the hands of clueless management who don’t understand how and why people use their product.

By: Serdar Yegulalp

Serdar Yegulalp — Sun, 28 Aug 2016 17:30:21 +0000

Exactly. I had this problem when trying (and failing) to use keywords to filter my Twitter streams in the early days of my use of the service. I finally just gave up. Twitter isn’t really a stream-based medium; it’s more of a pool that’s added to by way of streams, and you dig into the pool and pull out stuff every so often. Following streams religiously is pointless.

By: Tim Hall

Tim Hall — Sun, 28 Aug 2016 16:41:29 +0000

And filtering by keyword takes no account of context, and nobody had yet written an AI that’s smart enough understand whether somebody using a naughty word like “Cuck” is a member of the Alt-Right, or a Social Justice Warrior attacking the Alt-Right.

By: Serdar Yegulalp

Serdar Yegulalp — Sun, 28 Aug 2016 16:05:12 +0000

The other thing that annoys me about this, political implications aside, is that they’re using a technical solution to the problem which is a) far more complex, b) requires constant management (you need to tune the keyword list over time for it to work), and c) isn’t going to work anyway because filtering by keywords has proven to be uniformly worthless for managing Twitter content from any point of view!