David Holmes, at PandoDaily, tells me some stuff I did not know:
… First, it’s important to note how Twitter makes its money. In a Medium piece, Steven Levy writes that while Twitter’s user growth has continually disappointed Wall Street, it’s met revenue expectations far faster than many expected, hitting an estimated $1.375 billion in revenue last year. Twitter earned this cash through promoted tweets and trends that worm their way into users’ feeds. Crucially, Levy writes, advertisers do not pay based on how many people see the tweets; they pay based on how many people engage with them by retweeting, favoriting, or clicking a link.
That’s been Twitter’s revenue strategy all along. Rather than focus solely on building its user base (though, to be sure, Twitter is rightly concerned about that, too) it works to create an experience that leads to highly-engaged users who will be more likely to interact with each other in positive ways — and that includes brands.
… A Twitter troll is not a very valuable asset — not to fellow users and, more importantly, not to advertisers. It’s difficult to monetize trolls and their burner accounts, which exist not to be part of a larger conversation, but solely to spew vitriol at Twitter’s more earnest users. Furthermore, a Twitter full of hate is not a Twitter most users want to use. Facebook can algorithmically downplay negative posts if it wants. But Twitter’s more raw feed — along with “mentions” which make targeted attacks all too easy — don’t allow for that kind of robotic tinkering. And again, Twitter’s intent, from both a user and advertising perspective, is to create the richest experience possible for each individual, regardless of how many use the service. Even if casting off the trolls causes it to lose users (which, in the long-run, it won’t), it will have only lost users that harm the platform’s long-term ambitions…
Celebrities notwithstanding, I believe Dick C. when he says, “We’re going to start kicking these (abusers) off right and left and making sure that when they issue their ridiculous attacks, nobody hears them.” (Sarah Jeong has a post at the Verge theorizing that Twitter is perfectly capable of better policing trolls — though there’s also the fear that these mechanisms could be abused to silence free speech). It’s not because I believe Costolo is a decent human being. He seems like a pretty good guy, but that’s beside the point — good intentions mean nothing in the world of billion dollar companies.
No, it’s because a Twitter full of trolls is a Twitter that won’t make a dime for the company or its advertisers. And the reality is, money has always been the biggest and often only incentive for a company to do good.
Your thoughts?
jl
” It’s difficult to monetize trolls ”
I thought most Tweeter twits were trolling, of sort. But then, I do not understand that medium very well.
Just Some Fuckhead
I don’t think Twitter is going to catch on.
different-church-lady
Using the term “rich experience” in this context has got to be one of the saddest things I have ever read.
Just Some Fuckhead
@different-church-lady: This.
SiubhanDuinne
And yet again, I am very glad to be neither a Tweeter nor a Tweetee.
eric nny
I like my snark short, sweet and to the point yet I will never create a Twitter account. It seems so pointless.
RareSanity
@different-church-lady:
No harm, no foul on that watch thread church-lady.
I too am guilty of aiming rants at the wrong target every now and again. :-)
I could have been a bit more diplomatic in my response to you.
Eric S.
I like twitter to follow various journalists and scientists. I use it as a kind of RSS feed.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@eric nny: i follow half a dozen or so reporter/punidts and comedians, but I have their pages as ordinary bookmarks, I have no desire to join another social network.
Nemo_N
Video games youtuber TotalBiscuit has some suggestions, which are focused on giving tools to users to filter the trolls.Summarized:
1) An “account age” configurable filter.
2) The ability to disable the public display of @replies under your tweet and/or the ability to remove specific @replies from those publicly shown.
3) The ability to add moderators to your Twitter account that have the ability to block and remove tweets, but not necessarily post.
4) The ability to simply turn off @replies.
You can read his whole post here.
I agree with him here:
Howard Beale IV
With meta-loons like the Ginger Avenger just baiting for a fight and eventual lawsuits, makes me wonder how the Twitter troll troops will succeed.
Anne Laurie
@Eric S.:
Me too! That’s one reason I was interested to read this — even though I don’t have a Twitter account, I click on a lot of Twitter links, so I guess I’m still “paying my way” there.
eric nny
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Genius! This is why I lurk. I assume Billmon is the way to go since I see his tweets here?
max
It’s Farmville for chatty types.
Actually, that’s the essence of the problem. What makes it sorta useful is the avalanche of realtime info from people of many different, conflicting points of view. If you really start popping the trolls, you’re going to wind up with an ongoing war against various unpowerful types, whereupon it loses the ‘core of the experience’. They’re aiming for Instagram which won’t work for text.
max
[‘I don’t think they’ll effectively implement it.’]
Bubblegum Tate
@different-church-lady:
Yes indeed.
I too am blissfully Twitter-free. At my job, I occasionally have to tweet from the corporate account; I always feel dirty afterward.
Redshift
Oh, great. Another thread full of people who don’t use twitter telling me what twitter is like based on Twitter stories in the news and random tweets they’ve seen posted elsewhere.
Yeah, I think it’ll work and it will be a good thing, at least for a while. It seems like Twitter should be able to block the worst kind of trolling. The real question is, if they block the really easy ways to troll (creating new accounts as fast as ones get blocked, for example), is there a slightly less easy way to do the same thing that they won’t be able to block without unduly interfering with legitimate users? That’s always the issue with security/abuse, and it’s the question we won’t know the answer to until they try the first level.
Elizabelle
@SiubhanDuinne: yup
draftmama
Who cares about Twitter
PhoenixRising
On another infuriating topic: It wasn’t something I said. They really are willing to die on the hill ‘Not Unless We Said So’.
Breaking: Gay Inc would rather we all lose than let someone they’ve never heard of win marriage equality at the Supreme Court.
Gay Inc told the Michigan plaintiffs to shut up and go away wondering what would happen to their kids, just like they told Edie Windsor to pay her taxes and be quiet until a “strategic” time. And now the stakes are…the whole pot.
I wish I didn’t have reason to know that it’s exactly that bad. The only reason NM got a case through our state supreme court is that a county clerk told Gay Inc to go piss up a rope, he was going to enforce the law.
Anyone who bothers to read the Bloomberg reporter’s painfully accurate take will see that there’s a link to pitch in $5 to the lawyers who have been running this case out of their own pockets for 3 damn years!
FlyingToaster
I have a IRL twitter account (one where my family and friends can find me), where I mostly tweet about snowfall and being stuck in an airport with my daughter and when it got to 108° on my patio.
I follow various science, comedy, and weather types (Bill Nye, Aasif Mandvi, Cantore!) and drop them when they become irrelevant (Keith Olberman now that he’s out of political commentary). And I follow my friends, who also tweet about weird food they’re eating and getting lost in Iceland and posters of Kurosawa movies.
I think Twitter will outlast Facebook.
jl
@Redshift: I assure you that while I do not use twitter, I think twitter is a useful and valuable thing. It is certainly easier for me to understand some some other social media thingamabobs.
Eric U.
I am pretty sure I had a facebook post removed because I mentioned GNC wrt the story about the fake suppliments they have been selling.
Mandalay
@draftmama:
I used to feel that way, but I am finally starting to see the real benefit of Twitter, Facebook and blogs: they are highly effective asshole detection devices…
If you are a public figure assume that anything you write privately will be made public. Not hard to grasp, but a lot of people seem to have a problem with it.
sharl
@Redshift:
I hope you’re right about that, but it will be difficult as long as people can hide behind anonymous nyms (and I’m one of those, though I mostly follow and retweet others, rather than compose many tweets of my own).
How do you distinguish among bored teens (usually boys) who maybe don’t know how vicious their offhand posts are, from the committed trolls who have…issues, from those who appear to be genuinely mentally ill?
One tweeter afflicted by the first type of troll doxxed her troll sufficiently to learn he was a teen, then contacted the kid’s mom, whose response was roughly – ‘why that little shit! Don’t worry, I’ll handle it.’ But how many folks have that kind of investigatory skill? And how many parents of trolling teens would take responsibility that way?
In the second category was Lindy West’s troll – at the time a miserable, overweight fellow (his self-description) – who got angry about West’s tweets and posts about accepting one’s body without embarrassment (she describes herself as “fat” without shame). When West’s beloved father died, this troll learned about that through diligent research and used the information to post some really vicious shit. Taking a chance, West posted about it and frankly admitted that it really hurt, whereupon the troll contacted her to apologize and pledge $50 to a cause he thought she would appreciate. That led to a quite remarkable segment on This American Life (audio, 21min) that included an on-air exchange between the two.*
(…eta, I’m not optimistic that many other troll victims would be as fortunate as Lindy West was, if they tried the same thing.)
As for the mentally ill category, I strongly suspect there is one such person here. Can you spot him in the exchange among the tweeters? I bet you can! This guy has been bugging the Wonkette folks for awhile, as well as others. He gets suspended repeatedly, and just comes back with a new account. I would hope guys like that would at least be (relatively) easy to deal with, but we’ll see.
*Written account of Lindy West’s experience here (no linkage, to avoid moderation):
http://www.refinery29.com/2015/02/81725/lindy-west-troll-this-american-lifePaulW
I’m still old-fashioned blogging, and shilling my estories. :)
http://noticeatrend.blogspot.com/2015/02/blame-gaming-lying-hypocrisy.html
Mike in NC
Twitter is for vapid morons like Newt Gingrich and Donald Trump.
Morzer
I suspect Twitter will start out by conducting periodic colon cleanses to remove the more egregious and hateful Twitter trolls. This will fail unless they have a more stringent way of controlling account registration and linking accounts to an actual identity. Facebook seems to have tried and failed to implement this, so I am skeptical that Twitter will do much better. Ultimately I think they’ll either give up in despair amid right wing stalkers, glibertarians, misogynists and racists howling about free speech or give users the means to keep their own feeds as clean and decent as they choose, which will lead to polarized Twitter tribes that mirror our increasingly partisan society.
Tenar Darell
Just finished headdesking after I saw a report of 5 babies in Chicago with measles. Daycare center. I know teachers have to get vaccinated; do daycare center workers have to? Probably something that varies state by state.
Nemo_N
@Morzer:
We are already there. Two groups can talk about the same thing without ever seeing what the other one is saying. Take the ESA scientist shirt brouhaha; liberals (or at least people who like to pretend they are liberals) were using “#shirtstorm” while everyone else was using “#shirtgate”. This because they didn’t want anyone to associate it with “#gamergate”.
And all of this without the tools I mentioned in the post up here.
Give people the tools to filter trolls, people are going to divide themselves anyway.
PaulW
@Tenar Darell:
All it takes is one baby showing up with the measles, not the daycare workers.
Measles is the new (old) Captain Trips.
PaulW
@Mike in NC:
Twitter is where I get to send flowery love poems to the actresses and Playboy models I drool over, so shush.
lol
@Nemo_N:
Totalbiscuit can go fuck himself. He’s one of the biggest GamerGate apologists out there. He’s chiefly serves to lend an air of respectability to a hate movement.
PaulW
@SiubhanDuinne:
@PaulWartenberg I’m not much of a Tweeter but I’m a hell of a Twit.
jibeaux
I see the usefulness of twitter and maybe I’m just following too many people, but there’s too much noise there for me. I once saw these prairie dogs in a zoo, or something like prairie dogs, and they’d be standing up quietly then one would make noise and dive and it would set off this chain reaction of flurries, chatter and activity. That’s what twitter feels like to me, only not as cute.
Morzer
This strikes me as being a very interesting article about tipping, and I think it relates to the problem of trolling and the general acceptance of a level of abuse on social media sites:
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/17586/how_tipping_helped_make_sexual_harassment_the_norm_for_female_servers
Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)
@PaulW:
Exactly. The measles probably came from one of the daycare kids, not one of the adults. IIRC, someone with measles is contagious for up to 5 days BEFORE they show any symptoms.
FlyingToaster
@Tenar Darell: It’s by state, and within a state, by county or municipality or employer. Alas.
The other problem is that measles, mumps and rubella immunities fade over time. I had rubella at age 2; I was vaccinated with the MMR at age 18 (college dorm requirement); and when I was tested before getting married at age 43, showed NO rubella antibodies. I’ve been re-vaxed for MMR and DPT.
A child too young to be vaccinated probably was patient zero at this center, but the caretakers are definitely at risk.
Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)
Also, too, in job search news, I talked to an internal recruiter yesterday, sent her an updated resume this morning, she called me back to make a couple of edits and then sent it off to a potential opening. Speedy!
Tenar Darell
@PaulW: Snort, Captain Trips.
Regarding my wondering about the daycare workers, the babies were under a year so they were unlikely to have gotten the full MMR yet. I was unclear. I was thinking aloud about the transmission vector without being explicit. Could have been the aftermath of the worst trip to Disneyland, ever. I think I’ll go do some headdesking again.
NotMax
I has the vapors.
With exceptions so scanty they for all intents and purposes are non-existent, in American English quotation marks abutting a punctuation mark always go on the outside.
/dejected schoolmarm mode
Amir Khalid
@NotMax:
American English needs to learn better. British English’s much more sensible rule (punctuation outside the quote marks, unless part of the quote) avoids misleading people.
/BrEng partisan
Jamey
“Wow, I wish a bunch of snobs who don’t use Twitter would tell me why I’m stupid for using Twitter–and how to use it better…” (Opens Tweet …)
Jamey
@Mike in NC: And totally emptyheaded asshats like President Barack Obama, the Dali Lama, somebody’s mama… and NASA, Lawrence Lessig, Josh Barro, the list goes on. Twitter is just another communications tool and not an evil robotic device programmed to destroy our collective intelligence. Don’t like it, ignore it. But please don’t deride something that you obviously do not know how to use.
(My profession has me more more or less living with Twitter in the background, and, much a skeptic as I was, I have to say that I am better at my job and, therefore, happier because of Twitter. YMMV, of course.)