Dorsey to me has it half right. Twitter should just follow with what we typically do in real life: "follow" people, but masked by interests we trust those people about. I want to read about politics from the political analysts I follow, but don't care about their cooking adventures on the weekend. I want to read about tech from the software folks I follow, but don't want to hear about their politics. I sure as heck don't want to see "liked" tweets by people I follow in areas outside of the interests of theirs I care about.
Beyond that, I'm generally disappointed that we never hear about features that try to get users to act better, by their own volition, vs reactively shutting them down. Social media tools should help us understand the potential impact of our words and actions before hitting "Send". Only if you assume people are incapable of improvement, or that people are not fundamentally good, would it be fair to ignore the potential for sites like Twitter to design things so users will act better on their own vs having to be slapped down when they do something terrible.
> I want to read about politics from the political analysts I follow, but don't care about their cooking adventures on the weekend. I want to read about tech from the software folks I follow, but don't want to hear about their politics.
This is the biggest reason I end up unfollowing people.
Say I follow a person because they post interesting technical articles. Over time (as their follower count increases, usually...) they drift toward making 80% political posts and only 20% technical. I'd still like to see their technical posts w/o having to sift through all the political posts. Usually I just end up unfollowing, depending on how bad it gets, but I wish I could still see and participate in their topics I care about.
This is true even in real-life relationships. There are some people you just don't discuss certain topics with.
I don't discuss politics or medicine with my in-laws. I don't discuss religion anymore with my cousin. Or history with my grandfather. I avoid talking about money with my brother. Why? Because over time I've realized there's nothing to be gained from participating in a conversation with them on that particular topic.
I found the same thing happening to me all the time. I follow software devs, writers, etc. because I am interested in what they do not whatever politics they go on about like everyone else. What I found helped a lot was twitter's mute words functionality, so I just muted words like Trump etc. and it cleaned up my feed a LOT. Much more enjoyable experience now.
> Beyond that, I'm generally disappointed that we never hear about features that try to get users to act better, by their own volition, vs reactively shutting them down.
I think the problem with this approach is that it assumes that typical users like you and me, not bots or people with a particular agenda or goal (i.e. brigading) are the primary sources of abuse.
Unfortunately I think it's much more likely to be the latter section of highly motivated users or bots that are responsible for a disproportion volume of abuse, and there's little incentive Twitter can create to motivate them otherwise
I have found that with social media in general it has never mapped to my interactions in person. I have friends I talk politics with, friends I talk sports with, friends I talk music, and etc. Sometimes they overlap, but almost never in totality. Social media gives me people in total, because I don't think people have really learned how to curate themselves, or really understand how the signal broadcasts. Everyone is learning by trial and error, and I don't think we are learning the right things yet.
> I want to read about politics from the political analysts I follow, but don't care about their cooking adventures on the weekend. I want to read about tech from the software folks I follow, but don't want to hear about their politics. I sure as heck don't want to see "liked" tweets by people I follow in areas outside of the interests of theirs I care about.
> Beyond that, I'm generally disappointed that we never hear about features that try to get users to act better, by their own volition
Now that's a great idea. Let me create multiple outgoing feeds. Lists become 10x cooler when "C programming" only contains programming tweets
I just can't get value out of Twitter, for this very reason. I know you can use any social network for any purpose, but for me, Facebook has always been about following friends and family, and I enjoy the content. Twitter has always been pushed as a way to be "in the know", but no matter how hard I try to 'curate' my feed, I find that following people who I don't personally know means that most of the tweets I see are worse than meaningless, they have negative value. So my entire feed ends up being either ads, or content I don't want to hear about from the people I follow for other reasons.
Beyond that, I'm generally disappointed that we never hear about features that try to get users to act better, by their own volition, vs reactively shutting them down. Social media tools should help us understand the potential impact of our words and actions before hitting "Send". Only if you assume people are incapable of improvement, or that people are not fundamentally good, would it be fair to ignore the potential for sites like Twitter to design things so users will act better on their own vs having to be slapped down when they do something terrible.