Abuse and misinformation are certainly the big issues but even more bigger and rather meta-issue is the strong hub-and-spoke model that Twitter promotes. Here's an example: You could tweet some of the most informative and useful tweets relevant to, say, robotics enthusiasts for day after day and years after year, and you might still end up with absymal engagement in terms of likes, retweets and followers. Meanwhile, folks who happened to become celebrity by pure random exposure can tweet how they sneezed that morning and they might end up with dozens of likes on their sneeze tweet. The bottom line is that Twitter's ranking algorithms are strongly dependent on existing social engagement creating virtuous cycle of virality of irrelevant content as well as chicken-and-egg problem for not popular people. The end result is that Twitter is mostly a medium for information broadcast, as opposed to information exchange. This has fundamentally limited the participation as well as usefulness of Twitter and is the one thing they should strive to change.
That's not an issue of Twitter, but of human nature. I don't think technology can do anything about it. That is just wishful thinking about "future people" who spend their time learning and improving their skills 24/7, instead of slacking and having fun. Unrealistic - presumably people simply need time outs.
You could argue that Twitter actually does well with that problem: after all, if you follow a robotics enthusiast, you WILL see some tweets about robotics among all the sneezing.
It's most definitely issue of how Twitter ranks and promotes the content. To make content more visible, you must be popular in first place. To be popular, you must have your content more visible. It's a virtuous cycle 99.9% users cannot possibly break without winning random virality lotteries. I agree Pareto's law and exponential distribution applies in all social networks but for Twitter this is not only skewed by at least an order of magnitude but its current design and algorithms actively promotes this phenomenon instead of resisting it.
A thought experiment: Imagine Twitter was the only way to distribute information. How would that world look like? Everyone who doesn't have followers would almost have no chance of having followers and therefore their content will keep disappearing in Twitter blackhole regardless of how useful it might have been (given how bad their search is). Twitter algorithms takes rich-gets-richer phenomenon to whole new level. At times, it feels their algorithms wants to re-establish ancient model of nobility vs plebs. The whole notion of "follower" has negative connotations with implied power-play top-down relationship. I have seen people with mid-range follower count not following others even when they find them interesting because they don't want to ruin their followers/followee ratio. The notion of follower as opposed to friend or contact firmly puts in place one-way power structure, the information broadcast instead of information exchange model. Many folks have resorted to always following back any followers in protest of this model while many others resist following anyone who they don't consider their peers in power structure created by Twitter Universe.
A minimal fix Twitter can do is to identify good tweets from followers and occasionally show it to followees to at least have a shot at 2-way relationships. The current scheme of "likes" doesn't cut it because first one wins and everyone else gets buried deep. When people ask why Twitter is not so successful with larger population, not so much growing and still relatively quite small (after subtracting bots), I often get surprised they don't see above as the most fundamental issues with their model of social relationships itself.
Granted, it can be an issue of Twitter ranking content. After all, they could just decide to not ever show any robotics content at all, and only show celebrity sneezes.
What I mean by human nature is that humans will always follow celebrity sneezes, and seek to slack off.
I don't think Twitter could invent a ranking that would give the robotics enthusiast a following of 10 million people and weed out the celebrity person. They could do that - but people would stop using the service and switch over to Instagram.
One major issue, once social networks introduce ranking, is the question who they rank for. If the algorithm tries to maximize engagement, it will happily promote the celebrity sneezes. Of course algorithms could optimize for other things (personal development or whatever), limited by people actually keeping to use the service.
In the early days afaik Twitter had no ranking and filtering at all.
There are plenty of things that technology can do about this. For the nuclear option, complete anonymity would resolve this problem instantaneously. Comments would only be driven by the merit of themselves rather than by the merit of who's saying them. There is an obvious argument against this in that you'd ostensibly much prefer to hear from a nuclear physicist than an english major on topics of nuclear physics, and without the indicator of whose speaking this knowledge of expertise is removed. But on the other hand, I think this argument is very weak since we're already discussing the issue that, in practice, most people don't listen to the nuclear physicist - they listen to the english major.
Completely agreed, but that's also the point I was making. The issues with sites such as Twitter are fully self inflicted. The network is simply not designed for the spread or promotion of meaningful information. It's designed to attract followers through the promotion of celebrity/business accounts, and maintain their presence through maximizing "engagement" regardless of the direct consequences of prioritizing "engagement." And the celebrity/business accounts are attracted through the ease of being able to promote their business/persona/agenda, regardless of the value of any of these things. It's like running a casino and then suddenly having a fit conscientiousness about it driving poor economic decisions. It's your entire business model!
