Yeah, I'm a bit surprised nobody has picked up on the forgiveness part. The more I worked on this, the more it's necessity became clear. I think it's a more subtle point, but it's a powerful way to restore relationships and even potentially forge closer ties.
I get that many people think Twitter or social media in general is a broken system. It's my belief though the same power of design to get us into the toxic situations we're in can help get us out of it. It will take many changes to deconstruct the outrage engine, but I think one part is indeed finding ways to have constructive, reputation- and respect-preserving dialog.
Changing the algorithm is a much bigger task. It's a sort of 'how do you solve world peace as just one person' type question. If we lack access to change something big, we must still try to change what we can. That was why I started with a simple feature that Twitter could implement without much effort. We may as well try it and see what it does. If it works, it can help give us the momentum to tackle bigger problems, and give us the hope and concrete results to tackle larger problems.
The word "forgive" is a loaded one. I wonder if it wouldn't be easier for people to understand and accept if presented as a "heart" on the mea culpa itself, since that's already a familiar button and the use of the heart symbology gives it a touch of tenderness.
That's definitely an alternative, I almost did it that way!
I went with 'forgive' because I think the broader problem we have on social media is when looking across all users, it can be really ambiguous what things mean, which has led to a lot of misinterpretation of intent. The people entering the worldwide commons of Twitter are from every life stage, skill level, opinion tribe, culture, personality type, etc, and the tools we've used to find common ground among all of us in the past - language - is being thrown out in favor of hieroglyphs and UI structures that can be pretty ambiguous for a lot of people.
Adding ambiguity can be fun and quite useful in certain circumstances, especially with new things where the goal is to create emergent behavior. But for important things that strike at the core of who we are and have deep psychological impact, I'd prefer to see those rooted in specific meaning and intent. Concepts like forgiveness and mercy are things that span almost every culture throughout history and are part of the glue that tie us together, so I figured its probably better to be extra clear about that.
I also like to use design proposals to push people to think a bit, make them wrestle with things that sound silly because they're so straightforward, rather than just hand wave it (my other recent work on Spaces [0] is an example of this). But in this particular case, I loved the clarity of it. I do think it's worth further exploration and discussion tho!
I get that many people think Twitter or social media in general is a broken system. It's my belief though the same power of design to get us into the toxic situations we're in can help get us out of it. It will take many changes to deconstruct the outrage engine, but I think one part is indeed finding ways to have constructive, reputation- and respect-preserving dialog.
Changing the algorithm is a much bigger task. It's a sort of 'how do you solve world peace as just one person' type question. If we lack access to change something big, we must still try to change what we can. That was why I started with a simple feature that Twitter could implement without much effort. We may as well try it and see what it does. If it works, it can help give us the momentum to tackle bigger problems, and give us the hope and concrete results to tackle larger problems.