Twitter’s latest bid to try and fix the social media site is yet another impending disaster for a company that doesn’t seem to understand its user base. While CEO Jack Dorsey deserves credit for his legitimate attempts to try and understand user frustrations, he’s once again presented a series of flawed solutions in search of all of the wrong problems.
Twitter users constantly complain about inconsistent enforcement of bots and harassment and usability. Dorsey and company have decided to respond to this by removing the visibility of ‘Like’ and ‘Retweet’ numbers, which NBC News reports is meant to make the site “friendlier.”
Jack, you have a problem, but this ain’t it.
Twitter isn’t a cesspool of abuse because the “ratio” between comments and likes exist. Its discourse devolves into vitriolic dunking because Twitter incentivizes dehumanizing fellow users and maximizing engagement by being as inflammatory as possible to rise in relevance in the Twitter-ordered feed. Unlike Facebook, which entails a certain amount of accountability, or Instagram, which prioritizes the engagement of likes over comments, Twitter acts as the online equivalent of the 405 at 5 p.m. on a Thursday. Unverified users, and especially bots, have no motive to act thoughtfully or with an iota of empathy. You can just flip people off and merge without signaling from the solitude of your own car, cackling away as some sucker you just cut off fumes behind you.
‘Likes’ and ‘Retweets’ contribute positivity to Twitter. It’s commenting and substantive engagement that’s the problem.
Twitter still maintains that it’s a platform and not a publisher. To maintain that legal protection, they can’t just start policing speech at will, and nor should any American want the tech giant to enter the censorship business. But, Twitter can try and pull users out of their cars just a bit and encourage them to act like actual people, not small troll armies.
For starters, Twitter ought to turn its two tiers of accounts, verified and unverified, into three. Twitter should break up verified accounts into anonymous and nonanonymous accounts, prioritizing the nonanonymous ones. People behave a little less like keyboard warriors and a little more civilized when actually held accountable for what they say, while @johnmaga69 or @imp3achdrumph have no reason to behave like anything other than trolls. Twitter shouldn’t ban anonymous accounts outright, as plenty are innocuous and just good fun, but the more people put a name and a face to their accounts, the less hostile the site will be.
Twitter ought to also make it easier to communicate directly with fellow users, adding sorting mechanisms such as “mark as unread” to direct messages. This could result in more Twitter beefs being hashed out one-on-one rather than performed publicly.
Finally, for the love of God, give us an edit button. Obviously Twitter is unique in the rapid pace at which tweets circulate, and unlimited editing privileges could result in a tweet being edited to something bigoted or malicious after it’s already garnered thousands of retweets. But, what nefariousness could be achieved in a 30-second editing limit? Or why not give users 30 seconds to fix a typo before a tweet is actually published? Users just want the ability to correct a typo. Even a character change maximum could be useful.
Twitter keeps on trying to reinvent the wheel without understanding that you can’t change human nature. But it can change its incentive structure.
Irking its entire user base by removing positive signs of engagement to prevent it from contrasting with negative signs will only result in more ire. Instead, Twitter could simply incentivize its users to act a little less like bots and a little more human.
