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One of my chief criticisms of Twitter over the years has been that the company would much rather talk
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| November 6 · Issue #413 · View online |
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One of my chief criticisms of Twitter over the years has been that the company would much rather talk about new features than actually ship them. “Twitter’s CEO keeps substituting talking for doing,” is how I put it in January, amid an extended podcast tour for Jack Dorsey in which the CEO acknowledged every possible criticism from every one of the company’s critics while doing little to address them. The problem has never been that Twitter doesn’t know what products to build — it’s that it has an awful lot of trouble actually building them: At Twitter, good ideas languish for years. The expansion of a tweet from 140 to 280 characters required such bruising internal battles that the designer responsible quit in exhaustion after shipping it, I’m told. Other proposed features are abandoned when product managers realize that shipping them will need support from different divisions inside the company — requiring PMs to get buy-in from colleagues who are already busy with their own priorities, and who typically have little incentive to take detours. At Twitter, no idea has languished for quite as long as a feature that would let users follow areas of interest in addition to regular accounts. One reason people have historically abandoned Twitter is the difficulty in figuring out which accounts to follow. A “topics” feature, if it were properly implemented, could take the guesswork out of building a list of such accounts. Instead of finding the best accounts that cover the NBA, for example, you could just follow “NBA” and let Twitter do the work. You will be able to follow more than 300 “topics” across sports, entertainment, and gaming, just as you are currently able to follow individual accounts. In return, you’ll see tweets from accounts that you don’t follow that have credibility on these subjects. Twitter executives hope that Topics will make the platform more approachable for new and intermittent users and make it easier for heavier users to discover new accounts and conversations. The story recounts my own experience with Topics, in which I augment an alternate account I had set up to follow pro wrestling with the “WWE” topic, to generally positive results. Generally speaking, the more heavily you use Twitter, the less valuable you may find Topics — power users tend to be really good at curating a perfect list of accounts to follow. But for new, casual, and lapsed users, I expect Topics to be a powerful tool for Twitter that could help the company grow its user base. It appears that much more is on the horizon. On Monday, Dantley Davis, Twitter’s vice president for design and research, raised eyebrows with a tweet in which he said he is “looking forward to” the launch of several new features next year. They include: letting users remove themselves from conversations; preventing their tweets from being retweeted if they choose; preventing people from mentioning their user names without permission; and sending tweets only to a specific hashtag, interest, or group of friends. On one hand, this is classic Twitter: lots of talk ahead of actions that could be months, if not more than a year, away. But thanks to the company’s recent track record, I’m much more inclined to believe it will follow through on that talk. For the first time in many years, the company is backing up its talk with action. Here’s hoping that it’s one Twitter trend that is here to stay.
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Today in news that could affect public perception of the big tech platforms.
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While foreign actors may still try to influence the outcome of the election using social media, the mantle for spreading fake news has been picked up by everyone else. The majority of the fake news was shared by individuals (39 percent) or non-official political pages (35 percent). Almost one-fifth came from what the researchers called “alternative media accounts” like Breitbart, while mainstream media posted 1 percent of the disinformation. Politicians themselves accounted for 6 percent. The content was a mix of memes, photos that were taken out of context, and articles from fringe websites like American Herald Tribune, Patriots Unite, Trump Maga Reports, and Life News. The case is noteworthy in that it targets a strategic Middle East ally, whose de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has been linked by the CIA to Khashoggi’s killing in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in October 2018. “The criminal complaint unsealed today alleges that Saudi agents mined Twitter’s internal systems for personal information about known Saudi critics and thousands of other Twitter users,” said U.S. Attorney David L. Anderson. “We will not allow U.S. companies or U.S. technology to become tools of foreign repression in violation of U.S. law.”
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At its lightest or most innocuous, you are being added by tangential work contacts to annoying business chats, or groups of over-chatty folks coalesced around a particular interest. A nuisance, but not really the end of the world. But at its darkest, people can get harassed, fake news can be spread, and you might get slammed with an offensive, shocking, disturbing image or two (or three). Given that the app is used by minors (as young as 13 in some markets, although I suspect many younger than this use it), other vulnerable people, and billions of others, Groups on WhatsApp need way better basic controls, usable by more than just those who read change-logs on app updates, or tech blogs.
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Most billionaires aren’t relatable in any meaningful way. But when a billionaire makes a big show of quitting Twitter only to return a short while later, they have our complete sympathy. Here’s Marty Johnson in The Hill: In a series of tweets on Friday, Musk, who is also the CEO of Tesla, questioned the ”good of Twitter” and said that he was “going offline.” Reuters noted that this isn’t the first time Musk, who has nearly 30 million followers on Twitter, has sworn off the site only to come back later. In June, he claimed that he had deleted his Twitter account, although his account remained active. I’d say more about this but I’m going offline.
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