Eliezer Yudkowsky and Paul Graham have a lot in common. They’re both well-known bloggers who write about rationality and are influential in Silicon Valley. They’re both known for Bayesian stuff (Graham was a pioneer of Bayesian spam filtering). They both played a role in creating discussion sites which are, in my opinion, among the best on the internet (Less Wrong for Eliezer, Hacker News for Paul Graham). And they’ve both stopped posting to the sites they created, but they both still post to… Twitter, which is, in my opinion, one of the worst discussion sites on the internet. (Here is one of many illustrations.)
It seems like having so many celebrities, scientists, and politicians is a major asset for Twitter. What is it about Twitter which makes big names want to post there? How could a rival site attract big names without also importing Twitter’s pathologies?
Have any of these people said why they have made that choice?
I don’t use twitter, but one possibility might be that it actually isn’t a discussion forum. It’s a place for drive-by firing off of thoughts. For a prominent person, the function of a tweet is to say, “This is what I am thinking about at the moment,” so as to invite conversation elsewhere with the people they already know and find worth while talking to. This is far less time-consuming than an actual discussion forum, where it’s expected that a post will be of a more substantial length and that you will participate in subsequent discussion.
I predict from this hypothesis that Eliezer makes hardly any replies on Twitter to replies to his tweets.
Have any of these people said why they have made that choice?
Not that I’ve seen, but I have seen Paul Graham tweet complaints about Twitter, and I think I’ve seen Eliezer complain about the behavior of users on the platform.
Twitter makes tweet replies less prominent than Facebook. When I’m scrolling down Eliezer’s Facebook feed, I see comment replies to his posts. When I scroll down his Twitter feed, I have to click a tweet to see replies. So that could be playing a role.
It doesn’t seem socially expected to reply to replies to your tweets.
Simplest answer: twitter is where everyone else is, which makes it the simplest and easiest way to interact conversationally with potentially anyone on earth without an intro or in-person meeting.
In addition, twitter enables easy one-to-many communication for celebrities who want to spread memes, and brevity is the soul of wit.
Twitter does a few things I can’t do with other platforms.
1. I can quickly search through all of someone’s thoughts on a particular subjects, and all of people’s thoughts on those thoughts, and peoples thoughts on those thoughts, etc.
2. I can comment on someone else’s specific thought on a subject, and start a conversation thread on it.
3. I can subscribe to someone’s thoughts, without them needing to write essays, etc. It provides a very low friction way to share thoughts.
4. I can build off of my previous thoughts, creating an interconnected web of all my thoughts on a topic. The link is not to a whole “essay” but to the individual thought from that essay that’s relevant.
One way to think of twitter is a vast web of interconnected individual ideas. The character limit forces people to segment their tweets by thought, allowing for this to happen.
Twitter’s usefulness mostly comes from the celebrities being there. The initial reason the celebrities were attracted probably had to do with the char limit, its pretext, that they are not expected to read too much and that they are not expected to write too much.
You’ll see on reddit—at least, back when these things were being determined—a lot of celebrities, when they did AMAs, seemed to feel obligated to respond to every comment with a comment of similar length. Sometimes they wouldn’t wait and see which comments were getting the most votes and answer those, they’d just start with the first one that hit their mailbox and work down the list until they ran out of time. My guess is, non internet-native extroverts really needed a platform that would advise them about what’s expected and reasonable.
But I think, now that we’re all learning that we must moderate our consumption, the celebrities (and most other people) remain on twitter mainly because the celebrities were there in the first place. I don’t think we need the char limit any more. I think maybe we’re ready for the training wheels to come off.
But there’s another reason redditlikes don’t really work for a general audience. Mainly specifics about how voting tends to work. There is no accommodation of subjectivity. Everyone sees the same vote ranking even though different people have different interests and standards. The problem is partially mitigated by separating people into different subreddits, but eventually, general subreddits like /r/worldnews, /r/technology, /r/science or even /r/futurism will grow large enough and diverse enough that people wont be able to stand being around each other again. Every demographic other than the largest, most vote-happy one will have to leave. I really want everyone to be able to join together in the same conversation, but when the top-ranked comments always turn out to be “[outgroup lies]” or “[childish inanity]”, that can’t happen. The outgroup wants to see their lies, and the children want to see their inanity, and I think they should be able to, but good adults need to be able to hear each other too, or else they’ll just move to GoodAdultSite and then the outgroup wont be able to find refutations of their lies even when they look for them, and the children will not receive the advice they need even when they call out for it.
(I have some ideas as to how to build a redditlike that might solve this. If anyone’s interested, speak up.)
Twitter’s usefulness mostly comes from the celebrities being there. The initial reason the celebrities were attracted probably had to do with the char limit, its pretext, that they are not expected to read too much and that they are not expected to write too much.
Interesting. So if Twitter’s celebrity appeal is about brevity, and brevity is a big part of why the platform is so toxic, maybe the best outcome is for it to just get regulated out of existence? Like, we could pass a law that prohibits character limits on social media sites or something.
Woah, this seems like a big jump to a form of technocracy / paternalism that I would think would typically require more justification than spending a short amount of time brainstorming in a comment thread why the thing millions of people use daily is actually bad.
Like, banning sites from offering free services if a character limit is involved because high status members of communities you like enjoy such sites seems like bad policy and also a weird way to try and convince these people to write on forums you prefer. Now, one counterargument would be “coordination problems” mean those writers would prefer to write somewhere else. But presumably if anyone’s aware of “inadequate equilibria” like this and able to avoid it it would be Eliezer.
Re-reading my comment, I realize it may come off as snarky but I’m not really sure how better to convey my surprise that this would be the first idea that comes to mind.
ETA: it’s not clear to me that Twitter is so toxic, especially for people in the broad bubble that encompasses LW / EA / tech / etc. I agree it’s not the best possible version of a platform by any means, but to say it’s obviously net negative seems like a stretch without further evidence.
Woah, this seems like a big jump to a form of technocracy / paternalism that I would think would typically require more justification than spending a short amount of time brainstorming in a comment thread why the thing millions of people use daily is actually bad.
Under what circumstances do you feel introducing new policy ideas with the preface “maybe this could be a good idea” is acceptable?
I don’t expect anyone important to be reading this thread, certainly not important policymakers. Even if they were, I think it was pretty clear I was spitballing.
Like, banning sites from offering free services if a character limit is involved because high status members of communities you like enjoy such sites
If society’s elites are incentivized to use a platform which systematically causes misunderstandings and strife for no good reason, that seems bad.
Now, one counterargument would be “coordination problems” mean those writers would prefer to write somewhere else. But presumably if anyone’s aware of “inadequate equilibria” like this and able to avoid it it would be Eliezer.
Let’s not fall prey to the halo effect. Eliezer also wrote a long post about the necessity of back-and-forth debate, and he’s using a platform which is uniquely bad at this. At some point, one starts to wonder whether Eliezer is a mortal human being who suffers from akrasia and biases just like the rest of us.
I agree it’s not the best possible version of a platform by any means, but to say it’s obviously net negative seems like a stretch without further evidence.
I didn’t make much of an effort to assemble arguments that Twitter is bad. But I think there are good arguments out there. How do you feel about the nuclear diplomacy that’s happened on Twitter?
First of all, I apologize, I think my comment was too snarky and took a tone of “this is so surprising” that I regret on reflection.
Under what circumstances do you feel introducing new policy ideas with the word “maybe this could be a good idea” is acceptable?
To be clear, I think introducing the idea is totally fine, I just have a decently strong prior against widespread bans on “businesses that do this”.
I don’t expect anyone important to be reading this thread, certainly not important policymakers. Even if they were, I think it was pretty clear I was spitballing.
Agreed, I was not worried about this.
Let’s not fall prey to the halo effect. Eliezer also wrote a long post about the necessity of back-and-forth debate, and he’s using a platform which is uniquely bad at this. At some point, one starts to wonder whether Eliezer is a mortal human being who suffers from akrasia and biases just like the rest of us.
Fair enough. I agree the Eliezer point isn’t strong evidence.
I didn’t make much of an effort to assemble arguments that Twitter is bad. But I think there are good arguments out there. How do you feel about the nuclear diplomacy that’s happened on Twitter?
I don’t have time to respond at length to this part at the moment (I wanted to reply quickly to apologize mostly) but I agree it’s the most useful question to discuss and will try to respond more later. To summarize, I acknowledge it’s possible that Twitter is bad for the collective but think people may overestimate the bad parts by focusing on how politicians / people fighting about politics use Twitter (which does seem bad) and that even if it is “bad”, it’s not clear that banning short response websites would lead to a better long-term outcome. For example, maybe people would just start fighting with pictures on Instagram. I don’t think this specific outcome is likely but think it’s in a class of outcomes that would result from banning that seems decently likely.
Hahah. That’s a funny thought. I don’t think it does lead inevitably to toxicity, though. I don’t think the incentives it imposes are really that favourable to that sort of usage. There’s a hedonic attractor for venomous behaviour rather than a strategic attractor.
Right now the char limit isn’t really that hostile to dialogue. There’s a “threading” UI (hints that it’s okay to post many tweets at once) so it’s now less like “don’t put any effort into your posts” and more like “if you’re gonna post a lot try to divide it up into small, digestible pieces”
My general sense is that I see a lot of interesting people go to Twitter when they are committed to being on the outside of most elite institutions, but still want conversation. And Twitter gives a lot of control in who you see, and makes engaging those people in conversation very low cost. I think there’s a valuable contrarian cluster on there.
The best way to handle content of mixed length isn’t clear—by length (and quality). Some short form content here seems like posts, with the downsides of not being able to view it as a post, and less engagement.
Rather than discussions taking place in places, it’s based around someone making a comment (in the set of all their comments sorted by time) and someone responding. The format is very different—if I want to read EY’s Twitter posts/similar stuff, I know where to go. Celebrities might be there for the less serious entertainment, or because it’s where everybody is, or for a lot of different reasons all of which are also there or conveniently linked to.
If intellectual engagement requires focus, mixing it with stuff that requires less focus might make it easier for people to engage, or enable different levels of engagement.
Eliezer Yudkowsky and Paul Graham have a lot in common. They’re both well-known bloggers who write about rationality and are influential in Silicon Valley. They’re both known for Bayesian stuff (Graham was a pioneer of Bayesian spam filtering). They both played a role in creating discussion sites which are, in my opinion, among the best on the internet (Less Wrong for Eliezer, Hacker News for Paul Graham). And they’ve both stopped posting to the sites they created, but they both still post to… Twitter, which is, in my opinion, one of the worst discussion sites on the internet. (Here is one of many illustrations.)
It seems like having so many celebrities, scientists, and politicians is a major asset for Twitter. What is it about Twitter which makes big names want to post there? How could a rival site attract big names without also importing Twitter’s pathologies?
Upvoted. I’m pretty mystified and am very curious about the answers myself.
Have any of these people said why they have made that choice?
I don’t use twitter, but one possibility might be that it actually isn’t a discussion forum. It’s a place for drive-by firing off of thoughts. For a prominent person, the function of a tweet is to say, “This is what I am thinking about at the moment,” so as to invite conversation elsewhere with the people they already know and find worth while talking to. This is far less time-consuming than an actual discussion forum, where it’s expected that a post will be of a more substantial length and that you will participate in subsequent discussion.
I predict from this hypothesis that Eliezer makes hardly any replies on Twitter to replies to his tweets.
Not that I’ve seen, but I have seen Paul Graham tweet complaints about Twitter, and I think I’ve seen Eliezer complain about the behavior of users on the platform.
Twitter makes tweet replies less prominent than Facebook. When I’m scrolling down Eliezer’s Facebook feed, I see comment replies to his posts. When I scroll down his Twitter feed, I have to click a tweet to see replies. So that could be playing a role.
It doesn’t seem socially expected to reply to replies to your tweets.
Simplest answer: twitter is where everyone else is, which makes it the simplest and easiest way to interact conversationally with potentially anyone on earth without an intro or in-person meeting.
In addition, twitter enables easy one-to-many communication for celebrities who want to spread memes, and brevity is the soul of wit.
Good reduction.
Drethelin here is on twitter. His posts are so good,
that I can almost ignore the amount of intentionally divisive politics memes. You create these wounds, brother, and you do not heal
Twitter does a few things I can’t do with other platforms.
1. I can quickly search through all of someone’s thoughts on a particular subjects, and all of people’s thoughts on those thoughts, and peoples thoughts on those thoughts, etc.
2. I can comment on someone else’s specific thought on a subject, and start a conversation thread on it.
3. I can subscribe to someone’s thoughts, without them needing to write essays, etc. It provides a very low friction way to share thoughts.
4. I can build off of my previous thoughts, creating an interconnected web of all my thoughts on a topic. The link is not to a whole “essay” but to the individual thought from that essay that’s relevant.
One way to think of twitter is a vast web of interconnected individual ideas. The character limit forces people to segment their tweets by thought, allowing for this to happen.
Twitter’s usefulness mostly comes from the celebrities being there. The initial reason the celebrities were attracted probably had to do with the char limit, its pretext, that they are not expected to read too much and that they are not expected to write too much.
You’ll see on reddit—at least, back when these things were being determined—a lot of celebrities, when they did AMAs, seemed to feel obligated to respond to every comment with a comment of similar length. Sometimes they wouldn’t wait and see which comments were getting the most votes and answer those, they’d just start with the first one that hit their mailbox and work down the list until they ran out of time. My guess is, non internet-native extroverts really needed a platform that would advise them about what’s expected and reasonable.
But I think, now that we’re all learning that we must moderate our consumption, the celebrities (and most other people) remain on twitter mainly because the celebrities were there in the first place. I don’t think we need the char limit any more. I think maybe we’re ready for the training wheels to come off.
But there’s another reason redditlikes don’t really work for a general audience. Mainly specifics about how voting tends to work. There is no accommodation of subjectivity. Everyone sees the same vote ranking even though different people have different interests and standards. The problem is partially mitigated by separating people into different subreddits, but eventually, general subreddits like /r/worldnews, /r/technology, /r/science or even /r/futurism will grow large enough and diverse enough that people wont be able to stand being around each other again. Every demographic other than the largest, most vote-happy one will have to leave. I really want everyone to be able to join together in the same conversation, but when the top-ranked comments always turn out to be “[outgroup lies]” or “[childish inanity]”, that can’t happen. The outgroup wants to see their lies, and the children want to see their inanity, and I think they should be able to, but good adults need to be able to hear each other too, or else they’ll just move to GoodAdultSite and then the outgroup wont be able to find refutations of their lies even when they look for them, and the children will not receive the advice they need even when they call out for it.
(I have some ideas as to how to build a redditlike that might solve this. If anyone’s interested, speak up.)
Interesting. So if Twitter’s celebrity appeal is about brevity, and brevity is a big part of why the platform is so toxic, maybe the best outcome is for it to just get regulated out of existence? Like, we could pass a law that prohibits character limits on social media sites or something.
Woah, this seems like a big jump to a form of technocracy / paternalism that I would think would typically require more justification than spending a short amount of time brainstorming in a comment thread why the thing millions of people use daily is actually bad.
Like, banning sites from offering free services if a character limit is involved because high status members of communities you like enjoy such sites seems like bad policy and also a weird way to try and convince these people to write on forums you prefer. Now, one counterargument would be “coordination problems” mean those writers would prefer to write somewhere else. But presumably if anyone’s aware of “inadequate equilibria” like this and able to avoid it it would be Eliezer.
Re-reading my comment, I realize it may come off as snarky but I’m not really sure how better to convey my surprise that this would be the first idea that comes to mind.
ETA: it’s not clear to me that Twitter is so toxic, especially for people in the broad bubble that encompasses LW / EA / tech / etc. I agree it’s not the best possible version of a platform by any means, but to say it’s obviously net negative seems like a stretch without further evidence.
Under what circumstances do you feel introducing new policy ideas with the preface “maybe this could be a good idea” is acceptable?
I don’t expect anyone important to be reading this thread, certainly not important policymakers. Even if they were, I think it was pretty clear I was spitballing.
If society’s elites are incentivized to use a platform which systematically causes misunderstandings and strife for no good reason, that seems bad.
Let’s not fall prey to the halo effect. Eliezer also wrote a long post about the necessity of back-and-forth debate, and he’s using a platform which is uniquely bad at this. At some point, one starts to wonder whether Eliezer is a mortal human being who suffers from akrasia and biases just like the rest of us.
I didn’t make much of an effort to assemble arguments that Twitter is bad. But I think there are good arguments out there. How do you feel about the nuclear diplomacy that’s happened on Twitter?
First of all, I apologize, I think my comment was too snarky and took a tone of “this is so surprising” that I regret on reflection.
Agreed, I was not worried about this.
Fair enough. I agree the Eliezer point isn’t strong evidence.
I don’t have time to respond at length to this part at the moment (I wanted to reply quickly to apologize mostly) but I agree it’s the most useful question to discuss and will try to respond more later. To summarize, I acknowledge it’s possible that Twitter is bad for the collective but think people may overestimate the bad parts by focusing on how politicians / people fighting about politics use Twitter (which does seem bad) and that even if it is “bad”, it’s not clear that banning short response websites would lead to a better long-term outcome. For example, maybe people would just start fighting with pictures on Instagram. I don’t think this specific outcome is likely but think it’s in a class of outcomes that would result from banning that seems decently likely.
Hahah. That’s a funny thought. I don’t think it does lead inevitably to toxicity, though. I don’t think the incentives it imposes are really that favourable to that sort of usage. There’s a hedonic attractor for venomous behaviour rather than a strategic attractor.
Right now the char limit isn’t really that hostile to dialogue. There’s a “threading” UI (hints that it’s okay to post many tweets at once) so it’s now less like “don’t put any effort into your posts” and more like “if you’re gonna post a lot try to divide it up into small, digestible pieces”
My general sense is that I see a lot of interesting people go to Twitter when they are committed to being on the outside of most elite institutions, but still want conversation. And Twitter gives a lot of control in who you see, and makes engaging those people in conversation very low cost. I think there’s a valuable contrarian cluster on there.
(Meta note: the commenting guidelines aren’t showing up on mobile—it just says “habryka’s commenting guidelines”.)
Possible benefits (or attractions) of Twitter:
Short term length.
Short/variable post length. (I’m just going to write/read one tweet...)
No voting.
People who are there.
Difficult to find things, unless directed there/but not too difficult. (Diaspora contained.)
Lots to find, different bubbles. (Lots of things.)
Pathologies. Perhaps drama = entertainment. (If you could be more specific, what pathologies?)
More modes of use and engagement. (Not all of which are freestanding—consider link posts.)
The format. (Reblogging navigation, also see Longer notes)
Word of mouth (or a digital equivalent).
Perhaps it’s used in place of/in addition to Facebook.
More casual content, and mixtures.
Visuals
Speed
Shooting in the dark:
Features for filtering? (Having discussions with who you want/with the number of people you want.)
The font + text size?
average post length (acts like bullet points) + cute avatars
lack of censorship?
Everyone’s there for the memes/low expectations about when content comes out.
Everyone’s there, not because of one thing, but because the medium is malleable.
Something to do with governance
Longer notes:
The best way to handle content of mixed length isn’t clear—by length (and quality). Some short form content here seems like posts, with the downsides of not being able to view it as a post, and less engagement.
Rather than discussions taking place in places, it’s based around someone making a comment (in the set of all their comments sorted by time) and someone responding. The format is very different—if I want to read EY’s Twitter posts/similar stuff, I know where to go. Celebrities might be there for the less serious entertainment, or because it’s where everybody is, or for a lot of different reasons all of which are also there or conveniently linked to.
If intellectual engagement requires focus, mixing it with stuff that requires less focus might make it easier for people to engage, or enable different levels of engagement.
And on desktop.
I do indeed just have some empty comment guidelines for this post, so this isn’t a bug, just me not setting the correct guidelines.
Seems like if the guidelines are an empty string it should probably display the default-guidelines.