Have each Twitter user designate a buddy to whom your tweets are directed. If my hypothesis is correct, then simply having a single person in mind who you respect would temper your rudeness as you tweet. And if enough people on Twitter temper their rudeness, then good manners would replace bullying and put-downs as social norms.
Read the whole essay before you shoot down the idea.
My tips for surviving and enjoying Twitter:
1) only follow FIT picks or people of that caliber
2) never ever read the comments/replies to a tweets from the group in 1). They are always utter rubbish. You will find yourself more ignorant for having read them.
3) if it gets too noisy in your feed, consider turning off retweets from your curated group in 1)
4) never tweet. Basically no one cares what you have to say except maybe your parents.
5) never follow @klingblog. He is for sure a FIT pick and this blog is awesome, but he has the worst tweets ever. It’s just a re-run of this blog and substack.
I wonder: what’s in it for Twitter?
It would have to be an API client.
And yeah, twitter corporate would want it to be an upsale opportunity, ie. pay twitter to drop tweets to you.
Assume the hardest spam problem, ie. we wish to limit the spam from otherwise known good tweeps.
Tim Bray once talked about a procmail for twitter, which would probably work wonders for motivated users.
https://mobile.twitter.com/timbray/status/7847339586756608
What seems like an intractable problem is Twitter’s engagement stats would drop because the number of twitter-fights would fall.
I don’t understand why people believe Twitter won’t always live up to its root name. A twitter is one who twits. Twit comes from Old English, atwiten, to reproach.
Twit – To vex by bringing to notice, or reminding of, a fault,
defect, misfortune, or the like; to revile; to reproach; to
upbraid; to taunt; as, he twitted his friend of falsehood.
[1913 Webster]
This these scoffers twitted the Christians with.
–Tillotson.
Twitter is simply being living up to its name.
Actually, Arnold, in most of my own comments here it is YOU whom I sort of treat as my comment buddy, even tho you almost never reply to me nor others. That’s similar on other blogs, too. Of course, if you did respond more, you’d get more comments and even more trolls and might need to spend more time in cleaning up & moderating the comments until, like Althouse recently, you’d end comments.
Thanks to Fantasy Intellectuals, I’m following many now on Twitter, and it’s very satisfying to quickly dash off a response, little caring how reasonable it is and rather looking for engagement but, in tweeting, already feeling engaged.
Insofar as huge numbers of tweets are retweets & quoted retweets, with response threads, it seems all too unlikely for Twitter to want to reduce the response rates, which seems inevitable if they become less rude, less rage & outrage inducing.