2016-10-24 How to Fix Twitter

Post date: Oct 25, 2016 2:16:45 AM

First the goal: Let people interact with Twitter so that what they see is mostly the kind of thing they want to see, minimizing the content they prefer to avoid.

Twitter has strong support from journalists. Still, most acknowledge there are a small percentage of disgusting people creating a large amount of offensive content.

Much discussion has been advanced about what can be done and the downsides of each of the proposed solutions. No solution is perfect and many possible solutions have problems significant enough that they could kill the good parts of Twitter.

I suggest that Twitter can be fixed by using the information they already have in place combined with a moderation system that has proven effective elsewhere, along with a tweak or two to take advantage of how Twitter is organized.

Moderation, meta-moderation and karma are the concepts that make Slashdot work. Moderation is given to people with fixed and active accounts. This prevents people from creating a multitude of accounts in order to game the system, but it could still be gamed if not for karma. Karma is a score based on how long and well received the moderation and activity is by an individual account. A better karma score gives more opportunities for moderation, and a lower score gives fewer moderation opportunities. Everyone is in a pool of random selection to meta-moderate where they're given opportunities to judge the fairness of the moderation done by other people.

The critical mass for Slashdot is having many reliable well established moderators to provide a weighted yardstick for measuring the value of other contributors. With Twitter they have verified accounts to begin the same process. Additionally, the moderation weight determining what you see can be weighted by the people you follow, and to a lesser degree, the people they follow and even to greater degrees of separation.

What I want is an option to turn Twitter moderation on and use slider bars to determine what types of posts I want to see. I want to slide the exposure bar from "unmoderated posts" to "posts moderated positive" to "most positively moderated." I want to slide the "degrees of separation" bar from "everyone" to "people with some connection" to "people followed by those I follow" to "people I follow" which determines how heavily the moderation of others affects the moderation I see.