Thread by @jack

A few thoughts on @maggieNYT’s article on Twitter. A lot of fair critiques within. nytimes.com/2018/07/20/sun…

“But the medium has changed. Everyone I follow on the site seems to be tweeting more frequently, so I had to check in more frequently.”

This is the intention behind ranking the timeline. Show you “what matters” first, everything else still accessible. Lots of work still to do.

“On Twitter, everything is shrunk down to the same size, making it harder to discern what is a big deal and what is not. Tone often overshadows the actual news. All outrages appear equal.”

Def a problem. Believe we can help solve by showing more context and related conversation.

This is our primary job: “To be clear, Twitter is a useful and important platform. It’s a good aggregator for breaking news. I still check my feed to see breaking news developments, and I will continue to.”

Thinking a lot about how to promote more participation in conversation.

Powerful, but only if we help organize and not overwhelm people: ”And it is democratic—everyone gets to have a voice, whether they work for a local paper, a small TV station or one of the biggest newspapers in the world, or are not in the media business at all.”

”The downside is that everyone is treated as equally expert on various topics.”

One of the biggest areas I believe we can help. Helping to determine credible voices per topic in real-time is extremely challenging, but believe it’s possible. Mix of algos and network.

“There is an important discussion about journalism that must take place, including about how all of us performed during the 2016 campaign, but Twitter is not where a nuanced or thoughtful discussion can happen.”

This is what we’d like to fix the most.

Fundamentally, we need to focus more on the conversational dynamics within Twitter. We haven’t paid enough consistent attention here. Better organization, more context, helping to identify credibility, ease of use.

Challenging work and would love to hear your thoughts and ideas.