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Casey Fiesler @cfiesler
, 9 tweets, 4 min read Read on Twitter
The fact that Twitter is reportedly removing "likes" in order to "promote healthy conversation" (with, as far as I can tell, no justification beyond "jack thinks it will work") is a darn compelling argument for that company to hire actual, trained social computing researchers.
users: hey twitter maybe less death threats
twitter: more characters in tweets, you say? here you go!
users: hey twitter could you ban nazis
twitter: we hear you want hearts instead of stars!
users: hey twitter disinformation campaigns are--
twitter: OK FINE WE GOT RID OF HEARTS
And to be clear, (a) I heart twitter as you can tell from how active I am; (b) I am really glad they're helping fuel research on healthy conversations (see link); and (c) they ARE trying to hire a social science director. So I think they can do better. :) blog.twitter.com/official/en_us…
P.S. If you're interested in actual research - around harassment and moderation and mechanisms on Twitter - that could support design decisions, have a look at this new work from @shagunjhaver @suchetaghoshal @eegilbert @asbruckman #cscw2018 medium.com/acm-cscw/onlin…
And even more research about harassment that could help actually inform design decisions around health conversations on Twitter, one of my favorite papers from last year, from @linguangst @clifflampe @syardi & Tianying Chen lindsayblackwell.net/wp-content/upl…
The above tweets represent just two of the approximately one million research studies I've seen about Twitter and harassment and/or conversation health, and I'm like 99.9% sure that none of them had "get rid of hearts" as a design implication.
Follow-up thought: I wonder if this (^^^ thread above) is a symptom of an academic "bubble." Why are we doing all this research around things like online harassment if it's not actually being used to inform real platforms? What can we do to help our work have more impact?
IRONICALLY this tweet currently has 216 likes. And the conversation seems healthy enough to me. ;)
Dear journalists, I will be really disappointed if this hot take about Twitter likes doesn't appear in one of the articles that's probably coming up about public reactions to it. (P.S. I want to talk about this, ask me.)
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