My selfish take on Twitter: the Discourse could stand to care a lot less, on the margin, about “free speech” and “bias in the algorithm” and a lot more about discovering all the amazing ways a public water cooler could be improved for more joy, more discovery, more connection etc
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The design space is so unexplored! Just as an intuition pump: the most meaningful IRL relationships I've made in the last few years started on Twitter. AFAICT that's an accidental consequence of its primitives. What might you create if you took this seriously as a job-to-be-done?
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Twitter radically improved the quality of the creative and intellectual conversations in my life—not online, but in person. I have more and better ideas! I feel a much greater sense of belonging! It's amazing. What happens if you pivot Twitter along this axis?
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But also: there are many interesting axes to pivot around! e.g. Twitter is part of my thinking workflow. WIP ideas go out; reactions come back; my ideas are refined—elsewhere, off Twitter, through awkward workflows. What happens if you take Twitter seriously for creative work?
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Probably part of a good story here would involve creating an ecosystem of lots of weird third-party Twitter, as in the early days. But novel user interfaces are a public good, so I worry this only goes so far.
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Another way to put this: if Twitter (as it exists today) is the town square, what might it mean to build a public library for that "town"? A coffee house? A dance hall? A university campus?
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I presume to get to this kind of serendipity that allows for joy, discovery and connection is why we need things like new custom content filters and algorithms, and easier ways for moderating on a personal and community level.
Mute words are already such a blessing.
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I actually feel pretty grateful that I get to meaningfully encounter so many ideas and people that I otherwise thought I’d only find by rubbing shoulders in a major metro.
All from the comforts of New Mexico.
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how can we increase replies and threads between people and even strangers?
tweets with no replies or even likes is very discouraging for further engagement and you become a passive user of the platform.
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But also: why is it considered discouraging actually? Maybe it doesn't have to be treated as such?
Anyway, editor here does that a lot, but never knows if it's actually ok to join into strangers conversation around here. In this case, at least, the context seemed encouraging. ;)
