Must-Read: The problem is not so much that trolls are crippling Twitter--that is true--but that Twitter turns people who could be normal into trolls:
Noah Smith: Trolls Are Crippling Twitter: "he biggest problem is inherent to the technology itself...
...Short messages--what makes Twitter Twitter--are inherently conducive to insults, ill will and degraded discourse.... Anonymity and the ability to message anyone on the site, although essential to Twitter’s nature, enable harassment.... Dorsey conceived of... posting personal status updates.... Williams... of... reporting news. Glass... thought of it as a conversation club. In reality, it’s all three.... But there’s a fourth important.... Twitter is an ideal platform for being a jerk....
Anonymous.... Anyone can talk directly to anyone else.... You can tag other users in a tweet, and that other user can’t undo the tag.... Antisemitic trolls sitting in their basements in Hungary can threaten to send Jewish-American journalists to the ovens. Misogynistic teenagers in Australia can make rape threats against female journalists in Canada.... Twitter acts as a force multiplier for evildoers....
Antisemitic... from just 1,600 accounts... have managed to make life very difficult for many of Twitter’s Jewish users.... Racism against black people is even more widespread.... Twitter is suspending more and more of the harassers’ accounts. But because it takes only minutes to generate a new pseudonym, they don’t stay gone for long....
Beyond active harassment and malfeasance, Twitter is simply conducive to hurt feelings. It’s a lot easier to deliver an insult in 140 characters than to give a nuanced explanation of why you disagree.... The length restriction makes it easy to misinterpret things that other people say, and misinterpretation often leads to intolerance, aggression and closed-mindedness....
I don’t know how to solve these problems.... For the sake of a service I still love to use, I hope that Dorsey is able to come up with something.
