Prokofy's dashboard

Why is that your constant rearticulation of YOUR view is "ok" and but my articulation is "imposing"? I'm not imposing my view, I'm *defending it*. Could you grow a little tolerance out of your smugness please? I fail to see how a comment to a comment "drowns out everyone else," especially when in this particular thread my view is in a minority. Good Lord, the intolerance and insularity of people on social media is truly appalling. – Prokofy, on May 07, 2008 02:46

Everybody has a story. I have tracked words too. You are not special. And I'm glad you got work value of Twitter, but Twitter isn't just for you. Use Yahoo and Google news readers that deliver tracked articles into your mailbox if you want a more refined product. There is no need to nerf this one in the name of your fine-tuning. I fail to see why you get to keep repeating yourself, but if someone objects to you, they can't repeat themselves lol. I don't play games, either, dollface -- and your assumptions about that are ridiculous. I run an actual business in Second Life; I have actual RL jobs. Just because I chose to use a handle as a pen name from SL so that I don't have creeping stalkers harassing me more than they do doesn't mean I am somehow "playing a game". Get over your narrow concept of the Internet. And you and the others with this hectoring point of view are the condescenders, not me. I'm merely trying to point out broader, more conceptual concerns about a system with a lot of selfish blockers. If you don't care to zoom beyond your own little narrow usage of Twitter, that's fine, but don't impose this silo view on others.

I reject the male geek concept of troll which is constantly used to suppress legitimate critical thought on forums. Get over it, we're not in a MMORPG all the time and we don't have to troll for newbies and suck up to GMS anymore, Twitter is a real service about the real world. Trolling is not a constitutional or defensible legal principle for suppression of speech; and yes, these private owners of social media will increasingly have to uphold constitutional guarantees when they gain millions of users and take up the responsibility of a public commons. – Prokofy, on May 07, 2008 02:42

It doesn't matter if you've "said or hinted" it is *what most people do*.

And it's fine to do : )

We were ALL brought here by the "problem" that "the track list does not obey the block" -- can you grasp that? That IS the problem for many people who happened to come to this thread (who are random, and do not represent "the community of Twitter" AND concern about the ramifications of such blanket blocking system-wide are also valid.

We all get that batches of 15 repeats -- because many people are following the same sector/news I guess (although some of those accounts you reference seem like alts of the same thing).

Surprise, surprise, a lot of human activity, once you start tracking it and recording it worldwide is going to turn out to be redundant.

Scrolling past it is a good idea. You could also go back to Google, if you get upset by this much repetition. Because the alternative is to block/mute/ban people and news services that may be saying something important -- and duh, I do get that this doesn't block their *expression* as they can go on talking but it blocks their *ability to be heard* and that IS a legitimate public concern when you are dealing with people in power who have a duty to address grievances.

It doesn't sound like the owners of Twitter are doing to ban bots -- bots always infuriate people, I totally get that. So, why *would* there be a "bot cloud" to push information about home schooling? Gosh, is this some evil gun-toting, bitter, turn-to-religion sort of plot by conservatives? I wonder!!!

Be irritated all you want -- I'm not being condescending. I'm being matter-of-fat in tone and factual. The fact indeed *is* that you do not HAVE to be tracking this word, and you can indeed *scroll past* the problem bot patches.

Rather than repeatedly getting irritated that you can't get your way, I invite you to try to think about the system as a whole, and what kind of conversation it is when there are so many people mass blocking everything right and left because they are "irritated".

mdoeff, once again, the issue does indeed FOR SURE not only have to do with vanity feeds -- the people who initiated the thread and fueled the anger about the issue, loudmouthman and kosso, were the most irritated precisely because of their vanity feeds.

And overwhelming insistence on "my right to track my favourite key word" also seems to be at stake here.

I guess long years sitting alone reading the Internet has created a nation of very irritable, demanding, and entitlement-happy users, and bringing them into a joint public space like this infuriates them easily.

Again, I totally "get" what this is about for people: their overwhelming insistence on fine-tuning their feed to be "just perfect" the way they want, without ever having to have the eye fall on an undesirable thing. I think this is a rising tide of expectations, however. I think even if you block track, you will not really be fully free of it. I think the block-happy approach also only fuels the desire to make little closed, vetted communities of likemindedness who never have to hear about anything outside their little circle.

tindle, *why are you reading your vanity feed*? that's number one.

Number two, *why would you continue to read anything showing the panopticon symbol in your track feed knowing how vulgar and stalky this creep is?

Why engage? You don't do that with people who send you gross viagra ads, now, do you? You delete them instantly and move on.

You have to develop that sense about Twitter, and stop depending the entire discourse be sanitized to suit your low threshold for revulsion.

Most of the people complaining about this problem are complaining *because they track their names in a vanity feed*. So it's reasonable to assume that *most people* are doing that.

If you are in another, smaller category, following one word, great, but...when you search on Google, you also get lots of irrelevant things. You have to narrow your search. So I hardly think you can expect to follow a word and not get extraneous stuff.

You can also just scroll past it. And if you have a phone message limit, just use track when you can sit down at a web site and scroll quickly past those words.

While your individual needs to filter out your individual feed are understood, by encouraging massive use of block within track, you wind up creating a very controlled experience for everyone. For example, once you block "homeschooledu" you will never see again anything else they might say that is interesting. Block is a blunt axe.

Marjolein, stop tracking yourself, and read in summize.com or tweetscan.com and scroll past the re-tweets. Once you stop tracking your own name, this problem will end for you. If you are not willing to do that, then don't expect it to end.

There's nothing inherently good about compromise, and nothing inherently good about the mods making a ruling on TOS language that is already vague and overbroad. And that's why I say I hate fake peace-making.

Pantopticons would have been tossed in the bulk mail file along with the viagra adds and utterly ignored in email: the ONLY way he could ever come to any live 24/7 attention is because he leveraged people's vanity. Their need to follow themselves yet keep the vanity reflection positive and comfortable. And perhaps that was indeed worth tweaking. Regardless of the forms it then took of creepy stalking/vulgarity, etc. the problem stands: why do thin-skinned neuralgics upset about the pricking of their vanity balloon get to dictate the levels of public discourse?

I checked loudmouthman's feed for the last few days in Tweetscan. And I marvelled at what the hell all the fuss could be about. Out of 150 or so tweets, about 50 came from this Panopticons -- and they came because he kept grousing about it and grousing to others, and feeding it. Because there's a readily identifiable avatar, it was easy to scroll past the offensive Viagra ads and just read the signalled content. I had about 8 of these panopticons in my feed because I never contacted the guy or complained about him and just scrolled past him like I did other posts that were worse even, directly vulgar and hateful to me.

So louthmouthman can disrupt the entire viral and social nature of finding other people of interest because he has some Viagra ads in his mail box he can't scroll past?! I mean, come on, grow up!

You can't keep ceding power to mobs in social media, and ceding power to devs and coders of social media who haven't grown up yet enough to realize the sacredness of the public trust like the old media achieved. Frankly, more and more, the public, Congress, the FCC will be taking a look at why these claustrophobic, abusive private corporations that run millions of people's attention economy get to go on behaving like smarmy and exclusive private clubs when in fact they are common carriers sustaining the public commons.

There's nothing set in stone about a situation where a few disgruntled customers and fanboyz of the devs, and the devs themselves, get to ride herd over everybody else. This will be changing more and more. In fact, proof of that is the indifference that Twitter management met these constant angry demands to "enforce the TOS," as if the public at large should a) enforce its TOS and b) enforce it against the wider public interest.

It's silly to blaim panopticons for this track issue: you could blame Steve Gillmor just as much as he hs used a far wider bully pulpit to rail against it and demand the devs ad block-within-traffic as a feature. What is to blame is people's vanity. "Don't blame the mirror if you have a crooked face." – Prokofy, on May 06, 2008 13:31

That's slightly a better proposition but it still leaves open the problem of system wide insularity in which is supposed to be a tolerant conversation. – Prokofy, on May 06, 2008 08:14

I hate fake peace-making crap that basically is just a cover for a gloat and a belief that one side has "won". In this case, losing is winning, because the justness of the proposition stands more starkly. – Prokofy, on May 06, 2008 08:13

Loudmouthman, this is merely your subjective and narrow opinion, and you merely succeeded in gaming the system loudly much like the target of your wrath, injecting many biased and personal evaluations of this issue, regardless of whatever narrow merits it has as an information management stream issue.

My RSS feed hasn't been "poisoned" by these creeps -- I ignore them. The angst about them is all out of proportion to the problem, and there's been no willingness to contemplate the implications system-wide of this much insularity and track-blocking crazyness.

I hate the idea that a few people can decide what is "constructive and contributing". That's death. That's Soviet. I refuse to let *you* or mods dictate that.

What YOU need to hear is that no, you didn't get your way, and any gloating you're doing is totally premature. Listen to what what said:

"As a communication utility, Twitter does not get involved in disputes between users over issues of content except in very specific situations"

That means that you can't hijack the mods of Twitter and convince them who is "constructive" or "contributing" in the manner only you and your posse imagine.

"Twitter is not a judge for resolving disputes over most content issues—our focus is on service."

That means you do not get to decide what is positive and enforce it on others -- it is a public service, your level of tolerance for criticism and dissent or annoyances simply cannot be allowed to lower the whole common denominator of Twitter for all.

Here's the operative paragraph from this mod's ruling, and it's a narrower construct that you might imagine -- that is, it does not allow YOU to dictate who is " contributing" or "constructive" it merely deals with some very specifically defined behaviours that it judges as actions, not content:

"While our policy regarding content is mostly hands-off, we are strictly intolerant toward those who would subvert our intention to provide a utility for recipient-driven communication. Twitter will terminate accounts for a variety of technical abuse violations.

That includes the above-mentioned follower spam problem as well as other means that degrade our service. For example, our service is degraded through the cross-posting of updates from multiple accounts as a way to get around the block and unfollow tools."

It's important to understand the real crime here. It's not being "negative". It's not twitting people's vanity and calling out their hypocrisy. It's not making smart or even vulgar remarks.

This is the crime -- *hampering the ability of the service provider to provide the service. This is the crime: By creating numerous alts and cross-posting from multiple accounts, panopticons began to interfere with the functions of the service itself. Making an alt to get around a block of your direct Twitter feed is a classic griefing case that seems appropriately dealt with.

When you mention "metrics which I was using to locate conversations," I can only stress the feeling many of us have about marketers and researchers and SEO scrapers on Twitter: the service is for public conversation; it's not merely to be minded for your own profit.

Jennifer,

I have as much right as you do to be on Twitter, and to be in this thread. Your notion that threads can only consist of amen-corners is skewed.

I don't side with abusers. I try to analyze what's happening. And I see that the guy has skillfully played on the oldest feature of mankind: their vanity. That's all.

You all are repeating yourselves over and over without seeming to grasp that you can fix this problem by getting rid of your vanity track.

I can only ask you again, Jennifer: have you followed all the tips I just gave 2 posts ago about how to fix @ in Twitter? And if that isn't helping, have you UNTRACKED your own name so that you don't have to see freaks like this? If not, so do. Oh, you don't want to? Because you're that afraid you'll miss and @? Well, then just scroll past that freak. Oh, you are reading Twitter on your mobile and only want to see friends? Well, I can only say, don't track your name, and save the obsessive tracking for later when you don't have to watch message limits.

Cyberbullying only works on you if you crumble and don't fight back.

Fighting back would involve not tracking your name OR acquiring a thicker skin, ignoring him, and scrolling past a few retweets of your name. Engaging with him, obsessing about him -- this fuels it.

What I'm hearing from Twitter is that they have tools they already provide to people, and if that's not sufficient, I guess you have to go back to AIM or YM.

Bullying the Twitter mods and coders to put in this vanity feature for you and the minority of people ranting about this may not be an option for them -- and I'd support that.

When you rant and clamour loud enough and also bully people like me from expressing their opinions, I hope you will ponder at some point the consequences of living utterly inside an echo chamber with only your friends.

Re: "For example, the track feature does not currently obey the block list, but it should"

No, it shouldn't. You need to review this, and think about the system-wide ramifications:

o panicky, viral and hysterical spread of blocks on hitlists
o mistaken judgements leading to block of people who are merely re-tweeting innocently stuff they find interesting
o ultimately the problem of news aggregators not seeing people that have something to say merely because they could be acting on false block tips or irritated at criticism

There are serious issues at stake here, and if you truly don't mean to become involved in user disputes or content, then don't. People can just not track their own names as a vanity feed if they are upset at those talking back. They can then use your existing tools to adjust the experience.

Jennifer, in case you haven't done this, look here:
http://help.twitter.com/index.php?pg=...

2.5. How to change your @reply settings

New settings for @replies!

Based on popular demand, we've created new settings for managing your @replies on Twitter. You've got three options.

* Default: @ replies to the people I'm following

I receive @replies from people I follow under the condition that I also follow the person they are replying to. This setting is ideal for those seeking the happy medium in Twitter interaction, as @replies are still visible, but restricted to mutual followers. (Do you err on the side of caution? I am for you.)

* Always: all @ replies

I receive all @replies from people I follow, even if I don't follow the person to whom the @reply is directed.This setting is ideal for those seeking maximum social Twitter interaction, as viewing replies to people you don’t follow may spur impulsive or compulsive Twitter reading (or both!) as well as more potential @replying on your part. You may develop an unexpected interest in friends of friends, followers of friends, friends of followers. (Do you fly by the seat of your panties? Pick me!)

* Never: no @ replies

I never, ever receive @replies, and I never want to. I could care less about twitters directed at other people, whether I know them or not. This setting is ideal for those looking for minimal social-conversational Twitter interaction. (Slightly antisocial? Abhor social networking? It's me you want.)

Jennifer, I fully understand that this feels like "an obvious TOS violation" to you. However, you have to ask: why hasn't Twitter removed him in the days that people have screeched about this? It's not for lack of probably hundreds of flaggings of this account by all kinds of people who are really really riled up.

If it's the no-brainer you think, then why hasn't Twitter hastily and swiftly deleted this person and his many accounts?

Oviously, they either a) disagree with what seems right to you or b) are callously indifferent to any concerns and will do what they feel like or c) take their time to monitor the issue and are also mindful of the wider consequences. I would surely hope it's c).

Just because a person flaunts that they are creepy and gaming the system doesn't necessarily mean what they do is evil. Because, again, if you ignore them, and don't try to engage and taunt them, the worse that happens is...you have a couple duplicates of your tweets in your vanity feed.

Naturally, if you have a limited message number or you are watching this on the phone with "track," it's annoying. But it's nowhere near the horrid offense you feel it is, because you are looking at this emotionally, not rationally.

By implying that the only solution to this would be "hiding my content stream to the general public", you're really casting the issue in a tendentious light. Of course, you *could* lock your updates to avoid anyone ever seeing your or bothering you but the most sanitized and scripted list of friends. That you feel that would be boring and shouldn't be imposed on you then means that you have to be reasonable about it.

But...if you would just stop tracking your own name, you will stop seeing this. A person you don't follow can do this to you because you are tracking your own name, so that anyone who writes "@" can get your attention.

Turn off the track of your own name if you want this to stop.

WiredPig, I find it truly scary if just random people who form a lynch mob can decide what the TOS means, and how to enforce it. And I don't think anyone should be hasty in administering these executions at dawn that occur when hate-filled people ram the abuse-report button over and over again because they hate someone and railroad the mods into feeling they "must do something" because "the community wants it". That sort of sentiment is far too common.

http://www.cyberussr.com/rus/sg-zhit'.html

Looking forward to hearing from other customers and not just the mods.

If you'd like to see a summary of my points in more coherent form about the meta-issues for track, come to this new thread here:

http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter/to...

And I'm working on now making a summary of the argumentation I've seen here.

My absolute favourite gem out of this discussion was this one:

'sorenj replied 22 hours ago
ProKofy, How can you say that he has a good point? I fail to see the logic in this. What right does he have to the Twitter "inboxes" of various users. The public timeline, sure (as long as he keeps it "clean" and honest... which he has also failed to to at times) but someone's personal timeline... no. There is no right, privilege, or precept anywhere in this country that gives you the right to enter someones personal space to protest, rant, or harass, in fact there are laws to the contrary."

It shows a startling lack of understanding about what a public conversation on something like Twitter is, but of course, adapting to social media and its discontents is hella hard, and people are very fierce in their beliefs about it and their porting of habits from old media to it.

BTW, I'll take this opportunity to note that I never abuse-report or red-flag anybody, ever, even if they are "in violation of the TOS" with clear and present danger.

And that's because I hate the cult of police informants and the pressure that anonymous tattlers place on free discourse. So I don't do it, and to those of you who do it against me, I can only pity you.

Thor,

I think one of the problems you face here with this template is a that you have pre-determined and become set about your notion that "discussion" or "debates" are similar in content and form to "getting help" or "asking a question" or "tech support". They aren't. So that's why discussions are particularly poorly served by this sort of template, that privileges some points over others, even making the typeface lighter (I had never seen that, and it is darn creepy).

While threaded discussions may feel like an iron-clad coded technical tree to you, in fact they are organic, meandering, and human-powered, not machine-powered. That means that interesting thoughts can show up not just in some "main part of the tree" but in a comment to a comment.

By smushing the paragraph into mush and making the typeface lighter, you're pre-determining the importance of the content by drastically interfering with the user experience. Don't do this. All content made by users should be clear, and should have equal visibility as to typeface and paragraphing space.

By breaking out comments to the smushed-up lighter paragraphs because you believe they "don't answer the question," you're failing to see that the answers/tech support mode engineers are setting on the public just doesn't *work* for democratic public discourse in *discussions* that may be conceptual or thematic in nature, not dominated by a "question/technical problem" with a "answer/tech support" solution.

Another problem you face is a pre-determination that each and every problem or discussion works toward some positive outcome. Some won't. Some may merely be discussions that people have to try to bring clarity in their own minds about the usage of a product or its features, and may never "go anywhere". And that's ok. No need for false symmetry and pre-cooking happy little tree outcomes.

The idea that questions should be "voted up or down" is pretty creepy, too. I realize this is fashionable socmedia social engineering, but users simply ignore it much of the time -- that's how they protest. Such systems are gamed or used arbitrarily and don't mean anything. A question hasn't somehow become intrinsically "better" just because Heather got her little girlfriends to come and plus her up.

Re: the ability to move to the right forums. Some features of the forums *about* Twitter in fact are functions not of Twitter but Get Satisfaction, and it helps in clarity by being able to swiftly pick it out of the product picker and move to the right forum.

The happy face stuff is really Sesame Street. We're adults here and don't need emoticons forced on us as an option for each post.

And you're wrong that we "don't have to use them." You've stacked the deck. By putting out a message that a post has less value unless we mine the depts of our teenage emo selves and find "how we feel," our question is not as valid, it has a "medium" value instead of a "high" value.

That leads to inflation in the system as people game it and pretend to be happy just to boost the visiblity and franking of their question in your mechanistic system.

Remember, you are in beta. That means you can get criticism and change things.

That means you don't accept as set in stone all kinds of little narratives you as a company tell yourself, like "Because of this focus, there are a lot of carefully designed interactions here that allow signal to rise above noise."

I'm here to tell you that you've created unnecessary noise and static on the line in people's comments section by smushing their paragraphing and making type lighter. Those comments-to-comments need to count equally. And I'm here to tell you that forcing happiness or sadness on me in the process of rating my question are an unacceptable noise from the media coder.

Media should mediate, and not get in the way.

Prokofy

No, I'm not someone who participates in forum debates with multiple avatars or stalks people with multiple avatars. This is my main avatar. I am not this person, and I wouldn't even know how technically to set up any automatic functions that kept following all the time, etc. I just don't have time in the day for this.

I see the same guy, panopticons, cluttering up my vanity feed, but his icon is readily identifiable so I just scroll past him. I'm quite aware that he is saying vulgar, gross, and horrible things and trying to incite anger and fear, and I don't do that.

I do think that he has merely seized on a point where people are vulnerable to be called on their vanity, however.

I get to do what I wish, too? Hello? You *do* realize this concept is multi-dimensional? Or do you think your superficial brand of patriotism is the only one available? And this idiot doing the Panopticons stuff does...what? He spams my vanity feed a few times a page. And...that's worth borking and nerfing all of Twitter over? NOT.

I suggest if you don't want people to "assume" things "buddy," that you stop writing tripe like invoking "10,000 military moms" as if you speak for them. You don't. And you don't speak for the rest of us either. – Prokofy, on May 05, 2008 18:24

mdy, I'll tell you the point where you can realize it *is* a vanity: at the moment you become irritated with someone and wish to block them : )

Works like a charm : )