Dan Martin

This is a great feature IMO as well – thanks for sharing Dan! I also noticed in the last few months, Twitter will prompt if I actually read an article before retweeting it, another feature that falls into this bucket. Usually I am retweeting as the Dean of my school with an article that I also tweeted out from my school so I don’t click the link and read it before tweeting it, but Twitter doesn’t know I wear these hats 🙂 I appreciate that Twitter is attempting to take steps towards a healthier platform – possibly? Of course, they only have so much control of what toxic behavior their users still engage in…

Great Post Dan! I did not know about this feature. Being reminded to think before you speak, especially how Twitter laid it out, will deter some users from posting something negative. As it will definitely not stop all the bad apples, it’s a step in the right direction. I also like Twittters user flow. A user clicks on the conversation and it’s like a warning and reminder all in one. The warning/reminder is true so it seems natural within the flow. Tinder on the other hand, asking “Are you sure” when typing something that could be offensive feels too obtrusive. It’s a private chat, warning notifications within that flow might deter users from using the app. Twitter is a fly on the wall, whereas Tinder is the fly in your face you’re trying to swat away.

Thanks for sharing this Dan! While I think this could be a great feature, in theory, I wonder – is it going to actually do anything to stop the number of Twitter fights? I feel like people with loud opinions will continue to voice them with or without a reminder, especially people used to getting to tweet whatever they want.

Sometimes, I wonder if a lot of these changes from social media companies to make their culture less divisive are “too little too late.” Twitter’s arguably toxic culture has been built over 15 years. Some people live to go on the platform and argue with people and have been doing so for more than a decade. Something tells me this change would just be performative and make the brand look like it’s doing something when it isn’t…

Considering how Twitter has been used over the past two years by people of influence, who most certainly do not tend to think before they tweet, I think this is a great feature! Way to go Twiiter! But like all the new regulation we are seeing in the mobile, social, and search world it is merely a baby step in the right direction. I agree with the speculation of effectiveness, that I am hearing in the comments above. This has led me to wonder what the user testing is of new Twitter features, and specifically features like this one. Was it beta tested to specific users? Were these users pin pointed for their activeness in certain threads? All in all I am curious about how Twitter came to the conclusion that this process was the most effective for helping solve the toxicity that Twitter ‘fights’ have on their users.

This seems to me to be a wise move by Twitter, at least in theory. As you noted, Dan, Twitter is well-known as something of a cesspool of toxicity and vitriol. Personally, I feel like I’ve learned how to avoid the worst of it — but perhaps that has something to do with some of the most awful people out there being kicked off the platform. That, and I am pretty careful about who/what I follow. Still, I sometimes manage to fall down a rabbit hole of disgust, which is an enormous waste of time and energy. If Twitter wants to remain relevant as an actual source of information and forum for worthwhile conversations, I think it would be wise for them to help users know what they may want to steer clear of. That said, I would imagine that this could devolve into arguments about what is or isn’t getting flagged, OR we could wind up with trolls deliberately tanking conversations.

So Twitter has basically enabled a “vibe check” feature? Interesting.

It’s unfortunate that online discourse has soured to the point that we need something like this. Definitely agree with your last note about this potentially spiraling into something that either limits free speech or has some other catastrophic consequences that we don’t foresee.

I generally tend to lean out of favor of any algorithm-powered monitoring services, but I’ll give it some time to breathe on Twitter. The company does a great job with rolling out, testing, and evaluating new features (for the most part, see Fleets) so we’ll see how this goes.

Wow, this is a great feature to add, especially on Twitter. Every time I get on Twitter now all it is, is people fighting about something! The worst part is they have to make multiple tweets about it because they are limited to 240 characters. I think adding these feature will give people a chance to think before posting. I believe more social platforms should add this feature, especially Facebook. This could create a great impact on possibly not having negative posts go out. I am really interested to see the statistics on this after the feature comes out and how much of an impact it really has.

I have noticed that in some twitter threads there are hidden responses because of the vulgarness of responses. I think other than engaging in twitter fights, I think this is great for people in general when going to post anything. Because once it’s on the internet and even after deleting, it’s there forever. Social media is a blessing and a curse. Blessing for work and marketing businesses, but a curse because of the mental health affects it causes, but it could end your career or “cancel” you depending what you say. So I see this as a great additive even though without this reminder, people should always think before they hit the post button.

I IMMEDIATLEY thought of Lesley when the social media outage happened (knowing that Lesley does social media for her work) and I know it’s must have been a nightmare! I feel like I was probably the only one who did not realize that there was an outage. My thought were that maybe my husband did not pay the verizon internet bill and that is why my phone was not refreshing lol! I did see a lot of post and usage on Linkedin more than than normal yesterday, and was happing that there were other platforms that can be used while FB and Instagram was down. Makes you wonder what if ALL the social media outlets went down?! OR what if you after referring Instagran of Facebook, it said (.99 a month (yikes)! We can truly be a slave to social media.

I’m glad you brought this to my attention. Not that I use Facebook, I use Instagram, which suffered the same issue. Initially, I thought something was wrong with my new iPhone 13, but I had the same problem when I tried to open Instagram on my old phone. When I think of FB & Insta, I will categorize them as content networking platforms. It amazes me that if I were to compare them to Netflix, a streaming platform, it hasn’t crashed even through the pandemic. FB team needs to take notes on how streaming apps can withstand troubleshooting errors promptly. I heard FB stock dropped since the outage.

A lot of people joke about surviving the Facebook blackout and were mad that it was down for so long which I can understand, but could you imagine if Facebook had a major DNS issue that affected millions of people. It would be almost as bad as World War III! I found an article that stated how Mark Zuckerberg lost millions of dollars with Facebook being down yesterday and he even dropped on the top millionaires list. Crazy to think that 7 hours of people not being online can do so much damage.

Thought this was an interesting study based on the outage: https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/10/when-facebook-went-down-this-week-traffic-to-news-sites-went-up/

Great current event. I normally use social media before bed, so I did not know there was an outage until reading about it. As this outage affected many user who enjoy social media, let’s not forget affect on content creators. Some creators get paid per post or video, others have strict collabs with brands. This outage directly affected their revenue stream. In terms of regular users, this may have been a little bit of a wake up call to remember what life was like before social media.

Dan as you who doesn’t use social media, I’m sure this had not much of an affect on you. I know it gave me a chance to put my phone down and focus on everything around me rather what doesn’t matter on my phone. I know it gave me a chance to have a great mental health day and reevaluate how much I need to cut back on social media. As for those that use social media for work this day could’ve been a pro and con. Such as posting something early in the morning for a campaign or business but it not reaching the amount of reach it should’ve throughout the day because of social media being down. This shut down also could’ve given a day off for those who only use social media as work.

I first noticed that something was wrong when I was on twitter and saw people who aren’t usually active on twitter post for the first time in a long time! Personally it didn’t affect me as much, but I feel for social media managers and influencers who had to find alternate ways of connecting with their audience. It’s so interesting that a social media platform being down for a couple hours can cause so much damage. Just goes to show how reliant we are to the digital world. Hopefully Facebook can put safeguards in place so that something like this doesn’t happen again.

Thanks Dan for this!!! I have twitter, but it is only to complain to Philastreets on Sunday’s when my garbage is not picked up on Friday morning!! I can see why Twitter would want to implement this, however it looks like they are taking a successful strategy from another social media and implementing it to make them uccessful. I hate that. Its like why try to fix something that is not broken and working great!

I think my social media feature is the use of hashtags, especially on instagram. I love it =because I can following hashtags, and find other people who use this unique words to describe something that we both like (or dislike).

I think your use of Twitter defines the danger of social media and where the future of it is. I do not know what news sources you get on your feed, so don’t take this personnel. Too many people in America use their social media the way you do, however their news source is only from one extreme outlet. This leads them to thing everyone agrees with them and the rest of the world is crazy to think otherwise. This is were the future comes in. As more people understand this they will start wanting ways to avoid it, or the government will step in to make it go away through regulation. A truly innovative company can leverage this and demonstrate a new social media concept. Just like data privacy is now becoming a marketing battle ground, someday soon we could see a balanced new feed being the same thing.

The integration of other app feature happens a lot. In my opinion, instagram is the biggest culprit. Like you mentioned it makes alot of business sense to attempt to keep your users from going elsewhere. For example when instagram introduced video content to the platform, it singlehandedly put the app ,Vine, out of business. Anyone remember that app? When instagram introduced the 24 hour story highlights, it took a major jab at snapchat now that the popular feature was no longer exclusive to that app. As a frequent social app user, I can appreciate having all the cool features i like in one app. However, for users like yourself who would prefer to simplify the experience to what you use, i can see how new feature integrations can seem useless and unnecessary.

Personally I love twitter the way is, as I use it a lot to do watch parties and live tweets whenever a new episode of Insecure comes out! I did see that there were trying to implement this new feature and like you, I wasn’t a big fan. I felt like it didn’t really mesh well with the current use of the app. A lot of these platforms are copying from one another and its kind of annoying because why would I want 5 apps that essentially do the same thing, where’s the uniqueness! I would rather have these platforms create features that no other app is doing instead of copying and trying to make it work for their platform.