{"id":649,"date":"2015-04-05T22:03:22","date_gmt":"2015-04-06T03:03:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.padizio.com\/blog\/?p=649"},"modified":"2015-04-05T22:04:27","modified_gmt":"2015-04-06T03:04:27","slug":"n-degrees-of-twitter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.padizio.com\/blog\/2015\/n-degrees-of-twitter\/","title":{"rendered":"n Degrees of Twitter"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This week on <a href=\"http:\/\/atp.fm\/episodes\/111\">ATP<\/a> (or was it the after show?) the gents accidental discussed Twitter, frustrations with the crowd there, and strategies for dealing with what they politely called &#8220;negative feedback&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a great discussion, and as they spoke my mind wandered to technical solutions to the problem (as a programmer&#8217;s mind often does).<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m calling my solution &#8220;<em>n<\/em> degrees of Twitter&#8221; (based on the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Six_degrees_of_separation\">six degrees of separation theorem<\/a>). In this solution, I would choose a number (n) that represents the number of degrees of separation that I will allow in my @-replies. Sounds weird, but here&#8217;s how it would work:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>At 1 degree, my @-replies would only be people who <em>I follow<\/em>.<\/li>\n<li>At 2 degrees, my @-replies would only be people <em>followed by people I follow<\/em>.<\/li>\n<li>At 3 degrees, my @-replies would only be people <em>followed by people who are followed by people I follow<\/em>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And so on. Presumably, I could select a number 1-5, and then, &#8220;anybody&#8221;. At each degree, the &#8220;sphere&#8221; of people that can reach me via @-reply grows significantly.<\/p>\n<p>The important part is the follow chain: you&#8217;re essentially using yourself and your choices in who you follow to filter out people who are outside a sphere. When you select a degree above 1, you&#8217;re also putting faith in those that you follow to also follow worthwhile people.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s also important that it work in that direction: somebody who follows <em>me<\/em> should not automatically be able to @-reply me. Nor if they follow any of the people I do, or the people at the next level. What&#8217;s important is that somebody in <em>my<\/em> sphere has validated <em>them<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a number of positives to this solution:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Assuming you set the degree higher than 1, you&#8217;re putting some faith in the people you follow to help you see interesting stuff.<\/li>\n<li>You&#8217;ll be holding people accountable (and you&#8217;ll be accountable yourself) for following interesting people, while hopefully shunning trolls. This gives follows much more meaning than simply &#8220;I can hear you now&#8221; &#8211; you can hear them anyway, if they @-reply you in the current system.<\/li>\n<li>You are actively vetting the people who can &#8220;drive by your porch and shout stuff&#8221; simply by following and unfollowing people.<\/li>\n<li>You&#8217;re absolutely destroying spam replies. They can @-reply all day; you&#8217;ll never see it because junk accounts generally only get followed by other junk accounts (assume that this parenthetical is filled by irrefutable evidence of the above statement). <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I would wager that even if you set your degree to 5, you&#8217;d rarely &#8211; if ever &#8211; get spam. Ideally, if Twitter did build this, they&#8217;d be able to show you the follower chain for any @-reply, allowing you to know exactly who&#8217;s letting the spam in and alert them. Well, <em>if<\/em> you&#8217;re in their sphere, anyway.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s also downsides (reminder: it&#8217;s opt-in):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>You&#8217;re potentially losing out on serendipity. There&#8217;s always the possibility that some really great, smart person out there is going to @-reply you, and their genius never recognized because nobody (in your sphere) follows them.<\/li>\n<li>It makes Twitter potentially less interactive for a lot of people. In fact, this would be taking a giant step in the direction of Facebook in terms of personal privacy. (Don&#8217;t worry, eventually they&#8217;ll merge, right around when iOS X ships on the 0-port MacBook.)<\/li>\n<li>If you only follow people that think and talk like you, and share your politics, religion, and worldview, Twitter is just going to be a custom 24-hour news network of stuff you want to hear, and nothing that challenges your assumptions. Yes, that&#8217;s bad. Shut up, Donny.<\/li>\n<li>There&#8217;s a pile of technical edge cases for when somebody @-replies more than one person (and <em>many<\/em> other situations), that could lead to confusion if not implemented well.<\/li>\n<li>It&#8217;s probably a major technical challenge (<em>pfft<\/em>). But they&#8217;ve got people, I think they could figure it out.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I don&#8217;t have high hopes that Twitter would actually implement something like this. Mostly because I don&#8217;t think they care about this problem <em>that much<\/em>. But even if they left the default setting as it is &#8211; anybody can @-reply me &#8211; the majority of new and existing users would be unaffected, and folks like <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/siracusa\">John<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/caseyliss\">Casey<\/a>, and <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/marcoarment\">Marco<\/a> would have a way to shoo people who come by their porch.<\/p>\n<p>Oh, and you can shout at <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/pauld\">me too<\/a> if you like. For now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This week on ATP (or was it the after show?) the gents accidental discussed Twitter, frustrations with the crowd there, and strategies for dealing with what they politely called &#8220;negative feedback&#8221;. It&#8217;s a great discussion, and as they spoke my &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.padizio.com\/blog\/2015\/n-degrees-of-twitter\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.padizio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.padizio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.padizio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.padizio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.padizio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=649"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.padizio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":656,"href":"https:\/\/www.padizio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649\/revisions\/656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.padizio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.padizio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.padizio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}