> Twitter’s backend was initially built on Ruby on Rails, a rudimentary web-application framework that made it nearly impossible to find a technical solution to the harassment problem.

This is probably a new low in journalism.

My general feeling when it comes to questions about harassment on Twitter is that people look at it too much as a policy issue ("you're not banning and deleting enough accounts according to my ideological stance"), which has its place, but there's a lot of product aspects that make it such a shouty place.

A good example is the way the 'quote tweet' feature is often used to start a pile-on. It's not a bad feature in itself, but there is a significant portion of usage that lends itself to starting food fights. Could things be improved by, for example, a setting that limits quote-tweets to people who follow you? There's a lot of dynamics like that which can be explored.

“I think what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of people's identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that's part of their identity. By definition they're partisan.

Which topics engage people's identity depends on the people, not the topic. For example, a discussion about a battle that included citizens of one or more of the countries involved would probably degenerate into a political argument. But a discussion today about a battle that took place in the Bronze Age probably wouldn't. No one would know what side to be on. So it's not politics that's the source of the trouble, but identity. When people say a discussion has degenerated into a religious war, what they really mean is that it has started to be driven mostly by people's identities.

...

More generally, you can have a fruitful discussion about a topic only if it doesn't engage the identities of any of the participants. What makes politics and religion such minefields is that they engage so many people's identities. But you could in principle have a useful conversation about them with some people. And there are other topics that might seem harmless, like the relative merits of Ford and Chevy pickup trucks, that you couldn't safely talk about with others.“

http://paulgraham.com/identity.html?viewfullsite=1

This is the excerpt I've seen being tweeted about this piece:

At the same time, her defenders say, Harvey has been forced to clean up a mess that Twitter should have fixed years ago. Twitter’s backend was initially built on Ruby on Rails, a rudimentary web-application framework that made it nearly impossible to find a technical solution to the harassment problem. If Twitter’s co-founders had known what it would become, a third former executive told me, “you never would have built it on a Fisher-Price infrastructure.” Instead of building a product that could scale alongside the platform, former employees say, Twitter papered over its problems by hiring more moderators. “Because this is just an ass-backward tech company, let’s throw non-scalable, low-tech solutions on top of this low-tech, non-scalable problem.”

Setting aside the whole "Ruby/Rails is slow" discussion, I would've loved to see more elaboration by these sources about how a web framework makes moderation and policing "nearly impossible". Compared to what? The PHP scripts that became Facebook?

Part of the problem is that Twitter encouraged automated signups in the early days, blazing the trail for gigantic bot-farms that we all talk about today. They pushed popular rss-to-tweet gateways, wordpress plugins for auto-tweeting blog posts, etc. There should have been gigantic red flags waving when the hypergrowth of Twitter really started, because you knew these weren't all people signing up for one account.

I'm not sure if Twitter can ever put pandora back in the box, but at the very least, requiring a mobile number is a start. It's hard(-ish) to generate thousands of bots if you have to have a unique phone number with multifactor for each signup.

Lost? How is Twitter losing the Internet War? Their platform is more influential than ever and helped to seriously impact a presidential election (the results of which not too many people in media are happy with, fair enough).

Yes, the platform is a failure in so many ways - failure to protect the identity and safety of the people on it. (Though as someone who has served a subpoena to Twitter, let me tell you something - the legal team isn't exactly handing over data easily. It was a huge pain in the ass with tons of individual privacy concerns the whole way.)

And the platform is failing revenue-wise, yes.

But if it's about the Internet War, so to speak? Twitter is at the top of it all. No one has to like the externalities - I sure don't - but their influence is undeniable.

This smells like boring FUD. Twitter is an incredible tool for real-time information, and everyone already uses it. Twitters content problems are great problems to have, similar to the problems Facebook faces. I think Twitter has a very bright future.

Using Facebook, I have always felt that the website tried to "force" me into where it thought I belonged in the social graph. Twitter has a much lower barrier to entry. I prefer the lurker-first philosophy. Facebook tries way too hard to engineer interactions (so does Twitter, but I think it's not as bad).

Well at least we now know the solution to all of society's problems is making Ruby on Rails fast. Perhaps one day we can let out a collective sigh of relief once we remove the global interpreter lock.

What a cop out.

If they really wanted to solve the problem all it takes it consuming their own firehose API and writing back to delete flagged content.

You really don't need to insert the moderation into the "backend", you just have to want to solve the problem, instead of accepting the problem because it fuels your growth.

> There are two main components to Harvey’s job, this person told me: to formulate a clear set of rules for what constitutes abusive speech, and to be consistent in enforcing them.

The odds are against Harvey being the first person in human history to solve this problem without false positives and negatives.

I lurved the hate they had on ruby. I've never used ruby but strikes me as childish to blame all your ills on software that they developed to run their whole company on. I mean they could have used PHP, a real professional language! Just like what Facebook used :D

Twitter chased growth at the expense of quality, quality moderation, and quality infrastructure. Thats all it boils down to.

I am not a coder by any means, but I am a heavy social media user and know a lot about politics, sociology, psych, organizing, health, comms---and I admit, until I read this thread, I liked this article because it gave me a better reason for all the screw ups, beyond, "The Executives are dithering and have no business skills and social skills." Or the theory "The Executives do nothing because they don't care if women and vulnerable people die." Which is far more disturbing....it can't be true, even if it feels true. I would give anything if they'd listen to users who have been around awhile. So few people worked there and also used it at the same time. (And users longingly miss the Fail Whale logo...) As a user (250,000+ tweets) under a pseudonym, twitter has incredible uses, things Facebook and other platforms didn't do, because they were so closed and hard to search. They created echo Chambers, because you could only see people you already knew or were slightly connected too. Or worse, your mom or mother-in-law could find you. Twitter was so open--if I want to discuss philosophy or Japanese food or an MRI result, 24/7 I just search and people who love that are there. And pseudonyms had to exist, because thousands of people in real life have the same name. (just like the rest of the Internet back then and yes, now too) They thought people would just post status updates like, hey eating lunch, but we did way way more. They made it 140 chars with 20 chars reserved for names because many people had expensive tiny data plans, but could update by text message; allowing a much wider demographic to use it, and across multiple countries, even low tech ones with limited access. The most critical piece tho is that users invented everything good about twitter (Sorry creators--but we did). TW allowed some html symbols, so a user put an @ in front of a user name to reply, and it worked! Users also invented hashtags, the first one was for organizing BarCamp--which was kind of a conference not about alcohol and the original manual RT, and MT for modified tweet, and commenting on top of someone's tweet, or at the end of it and we figured out how to shrink long urls to post links. bit.ly had no purpose til then, and many users became Developers and got full access to the API and we crowdsourced hundreds of changes and ideas, from pictures to videos to emoji to gifs to analytics, to accessible apps for people with vision, hearing, speech issues. All while making lots and lots of jokes. They didn't start out with a heavy respect for pseudonyms, and privacy, and free speech--but TW learned it fast after the Green Iran Revolution, and after many patient users wanted to keep privacy because they had rare diseases, and mental health issues, and parents of kids with autism and speech issues took to it and found each other and felt less alone. It was less complicated than blogging and writing long stories on laptops after events happened. I could do everything from live tweeting a doctor's appt to an ER visit and get reactions from friends who could tell me what to ask. We still tweet everything from recipes to exact instructions on how to ride a bike, how to organize groups like #occupy to crowd sourcing Flu symptoms and rashes, to who is watching what TV show and how cool it is to watch live sports "together" even for people who can't leave the house that night and meet. Weekly hour long Chats take place under special hashtags like #hcsm for Health Care Social Media or #meded for medical education. (doctors and science fans and academics found twitter and they debate articles, techniques, crowdsource diagnoses) Police and emergency responders and good Samaritans have used it to (swear to god, it's true) befriend people who sound troubled or suicidal and validate their pain and sadness and find them help. It is to this day, the only platform I know that allows people from many different areas to find like-minded people and to bring together people across multiple subject areas. Nothing else does it quite the same way. Especially with the ridiculous algorithms other platforms use.