General Discussion Banter GLN, page-9235

I'm not a big user of Twitter. I really only started using it over the past year. I do think the platform (as it currently stands) is broken in quite a number of ways, much of which would be pretty simple to solve (bots, scams, fake profiles, banning people, censorship, and simple things like the ability to edit, etc...). As a really minor example I just did a post here that includes a graphic which is not square. Twitter automatically zooms in on it to a 1:1 aspect ratio which means users can't read it unless they click on the image. For me to solve that people (which I'll do from now on), I need to import my screenshot into a graphics program, change the aspect ratio to square, extend the canvas adding space on the top and bottom of the image, fill the expanded space with white pixels (as transparent pixels get ignored), and then copy and paste into Twitter. Now this will only take me an extra 30 seconds to do all this but there are many users that wouldn't know how to do all this and it could easily be implemented by default (or as an option). It's feels like the employees at Twitter are the laziest people on the planet. The platform should be improving all the time but it's not (as far as I can tell).

If anything I'm celebrating because I support free speech (except in very limited situations) and I'm hoping he'll do a better job on that front (i.e. that he'll make better decisions than they currently are - which won't be hard at all). It seems like not a day goes by without something that was previously determined as "misinformation" is now being re-categorised as a valid alternative view. If you are that bad at determining what is "misinformation" you shouldn't be doing it.

I understand that politics and money often gets in the way of what would otherwise be the optimal user experience. For example, I used to work on the search algorithms implemented in a major search platform. There were many aspects of the algorithm that prevented users receiving the most relevant set of results but we couldn't change those things because it would disadvantage the advertisers that were paying large amounts of money for their listings. I don't think Twitter is anywhere near as constrained (beholden to advertisers) as the company I used to work for so I don't know that they have the same excuse.

Anyway... sorry for the mini rant... I don't normally post about such things so I'll leave it here. I don't consume much MSM (if any) so Twitter is the only way I find out what is going on in the world - so I'm really hoping it can improve on all its shortcomings.