How could Twitter be tweaked to promote more rational conversations, now that Elon is on the board?

Federated Censorship.

I'm very excited by the prospect of a more free speech freindly twitter, as I think their (and other firms) use of aggressive censorship has done a lot of harm over the last few years.

It would be good to achieve this while still offering more pro-censorship users the experience they want. This should make the change policy change less likely to be reversed, and help Twitter's commercial success.

One method to achieve this might be to allow users to choose a form of censorship from a menu. Different groups would produce different censorship algorithms, and users would only see content that was compliant with their chosen algorithm(s). You could have a wide variety of different algorithms for different user preferences, e.g.:

• ChildSafe, for parents to protect their kids from sex, swearing etc.
• SFW, for people logging in on their work machines.
• LGBTQIA+ Ally, blocking anything that seems bigoted.
• NoSports, for those who don't want to read about sports.
• Libertopia, which allows everything.
• Index Titiatum Prohibitorum, protecting Catholics from seeing unpopish things.

These filters could compete to produce the best user experience.

This way, people would be able to protect themselves from 'toxic' tweets without burdening others who want to learn and debate in an unencumbered manner.

Twitter could implement a play-money prediction market just like metaculus or manifold markets -- they could even consider buying one of these teams.  Ideally, starting or voting on a prediction market would be as easy as running a Twitter poll.  (Reddit recently did something similar.)  Having large, metaculus-style prediction markets on newsworthy events might directly help important online conversations become more productive, more reality-based, and less polarized.  And in the long run, familiarizing people with how prediction markets work might also encourage/legitimize the further adoption of prediction markets as information sources to inform decisionmaking.

Twitter could create an easy-to-use, secure voting infrastructure for use by student groups, nonprofits, small businesses, unions, and other relatively low-stakes situations where you mostly just want to get a reasonably trustworthy voting system up and running easily.  Twitter could use this platform to advertise the merits of designs like approval voting and quadratic voting, boosting interest in those types of voting and building legitimacy for them to be adopted in higher-stakes contexts.

Instead of the current, AI-based system of content moderation, Twitter could experiment with different methods of community governance and judicial review.

Imagine a system where AI auto-censorship decisions could be appealed by staking some karma-points on the odds that a community moderator would support the appeal if they reviewed it.  Others could then stake their own karma points for or against, depending on how they thought the community moderator would rule.  An actual community moderator would only have to be brought in for the most contentious cases where the betting markets are between, say, 30% and 70% -- this would make the system more scalable since most appeals would get resolved by the community without ever escalating to a moderator.  

You could then have multiple levels of appeals and judges, creating another market on whether some kind of Twitter Supreme Court would uphold the moderator's decision.  (The above idea is ripped directly from Robin Hanson but I can't find the exact post where he describes it.  It also resembles the dispute-resolution mechanism of the UMA crypto coin.)

Making nuanced, human-based judgement scalable in this way could both directly improve the quality of twitter discourse, and help familiarize people with an innovative new social technology.  Also, by creating a system of community governance instead of AI-based censorship, it might offer a superior middle path compared to the current "AI-based censorship vs 4chan anarchy" debates about social media content moderation.

The "Stratchery" newsletter proposes a sophisticated scheme to split Twitter into two companies, with core Twitter retaining control of the social graph and underlying infrastructure, but relaxing their control of the end-user's UI experience, advertising, and content moderation.  Those endpoint presentation services would be provided by numerous companies competing in the free market.  Ultimately there is a vision for Twitter to evolve into essentially an internet standard for notifications, supporting many uses that sometimes look nothing like today's Twitter.

I'm not sure if it would be altruistically good for the world to loosen control in this way and open up Twitter via APIs (although it would certainly help avoid undue censorship on the free exchange of ideas).   But it's an interesting analysis of Twitter's business situation.

A list of fixes requested by Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution:

1. A better organization of DMs, including functional search.  And why do some of my DMs seem to disappear?

2. End-to-end encryption for DMs.

3. Available blue checks for more people.

4. Lately they have begun serving me up “popular” tweets from major tweeters multiple times.  I hate this.

5. Eliminate the quote tweet function, to limit pile-ons.

6. Sometimes my “scroll down” function gets stuck.  Unstick it.

7. I don’t myself prefer Promoted Tweets, and in theory yes I hate the bots.  But in practice, viewed only selfishly, neither has been a major problem for me.  I am not doubting they may be problems for others.

8. Longer-run, when AI is better and cheaper, how about a button “You didn’t subscribe to these tweets, but we think you really might like them.”  But apart from the main flow and screen.

9. I wish for a slightly smarter list of trending topics.  Yes I am greatly interested in the war in Ukraine, but I really don’t need “Zelenskyy says Russia is trying to hide ‘guilt in mass killing’ as the war in Ukraine continues”.

A year later, it seems like Elon does not value sane discussion on the Birdsite. If he does, he can't change Twitter too much, because he is under a lot of pressure to make money. This is the fundamental problem with modern ad-supported social media - The business model is not aligned with users, and there's not really an easy way of escaping this.

Twitter needs to clamp down hard on disinformation and extremist content, especially from or on behalf of authoritarian regimes.

Categorizing one's favorites (or putting them in folders) so one doesn't have to scroll through them all to the beginning.

Twitter, as a fairly open platform, could be immensely valuable (because social networks are valuable) for humanity if it was more geared towards its users.

My sense is that people have felt for years that Twitter experiment with features that no one asked for rather than making it a nicer place for existing users. (Not sure how true this is, although I'd personally agree.) This is often noticeable in e.g. this way: https://twitter.com/scifiagenda/status/1328804296436006912 (See thread for interesting comments on how Twitter product design is an echo chamber of toxic positivity.)

If a social network of Twitter's size and popularity could be slowly shifted towards an open feature development process informed by its users, it could start to grow into something else than what its most frequent users endearingly call a "hellscape". At some point, it would be so usable and useful that its users might even consider paying (a small fee) to keep their account or create a new one. With such a change, the bot problem would probably be significantly reduced automatically. By then, a Stack Overflow-style reputation system is in place that allows self-moderation of the entire platform. Maybe it ends up truly enjoyable again.

Nothing about the above is too hard for capitalists to stomach, making it much more realistic than asking for hyper-niche features that only EAs and rationalists would like/use. Whatever you want to do to Twitter, there has to be a business case for it, sadly.

Yes, I rant about this regularly for some strange reason that still eludes me. On Twitter.

I made a similar question yesterday without being aware of this one https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ccZCJcqBtWxFLCN2t/how-does-an-ea-aligned-twitter-looks-like