Ah, Twitter.
There’s a problem. Well, there are a lot of problems. Harassment, abuse, hate speech, mysogyny, and racism go unchecked, and have for a decade. For me, the biggest benefit of Twitter is its opportunity to hear all the voices I have the guts to listen to. I know more about Black America, LGBTQ America, Muslim America, and a dozen other versions of the country I live in precisely because of Twitter’s post-everything read-in-chronological-order policies. But I don’t know how much longer I can accept its post-everything-even-if-it’s-hate-speech policies, especially when I see (and to a lesser extent, experience) the pain they cause.
On the other hand, options like Facebook, which do have arguably better abuse policies have algorithms that turn our feeds into echo chambers, and then blame us for the result. They’re not exactly utopias either.
Options like Slack are great for small groups of friends or organizational teams to where behavior controls are either external (HR departments) or decided by owners who curate the feeds. You can’t block someone on Slack, so a feed owner who opens the door to everyone does so at some significant risk of letting in the trolls.
We’ve got fantastically smart readers. We’ve heard from a number of you that you’d love to write for us, but you can’t think of a topic. Here’s your first prompt:
What’s your plan for staying in touch with your fellow UX and Tech professionals over the next 5 years? Is it Twitter? Facebook? Slack? Something else? How much do you value signal over noise? Diverse thought over like-thinkers? If you could do anything to improve social media, what would you do?