These are great suggestions from Sally Poulsen.

I think many folks’ first response will be to say: “Yeah, but…” I’d encourage them to give it 5 minutes, and consider the merits of her ideas.

Social proof from other networks

Other social networks are already using some of Salle’s concepts to great success.

YouTube has gamified it’s entire onboarding process. New users unlock new abilities, as they meet specific criteria. For example, here are the requirements to acquire a custom URL:

When I was building my YouTube channel, going through all these steps was a fun challenge. As I created better videos and engaged with the community, I unlocked new abilities:

This kind of onboarding achieved what Sally Poulsen proposes in her piece:

Instead of requiring quality users to prove harassment, this flow requires new users to prove their quality.

Stack Overflow uses a similar approach. There, privileges (such as answering a question, upvoting an answer, closing voting) have to be earned.

Again, this incentivizes the kind of behavior you want on a social network!

While there are overprivileged trolls on the network, it’s a small minority of users. And, best of all, they’re not anonymous. Their public persona and their karma are always at risk when they make snarky comments.

Motivate good conduct

Sally Poulsen’s post provides Twitter with some ideas on encouraging users to behave respectfully:

Right now, anyone can walk in and start screaming at anyone. But in the flow I’m suggesting, Twitter is more able to act as a doorman, saying “Hey new user, you can scream all you want out here on the street — but the people inside don’t want to hear from you unless you’re more respectful.”

This is exactly what myself, and many other, Twitter users want.

Incidentally, Twitter’s long-forgotten Engage app gave verified users the ability to filter their mentions.

Verified users could view mentions only from other verified users, or, could filter their mentions by those with the most engagement.

I like Sally Poulsen’s suggestion even better: “allow users to limit notifications by follower count.”

Instead of having to manually mute or block bad actors, users could pre-emptively define who they want to hear from.

Most of the trolls I’ve encountered have less than 50 followers, so I could ask Twitter to block notifications from those folks.

2017 seemed to be the year that many of us woke up. We need to improve public discourse on Twitter in 2018. Sally Poulsen’s given Jack Dorsey ideas on how that might happen.

Co-founder of transistor.fm, Twitter: @mijustin

Get the Medium app

A button that says 'Download on the App Store', and if clicked it will lead you to the iOS App store
A button that says 'Get it on, Google Play', and if clicked it will lead you to the Google Play store