A LIST OF SERIOUS AND NOT-SERIOUS SUGGESTIONS FOR TWITTER IN HOPES OF ADDRESSING THEIR HARASSMENT PROBLEM

Twitter dot com has been getting kicked in the pants about harassment like crazy. As a certified user experience analyst and designer (no seriously) I have come up with a list of UX and business model adjustments they could make to encourage a more positive form of interaction among our betters, peers and lessers.

A PROBATIONARY TWITTER CLIENT

Have the Twitter client software add or remove features based on user behavior. Wouldn’t it be amazing if, after racking up a spate of harassment and suspensions, an asshole on twitter (yo @nero) had to solve a Captcha just to send a tweet? You could decide that this would last for an arbitrary amount of time, forcing the user to reflect on the actions that brought them to this point every time they tweeted. Maybe even have the Captcha they have to solve include text from their victim describing how the harassment made them feel? What if being a jerk meant you’d see more ads? What if being a jerk meant you could only tweet once an hour? We know they can rate limit (see below) so how about using it for something other than chatty people?

KEEP THE EXPERIENCE OF NEW USERS SIMPLE

Maybe for the first 24 hours after an account is created, a user can only retweet or Like tweets. Enforce the internet edict of lurk more with a vengeance. Let them know this is the time they should spend getting used to the temperature of the pool.

GIVE EXPERIENCED USERS BETTER TOOLS

Allow experienced users to access an “advanced features” control panel, that gives them to option to automatically prevent @ replies from eggs, accounts with fewer than X followers, anyone who has ever tweeted the hashtag #g_merg_te, #blessed, #tcot and so on.

RATE LIMIT US COLLECTIVELY

If you tweet too much, Twitter has built-in tools that will “rate limit” your account. What this means is that if you say dumb things frequently, in short bursts, Twitter will attempt to mitigate the effects of your loquacious stupidity by enforcing a delay between your tweets. This is pretty good, but what if we rate limited Twitter collectively? What if when things get heated and the TLs are ablaze with DELETE YOUR ACCOUNT, FUCK ME DADDY and NEVER TWEET, Twitter as a whole just stopped letting anyone tweet for ten minutes, to give us all a breather?

ANGER MITIGATION TOOLS

Getting angry on Twitter can lead to fierce-yet-impotent .@ replies, racial and gendered slurs, and even irrational nudity. It’s in everyone’s interests to limit these outcomes as much as possible, especially the nudity. A heuristic sentiment analysis method to detect angry Tweeters could be used to help people who are way too invested in shouting at strangers. Twitter could identify the angry tweeter, then lock their account until they send a tweet from a designated park, art museum or nearby public space, verified through geolocation. To ensure accessibility, alternative options like Skyping with a puppy, or reading or listening to a reading of a Wallace Stevens or Marianne Moore poem and reflecting on it would be available.

SET A DAILY TWEET LIMIT

What if you could only make 5 tweets a day, or perhaps a dynamic number of tweets per day based on follower count, fav count, retweet count, and how attractive you are? What if egg avatar accounts were limited to one tweet per day? I bet you’d try harder and do less racisms.

SET A DAILY COLLECTIVE TWEET LIMIT (POOL’S CLOSED)

What if Twitter only allowed the entirety of the userbase to tweet a certain number of times per day collectively? After a million tweets, or whatever the limit was set to (I’d recommend starting at 17) the service shuts down for eight hours. This could also encourage more personal interactions, if the last tweet of the day was the only one people could respond to after the limit was hit.

ASSIGN US RANDOM PENPALS

And what if, after a daily tweet limit was reached, either individually or collectively, Twitter automatically assigned us another limit-reached account to be penpals with until our accounts were unlocked? Until the limit was reset, the user would only be able to Direct Message their randomly-assigned penpal. It’d be handy for allowing Gamergaters and ISIS members to finally link up.

ADD ACHIEVEMENTS TO TWITTER

What if users could unlock achievements for having their account suspended, having to talk to the FBI about their tweets, or being harassed until they are forced to make their account private? OR what if certain features were only available when achievements were unlocked — ie you can only @ verified users after you’ve made 100 tweets, or gained 100 followers.

ALLOW ME TO FORCE PEOPLE TO MAKE A MICROPAYMENT TO @ ME

Add an account option that forces a micropayment to a PayPal account, or a charitable organization, before a user can @ me.

ADD VARIATIONS TO PINNED TWEETS

Currently, Twitter allows users to “pin” a tweet to the top of their timeline on their profile. What if Twitter forced them to choose three tweets: their most important tweet, the tweet they are proudest of, and the tweet that will haunt their conscience on the nights when they run out of their contraband unprescribed Ambien-and-Gin cocktail, and randomized which of the three was displayed?

BAN ALL THOSE FUCKING ASSHOLES, YOU KNOW WHICH ONES

There are plenty of racists, racists acquitted of murder, and Men Tweeting Their Own Way to go around. What if you just said fuck that and chucked them? Would anything of value be lost? Would the world at large even care? How do you sleep at night doing tech support for somebody trying to dox a grade school teacher who swiped left on Tinder?

MORE LIVESTREAMING OF PEOPLE REACTING TO OUR TWEETS

If we could see a livestream of the social media intern at Hardees forced to read endless DIE IN A FIRE responses to their ads, that’d probably bring some new users in! You’ve already got Periscope, give us Periscorn!

DEMOGRAPHIC ANALYTICS

Let us know who we tweet like! We know you’ve got in-depth marketing profiles on your users, complete with inferred age ranges, wouldn’t it be great to tell grown men and women they literally tweet like a twelve year old Pokemon? Is Pokemon a thing twelve year olds do, anyway?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

clarence johnson (@cjohnson319) is available for UX consulting or telling you ur doing it wrong at reasonable rates, @jack.