This maximalist approach to free speech was integral to Twitter’s rise, but quickly created the conditions for abuse. Unlike Facebook and Instagram, which have always banned content and have never positioned themselves as platforms for free speech, Twitter has made an ideology out of protecting its most objectionable users. That ethos also made it a beacon for the internet’s most vitriolic personalities, who take particular delight in abusing those who use Twitter for their jobs. This spring, the Not Just Sports podcast posted video of sports fans reading a sampling of the hateful tweets that the sportswriters Sarah Spain and Julie DiCaro received while writing and reporting. The video amassed over 3.5 million views on YouTube. Its message: This level of depravity is commonplace on Twitter.

— Charlie Warzel – “A Honeypot For Assholes”: Inside Twitter’s 10-Year Failure To Stop Harassment

Scathing. This only confirms my theory that Twitter’s apathy on abuse and harassment is baked into the company’s culture, and that the teams responsible for fixing the problem are rendered powerless because of it. I’m starting to suspect that the only solutions for Twitter’s endless harassment problem are either a new service with anti-harassment baked in from the start, or for Twitter to be bought out and its executive staff replaced.

Neither option seems likely to me.

I typically don’t care for the financial side of the tech industry. As long as the companies I patronize make enough money to keep making the products and running the services I use every day, the specifics of the profits and loss statements for the quarter don’t matter to me. Let alone the damn stock price. Maybe if I had enough money to play the markets, that would change, but it’s doubtful.

But one company did announce earnings yesterday that caught my attention—Twitter. Their revenue is down, their monthly active users have plateaued, and their stock price has responded in kind.

Is this a surprise to anyone? Twitter’s revenue is dependent on advertisers, and user growth is dependent on a positive view of the company. Right now, Twitter has a whole lot of neither, right now, owing in no small part to Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones’s very public experience with abuse on Twitter. This itself is just another example of the endless harassment problem on Twitter that first blew up with GamerGate, but goes back far longer than that.

What advertiser would sign on to have their message run on a network that has the valid perception of being loaded with abuse and harassment? Even Twitter’s in-house solution for its users to buy promotion on the platform has no abuse oversight. Early on, noted neo-Nazi troll weev managed to get a white supremacist message into a promoted tweet. After opening the account verification process to users, a phishing scam managed to get a promoted tweet through. At least it’s not just abusers Twitter doesn’t care about.

Sarah Jeong, in her excellent book The Internet of Garbage, made a point that resonates hard in the recent Twitter news:

When people are invested in the community, the community will police and enforce norms, but when unrepentant bad actors are never banished or are able to reproduce their presence at an alarming rate (sockpuppeting), community trust and investment will evaporate.

I don’t trust Twitter, and a growing number of people in my timeline feel the same way. And there’s no shortage of people posting ways in which Twitter can improve. It’s practically a cottage industry. So far, after two years of promises, Twitter has barely made even the tiniest dent in the problem, and I’m counting banning Milo as part of that.

We haven’t up and left yet, but I’ve seen grumblings. I created a new account on App.Net, not because I’m worried Twitter is going to go under or get bought out… just to get ahead of the exodus if it happens again.

What has happened is advertisers are showing they want nothing to do with Twitter’s nonsense. Without new users and without advertisers, Twitter is dead in the water. And nobody is likely to pay for a moribund service with an abuse problem and declining revenues. Well, maybe Verizon.

Maybe, just maybe, a crashing stock price combined with the bad press over Leslie Jones’s harassment will be enough to either get Jack Dorsey to make fixing Twitter’s harassment problem a priority. I have my doubts. At this point, the apathy and disdain for dealing with abuse at Twitter is embedded in the culture.

Those in the community around preventing online abuse who have connections at Twitter say there are people there who do carer and are working hard. I don’t doubt it. I just doubt the ability of Twitter’s corporate bureaucracy to let them do their work and make the changes so desperately needed to make Twitter a useful platform again.

I want to be proven wrong. And so do many, many other Twitter users.

I want you to imagine you’re at a party. Not a great party, more like one of those dull work parties, where nobody is really thrilled to be there, but attendance is mandatory. And imagine, if you will, someone saunters in and takes a gigantic dump in the punchbowl.

What would you do? What do you do?

Bringing it up with a manager seems like a safe bet. So you tell the person in charge of the party that someone took a shit in the punchbowl. “Yeah, yeah, whatever.” they say. “We’ll get someone to take a look.”

So the party continues, with a big turd floating in the punchbowl. Occasionally, someone tries to get punch, ignorant of the turd, and is stopped by someone with enough sense to know you don’t drink from a turd-filled punchbowl. The conversation at the party shifts from work mundanity to why there’s a turd in the punchbowl, who shat it, and why nobody’s done anything about it.

“Yeah,” says Dawn in accounting, “I brought it up with the Office Manager an hour ago, and it’s still there.”

Now, it turns out, this party is actually being sponsored by one of your company’s clients. So, when the client’s guy shows up and sees the turd-loaded punchbowl, what happens then? They technically paid for that punch that nobody can drink.

Suddenly, now it’s important. Nobody at the party can drink the punch, the entire vibe is ruined, and nobody’s happy—but because someone with a financial stake in having drinkable punch raised the issue, now someone’s motivated to address it.

Any similarity to the above story to recent events involving a certain right-wing provocateur—by which I mean serial harasser—on Twitter, is far from coincidental.

It’s incumbent upon any organization that tries to be a space for social interactions online, that they both acknowledge someone’s going to try and take a shit in the punchbowl. It’s human nature. Someone’s always going to try to ruin the fun for everyone else. When this happens, you can’t just stand aside, tsk, and then fall back on some vague platitudes on “free expression,” or whatnot. Instead, you remove the turd, you dump out the punch, you clean the bowl—or just replace it completely—and kick the punchbowl pooper out of the party.

And that last step is not censorship. If someone shat in the punchbowl because they didn’t like the punch, didn’t like the party, or didn’t like the company running the party, it doesn’t matter. There’s better, politer, more constructive, and less disgusting ways to express your dissent. Ways that don’t ruin the party for everyone else, that don’t risk making everyone sick, and might actually make things better.

Let’s dispense with the metaphors for a bit.

Internet trolls and abusers love to make a false equivalency between their targeted campaigns of hate and simply “disagreeing” with what their victim is saying. This is absurd on the face of it, but I’ll explain why in a bit more detail that is inevitably going to read a bit like a Monty Python sketch.

Disagreement is an intellectual process, wherein you express a contrary view to someone and present evidence and reasoning to back it up. Harassment and abuse is insulting, threatening, and hounding a person with repetitive comments—even if those are attached to a valid disagreement.

To put it another way, disagreement is saying “I don’t agree, because of x, y, and z.” Harassment and abuse is saying “I don’t agree, because of x, y, and I will murder you and your family because of it.” The former of these is protected speech. The latter is a criminal threat, but good luck getting it prosecuted in a court of law.

And, while we’re on the subject, nobody online is obligated to get into a debate with you if you disagree. Even if you’re polite about it. Someone’s refusal to debate you is not even close to the same thing as being harassed or abused yourself.

As long as the trolls have free reign to shit in the punchbowl, everyone else is going to have a very unpleasant experience on Twitter. By banning one of the service’s serial punchbowl poopers, they’ve at least taken a major step in showing they care, just a little bit, about having punch that’s free of turds for all of us to enjoy.

My suspicion is, however, that they only care because the punch was paid for by someone who needs to have Milo’s latest victim using Twitter as part of the promotional strategy for the new Ghostbusters. Only by threatening Twitter’s ad revenue could Jack and his team decide that enough was enough, and give Milo a long overdue push out the door.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad he’s gone. I just don’t have much hope that Twitter’s going to do much to prevent anyone else from shitting in the punchbowl. I hope I get proven wrong.

I’m a user of the Getting Things Done ¹ methodology for organizing my life and keeping my ADD-addled brain somewhat free from drowning in an inattentive fog. It works, for the most part. The core idea of GTD is that instead of your standard to-do list of giant things like “Do the taxes,” “Finish the Henderson Report,” and “Buy groceries” you break these all down into the individual, specific, concrete “Next Actions,” in the parlance, and do those. So, instead of those big, vague, difficult tasks, it’s a bunch of “Print out the W–2 form,” or “Email Bob in accounting for the Henderson receipts,” or “Get the reusable grocery bags.” Simple, right?

Well, there’s more to it than that, but that’s the gist. Another key part of the GTD methodology is that your Next Actions aren’t put on a big list with all the others. You divvy them up by “Contexts”. A “context” is a specific tool, or location, or even a person, that is required for you to do the task. It does you no good to have “buy milk” staring at you while you’re trying to put together the Henderson Report. You want that on your “Grocery Store” context.

Problem is, with few exceptions like running errands, the whole “context” thing has fallen down in the last fifteen or so years, since Getting Things Done was published. Now we have all these little pocket computers that keep us connected to everything at all times. Some of us work from home, either by choice or by fiat. You could crank out all your @email tasks at your desk, or on the john. The availability of what you need to do your job, or your hobby, or whatever, is no longer limited by geography or connectivity.

This is a huge pain in the keister, if you’re someone like me who does better with hard barriers on their time and attention.

I know I’m not the only one with this problem. A casual Google search brings up (for me) plenty of people thinking about contexts in GTD—thinking of new kinds of contexts that fit how they work, basing contexts on “energy level,” time intervals, streamlining it down to “Active” or “Maybe”, or just plain ditching the whole “context” thing in the first place.

These are all interesting ideas, and I’ve tried many of them at various times. For me, what seems to work is using contexts to divide all my actions and projects between my “@day job” and my “@personal” life. I can then, using my GTD tool of choice, OmniFocus, set up filters and Perspectives to see all my work-related stuff without my personal stuff mixed in, or vice-versa.

It helps, but only so much. I’ve got one of those Knowledge Worker jobs where I spend most of my days in either a text editor, or a web browser. I have a few contexts I use to keep things organized: @online for anything that requires the Internet to get done, @write and @design code for creative tasks, and @email for… email. One the one hand, having all these little subcontexts seems fiddly. On the other hand, if I were to use an @computer contexts for all my actions that use a computer… well, I wouldn’t need much in the way of other contexts.

This is all my manifestation of the problem, of course. Context collapse might manifest differently for you. It might be unwanted texts from the boss and pinging of work emails on your phone while you’re trying to eat a quiet dinner. It might be an inability to work on your side project because the same machine you code on is the same machine you use to play all those cool video games on. Whatever the case, the blurring of lines between our contexts can, without something to keep things neat, turn everything into a morass.

So far, my strategy of a device for work, a device for home, and separate views into the things I want and need to do, have helped a lot. It just feels like there’s more that can be done. As is often the case, I may not have answers, but I do have a lot of things to think about.

It’s been a long journey with a lot of unplanned pit-stops, but the Mindful Tech series has reached its conclusion. Here, I gather all the posts together for your reading convenience.

• Part 1: The Low Hanging Fruit
• Part 2: The Great Auditing
• Part 3: Mode Switching
• Part 4: Solving the Right Problem
• Part 5: Mindful Social Media
• Part 6: Mindfully Learning Technology
• Part 7: Our Data Trails, Ourselves
• Part 7.5: Our Data Trails, Ourselves (Continued)
• Part 8: Where Our Data Lives
• Part 9: Beyond Disconnection
• Part 10: Setting Your Own Terms