Jack Dorsey:

We’re committing Twitter to help increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation, and to hold ourselves publicly accountable towards progress.

Commenter zestyping at Hacker News:

Today, Twitter is a planetary-scale hate machine. By which I don’t mean “people post hateful things on Twitter.” I mean literally generates hate, as in, put a bunch of people with diverse perspectives on Twitter and by the end of the day they hate each other more than when they started. Common ground might have existed, but they won’t find it, because Twitter, like any arms dealer, works better when they fight. It even benefits from collateral damage, when they hurt people they didn’t specifically intend to hurt.

Through its core design—short messages, retweets, engagement metrics—Twitter incapacitates the safeguards necessary for civil discussion. It eliminates context, encourages us to present each other out of context, prevents us from explaining ourselves, rewards the most incendiary messages and most impulsive reactions, drives us to take sides and build walls.

If Twitter is going to foster healthy conversation, it will have to change fundamentally. It won’t be a matter of tuning some filters and tweaking some ranking algorithms.

The best concise account of the problems with Twitter I have seen. Who are you going to believe?