Oh my. Twitter, or any other platform, is not your megaphone that will amplify your opinion without restrictions. Don't like that? Start your own platform, and see how that turns out.
Related: yes, I do support interoperability requirements between platforms. No, that still doesn't mean you get to blast your opinion all over the internet without hitting a roadbump every now and then.
> Oh my. Twitter, or any other platform, is not your megaphone that will amplify your opinion without restrictions
Where did this sentiment originate from? I never heard of it before and all of a sudden in the last few years I hear so many people parroting it. Why is it that all these people were silent for so long and now they're yelling in unison about how bad Twitter as a megaphone is?
For YouTube at least I can give a clear example. I’m pretty sure they’ve cleared this up now but for a while you had no way to get consistent notifications of new content from creators you’d explicitly subscribed to. Twitter is similar in this way. If I follow someone, I want to see their tweets. Full stop.
I don’t want them arbitrarily hidden from my timeline by an algorithm. Twitter offers a chronological timeline but has repeatedly reset my user preference for it. If there weren’t third party applications that respected my preference I definitely would not be using it anymore.
Because fundamentally when people complain about being censored on places like twitter or TikTok, they're really complaining about not being broadcast loudly enough.
When criticizing X, you cannot in good faith say — why don’t you build Y that’s like X? It just implicitly admits that criticizing X is off limits and you don’t like it.
Except that's not what's happening here. When doing anything on the internet "how are you going to control spam and obvious trolls" is question #1. Twitter has an answer to that: we mechanically and/or personally identify spam/troll content, and ban their creators.
Now, many people want them to stop doing that. Which they decline, since they KNOW what will be happening in that case.
So, if you think you can do a better platform, while disregarding the (minimal) lessons learned from Twitter (or Reddit, or...), go ahead! You will fail, not because "criticism of the original platform is off-limits", but because it's a well-known anti-pattern.
The discussion is about whether people can see what the algorithms are doing. Read only access to the code so they cannot manipulate people into their belief system or arbitrary shadow-ban rules.
You’re right about human judgement but that’s not the topic. The central point, I repeat emphatically, is about transparency, not governance.
Twitter can continue exactly the same way but just be transparent. The intense pushback is because they’ve holed themselves into an untenable position? Not sure why people are so against transparency. Maybe they lied in congressional testimonies?
I'm pretty sure the "algorithm" is "we count the number of end-user flags/reports, and if > X we remove it"?
Public knowledge of what "X" is doesn't really help, I think, other than to aid spammers? And a requirement to "talk to a human" upon hitting X would surely immediately degrade into "Google has reviewed your appeal and has determined that the infinite block of your account remains in effect. There is no further appeal"?
There are a whole host of algorithms. Recomendation, feed, suggested followers, interest-based suggestions, etc. I am suspecting algorithms for how "trending" topics are picked are quite involved. It probably goes through filters, blacklists, whitelists, some AI-voodoo and gets increasingly promoted based on engagement in real-time.
That secret sauce is ripe for manipulation and extremely powerful.
Against combating spam - I mean, isn't this how something gets stronger? HN has a strong view that open source software is more secure because it gets hardened through exposure, not through obfuscation.
> Twitter can continue exactly the same way but just be transparent.
No it can't. If the algorithm was transparent the only thing you'd see is spammers who have put tons of resources into figuring out the exactly optimal way to maximize engagement. Grassroots engagement would be impossible.
Some are arguing that the algorithm is so simple that there is nothing to disclose. That means that spamming has reached a plateau and can't get anyworse.
Also, Twitter's spam control has been objectively bad.
People think that the entire platform has been hijacked by left-wing / progressives and the reason for lack of transparency is more insiduos than "spam". For example, being liable for what they told Congress.
Why not make the ban evident in a log of changes to a user's feed and allow that user to personally unban who they like? For a wide-swath of use cases from the recent past, the posts that incited the bans were not criminal in nature.
Related: yes, I do support interoperability requirements between platforms. No, that still doesn't mean you get to blast your opinion all over the internet without hitting a roadbump every now and then.