- Optional verification check marks for anyone who wants them. Throw out the Blue Check status symbol. Offer "real person" twitter filter.

- Transparent and consistent moderation policies. Bans are inconsistently applied for reasons that are often hard to figure out.

- Return to a reverse chronological time and/or down selection of rage-bait content.

Those are not mutually exclusive. I may be interested to know that @emmanuelmacron and @emmanuel_macron are both real persons but I’d also want to know that @emmanuelmacron is the famous one while the other is just an homonyme. Blue Check symbols are also a lot useful to distinguish real brand accounts from fake ones.

> Transparent and consistent moderation policies. Bans are inconsistently applied for reasons that are often hard to figure out.

See @yishan’s thread on moderation [1]. Moderation is a hard issue, "consistent moderation" is not achievable because the hardest decisions are made based on the personal feeling of the moderators (that’s also why FB has tons of humans moderators: you can’t just automate it beside obvious spam content). You can’t have rules for everything and you will ALWAYS have people whose behavior match the 'rules' but are still problematic. I guess that to have a good opinion about moderation you must work as a moderator for some time.

[1]: https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514938507407421440

Moderation is a solved problem. Replace the entire team with dang. Bam. Good forum.

What is the scalability of dang?

For deeply indebted and cash-flow poor companies like Twitter is about to become (at the surprisingly high--and positive--$1.5B EBITDA, interest is going to erode that by upwards of 60%), is there an equivalent service offering? dang-as-a-service, or "daas", if you will?

I guess the real question is: are dang's parents still alive or do we have to clone him? Hopefully Twitter can wait for the minimum 18.75 years it'll take to scale out.

That's a super interesting question. In my idealist mind, if one person can do something, anyone can do it (given reasonable levels of teaching and learning ability).

I don't think it looks like DaaS -- each company must curate their own "dang" group that has an almost gut-level understanding of the site's "sinew", or the ideals that it lives by come hell or high water.

Maybe Twitter doesn't even have a philosophy. Maybe it ought to.

Nope. I can't be dang.

I can learn the tools he uses. I can learn the procedures he follows. But I don't think that I can learn his patience and his charity toward people who are being flaming trolls. I mean, I've seen him model it. But I can't imitate it for long.

Train AI model based on HN moderation by dang

Sell high quality moderation as a service for other plaforms

Profit?

"Assume good faith" is one of the HN Guidelines[1].

I think dang walks the walk and applies that principle himself during moderation, to a rather amazing degree considering how long he's been at it and the challenges of the job.

My sense is that Musk earnestly wants to do something similar at Twitter, and that he's motivated by a kindred idealism.

However, assuming good faith on the part of forum participants means that outgroups end up having to tolerate a lot of unpleasantness, so long as that unpleasantness is couched civilly enough and could possibly be interpreted as well meaning. (For example, whether women are biologically predisposed to be less ambitious than men is considered fair game on HN and gets debated ad nauseam.)

It's obvious that dang passionately wishes for people from all backgrounds to feel welcome, but that wish exists in tension with the lenient moderation philosophy.

I've come to believe that HN's demographic skew is a direct and predictable consequence of the moderation philosophy, and that ultimately the skew is endemic and won't budge over time. I'm occasionally troubled by my own participation here because of it, as much as I enjoy and appreciate the positive aspects of the site.

I expect something similar will play out at Twitter, with outgroup participation waning as Musk shapes it according to his utopian vision of what he calls "free speech".

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Yes but isn't that a good thing for a public forum/town square, given the alternatives (censorship, politicization, etc.)? Shouldn't it be exactly the sort of place that people feel unafraid to discuss controversial subjects?

If the choice is between some outgroups feeling uncomfortable with civilly-expressed criticism of themselves and their worldview, and draconian, politicized, highly subjective, moderation foisted on everyone, I know where I stand.

And private fora are not town squares. The rules for actual town squares have to be lenient because government suppression of speech is problematic. The relevant freedom for private fora is not freedom of speech, but freedom of association.

Why not? At what point is it OK to let people exclude each other? We don't all have to be friends and play together, do we? We're discriminatory, hierarchical, social animals. Some people will always be excluded. Using authority to try to solve this problem is futile and draconian.

> And private fora are not town squares

I agree, but the question here is whether it's worthwhile for this particular private forum to operate under the same principles of free speech. Certainly some people seem to think so.

> the sort of place that people feel unafraid to discuss controversial subjects?

> If the choice is between some outgroups feeling uncomfortable with civilly-expressed criticism of themselves

So this is the key tension. Outgroups get criticism of themselves every-bloody-where. As you noted, "We're discriminatory, hierarchical, social animals". One more place doesn't make the difference. What good moderation does is provide an opening for an outgroup to issue its own civilly-expressed criticism, with a chance of being listened to instead of reflexively ridiculed and dismissed.

I'm not sure that's true at all, lots of fringe views gain traction on Twitter. I'd imagine more of them still are moderated out of existence.

> So this is the key tension. Outgroups get criticism of themselves every-bloody-where

Yes, and by being a digital town square, Twitter, or any similar platform, would become part of everywhere, with the same consequences for outgroups.

> provide an opening for an outgroup to issue its own civilly-expressed criticism

I agree that outgroups should have this opportunity, but it must be applied to all the outgroups, including those who have a mutual loathing for each other, and those whom we loathe ourselves. Fairness dictates we shouldn't play favourites, in the same vein that the ACLU defended the a Nazi group's right to march through Skokie.

If an outgroup wants a private, safe space to express themselves, that place cannot also purport to be a public square of free expression. It's one or the other.

That's not particularly close to what I said. I am talking about the outgroup being able to participate in the "public square of free expression", in a way that is actually free for them to speak to the ingroup.

These conditions do in fact represent "actual" freedom. Basically if you support people insulting and ridiculing Nazis (which I do), you should support them insulting and ridiculing anyone else on the same principle.

> civilly-expressed criticism of themselves and their worldview [0]

or where they should expect to be ridiculed and insulted? And why would anyone sane want to regularly participate in the latter?

[0]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31167326

As to why people would want to participate, I suspect it's for the usual reasons: to accomplish a goal, or to gain influence and social status.

Edit: Surely you agree that sometimes rudeness is warranted, and that people in fact are rude on Twitter?

Also, it's not clear how to do it well. I do have some ideas which I'd like to try someday. Here's one: people work well with feedback loops, so telling them that they're penalized and giving them a way to fix it could be a good thing. Unfortunately, it could also just be awful. This place is always one step away from sudden decline, and when walking near a precipice one wants to step carefully.

I've been a moderator before, within a team of moderators. There were varying views within that group from 'ban the slightest aggression or just disliked person' to 'give people as many chances as can be afforded, ban is last resort (my view).'

Members got 'banned for nothing!' or regarded as 'why is that person still here?' Depending who you asked both statements were wrong...

It just doesn't scale massively without something like Reddit's subsite moderation structure. FB, Twitter, etc all can't do it at scale across one public community and algorithms can never be nuanced enough and are extremely vulnerable to political/ideological bias ('misinformation' labels are a simple example of this, regardless of what you think of their accuracy or usefulness).

It’s quite possible that an AI could learn to do all this but I suspect that a big part of modernism that participants in a community know and respect the moderators. Not many humans respect AI in the same way.

An algorithm can't ask itself for feedback. I hope Musk does make the Twitter algorithms open source, that would be fascinating and put pressure on other platforms if it turns out to be eye opening or useful

But I think a more refined version of my initial comment is that if the users respect moderators, then moderation will be much more cohesive and well received.

Twitter clearly has utility. But it will never be a nice place to hang out except in some very localized parts of it.

It was built in America, by Americans, and now, is about to be owned by an American. And like America, everyone is (should be) welcome... provided you honor our Western traditions of free speech.

I like what Musk said about free speech within the limits of the law. I think that's a good place to settle things.

A lot of stalking and harassment laws are state level and not the same in every state. Since online harassment is a common problem on Twitter, which state’s laws would you like to apply?

Spreading misinformation that results in violence towards an individual is not governed by federal laws unless it falls under the definition of a hate crime.

Spreading misinformation about results of elections isn’t illegal but is very obviously quite damaging and has real world consequences. How do you tackle this issue?

That’s just a very very small sample. The problem you are going to face with your approach is that the US laws were not designed with the idea of governing stuff on Twitter.

You don't. People are legally allowed to spread misinformation.

> The problem you are going to face with your approach is that the US laws were not designed with the idea of governing stuff on Twitter.

Yes they were... you just don't like the way American laws handle these things.

Difference.

Twitter is not purely a US forum. In some places the law may say that "hate speech" is illegal, or that politically dissident speech is illegal... what then? Are you presuming that US jurisprudence should be the standard for all of humanity, worldwide?

"We" is only "citizens of the USA". Other countries have quite a different tradition regarding this, and citizens of such countries often quite a different understanding than USA citizens of what is considered as "free speech" in the USA and what does not.

How do you avoid the problem of thousands of accounts from Russian-funded troll farms pumping out millions of disinformation tweets on everything from vaccine conspiracy theories, Ukraine wars, lies about elections and so on? Do you just accept that Putin gets a free ride to influence public opinion, destabilise the liberal democracies and nudge close elections in his favour?

Muting accounts might be good for my blood pressure (if I can mute thousands of accounts) but it doesn't fix problems like the above or interesting people getting bullied off the platform (it's bad enough already).

> No mora bans on so called "hate speech"

Why is hate speech "so-called" hate speech rather than just hate speech? Do you think Twitter would be a better forum if anyone can e.g. bombard a Black professor with racist abuse when they share some research?

Do you think HN would be better with no moderation?

> or politically dissident speech

This is not banned.

So why are you panicking just because Musk bought the company?

This is laughable gaslighting. That whole thread is misdirection. Yishan is a liar and should be called out on it.

Moderation is not "easy" because it requires careful design and effort, but it is not "hard" in the way he describes it.

None of the major social media companies made any real effort to make moderation transparent.

None of the major social media companies made a real effort to come up with a solid set of content rules that most people can agree with upfront (at least in principle) and that doesn't change after every major news story.

How can they claim this stuff is "hard" when they never even tried to take the most obvious measures to re-establish some level of trust in their companies? Trust that they've had initially and squandered though their actions, BTW.

Edit:

Also, I am sick and tired of social media CEOs, VPs and founders pointing a finger at their users and saying "you, users, are the real problem here". This is bullshit. An average interaction on (moderated!) social media is significantly worse than an average interaction in (unmoderated) real life. It's about medium structure, not people. The vast majority of people are fine.

One problem with moderation is that you have to choose somewhere on the continuum between (A) "Don't be dick (everyone surely knows when they're being a dick, right?)" and (B) Enumerating literally every possible rule violation.

You quickly learn that (A) doesn't scale and it gives your moderators maximum leeway, most of them having very, very, very different ideas of what it means to be an ass.

And with (B), you get into the business of rules lawyering where users will continually use your own rule list against. By trying to be comprehensive, you create leeway through omission. This reminds me of forums with 1000 rules. Nobody is going to read them, and the only people who do are the ones who will waste your time by finding the one obvious rule you left off. And with this, it seems even easier for bad users to rally the support of obvious ones because they seem to make a good point, and you have a weirdly bigger issue on your hands than you would have if your rules were less focused.

In other words, there is no way to make a set of content rules that people can agree with (in spirit not interpretation), else moderation would be easy.

You can try this yourself. Pick a hot topic like trans rights or racism, come up with tweets that you think are obviously unwanted and also tweets that come close to crossing the line. And then try to write a rule that encodes this sorting in a way that leaves no room for interpretation neither among users nor your moderators.

Because most people don't care about this. For most websites, making moderation transparent only opens you up to more abuse and does nothing good.

>None of the major social media companies made a real effort to come up with a solid set of content rules that most people can agree with upfront (at least in principle) and that doesn't change after every major news story.

Because it's literally impossible to do this.

>Also, I am sick and tired of social media CEOs, VPs and founders pointing a finger at their users and saying "you, users, are the real problem here". This is bullshit. An average interaction on (moderated!) social media is significantly worse than an average interaction in (unmoderated) real life.

No it's not bullshit, I'm taking from this reply that you haven't spent any amount of time moderating an internet forum. (Feel free to tell me if I'm wrong there) The users are the real problem and it's the entire problem you're getting paid to solve when you work for these companies. Nobody would use these services if they weren't solving these problems. Real life interactions usually only involve a handful of people and don't require figuring out how to get everyone in the world to get along with each other. If the users were capable of "coming up with a solid set of content rules that most people can agree with upfront" they would've done so already and we wouldn't even be having this discussion because there would be no need to demand that Twitter try to do it.

I think Yishan was trying to say that moderation is hard not in a "This requires brilliant minds and hard effort" kind of way, but more in a "This will emotionally deflate you for years" kind of way*

Edit: *especially if you're the public figurehead who will receive tremendous heat for this.

This raises an obvious question. If the people hearing the ideas manifestly want to hear them, who is being served by the moderation?

One possibility is the moderator. It's evident that Twitter executives, or people who influence them, don't want certain ideas to spread. But why? One possibility is that they believe these ideas to be false or "harmful" (whatever that means).

They believe the the masses are easily duped and that counter-arguments are unlikely to be sufficiently persuasive. If only a minority of people are easily duped, then false ideas tend to burn out within a small radius as they are exposed to counter-argumentation and common sense.

But if the masses are putty in the hands of bad idea creators, then a wise and disinterested moderator has a role to play. He can spot the bad idea and cut it off before it spreads.

But can a wise and disinterested moderator exist? If company executives faced no outside pressures, then it's theoretically possible. But we can see clearly this does not exist in the real world. The US Congress and Whitehouse have not been shy about making very specific moderation demands of Twitter, backed by serious and credible threats. As a result, correct ideas are bound to be moderator out and bad ideas allowed to spread.

(A few hundred years of political philosophy, as captured in the founding documents of the US, make it clear why we don't want government to play any moderation role whatsoever.)

In my opinion, the wisdom of the masses combined with opportunities for vigorous counter beats centralized moderation by a very large margin.

How is it not both? Give people a medium wherein they can be semi-anonymous, or otherwise removed from the immediate social impacts of their actions and words, and they are awful. It seems to me that you need (a) distance from social impacts and (b) people willing to be awful.

How is it not both? How are people not responsible for their own actions online? I don't get what you're saying.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin... [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/chipotle-rehires-manage...

> Post-MLK-assasination race riots reduced Democratic vote share in surrounding counties by 2%, which was enough to tip the 1968 election to Nixon. Non-violent protests increase Dem vote, mainly by encouraging warm elite discourse and media coverage.

A twitter mob went after Shor, including people tagging the CEO of his company (who _is_ on Twitter, not sure what the confusion is there) and asking them to "Come get your boy." A few days later, he was fired. Four days after that[2], he was kicked off the Progressphiles list for being "racist."

If you don't like New York Magazine, here's a Vox article that goes over what happened[3].

[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/case-for-liberalism-... [2] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/white-fragility-raci... [3] https://www.vox.com/2020/7/29/21340308/david-shor-omar-wasow...

The culture didn't last long - people usually fight back at the mobs now, who have died off some. Now it only exists in minor extremist form where leftists (anti-Epstein conspiracists) and rightists (many other kinds of conspiracists) go around calling random people pedophiles. Twitter still doesn't ban them if you report them though.

Also, that research he quoted is from a Black researcher (Omar Wasow) who is still around tweeting himself and seems well respected.

And in the end nobody suffered as much as the folks living in these high crime neighborhoods. Not only is there evidence the riots increased homicides, https://www.city-journal.org/new-evidence-connects-police-pr..., but also it created a backlash against police reform even in the most progressive cities in the country, like NYC and SF. Police budgets are now bigger than ever: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/cities-vowed-2020-cut-po...

Bi-partisan momentum on police reform evaporated as Trump baited progressives into picking a self-destructive fight over the acceptability of rioting and the need for policing.

In our timeline he did, since I remember reading some followups he wrote about it.

It's not the real most annoying research you could post; that'd be the NBER paper finding protests reduced covid cases by getting uninvolved people to stay home.

I don't really care about the details of these stories, it doesn't affect me if the virus came from a lab or how deep the corruption runs in the Biden family. But any rational person without a political agenda has to agree that the censorship system as it exists is ripe for abuse by bad actors. These two examples in particular completely changed my viewpoint on moderation and I no longer see Facebook or Twitter fighting "misinformation" as a good thing given how easily they can be manipulated into denying valid information. They simply cannot be trusted to identify what is or isn't misinformation.

... That may be true for Twitter, but it's certainly not the case for IG and FB. Discussion of any sort was off-limits, based pretty much entirely on Daszak's letter (we agree that's batshit insane, right?). Millions of posts were deleted, and tens of millions got a little warning bar that dropped interaction by "at least" 80%.

Meanwhile back at Twitter, people who tweeted wrong-think of very mild varieties, such as anything but the current and official (and ever-shifting) stance on vaccine effectiveness were getting banned. While that's not super cool, you're right to point out that Twitter weren't quite as authoritarian as claimed.

Some people did that, sure. Others were genuine. For example, this tweet in cautious favor of a new vaccine development got a Professor of haemostasis and thrombosis at the University of Sheffield banned, and even on appeal they made him delete the tweet: https://twitter.com/ProfMakris/status/1474068222550884367/ph...

Many, many other cases of this sort exist, and there's no justification for it. Speaking of unwarranted - your assumptions about people's motives, to justify attacking and censoring them, are disturbing. Do you feel like that's a normal thing to do?

Trump has used this tactic effectively many times in the past: he says something that makes sense ("we need border security") in such a racist and distasteful way that causes the opposition to kneejerk react against whatever policy he's proposing, forcing them to take a position that's at odds with common sense ("border walls are racist!"). It's possible he may have had some classified information about the lab leak being a feasible story, but I also wouldn't be surprised if it was just one of the thousands of things he blabbers uncontrollably about and this particular one luckily happened to have some truth to it.

My theory is that a lot of people had an axe to grind, and that thread was sufficiently aligned with them.

Sounds like one to verify identity, one to verify a "position"

this used to be a big deal because people could steal celebrity handles. that's why many famous accounts start with @theReal...

celebrities being reachable on twitter is a big part of the appeal. anything that helps them to protect their brands is good for business

A lot of people get this mixed up! but it more adequately explains low-follower outliers.

[1] only-ish

You can make this argument about the extremists on either side.

There should be no doubt as to what is real and what isn't, independent of political ideology.

God damn Southpark Politics

The problem is people choosing emotions over rational discourse and establishing footing and common ground. A lot of commenting is in the vein of “I am right and you are going to hear me out (or else)!”

Tell me, which of our major modern divides can be solved by "rational discourse?"

Consider something like the coronavirus pandemic. Studying the virus itself is a monumental undertaking requiring the funding of states or large corporations. Laypeople must simply "choose sides" and pick the sources they like best. Suppose that you tell me the virus is killing X people a day and I claim it is only killing Y. How do we settle that via "rational discourse?"

We can't discover the truth by talking amongst ourselves like a couple of Greek philosophers using inductive or deductive reasoning.

Our choices are either to perform our own primary research (again, wildly impractical for an individual) or to point to sources we feel are credible.

So I would envision that it would mean people talking and finding out validity of statements made. If you come with a Mirror tabloid article that says that Coronavirus turned people into vampire zombies, that would be a much different discussion than discussing the minutiae of a topic.

The problem is “side thinking” and not enough “gradient thinking”

We might not know some of the finer details, but by inquisitive discourse we can come to a ballpark for your example, or identity problems with each method.

That's a really different concept. Either you have a strange definition of extremists, or you have a strange definition of "the middle".

On the one hand, in context, it makes a little sense; you can understand it as saying that objective reality is an orthogonal concept to political extremism.

On the other, it's hard to imagine an "extremist" who's "in the middle".

I suppose you can picture a few things though:

1. A "delusional centrist". Here you get the severed connection to reality, but also the political moderation. Some "End of History" person with 90s-era thinking might be like this -- maybe what you think of when you hear "Krugman" or "Fukuyama" (though I think both have been shaken, actually).

2. A "radical moderate". Here, "moderate" is a little different from "centrist". I hear "centrist" and I think a Clintonian foreign policy hawk with liberal social policy; I hear "moderate" and I think more of a cultural stance. Nowadays "moderate" might connote breaking cultural taboos. It seems like male comedians end up in this category a lot. I don't think he'd use this description for himself, but I once heard someone describe Slavoj that way. "Radical" somehow connotes a connection to academia and to certain philosophers more than it does any specific conclusions (which may not be extreme at all).

Overall this maybe just what you get when you play with two words neither of which means a ton.

Yes, extremism to me does feel orthogonal to political orientation. "Delusional centrist" is closer to what I had in mind.

Here's the thing that I think is important: you can't talk to extremists rationally. Their mental world model doesn't match reality in big chunks, so there's no shared world view to agree on.

Perhaps I am redefining "extremist" but that's just my mental model.

This is my exact point.

>I'm now going to reveal the institutional bias of every large social network (i.e. FB, Twitter, Reddit):

>Are you ready?

>Here it is...

>They would like you (the users) to stop squabbling over stupid shit and causing drama so that they can spend their time writing more features and not have to adjudicate your stupid little fights.

>That's all.

Yeah, as if 'users squabbling over stupid shit and causing drama' did not result in higher engagement rates and these platforms did not exploit that for their own gains.

To me, this is proof that verification isn’t about security feature, just social status. It’s been exploited by hackers to mimic famous accounts, including Musk himself https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46097853.amp

A name is not a unique identifier. Full stop. If you expect a specific name to refer to a specific person just because it's public, you're glossing over a lot of details which just plain don't make that work.

To some degree, this is not a problem with the social media network, it's a problem with people not realizing that a name on a social media network doesn't necessarily have to be the first person you think of when you see that name, and some personal responsibility to know who you're contacting is expected. There's things social networks can and should do to make this easier, but ultimately the problem will persist until people change their behavior.

@willsmith is clearly not the Will Smith that slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars. He isn't claiming to be, but he could change his profile photo and all of a sudden the world would think he was the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. The blue checkmark adds some validity to that claim.

Some account handles will match real names. People make assumptions on that. At the current time, no matter of locking down profiles so they don't change will solve the problem of people assuming an account name must match the famous person with the same name, because names are not only not unique, collisions are common enough that famous people share names all the time. People don't do the barest amount of verification of what they are seeing compared to what they assume, so nothing you add that they have to look at to fix that will actually fix it.

Or repurpose the misinformation banners to make it clear that this is a person with the same name not a person with the same position/title. Maybe the long-tail gets messy but that's where implicitly or explicitly linking to external sources is valuable. Or just trust twitter to be that external source (maybe with 3rd party alternatives via "open sources").

By "missing some of the nuance", I meant of the example presented earlier (https://twitter.com/willsmith), which is not someone impersonating Will Smith the actor, is someone somewhat famous in their own right (even if much less so than the actor), and has the name because they were on Twitter first. They go out of their way to state who they are and to disambiguate themselves from the actor Will Smith, but are also verified as Will Smith. Guess what? They got a lot of hate tweets recently from people that didn't bother to actually look whether @willsmith was the actor or not and just blindly assumed so.

Perhaps you missed some of the nuance in that as well?

To deal with harassment and SPAM, there are perfectly functional tools like rate limiting and user-initiated blocking. These don't need to be applied based on post content. Note that saying something unpleasant once isn't harassment, and that posting something people disagree with isn't SPAM.

The problem is that the most dangerous content is appealing to people on a very low emotional level, it's called "stochastic terrorism" for a reason. Just take the QAnon crap about children being held hostage and mined for adrenochrome in the basement of a pizza parlor. Yes, the dude deciding to shoot up a pizza parlor [1] should be punished for his actions - but should those who published the crap or hosted the crap be allowed to get off without consequences? What about the baseless claims of a "stolen" election that led to a putsch attempt and the deaths of seven people [2]? Neither of what was published was illegal, even under European laws, but nevertheless real, actual people died.

99.9999999% of people won't fall for QAnon content to the degree they get violent over it, but it only takes one gullible-enough person and suddenly something that most (>50%) of the population would dismiss as crap becomes an actual cause for massive harm. If hundreds are gullible enough, you get a Jan 6th-scale event. And if millions are gullible enough, you get Trump, Orban, Kaczynski or Brexit (as well as, again, an accompanying rise in violence, murder and terrorism based on these people and their ideologies).

In my opinion, actions have to be taken against the peddlers of QAnon, election fraud and other propaganda before the stochastic terrorism principle applies and people get killed as a result. And the worst contributor to that is unmoderated and undermoderated social media, no matter if it's 4chan and the other chans that gave rise to QAnon, Facebook and Twitter that gave rise to Trump or Telegram that gave rise to the corona deniers and anti-5G conspiracy peddlers.

Democracy is not something that is god-given, democracy is something that has to be fought over to obtain it (and in every country, that fight cost millions of deaths) and has to be fought over to keep it alive - sometimes bloody (e.g. in Ukraine), sometimes at the election campaigns, and always at a legislative level. Democracy needs the attention of everyone and the counteraction against threats - including curbing the freedom of speech, where proven to be necessary.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/business/media/comet-ping...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/us/politics/jan-6-capitol...

YES. The people who published the nonsense are in no way responsible for the actions of the murderer. Neither are the people who manufactured the hardware, mined the raw materials, ran the cabling, or built the datacenter. Responsibility for action must terminate at the actor.

Liberty basically decentralizes power as much as possible. The inevitable consequence of this is that individual people are powerful. And if they happen to be gullible or stupid, they can exercise that power to do stupid things. The alternative is taking away power from individuals and concentrating it in authority. This inescapably carries a much higher risk of the power being corrupted and abused, since there are fewer actors who wield more of it.

I'm glad to suffer the occasional school shooting or laughably ineffective putsch, if it means I will never be subjected to a Kristallnacht.

> actions have to be taken against the peddlers of QAnon, election fraud and other propaganda before the stochastic terrorism principle applies

This is basically precrime/thought crime. I just don't trust any authority with that much power over any period of time. Following Blackstone's formulation, I would rather 10 dangerous lies spread unchecked, than be censored for promoting one truth.

This would limit the population of "people who can trick others that they are Emmanuel Macron" to people named Emmanuel Macron, which is such a small edge case I don't think it's worth considering. Add photo validation to ensure that a profile picture is actually you and the problem is pretty much solved.

For brands, it doesn't seem impossible to do verification for any brand through DNS proofs or something like that.

Also, the more transparency you have the more you get things like "but you did this and that for Alice last time, that's so inconsistent with your decision about Bob today!!1!". Yup, it's not consistent because it's human and constantly evolving, people get better with experience, cases are never 100% the same, etc.

You'll never stop the banned person from being angry. The point of transparency is so that you provide something to make the mob think twice about grabbing pitchforks.

It's the same reason we have a justice system, to stop vigilante justice from tearing apart society. You have provide the illusion of justice or people make their own judgements based on limited information. Of course it won't be perfect every time. You just have to persuade _enough_ people.

If there is an emotionally resonant argument that can be made in favor of the banned user, then a mob will form.

Procedure, objectivity, precedent be damned.

You are essentially describing the court of public opinion, which is governed by deeper rules that are hardwired into our social brains.

Big Tech is extremely political, practically ruled by politics, and those politics - as of 2022 - are almost exclusively left-wing.

Twitter's response to everything they don't like is to construct a rule forbidding both sides to do anything that goes against Twitter's politics. Truth, public interest, and freedom of speech do not factor into the equation.

And this is one of the things that are broken on the large social media platforms. I mostly use FB, so that's what I know about. But what they do is so ridiculous, that I started to collect their decisions. I've been banned for a week for calling a politician, a public figure (with 50k followers) "braindead" in response to a really stupid comment he made publicly under news article. (That's all I said. It's a widely used expression in Hungarian for saying that someone is an idiot. It's the exact same term as the medical one for someone being in the state of brain death. Not exactly a nice thing to say someone but not over the top either.)

He used his public profile (not his personal one, but the FB page). I got blocked 20 minutes after making the comment for harassment . Their policy explicitly says that public figures should accept more than ordinary people. And this is what the law says as well. At the same time I keep reporting people making homophobic, racist comments or simply just being flat out rude, using obscene remarks (addressing me or others) and they almost always get rejected after 3 days.

But since transparency is non-existent, no one really knows what's acceptable and what's not, what the consequences are (it seems that the penalties get longer and longer, doesn't matter how serious the violation is, but there might be an expiration, so maybe only the last year counts).

At the same time what I found to be working (which is the same I see here) is that instead of deleting, which is inefficient for a lot of reasons, you should issue warnings, explaining what is not OK with the comment. This seems inefficient at first, but it works because it adds transparency and helps everyone understand and internalize the rules. It also helps people to calm down because they'll see that if others misbehave they won't get away with it either.

But yes, algorithms don't work (yet), especially not in non-English languages. Underpaid, invisible, who-knows-whos might be cheap, but they don't cut it either.

Honestly, Elon Musk along with the team at OpenAI using things similar to what has already been accomplished with GPT-3, can make a real improvement in AI based moderation, at least in terms of being able to understand the differences in messages and their meanings. Everything from hate speech to terroristic threats to suicidal messages can at least be accurately measured and scored by AI to move up to a human moderation queue. AI based moderation in a transparent way would really help the current opaque, biased, politicized moderation that currently exists on twitter and most other large platforms.

There are multiple, ever-shifting layers of references and sarcasm and irony and slang and so on.

Check out some of the more notorious places online - r/pol, Kiwi Farms, etc. Even for humans that stuff is extremely dense and bordering on incomprehensible unless you have seriously spent some time diving into it.

Like any subcultures with their own slang/lore/jargon/etc many of the statements cannot be understood on their own, only when the fuller context is understood. On top of the complexity, the meaning of everything changes unbelievably quickly. The meaning of many statements is the opposite of their literal meaning, or somewhere in the middle.

I've never seen ML/AI experiments that really grasp humor or other such metatextual type stuff.

This is one of those things that sounds great in theory. But in reality, it likely functions much more like any other adjudication system. People can break rules an infinite number of ways, so there are an infinite number of reasons to ban an account. Understanding many of them will require context that may be problematic to share (for ex: if it happens in DMs). So in practice, the shorthand public reason for bans will pretty much always reduce to "violated site policies."

The day Parlor was deplatformed - by all of big tech in an obviously coordinated action - the flimsy pretext was they weren't doing enough to curb hateful speach. Yet on Twitter you had the president of Iran shouting more death to America and China congratulating itself for repressing minorities within its boarders. Yet twitter didn't get booted in the same way. The hypocrisy is beyond blatant.

And that's the real reason for the outrage that Musk might force Twitter to actually move back towards a neutral balance and cease being part of the coordinated propaganda machine - the other services shenanigans are going to stand out even more starkly in contrast. Twitter is big enough and casts enough of a shadow that there is going to be some significant contrast. So much so that those filthy casuals are going to start noticing something different. They might actually start paying attention to everything else going on in tech and the media. Real horror of horrors - they might start asking questions! Uh oh! And if you think all of what I wrote above is conspiracy theory BS - great! Then what does it matter if Musk owns Twitter or not? The gate swings both ways. If everyone else is normal and he starts to bend twitter to his will, that will stick out like a sore thumb in contrast. Nothing to worry about, eh?

Second: let’s say it’s true. How would we know whether it’s because 90% of problem content is generated from participants with one political leaning vs a policy designed to discriminate politically?

I understand your point about being unfair. But wouldn't this solution just lead to people simply leaving the platform because of the increased toxicity?

Then I tried the fediverse, and it was worse, except that it was much weirder overall and posts mostly concerned extreme fringe topics and opinions.

I like good blogs and I'm fine with some Youtube channels, even though the signal to noise ratio is high. But microblogs seem like a complete waste of time to me. Can someone explain the appeal of these sites to me? What do people get from them? What interesting things do you read on Twitter?

I agree with you in that, it sucks for content consumption, outside of keeping up with things in a shallow way.

I don’t know if you could rise to higher levels of understanding by continually using twitter, in the way you could by reading a lot of books.

I'm on fosstodon.org and don't really see this, I get presented with mainly FOSS related opinions/news/tech and cat pictures, I'm very happy with it.

I can't stand twitter which appears to want to bombard me with politics, popular culture and garbage.

Signal to noise ratio is indeed very high, and sadly I see too much content I don't care about, which makes me abandon Twitter for weeks, but I think that it could be fixed.

There are 3 feeds - (1) home, your personal follows, (2) local, the people on your local instance and (3) federated, the people followed by anyone on your instance (+ stuff they boosted).

If you join a server somewhat aligned with your interests, you'll have a much better time.

At least Reddit is easier to tune - you can get a great feed by joining a dozen subreddits, instead of following hundreds of individual accounts on Twitter.

They've had this for years. Press the "swish" (stars) button top right.

edit: to everyone saying that this doesn't happen anymore, thanks for the clarification! i guess i stopped fighting the algorithm back when this wasn't the case.

Of course, the main way they measure ‘liking’ the site is via engagement, which may actually just measure compulsion to use, not enjoyment. And, of course, the however small, cohort of people who genuinely ‘like’ chronological order are ignored.

I think the issue is a little deeper: it's not that people want chronological vs. non-chronological timelines, it's that they want a way to get the "best", "most relevant" content to be surfaced from those timelines and presented in a sane way. Non-chronological timelines are better at producing the "best", content (for some relative definition of "best", at least), but by presenting it out-of-order, it requires more of the user.

Maybe to improve profitability you'd want to improve how much you can serve out of memory, but I think Twitter has more than enough compute to just generate your page for you when you visit. (I haven't seen a fail whale for over a decade!)

My understanding (from a watching a Twitter Tech talk, maybe about redis?) is that that is actually how it is (was) implemented. They were so focussed on time to first render, they took the efficiency hit.

But algorithmic feeds are endlessly unique and composing them is vastly more difficult than doing chronological order.

Suppose that your feed refreshes itself while you're trying to read a particular tweet. You go back looking for it--now badly ordered, irrelevant content is positively correlated with your amount of scrolling and time spent in-app.

So the app isn't just optimizing against your lazy attention, it's probably in some cases also rewarding itself for actively hindering you.

These software patterns are anti-human. Imagine using a hammer that is trying to maximize your engagement with the hammer itself. Well, I know I'll be more engaged with the hammer if the head keeps falling off, but that isn't what a hammer is for.

It usually takes me a few minutes to notice. I'll see a tweet that I recognize from a previous session, or from someone I don't follow, or something like that.

Perhaps I'm on the wrong end of Twitter's A/B testing.

Click the "Sparkle Button" to change the timeline sort algorithm. Right, totally obvious...

Holy crap, I can actually use Twitter again. Thanks.

b) The icon is exactly the same style as all of the other icons in the app. If you couldn't work out that the picture is clickable how did you know how to search or access messages. I'm actually confused how you use any mobile app given they mostly all have this style.

c) It is not a traditional sort ordering though. Using the curated mode brings in entirely new content into the feed that is not in chronological e.g. followed topics, recommended topics, greater emphasis on retweets.

I think in this case it might be that you clicked through a pretty hard to miss box.

It also appeared on multiple of my accounts that were made before the switch, so this hypothesis also seems wrong.

This happens so often with so many things.

Facebook: "I haven't used Facebook in 10 years, and never bothered to unfollow things on my feed back then, but it sucks! The feed is just garbage!"

SNL: "I haven't watched SNL since the 90s. It hasn't been funny in years!"

Expensive restaurants: "I went to one Michelin star place in 2007 and it was like 3 bites of food! I don't know why people bother!"

I do occasionally have the misfortune of using twitter - sometimes a link is posted or sent to me, or I am curious if something specific is trending. It sucks ass and is unenjoyable in my opinion - the worst when someone tries to use it as a full blown blogging platform. It seems designed to exploit certain triggers for compulsive content consumption.

There are numerous similar testimonials of people that still regularly use twitter if not compulsively, so the straw men are irrelevant.

Twitter users follow people and see their posts. Their feeds are mostly their followers posts.

You ever look at the youtube home page when you're logged out? It's absolute garbage. It's also not the way most people use youtube.

Can you actually back this up with any evidence, because I don't buy it off hand. You're saying it's uncommon for a huge long tail of rare users and lurkers that just casually drop in to twitter to see some one off post/conversation from an aggregator or their friend sent them, or post/DM bitch to a company that fucked them? I have a twitter account, I have a handful of followers (all likely from more than 5 years ago), but I hardly use twitter enough to even care. And I don't think this is that rare.

> You ever look at the youtube home page when you're logged out? It's absolute garbage. It's also not the way most people use youtube.

I don't follow your point. Most people use youtube by following links from aggregators such as reddit or here. They don't actively participate in the youtube "community" with its cesspool of comments nor even subscribe (what is it - like 3 to 5 subscribers per 1000 views) - that is hardly the "vast majority".

That's a strong assertion. You have any data to back it up?

> They don't actively participate in the youtube "community" with its cesspool of comments nor even subscribe (what is it - like 3 to 5 subscribers per 1000 views) - that is hardly the "vast majority".

I think you're right about the comments and even subscriptions, but you're entirely skipping the "algorithmic" way of using YouTube, which is using the suggested videos on the homepage like the person you were replying to alluded to, as well as the related videos. Also, searching.

YouTube can and will suggest new videos from channels it has decided you like on the homepage whether you're subscribed to them or not. It will also put them in the related videos, even if they're unrelated to the video you're currently watching.

Huh? This is blatantly false. Link aggregators are not as large as you think. People go on youtube.com and watch the videos there, or check out their subscriptions, or use the search bar in youtube.

And yet its influence on media I do consume is undeniable. I dont think there are many journalists not on twitter

Defaults matter! Most people will just see the default state of things and not be too curious about ways they could change things, and never even notice this sort of setting.

And on top of that, like Facebook did long ago with its chronlogical timeline setting, it resets itself back to the algorithmic timeline periodically.

The one thing that is mighty annoying though, is how it keeps pushing "recommendations" on you. The "someone liked", "someone follows someone", this kind of stuff. If only there was a dedicated button to make someone else's tweet appear in your followers' timelines... I somehow managed to break that misfeature by muting a bunch of "words" that are apparently contained somewhere in the recommendation objects because apparently the mute feature checks not only against the text of the tweet but against some kind of serialized form of it. So I no longer have these neither on the web nor in the Android app.

I would also add ability to privately mark people as "Friend", "Collegue", "Trusted" etc so that I can influence algos to show more stuff from people I care. Facebook has this feature to mark friend as "Favorite" and it has seriously improved my newsfeed. Unfortunately, they limit it to 30 and it's just nonsensical.

Also doesn't following 5k people make your timeline way too chaotic?

We should debate idea's not authors. Anonymous Speech enables idea's to be spread not personality cults, one would thing those opposing Elon believing that people just support him because of his personality and fame would want more Anonymous Speech not less