Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I resigned from Twitter

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

821–830 of 1001 posts

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#821

Post by azekai »

smsm42 wrote: post #804
mjamil wrote: post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree that "enlightened" societies don't rely on mediating access to information as the defining tool of control; our difference of opinion is perhaps that you think of this purely as limiting information spread, where I think of it also as shaping the information for their own ends. The governments of the UK and the USA, to state two examples you mentioned, have used these tools effectively as propaganda channe…

USA is literally founded on this principle: Congress shall make no law /.../ abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press And while it talks about the Congress, it is clear why the founders considered it to be necessary - the principal value of the free and unabridged speech to forming a free society is tremendous. True, in an armed conflict, speech has been used as a weapon, and it is also true that the reality…

>As David Chappelle noted recently, "twitter is not a real place" - and doesn't need to be elevated to the position of society's gatekeeper, but rather demoted to society's cesspool. They proved themselves not up to the task to maintain robust free discourse platform - let them rot in their own bubble.

Agreed. Part of that is the 'hot take' represented by the limited characters of a tweet are inimical to nuance. So much of it is just people taking turns 'dunking' on each other, and it gets increasingly heated and rage inducing. Add to that an inflammatory algorithm, where outrage drives interaction, and of course you have a cesspit.

Part of the good thing about the old internet is when you have to construct a blog to share your thoughts, you have to be driven to actually, y'know, build something. It also has the added benefit of being relatively closed off. Now everyone has easy access to an empty field with which to yell into the void... and it turns out with that low bar and high inter-connectedness comes a lot of yelling.

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#822

Post by vadfa »

mjamil wrote: post #608

I'm in a post-Thanksgiving charitable mood, so thank you, Jack. The execution hasn't been perfect (as has been commented on ad nauseam), but Twitter is the closest to a worldwide-accessible [1] Speaker's Corner [2] I know of, and that - despite all the completely valid criticism - is a valuable public service: mediating access to information has been the defining tool of control for those in power pretty much since c…

Seems you are a liberal according to your twitter profile. This is not a dig, just saying, your experience on that platform is not the same as everybody else's, which is why I found your whole message a bit surprising.

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#823

Post by moffkalast »

8K832d7tNmiQ wrote: post #561
MisterPea wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but is Twitter really suffering with any engineering problems? I generally would like to see a CTO come in charge but here's a unique case where someone from product might be more suitable.

Their web video player is still horrendously bad and still haven't fix their buffering problem for years.

If I had a dollar for every pixel I see in twitter videos I'd have two dollars which isn't a lot but it's weird that they still somehow call them videos.

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#824

Post by bakuninsbart »

smsm42 wrote: post #804
mjamil wrote: post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree that "enlightened" societies don't rely on mediating access to information as the defining tool of control; our difference of opinion is perhaps that you think of this purely as limiting information spread, where I think of it also as shaping the information for their own ends. The governments of the UK and the USA, to state two examples you mentioned, have used these tools effectively as propaganda channe…

USA is literally founded on this principle: Congress shall make no law /.../ abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press And while it talks about the Congress, it is clear why the founders considered it to be necessary - the principal value of the free and unabridged speech to forming a free society is tremendous. True, in an armed conflict, speech has been used as a weapon, and it is also true that the reality…

Both you and the person two comments above have overtly rose-tinted glasses on the proclaimed ideas of the so-called "free societies".The founding fathers did not accidentally deny their slaves the right to free speech and a free life. It is no accident that no woman nor a man without property signed the constitution. Public discourse has been dominated by white, rich men since the inception of the US, and history is full of examples of active suppression of speech by women and minorities.

This doesn't go against the notion that a world in which the reach of speech is controlled by large tech companies is quite dystopian either, I just really don't wanna go "back to the good old times" either.

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#825

Post by salt-thrower »

Dumblydorr wrote: post #663
mjamil wrote: post #608

I'm in a post-Thanksgiving charitable mood, so thank you, Jack. The execution hasn't been perfect (as has been commented on ad nauseam), but Twitter is the closest to a worldwide-accessible [1] Speaker's Corner [2] I know of, and that - despite all the completely valid criticism - is a valuable public service: mediating access to information has been the defining tool of control for those in power pretty much since c…

Has mediating access to information been the defining tool of control for civilizations? Maybe in tyrannical, despotic societies that is true, but those don't allow Twitter today via firewalls, so that's mostly a moot point in this thread. I'd say the sword and the coin have both been far more controlling than limited information spread. What of free society? Is the government of the USA, UK, or other "enlightened" s…

> What of free society? Is the government of the USA, UK, or other "enlightened" societies throughout history relying upon censorship and denial of information? I think they're moreso allowing moneyed interests and plutocracy to have lobbying and backdoor dealings, they can easily ignore the public square most of the time.

This is definitely part of the picture. To add to this, I'll refer to Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky. "Propaganda" does still exist in modern "free societies," but it isn't overt like a 20th-century dictatorship would have been. Subtle manipulation of corporate media by monied interests to sway public opinion, combined with lobbying and corporate capture of government institutions, is more than enough to maintain the hegemony of certain narratives and power structures. I find it fascinating, and unsettling, to learn about.

So in a nutshell, controlling information and mainstream media narratives is important for the modern ruling class, but it's much more subtle than overt censorship like a dictatorship would have. Which, in my view, makes it much more advanced and insidious.

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#826

Post by gojomo »

riffic wrote: post #720
blocked_again wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FWIW, you've also championed transparency and decentralization for your platform more than any other SV social media titan Twitter don't even have an RSS feed let alone championing decentralisation.

http://cdevroe.com/2021/10/26/bluesky-status/ love this bit: "The truth is that Twitter could become decentralized almost overnight by simply adding some JSON-LD serializers, an inbox endpoint and maybe tweaking their storage schema slightly to become part of the fediverse – anyone who wouldn’t want to use twitter.com could follow twitter.com users from their own server and so on. That does not require 2 years of mak…

Indeed. If Dorsey wanted Twitter to be "open", he'd open it. Instead he's closed it & started a sideshow to further distract those who could create credible challenges to Twitter.

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#827

Post by CameronNemo »

smsm42 wrote: post #804
mjamil wrote: post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree that "enlightened" societies don't rely on mediating access to information as the defining tool of control; our difference of opinion is perhaps that you think of this purely as limiting information spread, where I think of it also as shaping the information for their own ends. The governments of the UK and the USA, to state two examples you mentioned, have used these tools effectively as propaganda channe…

USA is literally founded on this principle: Congress shall make no law /.../ abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press And while it talks about the Congress, it is clear why the founders considered it to be necessary - the principal value of the free and unabridged speech to forming a free society is tremendous. True, in an armed conflict, speech has been used as a weapon, and it is also true that the reality…

USA is literally founded on this principle:

Congress shall make no law /.../ abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press

IIRC the founders explicitly did not include that in their constitution. Hence it being called "First Amendment" rights.

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#828

Post by golergka »

thendrill wrote: post #94
golergka wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin benefits drug users and dealers every single day, and have been doing it for almost 10 years. May be in US it's different, but there's just no street drug trade anymore around here. If you want to buy weed, you have to buy bitcoin, in some shape or form.

You mean Monero thou. Why use bitcoin?

Because that's the only coin the biggest and de-facto monopoly marketplace, that processes tens of millions of dollars worth of deals per day, accepts.

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#829

Post by garmaine »

chasd00 wrote: post #650
garmaine wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He tends to focus on one or the other at a time though.

I'm sure he only focuses when things are really wrong. It must be awful to be fixing Tesla problems when SpaceX is humming along. Then switch to SpaceX when it's falling apart while Tesla is back on its feet. It's like a perpetual grass-is-greener problem regardless of which side of the fence you're on. edit: a month or two ago there was this huge increase in SpaceX development all of a sudden that has since dwindled…

Further testing at SpaceX is basically on hold until the FAA completes their review of the orbital launch facility, which they have promised to do by the end of December. Plenty of ground testing going on, albeit with less publicity.
Post reply on HN