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Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social

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Re: Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social

#211

Post by carapace »

tehlike wrote: post #178
carapace wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I agree. You're almost certainly right that this is just a false positive or a bug. I'm just pointing out that the "evil corps" stereotyped has been earned by past events. The folks who are suspicious of corporate behaviour and motives have their reasons.

Once we make peace with the fact that employers are not family, and big corps are in it for profit, some level of skepticism is warranted. I am mostly thinking attributing _everything_ to malice or profit is wrong. Even then, nearly almost everyone here is using one or the other big corp product for free or paying for it, which feels ironic too. Like yeah, evil, but i will continue to use it is a funny concept. Accep…

Well said.

Part of the problem is that different folks have different experience with and ideas about the folks running big corps, so we wind up over-generalizing and talking past each other. I did it myself above when I used "these guys" to mean a handful of bad actors, not the whole of all those companies' executive suites.

> Like yeah, evil, but i will continue to use it is a funny concept.

Yeah, I find that perplexing too.

Re: Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social

#212

Post by s1artibartfast »

fartcannon wrote: post #200
s1artibartfast wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of people that have no interest in cultivating an objective and accurate world view. "sounds plausible" goes in the "objective evidence" pile and nobody follows up to see if they were correct. What is a hypothesis here? That twitter thought they could block Mastodon and no one in the world would notice? That no one would care?

Damage control is cheap and easy.

So do you really think a team at twitter sat down and thought, lets block mastodon for a day to avoid some customer bleed, then we can do damage control, but it will be worth it in the end?

Re: Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social

#213

Post by tehlike »

daenz wrote: post #153
tehlike wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Organizations are made up of people. When you have 5000 people making small decisions with 0.1% possibility of being wrong, if have 40% of chance having at least one mistake over 5000 decisions.

People are not independent coin tosses. They coordinate, manage, overrule, scheme, discuss, and process information in strategic ways that render these kinds of extremely simplified models impossible.

They don't work on every single decision collectively.

Re: Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social

#214

Post by tehlike »

can16358p wrote: post #164
tehlike wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Design a better one and there will be companies looking to acquire you. Problem solved, in a more constructive way.

Well it's not my job, though even by looking at spam accounts on Twitter I can easily pinpoint common patterns that can be extremely successful at preventing spam at Twitter, MUCH better than blacklisting domains. It's dead obvious that they do not want it. The reasons why is beyond me.

"it's not my job".

Someone whose job it is made a few mistakes. you must have made a shit ton of mistake too. Claiming otherwise is stupid.

What you and i can pinpoint on twitter spam is independent of "everything is evil". Difference.

Re: Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social

#215

Post by dfxm12 »

dane-pgp wrote: post #207
dfxm12 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the point in saying "private company" Different rules, laws, regulations, etc. apply to private sector vs public sector. Specifically in this case, OP is implying that a theoretical public sector social network wouldn't be allowed to block linking to mastodon because of the second (EDIT: no, wait, first amendment!) amendment, but that Twitter is well within its rights since they are in the private sector. Whet…

> wouldn't be allowed to block linking to mastodon because of the second amendment I don't know how I feel about a well regulated Militia overthrowing the government to protect free software and open standards...

:)

Re: Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social

#216

Post by dane-pgp »

anotherman554 wrote: post #138
user3939382 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are a private company I've been hearing this a lot lately, surprisingly from people who consider themselves to be politically left. I say surprisingly because historically, leftist ideology has been quick to solve problems with corporate behavior with regulations, whereas traditionally it's been the right pushing laissez-faire. In any case, guys - private company doesn't mean your behaviors and policies aren't…

"I've been hearing this a lot lately, surprisingly from people who consider themselves to be politically left. I say surprisingly because historically, leftist ideology has been quick to solve problems with corporate behavior with regulations, whereas traditionally it's been the right pushing laissez-faire." On this web site when I hear people talking about controlling what social media platforms do via regulation, m…

Fortunately there are a couple of bright lines that can be drawn between those two hypothetical laws.

Firstly, there is only one front page of each edition of the NYT, and the page has a very limited data/readability capacity. On Twitter, every user's page is a front page if you want it to be (although admittedly the recommendation of people/tweets by "the algorithm" starts to feel like an editorial decision, which invites further scrutiny).

More significantly, though, once an organization has built a social or telephone network, it is actually more expensive to disconnect or delete messages based on the opinions contained within them than it is to just allow them to continue moving between users. This is in contrast to the (physical) NYT, where editors necessarily have to whitelist every piece of content, and forcing articles past that whitelist has significant cost implications (even if no one reads them).

Re: Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social

#217

Post by tehlike »

ekianjo wrote: post #130
kaiken1987 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the difference is that incompetence is far more plentiful than malice. It's an odds game. Everyone makes mistakes, few actions people in general take are done in malice.

Odds are not unviversally random. Like what happened at Exxon was more often malice than incompetence.

Is every exxon decision malice then? like opening a gas station in your neighborhood because it didn't have any? Sure it has profit in mind, but is it evil or malice?

Re: Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social

#218

Post by Osmose »

fartcannon wrote: post #195
Osmose wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everything needs to be an absolute rule, this totally looks like a small bug on Twitter's part, and if it takes like weeks to fix then you can decide "okay that's a little more suspicious". What's the point of making this particular moment an immediate, gigantic moral issue?

I prefer the other way around. Twitter is probably acting bad. If they update it immediately, apologize, then we can assume its not an issue. What value do you get by giving them the benefit of doubt? You just give them a way to gently manipulate you if you assume every little thing that's bad is an accident.

The alternative to "Twitter is acting bad" doesn't have to be "Twitter is completely innocent", it can be "Huh that sucks, wonder what caused that". You don't have to make an immediate judgement call on the morality of every tiny bug.

The value I get from that is not spending energy judging everything immediately as soon as I see it, which, in a world with social media, is a significant savings.

Re: Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social

#219

Post by dfxm12 »

lapcat wrote: post #170
dfxm12 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the point in saying "private company" Different rules, laws, regulations, etc. apply to private sector vs public sector. Specifically in this case, OP is implying that a theoretical public sector social network wouldn't be allowed to block linking to mastodon because of the second (EDIT: no, wait, first amendment!) amendment, but that Twitter is well within its rights since they are in the private sector. Whet…

> OP is implying that a theoretical public sector social network I dispute that the OP was implying or even thinking anything about a theoretical public sector social network.

OK.

Re: Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social

#220

Post by jdauriemma »

fartcannon wrote: post #27
tehlike wrote: post #11

I bet it's likely a bug. There were times i wasnt able to post LinkedIn urls in the past. I bet it's their crawler/integrity service having hard time. Never assume malice when it can be sufficiently explained by a bug or incompetence.

Nowadays, maybe let's assume malice. Maybe its a false positive and a bunch of people stop using twitter, Facebook, google, apple, or Microsoft as a result. That is less harmful (some might say it's good) than the opposite, where big corps use our collective desire to forgive as a tool to exploit us. You can apply that saying to your wife and kids. Or your neighbour. Big corps that make money off exploiting peoples n…

Maybe this is a bit too forgiving of Twitter, but do they even see Mastodon as a threat worthy of stifling in this manner?
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