Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And what’s more, you can still read them if you’re banned. That is changing and in many places already no longer true.
Such as?
Instagram.
A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter
71–80 of 577 posts
Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Worth pointing out that more life exists outside the corporate run stages. Part of their trick is to make you think that the only way of life is via their platforms. I’m not and never have been a Twitter or or TikTok or Facebook member.
I also avoid those platforms but that also means self-exclusion from entire communities. I've seen large groups (DnD groups, gaming/sports clubs, obscure tech forums etc) being swallowed wholesale by Facebook, then Reddit and now Discord. That may not matter for a random game group but unfortunately Twitter is where most of the worlds journalists post and network.
Where I live now, most sports and hobby clubs coordinate solely via Facebook.
If you don't have a FB account (like myself, currently), you are shit out of luck when it comes to finding out what's going on where/when.
Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter
#73Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter
#74Its clear that the broken element in this process is not the AI banning the writer of the post, but the poor presumably human review
Good human reviews are, well, nearly impossible at the scale of Twitter or Google. It would require employing hundreds of thousands of reviewers, training them, and paying them decent salaries for one of the most horrible jobs in the world. So, everybody is trying to automate as much as possible in this area. I am sure that in this case, if there is a human even involved in the escalation, it takes them a few seconds…
It's the year 2032, and Wings, Jack Dorsey's self-driving taxi service, is a hit. Because Wings doesn't have to pay human drivers, most of their rides are free. The company makes money by showing ads during rides and selling data about users's movement habits. Wings is not profitable yet, but revenue is through the roof, and the company is expected to IPO for a zillion dollars.
Unfortunately, Wings's self-driving AI is much likely to destroy property than a human driver. As a result, some members of the public have called for every Wings car to be remotely controlled by a human. However, others push back. Employing good human drivers would be nearly impossible at the scale of Wings. Here is an interview with a poor grandmother who relies on Wings to see her family, and here's how a nonprofit uses Wings to find homes for lost puppies. You don't really don't want to go back to paid Uber and Lyft rides, do you?
There are a couple of problems with this analogy. But the core point is this—if a company can't sustain a key aspect of their business at scale, then perhaps they shouldn't be able to scale.
Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter
#75This is how big tech does damage to humans. Love it or hate it, the online world is our current public square. A public square, in the united states, has typically been an area where people can shout out their concerns or whatever they want to anyone who can listen and the government cannot stop it. Currently, our public squares are owned by private megacorporations that not only ban people for reasons many people ag…
I always wonder why not just rely on the same user reporting and automation systems to downrank, gray out, hide from indexing, mark content as controversial, instead of banning entire user accounts?
Then repeat offenders can be banned with good reason. It seems absurdly heavy handed to remove legitimate accounts, irreversibly and without recourse, for a single post or comment, this should not be legal.
Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter
#76This is how big tech does damage to humans. Love it or hate it, the online world is our current public square. A public square, in the united states, has typically been an area where people can shout out their concerns or whatever they want to anyone who can listen and the government cannot stop it. Currently, our public squares are owned by private megacorporations that not only ban people for reasons many people ag…
The public square argument is a distraction and it goes nowhere. What needs to be called out is Twitter just being terrible at enforcing their own TOS, and the human review process apparently having no oversight or consequences for responses like the author received.
This is a straightforward problem of bad and inconsistent service quality.
Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter
#77This is how big tech does damage to humans. Love it or hate it, the online world is our current public square. A public square, in the united states, has typically been an area where people can shout out their concerns or whatever they want to anyone who can listen and the government cannot stop it. Currently, our public squares are owned by private megacorporations that not only ban people for reasons many people ag…
Eh, I don't buy the public square argument. The online world is a cesspool filled with bots and crazy people. I don't need to voice my opinion on Twitter, nor is Twitter a place I need to be . What matters is how we relate to the people around us, in our communities. Your neighbor isn't a bot, the barista at the coffee shop isn't a russian troll. We need to stop taking the "online world" so seriously and connect with…
The real world is also a cesspool filled with crazy people and people trying to abuse the system (something analogous to bots). Also spammers and harassers.
The difference is that on the real world public squares there’s no amplification effect that we have on those platforms, save for some very closely watched exceptions (politicians, celebrities). Also very little anonymity.
Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am so tired of the public square analogy. You don’t need Twitter. You don’t need Facebook. You don’t need Reddit. And what’s more, you can still read them if you’re banned. If you think it’s ok for a restaurant to turn you away because of a dress code, then this is a non-issue. The are several major platforms you can use as a megaphone, just like you have plenty of restaurants to choose from for your meal. If you a…
That’s a very naive argument. If your friends and family are on Facebook, your work contacts across the country are on Twitter, the only forums left alive on the web are on Reddit, how can you not need them? These things have replaced existing connections you used to have via other channels. You can not step away without severing them now, it is no longer a matter of personal choice.
“These things have replaced existing connections”
I hear this now and then and it puzzles me. All my personal online and business communication is through email, with some friends and groups on WhatsApp and Telegram. People sometimes talk to me on Twitter but, if I want to talk to them, I steer them to email. I seems really risky, as we see in so many incidents reported here, to actually rely on platforms like Twitter for maintaining connections.
Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter
#79«Turns out that maybe we shouldn't be letting AI handle moderation.»
It's always the same... People speak up and things suddenly are a problem ("turns out that...") only when the bad thing has happened to them.
If there's any actual point that we should take home is that bad consequences are going to happen, and we'd all better listen up when other people warn us about these things before it's too late.
AI moderation is just one of the topics we are all generally ignoring.
Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter
#80This is how big tech does damage to humans. Love it or hate it, the online world is our current public square. A public square, in the united states, has typically been an area where people can shout out their concerns or whatever they want to anyone who can listen and the government cannot stop it. Currently, our public squares are owned by private megacorporations that not only ban people for reasons many people ag…
I’m ex Facebook software engineer (even had selfie with Zuckerberg as the avatar picture) who got banned on Facebook. Up to this day I have no clue what for. But it’s extremely annoying because I lost lots of photos that I didn’t back up and close to thousand contracts of people. Users should definitely own this data, not a corporation.
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