Live data from Hacker News

A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

fanbyte.com

121–130 of 577 posts

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#121

This 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.

I think your suggestion is better than the alternative we have now - but I think its not the right one either.

What if the majority of people strongly disagree with a minority groups statements or cries for help? What if the users join a mass flagging / downvoting / reporting campaign (either purposefully, or stand-alone-complex style) to exclude these users.

If the statement is "Maybe the majority is telling you they don't like you, asshole" then consider the 1950/1960's. I would state that a significant portion of the US was torn on whether a group should be treated the same as other groups. During that time, I am almost positive if we had this policy, the minority group would have been 'grayed out', 'hidden from indexing', 'marked content as controversial.'

Do I have a better suggestion? No. No I don't. I think yours is better than what we have now, but the tyranny of the majority is a thing.

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The irony here is that I deleted my FB years ago and back then at least, FB only permitted deleting one photo at a time. Took me well over an hour to delete all of my photos. In hindsight, I should've just done something obviously ban-able instead.

Has the deleting single photo thing resolved by now? I too remember deleting close to 100s of photos one by one.

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Twitte…

For users who are banned from these services, they have to do just what you say.

Lets not confuse ourselves though - the vast majority of America does not feel the way you and I do. My kiddos swim team is on facebook, thats how we track and sign up for service, and if we lose our access we are excluded. Asking everyone on the team to move to email is a nonstarter.

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#124

This 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 would love to know a way this can be solved as its painting a depressing picture.

When a giant corporation says “here’s our private property, use it as your public square”, say “fuck off”.

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Twitte…

Almost nobody in my circles uses email for personal conversations anymore. People don’t share their email when you meet at a conference. You don’t join the X tech discussion group over email (anymore).

This also implies only talking to people you already know, no opportunities to join or start communities.

And that’s still besides the point: just imagine that your email account is cancelled tomorrow because they don’t like something you said in a mailing list.

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#126
post #10

> Overnight, I received a response that my appeal had been denied. So a human being, someone who works at Twitter dot com, looked at that video, looked back at the rule it was breaking, looked once again at the video, and went “Yeah, this all checks out.” My guess is that appeals are either processed by some simple code or offloaded to some cheap labour service - such as Amazon Mechanical Turkey or some sweatshop in…

I would be surprised if every initial appeal isn't deflected by automation, as first step, just to fend off "annoying users" and get rid of those who don't care.

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#127
post #69

This 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…

Quoted post unavailable.

Forcing users to acknowledge their sins on a platform, when none are committed, is an issue. It reminds me of struggle sessions.

I will use an extreme case (unrealistic) to prove the point: If you were forced, every day, to say 'XXXXXX cereal company is the best in the world, and they are greeeat.' before you were allowed to eat your toast, you will eventually start to believe this. Ok, maybe not you - but humanity isn't as strong willed as you are perhaps.

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only night club.

Ironically this is how night clubs work, too. One gets a monopoly/gets popular and everyone goes there for a time until it because uncool and people move on to the next cool club. In social media see LiveJournal -> MySpace -> Facebook -> Tiktok. Each had a monopoly at the time until something cooler came along. The tenure also, ironically, seems to be around the same duration of a popular nightclub. Also, don't mista…

This is not a good take. First, it's not true that the most popular club has a monopoly in any meaningful sense. But even granting you that farcical premise: any "monopoly" effect is on a city-wide basis and does not scale, and does not trend towards global winner-take-all outcomes that social media does.

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#129
My Twitter account has been suspended multiple times, the last time for an obvious joke. As with the article author here, Twitter reviewed my appeal and denied it. https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/twitter4.html

In the end I caved, giving Twitter my phone number and deleting the tweet, because I need my Twitter account for professional purposes. But now guess what, there was a data breach, and hackers are selling millions of Twitter user phone numbers and email addresses. https://restoreprivacy.com/twitter-vulnerability-exposes-5-m...

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#130
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is an equilibrium point beyond which mass protests and regulations pressure start. Every company is iterating and optimizing to find this equilibrium point, and then stays slightly behind it.
Post reply on HN