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Welcome to Hell, Elon

theverge.com

221–230 of 315 posts

Re: Welcome to Hell, Elon

#221

The key quote which other comments are overlooking: > Here are some examples: you can write as many polite letters to advertisers as you want, but you cannot reasonably expect to collect any meaningful advertising revenue if you do not promise those advertisers “brand safety.” That means you have to ban racism, sexism, transphobia, and all kinds of other speech that is totally legal in the United States but reveals p…

To play the devil's advocate: So why haven't advertisers abandoned Fox News? As long as Musk limits his newly acquired toy to being no worse than Fox News (which is plenty bad!), he can still keep advertising dollars coming in.

Because Fox News is stable, banal, they play the respectability card. Internet users on the other hand can be fucking volatile. Advertisers don't care how hot the takes are on cable news, they just want to sell shit to the elderly, they do care if their ads are placed around overt fascists because that's where their association attracts bad press. Same thing that happened to Youtube in 2017. People gave a bunch of large brands bad mainstream press because their ads played on fringe/conspiratorial/violent content and they, responding to the bad press they receivdd specifically, gave Youtube a heavy ultimatum about keeping ads off that sort of content before they abandon the platform. The rest is history.

Re: Welcome to Hell, Elon

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It wasn't until I moderated a community myself that it finally clicked. The key is that each community needs to moderate itself. The second you give one entity centralised or external control over moderation it can be used for terrible things. I can't think of any solution for the toxic communities other than to cut themoff and let them fester. The youtube/facebook/etc strategy of 'all engagement is good, show them…

> The key is that each community needs to moderate itself. The second you give one entity centralised or external control over moderation it can be used for terrible things. Do you have any examples of this in practice? I'm not saying I for "1 person has all the power" but I'm not aware of any community that doesn't require 1+ moderators who have the power to hide/remove/block/etc, even HN has that.

Add to that, dang also has the power to unhide, unflag, etc. when he notices brigading. Giving the reins entirely to the community totally works for a very small community. Not the whole internet.

Re: Welcome to Hell, Elon

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It wasn't until I moderated a community myself that it finally clicked. The key is that each community needs to moderate itself. The second you give one entity centralised or external control over moderation it can be used for terrible things. I can't think of any solution for the toxic communities other than to cut themoff and let them fester. The youtube/facebook/etc strategy of 'all engagement is good, show them…

> The key is that each community needs to moderate itself. The second you give one entity centralised or external control over moderation it can be used for terrible things. Do you have any examples of this in practice? I'm not saying I for "1 person has all the power" but I'm not aware of any community that doesn't require 1+ moderators who have the power to hide/remove/block/etc, even HN has that.

In traditional fora/irc/whatever or even reddit to some extent (subreddit moderators follow the pattern, admins do not) the moderators are the founders of the community or are selected by then community via social processes. The structure resembles a village. Mastodon is the most clear example. Mostof the small servers are their own community with a common interest, usually funded by its members directly or by someone doing it to henefit the members. 'If you don't like it, leave' is a valid sentiment because the moderators are not holding your social network hostage and don't get to choose which other communities you can see or participate in.

In the facebook/tiktok/google/etc model, moderators are minimum wage workers with moderation objectives set by people who own the platform to satisfy advertisers or other central authorities. The structure resembles a mall or maybe a state. The penalty for non-compliance is isolation, and in many cases for facebook and google restriction of access to real services in the real world.

HN fits neither neatly, but is slightly more towards the first.

Re: Welcome to Hell, Elon

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That’s like someone who has no idea how to cook leaving a bad review for food they could never hope to improve on Ignoring the context of the article, I don’t believe that the example you’ve given here is really fair. It’s perfectly valid to review something which you could not create. If we excluded that whole category, then reviews would mostly cease to exist, and only peer review would be possible.

IMHO, the world would be a better place of people who're qualified in a particular subject would opine in their area of expertise. Nowadays, we have every Tom, Dick and Harry commenting on anything and everything, regardless of how informed, educated or even experienced in the area they want to criticize.

> IMHO, the world would be a better place of people who're qualified in a particular subject would opine in their area of expertise.

You can go to sites or youtubers that specialise with reviewing stuff.

The problem is that it's just opinion of a single person & they can be easily bought or swayed so even if you have "experts" reviewing it that doesn't mean quality.

Also don't need an expert to tell you some piece of shit of a device fell apart after a month...

But I do wish that the reviews on sites were actually stuff people write month+ after getting the thing instead of "well, I got it, it works, I tried it for 5 minutes"

Re: Welcome to Hell, Elon

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of free speech is to push the line. Imagine if people stuck with the speech standards of the 1950s. There would be plenty of people here who would be disenfranchised.

With the government? Yes. Within a community? It's more complicated than that. Is someone coming into a community posting the n-word or just being incredibly abrasive/offensive "pushing the line" or just being a troll? Online communities get to set their own rules and if you want to buck that trend then try to get support to change those rules or create your own community where you can make the rules.

it looks like support to change the rules has been obtained.

Re: Welcome to Hell, Elon

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of free speech is to push the line. Imagine if people stuck with the speech standards of the 1950s. There would be plenty of people here who would be disenfranchised.

The point of free speech is to be free. Pushing the line constantly is a tactic that some argue (or rationalize) is a way to maximize that freedom, but it's not the purpose, any more than the purpose of a right to bear arms is to get as many questionable shootings as possible.

Now that I think of it, you're right. I shouldn't have used the word "purpose". A proper reformulation of what I meant would be that free speech will, as a property of its existence, push the line against someone's expectations somewhere at some point in time and that denying free speech many decades ago would have inhibited several rights and expressions of rights we take for granted today.

Re: Welcome to Hell, Elon

#227
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like bewilderment on how many times someone can not deliver on promise yet still get people throwing money at them

Elon predicted in 2013 that Tesla would be shipping 500,000 cars a year by 2020. That was a crazy insane prediction that he delivered on, among many other similar predictions. Nobody expects all predictions to come true -- professional futurists have a batting rate of about 10%.

I'm talking about stuff people preordered and still didn't got, not on his predictions.

Re: Welcome to Hell, Elon

#228

Can't wait to see that hot takes from the free speech absolutists who have never experienced that first-hand on a platform they frequent regularly. We already know what that looks like, it's 4chan/8kun/etc and surprise, it's absolute shit.

There are numerous examples of tweets which aren't remotely vulgar or crude which were removed from twitter. There is no need to resort to speech like in the platforms you mentioned to bring twitter closer to a true free speech platform.

Re: Welcome to Hell, Elon

#229

Never bet against Elon. Starlink alone will make more money than twitter ever could. If you don’t see the potential for Twitter. That’s fine. But don’t write an article about how it’s “hell” if you don’t have the vision for how to improve it. That’s like someone who has no idea how to cook leaving a bad review for food they could never hope to improve on. If Elon listened to Haters/Doubters like this Verge journo, th…

Fanboying Elon on the twitter deal of all things is just hilarious. He paid $44B with no diligence for a company with hardly a billion worth of revenue , stagnating growth, a last-generation social graph, an incredibly toxic userbase, and a very demoralized staff--and he has no plan for how to fix it either. This will go down as one of the worst deals in history and here you are saying "but Starlink".

What are the generations of social graphs?

Re: Welcome to Hell, Elon

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, I used to be a free speech absolutist when I was younger, back when I thought the world was black and white and that simple ideas could "solve everything". Then I participated in forums/groups that had zero moderation and it was hell. Even then I didn't recognize the issues fully. It wasn't until I moderated a community myself that it finally clicked. I tried to be unbiased as possible but that lead to me silenc…

> It wasn't until I moderated a community myself that it finally clicked. The key is that each community needs to moderate itself. The second you give one entity centralised or external control over moderation it can be used for terrible things. I can't think of any solution for the toxic communities other than to cut themoff and let them fester. The youtube/facebook/etc strategy of 'all engagement is good, show them…

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