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

Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 975 posts

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#151

Post by rchaud »

pjc50 wrote: post #147
heed wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What got me was him weaving in (2-3 times) self promotion tweets of some tree planting company he funds/founded(?). He basically personally embedded ads into his thread, which is actually kind of smart I suppose, but very confusing as a reader.

Kind of genius to put it in the middle. Most normal people write a tweet that blows up and then have to append "Check out my soundcloud!" on the end. Or an advert for the nightsky lamp.

That was the middle? I stopped reading once it got to 'here's my exciting new gig about trees' bit.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#152

Post by mikkergp »

atchoo wrote: post #76

I think you have to be quite credulous to engage in this topic of "twitter moderation" as if it's in good faith. It's not about about creating a good experience for users, constructive debate or even money. It's ALL about political influence. > Iʻm heartened to know that @DavidSacks is involved. I'm not. I doubt he is there because Twitter is like Zenefits, it's because his preoccupation over the last few years has b…

Yeah, I saw David Sacks tweet:

“ The entitled elite is not mad that they have to pay $8/month. They’re mad that anyone can pay $8/month.”

There must be quite a few people in here who are well versed in customer relations, at least in the context of a startup, can anyone explain to me why Musk and Sacks seem to have developed the strategy of insulting their customers and potential customers?

I can think of two reasons

1. They think twitter has a big enough most of obsessed people that they can het away with whatever they want.

2. They think that there really is a massive group of angry “normies” they can rile up to pay $8 a month for twitter blue, but isn’t ironically the goal of twitter blue to get priority access to the “anointed elite”? For sure I’m not paying $8 a month to get access to the feeds of my friends and business associates.

David Sacks’ tweet does feel very Trumpian in a way though, which supports the notion of bringing trump back and starting the free speech social network.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#153

Post by dariusj18 »

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #113
dariusj18 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems apt that the most engaged comment in the thread is a meta comment which derails any conversation about the content of the post itself.

The medium is the message.

But also an example of how moderation or lack therein would help to serve a particular end goal. ex. HackerNews is a pretty well moderated forum, however sometimes the content (PC being related to technology) is within the rules, but the behavior it elicited in the other users is detrimental to the overall experience.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#154

Post by ilyt »

mbesto wrote: post #120
lm28469 wrote: post #11

Reading these threads on twitter is like listening to a friend having a bad mdma trip replaying his whole emotional life to you in a semi incoherent diarrhea like stream of thoughts Please write a book, or at the very least an article... posting on twitter is like writing something on a piece of paper, showing it to your best friend and worst enemy before throwing it in the trash

And hilariously he starts with "How do you solve the content moderation problems on Twitter?" and never actually answer it. Just rambles on about a dissection of the problem. Guess we know now why content moderation was never "solved" at Reddit, nor will it ever be.

He kinda did in roundabout way; the "perfect" moderation, even if possible, will turn it into nice and cultured place to have discussion and that doesn't bring controversy and sell ads.

You would have way less media "journalists" making a fuss about what someone said on that social network and would have problems just getting it to be popular, let alone displace any of the big ones. It would maybe be possible with existing one but that's a ton of work and someone needs to pay for that work.

And it's entirely possible for smaller community to have that, but the advantage with this is small community about X will also have moderators that care about X so

* any on-topic bollocks can be spotted by mods and it is no longer "unknown language"

* any off-topic bollocks can be just dismissed with "this is a forum about X, if you don't like it go somewhere else

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#155

Post by j33zusjuice »

aniforprez wrote: post #85
polytely wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are you reading on the computer? maybe thats the disconnect. for me each tweet has around 4 lines of text. so it reads more like the post you are reading now. where each tweet is a decent chunk of text. making the reading experience only marginally worse than reading something on hacker news.

The amount of UI noise around each tweet and how much you have to scroll, coupled with the need to trigger new loads once Twitter has truncated the number of replies and also HOW MUCH YOU HAVE TO SCROLL makes this a terrible experience I understand why people tweet rather than write blogs. Twitter gives more visibility and is a far lower barrier of entry than sitting down and writing an article or a blog. That Twitte…

No post body was provided.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#156

Post by belorn »

thesuitonym wrote: post #62
belorn wrote: post #20

> Moderating spam is very interesting: it is almost universally regarded as okay to ban (i.e. CENSORSHIP) but spam is in no way illegal. Interesting, in my country spam is very much illegal and I would hazard a guess that it is also illegal in the US, similar to how littering, putting up posters on peoples buildings/cars/walls, graffiti (a form of spam), and so on is also illegal. If I received the amount of spam I g…

Unsolicited phone calls are somewhat illegal, but it's dependent on circumstances. It's the same with email spam and mail spam. One person's spam is another person's cold call. Where do you draw the line? Is mailing a flier with coupons spam? Technically yes, but some people find value in it. In the US, spam is protected speech, but as always, no company is required to give anybody a platform.

It is dependent on circumstances, and the people who would draw the line in the end would be the government followed by the court.

Not all speech is protected speech. Graffiti is speech, and the words being spoken could be argued as protected, but the act of spraying other people properties with it is not protected. Free speech rights does not overwrite other rights. As a defense in a court I would not bet my money on free speech in order to get away with crimes that happens to involves speech.

Historically the US court has defined speech into multiple different categories. One of those are called fraudulent speech which is not protected by free speech rights. An other category is illustrated with the anti-spam law in Washington State, which was found to not be in violation of First Amendment rights because it prevent misleading emails. Washington’s statue regulate deceptive commercial speech and thus passed the constitutional test. An other court ruling, this one in Maryland, confirmed that commercial speech was less protected than other forms of speech and that commercial speech had no protection when it was demonstrably false.

In theory a spammer could make non-commercial, non-misleading, non-fraudulent speech, and a site like twitter would then actually have to think about questions like first-amendment. I can't say I have ever received or seen spam like that.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#157

Post by pjc50 »

lm28469 wrote: post #11

Reading these threads on twitter is like listening to a friend having a bad mdma trip replaying his whole emotional life to you in a semi incoherent diarrhea like stream of thoughts Please write a book, or at the very least an article... posting on twitter is like writing something on a piece of paper, showing it to your best friend and worst enemy before throwing it in the trash

The core is really:

> https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1586956650455265281

"Hereʻs the answer everyone knows: there IS no principled reason for banning spam. We ban spam for purely outcome-based reasons:

It affects the quality of experience for users we care about, and users having a good time on the platform makes it successful."

And also this Chinese Room argument: "once again, I challenge you to think about it this way: could you make your content moderation decisions even if you didnʻt understand the language they were being spoken in?""

In other words, there are certain kinds of post which trigger escalating pathological behavior - more posts - which destroy the usability platform for bystanders by flooding it. He argues that it doesn't matter what these posts mean or whose responsibility is it for the escalation, just the simple physics of "if you don't remove these posts and stop more arriving, your forum will die".

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#158

Post by rchaud »

drewbeck wrote: post #145
lm28469 wrote: post #11

Reading these threads on twitter is like listening to a friend having a bad mdma trip replaying his whole emotional life to you in a semi incoherent diarrhea like stream of thoughts Please write a book, or at the very least an article... posting on twitter is like writing something on a piece of paper, showing it to your best friend and worst enemy before throwing it in the trash

There’s a study to be done on the polarization around twitter threads. I have zero problem with them and find overall that lots of great ideas are posted in threads, and the best folks doing it end up with super cogent and well written pieces. I find it baffling how many folks are triggered by them and really hate them!

This is likely because threads are a "high engagement" signal for Twitter and therefore prone to being gamed.

There are courses teaching people how to game the Twitter algo. One of those took off significantly in the past 18 months. You can tell by the number of amateurs creating threads on topics far beyond their reach. The purpose of these threads is for it to show up on people's feeds under the "Topic" section.

For example, I often see see random posts from "topics" Twitter thinks I like (webdev, UI/UX, cats, old newspaper headlines). I had to unsubscribe from 'webdev' and "UI/UX" because the recommended posts were all growth hackers. It wasn't always that way.

I'm not the only one, others have commented on it as well, including a well known JS developer:

https://twitter.com/wesbos/status/1587071684539973633

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#159

Post by sweetheart »

I'm amazed at the number of people in this thread who are annoyed that someone would insert mention of a carbon capture initiative into an unrelated discussion. The author is clearly tired of answering the same question, as stated in the first tweet, and is desperately trying to get people to think more critically about the climate crisis that is currently causing the sixth mass extinction event in the history of the planet.

Being annoyed that someone "duped" you into reading about the climate crisis is incredibly frustrating to activists because it's SO important to be thinking about and working on, and yet getting folks to put energy into even considering climate crisis is like pulling teeth.

I wonder if any of the folks complaining about the structure of the tweets has stopped to think about why the author feels compelled to "trick" us into reading about carbon capture.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#160

Post by P_I_Staker »

mikkergp wrote: post #77
P_I_Staker wrote: post #63

Key word here: ex (joking)... but seriously I'm absolutely baffled why someone would look to a former reddit exec for advice on moderation. I guess you could say that they have experience, having made all the mistakes, and figured it out through trial and error! This seems to be his angle. What I got from the whole reddit saga is how horrible the decision making was, and won't be looking to them for sage advice. Thes…

Who is doing a good job at scale? Is there really anyone we can look to other than people who “have experience, having made all the mistakes, and figured it out through trial and error”?

Sorry if this wasn't clear, but that's just his perspective. Mine is that they're a bunch of clowns with little to offer anyone. Who cares what this person thinks more than you, I, or a player for the Miami Dolphins.

Twitter is going to have to moderate at least exploitative and a ton of abusive content, eventually. I don't understand how this rant is helpful in the slightest. Seemed like a bunch of mumbo jumbo.

You do have a good point about there not being very many good actors, if any.

Post reply on HN