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Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

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Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#781

Post by haberman »

pstuart wrote: post #778
haberman wrote: post #774

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter made it impossible to Tweet links to the story. A dialog box showed an error message if you tried to share the link: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/10/twitter-facebook-blo... This is an extraordinary technological measure. Plenty of things posted on Twitter turn out to be false, misleading, or not worth shining light on. This one turned out to be true, and yet earned the most extreme sanction Twitter is…

What turned out to be true? The findings per the GOP Senate committee: https://www.grassley.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/grassley_johns...

Tens of thousands of emails recovered from the laptop turned out to be authentic, including the emails that formed the basis of the NYPost story.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#782

Post by danans »

Manuel_D wrote: post #773
danans wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Plenty of people disagree, and do indeed claim that not letting a transgender woman compete against natal females is harassment towards transgender people. Heck, I've even seen people claim that this is genocide. It's a ridiculous claim but so what? It has no teeth anyways. Nobody gets suspended from mainstream social media for simply expressing opposition to transgender gender athletics. They get suspended for act…

> Nobody gets suspended from mainstream social media for simply expressing opposition to transgender gender athletics. This is untrue, people are indeed banned for this: https://www.pcgamer.com/politics-streamer-destiny-receives-i...

From that same article it says that he was banned for "Promoting, encouraging, or facilitating the discrimination or denigration of a group of people based on their protected characteristics". That is harassment, not expressing an opinion.

All you did was repeat the banned individual's own opinion about why they were banned. Of course, you are free to think Twitch is lying about its reasons for the ban, but you've offered no evidence of that.

According to that article, the individual also had a history of encouraging the murder of protestors by white militias on Twitch, so sounds like they had plenty of grounds on which to ban him already, and perhaps they finally just got around to it.

It undermines your argument to use someone like that as an example.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#783

Post by rglover »

etchalon wrote: post #777
rglover wrote: post #736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Demanding? No. I think it's a smart business decision and removes a ton of overhead and stress. And no, App.net was Dalton Caldwell's halfhearted attempt (the UI was okay at best) after Twitter already had the network effect in motion (six years after Twitter launched).

There are no successful "pay for access" social media networks, and the argument that Twitter's dominance some how held App.net back ignores all the other social networks that succeeded despite being founded after Twitter.

Yes. The reason a social network works is because of its brand, adoption, and network effects—not features (App.net sounds like a Boomer social network).

Twitter is so well-established that introducing a premium paid version would be de-facto successful—if done properly, not like Twitter Blue—for producing revenue. Especially because so many people rely on it to communicate.

A rough example:

Twitter Basic = Free. Follow up to 50 people. Bookmark up to 100 tweets. 140 character limit. Ad supported.

Twitter Pro = $5/month. Follow up to 500 people. Unlimited bookmarking. 280 character limit. Up to 10 minute videos. Customized ads.

Twitter Business = $10/month. Follow up to 2500 people + all of the above.

Twitter Elite = $15/month. Elite Checkmark, unlimited follows, all of the above, + 420 character limit and up to 30 minute videos.

---

It can certainly be done, but it requires creativity and speed. Both of which waved bye bye to Silicon Valley about 10 years ago so it will likely be a mediocre version of the above at best.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#784

Post by danans »

motohagiography wrote: post #767
danans wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Hate," is a weak substitute because it is so vague we can apply it to anything That is a big stretch. Hate can't be applied to many things, including disagreements like this comment. But it can be pretty clearly applied to statements that, if carried out in life, would deny another person or peoples' human rights. Another is denigration or mocking someone on the basis of things that can't or shouldn't have to chan…

> How can you identify this systematically (vs it being just your opinion), but not identify hate speech? What I think distinguishes malice is the prosecution example. Where if someone makes an argument about you personally, and they are unable to abstract the idea from you personally as an individual, that is acting with malintent toward you. Antagonizing someone personally by trying to scandalize them in the eyes o…

> Hate is something we only recently started accusing others of.

Because hate was normalized before, just like child abuse, spousal abuse, and any number of other terrible things that we call out by name now.

Just because we didn't have a general word for what inspired lynchings doesn't mean it didn't exist.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#786

Post by shadowgovt »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #629
ufo wrote: post #586

In the US, where Twitter & Facebook are dominant, the current consensus in the public mind is that political polarization and radicalization are driven by the social media algorithms. However, I have always felt that this explanation was lacking. Here in Brazil we have many of the same problems but the dominant social media are Whatsapp group chats, which have no algorithms whatsoever (other than invisible spam filte…

This to me is a vital point. One of the things rarely touched on about Twitter / FB et al are that they are transmission platforms and then a discovery / recommendation layer on top. The "algorithm" is this layer on top and it is assumed that this actively sorts people into their bubbles and people passively follow - there is much discussion about splitting the companies AT&T style to improve matters. But countries w…

This explanation would also indicate why we had less of this issue in the pre-Internet era of broadcast media.

Broadcast is centralizing the conversation, and to maximize viewership / listenership they are encouraged to talk about a broad variety of things... But they're the ones doing the talking.

Apart from choosing to tune into specialized shows, there's less self-sorting possible when the channels and content are finite. You can't easily just tune into the stories you want to hear on the six o'clock news; someone else is deciding relevance and the topics chosen to be relevant are seen by everyone.

But either introduce bidirectional communication or the modern cable dynamic of a thousand channels, and that homogenization goes away.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#787

Post by pstuart »

haberman wrote: post #781
pstuart wrote: post #778

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What turned out to be true? The findings per the GOP Senate committee: https://www.grassley.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/grassley_johns...

Tens of thousands of emails recovered from the laptop turned out to be authentic, including the emails that formed the basis of the NYPost story.

My original comment in this thread never contested that. There's worthy conjecture of the provenance of same, but that's a different discussion.

What was found to be true was that Hunter Biden was open to profiting from his association with his father (among other distasteful things).

What has not been found to be true (read the report and tell me otherwise), and that is that Joe Biden himself was corrupt and sold favors. If you cite the "10% for the big guy" quote, you also have to acknowledge that it was ready to be offered, but never shown to be accepted.

Don't you find it odd that will all the investigation that happened by his political enemies that Joe Biden was never charged with anything? Do you think that they would pounce on any opportunity to do so?

But it's been shown by people such as yourself that actual guilt doesn't matter -- just the accusation is good enough.

Also note that I offer no defense to Hunter because what he did was sleazy. I also note that those obsessed with the affaire d'laptop don't care about the corruption of his predecessor and family (specifically his son in law), which was far more vast in scope and in venality.

I am against corruption regardless of which party engages in it. Would you say the same is true for you, and if so, demonstrate that in some way?

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#789

Post by throwzway7524s »

While the points made were interesting, I had to stop reading almost half way because I found this post insincere and way too manipulative. And unlike most people on HN, I am very tolerant of marketing and enjoy receiving unsollicited commercial offers via email. This is the first time in many years that someone puts me off like this author, despite the fact that the points made are quite interesting.

However his content marketing scheme just felt way too inauthentic for me and made me feel that this guy isn't here to educate me, doesn't have my best interest in mind and does not give a crap about me.

Just posted it because many people on HN are "cargo-culting" (as people say here) tech figures, so wanted to advise people not to imitate this kind of marketing.

I guess my real problem here is that his product plugs are way too intellectually dishonest.

Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

#790

Post by largbae »

This thread was a great read, even the tree parts, but it fails to address the line which I feel that social media crossed in 2020: I was inattentively ok with the behavioral spam filtering, I didn't notice it but very likely would have appreciated it if I had.

The line was crossed by fact checks and user bans that were clearly all about content and not about machine-detectable behavior patterns. This thread seems to avoid or ignore that category of moderation.

And I hope the new Twitter does too.

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