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“Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted and demonetized”

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Re: “Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted and demonetized”

#261

Post by trompetenaccoun »

phphphphp wrote: post #246
trompetenaccoun wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>people will know about it (a lot of retweets) Yeah, unless those get suppressed too which is what currently happens on social media sites like Facebook, Reddit and (pre-Musk) Twitter. There is no way authorities can gently steer public debates in the "right" direction. Any meddling is overstepping a line and problematic.

Are you able to provide a citation for Twitter suppressing retweets?

It's been referred to by them as "de-emphasizing" of content. It's fancy newspeak for this type of suppression of speech:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/a35nbj/twitter-content-moder...

Re: “Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted and demonetized”

#262

Post by sosodev »

35amxn35 wrote: post #249
phailhaus wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Er, Twitter is most definitely not trying to be like the notoriously-toxic 4chan.

Trust me, once you get the hang of it, 4chan is surprisingly wholesome. Sure I've been called a nigg r/fagg t/subhuman/kike/retard, I've been asked to kill myself countless times, countless people told me they had fucked my mom, etc. But when you go above that, you see that it's refreshing and lot less toxic than passive-aggresiveness and the brigading that upvotes/downvotes/retweets bring (in places such as Twitter…

I see what you're saying but there is just no way that you can argue 4chan is wholesome. The lack of moderation has created a community that encourages some of the worst human behaviors. The correlation between mass murderer and 4chan fanatic is too distinct to ignore.

Re: “Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted and demonetized”

#263

Post by seti0Cha »

camdat wrote: post #254
hsn915 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is delusional. When you have a big tech company with thousands of employees, the pareto principle comes into play in a huge way: proably only 10% of these people are actually doing any work that directly impacts the platform. At least half the employees are probably not doing anything really useful. This applies even to tech companies with a mere 100 total employees. At 3000 employees it's probably even more so.…

>He is good at making engineers a "high status class" From what I've seen, Elon's companies pay below-market for most roles. Levels.fyi indicates that, on average, engs take a 10-15% pay cut by deciding to work for Tesla. I'm sure there are a handful of engineers that exist that could save Twitter single-handedly, but none that would do it for the pay he's offering.

He can get away with paying below market rates to Tesla engineers for the same reason video game companies can do it: people think it would be cool to work there. It doesn't seem plausible to me that if Musk can't get people to work at Twitter for cheap he wouldn't just offer more rather than let it die.

Re: “Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted and demonetized”

#264

Post by zamalek »

endominus wrote: post #147
zamalek wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And if this free speech absolutism is a position that no one holds, why are you arguing against it? Musk is a free speech absolutist, by his own admission. His followers are likely similar. > I have never heard even the most die-hard free speech supporter advocate that someone is free to follow you around all day, yelling to drown out your voice. It's a contrived example, but despite that free speech absolutism all…

>Musk is a free speech absolutist, by his own admission. I don't think his concept of free speech absolutism matches yours. Given the other things I've heard (something about moderation teams with diverse voices, and this news about deboosting) it seems more likely that you're arguing against a strawman here. >It's a contrived example, but despite that free speech absolutism allows for it. Does the free speech absolu…

> Does the free speech absolutism you're arguing against allow for sonic cannons?

When did I mention sonic cannons? WT actual F.

Re: “Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted and demonetized”

#265

Post by heavyset_go »

danans wrote: post #203
thefaux wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That raises the question of what are the "dividends" for those parties, regardless of the financial success of Twitter. My guess is that they see twitter as the central online hub of anti-capitalist ideology, which is also correlated with marginalized identity politics. If the bankers could nip that growing movement in the bud before it fully coalesces into something with real political power, then that would seem…

> My guess is that they see twitter as the central online hub of anti-capitalist ideology Then joke is on them because the far right is also anti-capitalist, but in the form of ethnonationalist socialist authoritarianism (Yes, there are many shorter names for that). Or perhaps they're actually on board with that approach since they have found that an increasingly pluralistic democracy does not serve their interests.…

> Then joke is on them because the far right is also anti-capitalist

It might look like anti-capitalism, but time and time again, the far right's "problem" with capitalism is actually a problem with the results of liberal democracy in capitalist societies.

They very much want capitalism, but not a corrupted form of it. They feel that capitalist liberal democracy rewards the wrong people, like allowing what were once subservient minorities to succeed and accumulate wealth, sometimes surpassing the success of the majority, or allowing non-traditional people, art, cultures, etc to flourish if there was a market for it.

For example, Nazis were very much about the Social Darwinist aspects of naked capitalism, and the word privatization was coined to describe Nazi economic policy[1]. However, they were very much against the results that capitalist liberalism allowed to flourish, which were the basis for their rhetoric around "degeneracy" and campaigns against what they saw as degeneration of traditional (and ultimately mythical, given the Aryan supremacy mythos) culture. They saw capitalism as corrupted by Jewish and foreign cabals that pulled the strings to keep the Volk down. What they ended up doing is seizing capital from Jewish people and gave it to German capitalists[2], which I wouldn't describe as anti-capitalist at all:

> Business owners benefitted as much as private individuals. Companies like Neckermann, which sold mail-order goods and vacation packages, and Evonik, a manufacturing group formerly known as Degussa, bought businesses formerly owned by Jewish people. The ability to consolidate power made them leaders of their industries, and implicit partners with the Nazi government. Each of these transactions were legal, and many were meticulously recorded.

While far right rhetoric seems on its face like it's anti-capitalist, because if you squint it can kind of look similar to the rhetoric from the left, that's a folly. Fascism and its ilk are reactions to liberal capitalism, and coincidentally, socialists have a lot to say about capitalism, but the similarities end there. It's a mistake to take such rhetoric as being inherently anti-capitalist and not, instead, anti-liberal society.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatization#Etymology

[2] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/1938-nazi-law-forced-...

Re: “Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted and demonetized”

#266

Post by root_axis »

nomel wrote: post #227
root_axis wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter has historically utilized a wide range of moderation strategies including deranking, post removals, fact checking blurbs, temporary bans, permanent bans and more.

It appears that three of these that you listed, which are the most silencing, will no longer be used (assuming legal content): post removals, temporary bans, permanent bans. I don't understand how the new policy is "status quo", if this is true. That's a very significant change of policy.

Nothing that Elon said suggests that twitter will no longer issue bans or remove posts. In fact, we know that permanent bans are still in place, and he will obviously continue to do both.

Re: “Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted and demonetized”

#267

Post by Havoc »

On the face of it this seems really good, even if what is "hate" is a tricky question.

The whole bad news/outrage gets eyeballs is a major part of why the internet is more shit lately in my opinion.

Whether that works out remains to be seen but conceptually I like the idea.

Re: “Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted and demonetized”

#268

Post by scubbo »

nomel wrote: post #197
SoftTalker wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just ditch the algorithms. Go back to what twitter was in the beginning: you see the tweets of people you follow. That's it.

I don't want purely that, because I end up drowning in uninteresting tweets from everyone I follow. I want to see notable tweets, from the people I follow, because I don't care if they're eating a sandwich. I also want to see tweets I would find notable/interesting, from people I don't follow, if I knew they existed. An algorithm would help with that suggestion. What I really want is Spotify's "Discover Weekly", and…

Both of which are totally reasonable desires - but you should be the one that gets to decide which "mode" you're operating in. If you want only (and all) followees tweets - go to that view. If you want just the "greatest hits" of your followees - a second view. And if you want to trust in The Great Algorithm and take some recommendations, that's also reasonable. What I think people are really opposed to isn't necessarily recommendations algorithms, but rather algorithmic recommendations being forced upon them when not requested.

Re: “Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted and demonetized”

#269

Post by nomel »

oxfordmale wrote: post #88
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #22

I'm certainly not a fan of how Musk has handled the Twitter takeover, but this sentiment, "New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach", seems highly reasonable to me, no? That is, what I find so awful about most social media (and places like YouTube) is how they focus on some of the most anger-inducing content for "engagement". That is, I think the problem is much more their algorithms than wha…

It is unfortunately not how Twitter works. It is very hard to restrict freedom of reach. If you follow a person with extreme opinions, you will still see their posts. Even if Twitter managed to address that problem, there will be users that created curated list of Tweets of interest to their followers. ...and not to forget the mainstream media that love to refer to extremist tweets as it is an easy article to write.

> If you follow a person with extreme opinions, you will still see their posts. Even if Twitter managed to address that problem

The purpose of following a person is to see their tweets. How is this a "problem"?

Re: “Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted and demonetized”

#270

Post by Macha »

pschuegr wrote: post #164
mabbo wrote: post #16

It's all about economics of demand for what Twitter is offering: advertising. Elon's changes have massively harmed the value of an ad on Twitter. Moderation teams are massively cut, meaning advertisers have to worry about their products beside hate speech or worse. At the same time, Elon is explicitly un-banning people who were banned for hate speech, promising that no ads will show beside their future hate speech- i…

It seems a little unfair that people who hang out in hateful places get a better UX (ie no ads). If anything, they should generate ads for anti-hate groups and therapy providers and plaster the feed with them.

You can feel potentially relieved that mostly they get trashier ads, rather than no ads. Supplements and gambling and anime blow up dolls used to be the order of the day on 4chan at least.
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