301–310 of 352 posts
It's all very Brexit reminiscent. "Let's leave the EU and get rid of all this red tape and beaurocracy" leave EU discover why all those rules were necessary slowly re-invent a crappy copy of the above rules, at great personal expense, because the same external forces that existed before require them
I do and don’t understand all the hubbub about “free speech” on Twitter and other social platforms. I can understand the perspective that if someone is making claims that your platform / forum allows “free speech” then people are justified in being upset when this is not the case. On the other hand the rule since the days of dial up BBSs is: the sysop can do whatever they want with their system, and you are owed noth…
"I don't understand why people are upset when they get banned from the 40% of all roads, parks, and sidewalks that are owned by GloboCorp. In the old days of private homes, sure it sucked when you got thrown out of a houseparty, but that's just the game. It's both private property, there is no difference."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can still choose who you follow on Twitter. It seems to be moving back towards that idea, which is good. It's pretty easy to avoid political bullshit if you are careful with following. For years Twitter used to make it impossibly hard to switch to just "latest tweets" instead of their awful recommendation feed which include likes/rts of people you don't even follow. No wonder Twitter became such a heated trainwre…
> You can still choose who you follow on Twitter The default algorithm shows you what people you follow are most interested in. This does a lot to shape the conversation. You can switch to seeing tweets from people you follow in chronological order, but it typically doesn't show all of them. If you don't interact frequently enough with someone they'll fall out of your feed. It's quite a lot of work to get rid of all…
Maybe they’ll add a chronological option again at some point. The Apple style middle ground of making it easy by default (instead of customizable) seems to hold sway among twitters UX/product team.
Hopefully that will change as well. Anything is better than the old default system. I could see the old way being good for entirely new users but it was awful for long time users who carefully curated their following list.
Sadly it seems controversial topics still get the most traction even within the limited set you follow.
I really like this post. These are lessons I learned a long time ago, when I was 10 or so running web forums. But there are three big things this misses: 1. What is and is not legal is usually decided in the courts. That's expensive, and lawyers help prevent you from getting to the courts in the first place. 2. The ideal goal for good discussion on a forum is transparency and consistency in moderation. For example, S…
What is legal in one country can be very illegal in another
It's one of the other benefits of small social media. A tiny site with ~1000 monthly users is much less likely to receive urgent takedown-request emails from Malaysia.
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I'm referring to pre musk ban. The exact tweet was “I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE,” Someone was proposing incitement to violence has a threahold etc. This to me is clearly incitement to violence. Some have claimed he didn't know what "death con" (defcon) means to which I say what could he have possibly meant. It's on Jewish People.
Defcon levels are about preparing for defense not attack. I think your bias is showing.
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Adding a tiny Gladwell: I've been using Twitter since 2007 and pretty much daily for probably 10 years and same, never accidentally encountered "unfiltered hardcore porn" clicking on trends or pretty much anything.
As time goes on, it turns out that pre-Elon Twitter is becoming more and more of a disaster. Now it turns out it was full of porn, and especially child porn which previous leaders didn't care about. Also instead of a company struggling to be consistently profitable it was actually a complete dumpster fire that was doomed to fail in the near future if not for the timely intervention
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Elon Musk becomes a Fox News darling right before he launches an electric pickup truck. He obviously doesn’t want Tesla to be a brand associated with left wing politics.
If he manages to get conservatives to buy EVs to own the libs, that will be awesome. It's a pretty weird theory though: make yourself anathema to your core market, liberals with money, in hopes of winning over the anti-environmentalists. It's even weirder seeing as its timed to coincide with every other car manufacturer in the world entering the market and gunning for your market segment.
Weird theory, but it points to Elon not being quite as foolish as the left would believe.
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You can still choose who you follow on Twitter. It seems to be moving back towards that idea, which is good. It's pretty easy to avoid political bullshit if you are careful with following. For years Twitter used to make it impossibly hard to switch to just "latest tweets" instead of their awful recommendation feed which include likes/rts of people you don't even follow. No wonder Twitter became such a heated trainwre…
> You can still choose who you follow on Twitter The default algorithm shows you what people you follow are most interested in. This does a lot to shape the conversation. You can switch to seeing tweets from people you follow in chronological order, but it typically doesn't show all of them. If you don't interact frequently enough with someone they'll fall out of your feed. It's quite a lot of work to get rid of all…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've also had this happen to me. It doesn't happen every time, but I've had Twitter show me graphic penetration on topics that are just, like, a city name. (I've never seen it on the homepage or in someone's replies, only topics from the trending bar.)
Apparently, there was a spam/reader DoS attack during the last few days associating porn to Chinese cities, in an effort by PRC's government to disorganize demonstrations against the government and the Zero Covid policy. Could be related?
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Agree with everything you said. Especially that what is acceptable speech is dynamic and it’s hard to define. I view the boundaries of acceptable speech as a resource. And like other resources in which we need to allocate in society, we use the power of markets to come to the “fairest” allocation that we can. I believe Elon could implement a “free speech market” on Twitter where Twitter creates an asset which gives t…
Two points on this.. 1. It sort of is that insofar as advertisers (the actual customers) are free to stop buying ads, but when they do so Musk throws a conniption fit and says not giving him money is a step away from tyranny 2. If there's a tradable 'right to offend' asset then it will either be bought up by wealthy people who are assholes or assholes who raise money from other assholes on the promise that they will…
2. If there’s one thing I know about wealthy people, it’s that there’s wealthy people on both sides of any given politcal/social issue. So for every one that wants to allow certain speech there will be one that wants to ban it. Also people can organize from the grassroots to form large pools of capital and have their voice heard if the issue is important enough.
3. Although your hypothetical is a bit sensationalist and off topic, I’ll entertain it. If the outcome of such a scheme really did lower the homicide total by 10%, then it’d be hard to argue against it vs. the status quo as it is an objectively better outcome.