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Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains

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Re: Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains

#411

This is what I have come to expect from every person that calls themselves a "free speech absolutist." What they actually believe is that they should be able to say whatever they want and do whatever they want, personally, without any consequences for themselves. There is no grander principle than "my ability to do what I want and exert power over others however I want, without critique or criticism." I really wish t…

even worse, It's had this 5 second delay for Threads for a month. https://www.threads.net/@jank0/post/CuV_5fprO3z/?igshid=NTc4...

Re: Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains

#412
post #312
post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't see it with your URL either That's because you're not spoofing the User-Agent to be a browser rather than curl.

Oh that's it, thanks! In fact it it returns a 200 not 301 then: % curl -gsSw'%{time_total}\n' -A 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/16.6 Safari/605.1.15' https://t.co/DzIiCFp7Ti https://www.threads.net/@chaco_mmm_room window.opener = null; location.replace("https:\/\/www.threads.net\/@chaco_mmm_room") 4.690000 % curl -gsSIw'%{time_total}\n' -A 'Mozilla/5.…

The specific logic with user agents is that it happened (I think they've ended it now?) whenever the word "curl" was not in your user agent string. If the substring "curl" was contained anywhere in your user agent string, it did not have a delay. I cannot imagine how it could rot in that specific way non-maliciously.

Re: Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Restricting speech is always in the interests of those that have the power to shape discussions, so limiting speech is always counter productive. This is not true. Restricting hate speech is an obvious counterexample.

It isn't obvious at all. It doesn't help for that matter, but that is secondary. On the contrary, it is just a popular excuse to restrict speech because nothing about hate speech is objective. We see bad legislation around the globe and that will never protect any minority. It is a bad idea and damaging and there is ample empirical evidence for that.

I love free speech, but you're going to have to convince me with a lot of evidence that Germany restricting pro-Nazi speech after WW2 was bad.

Re: Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains

#414
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the value Breitbart adds to the internet outweigh the negatives of turning people into dangerous fascists by weaponizing misinformation? No. Does the value added by sources like the NYT outweigh the negatives of being occasionally biased or outright wrong? Yes.

There is no objective, public, or shared "value" at play here. The only "values" that matter are the personal whims of whoever happens to own Twitter, or Google or Facebook.

Just because this is a very difficult question doesn't mean we can throw our hands up and pretend it doesn't exist. Many things in life are very difficult and yet worth solving anyway.

Re: Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains

#415
post #209
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that HN is explicitly heavily moderated while Twitter pretends to be an equitable free speech platform.

Unless you disagree with Elon

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/08/15/elon-musk-once-again-tri...

Re: Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains

#416
post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't forget to mention that - it's simply not what the word shadowban means, as I've always understood and used it. This is a big problem with trying to explain these things - people mean very different things by the same words, and it leads to misunderstanding.

Which other word do you think would be suitable here? In my view, 'shadowban' aligns with the definition in this context, as you aren't notifying people about it (hence 'shadow') and their actions of upvoting or downvoting have no impact (so same as shadowbanning comments or submissions etc).

I would call it either a penalty or a loss of voting privileges, depending on the specific case. It's not a ban because the account is not excluded from participating in other ways. In the same way, downweighted or penalized sites aren't the same as banned sites.

Re: Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains

#417
post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What we do is try to educate them and loop them back in. But that's selective education. You don't do it for every shadow moderated comment. The trend is still that shadow moderation more often disadvantages trustful users. Will you acknowledge that harm? Over 50% of Reddit users have a removed comment in their recent history that they likely were not told about. When shadow moderation is in play, abuse runs rampan…

What alternative(s) do you propose? How do you think spammers and abusers will exploit those options? Again: HN works in general , and the historical record strongly confirms this, especially as compared with alternative platforms, Reddit included, which seems to be suffering its own failure modes presently.

> What alternative(s) do you propose?

A forum should not do things that elbow out trustful people.

That means, don't lie to authors about their actioned content. Forums should show authors the same view that moderators get. If a post has been removed, de-amplified, or otherwise altered in the view for other users, then the forum should indicate that to the post's author.

> How do you think spammers and abusers will exploit those options?

Spammers already get around and exploit all of Reddit's secretive measures. Mods regularly post to r/ModSupport about how users have circumvented bans. Now they're asking forums to require ID [1].

Once shadow moderation exists on a forum, spammers can then create their own popular groups that remove truthful content.

Forums that implement shadow moderation are not belling cats. They sharpen cats' claws.

[1] https://twitter.com/rhaksw/status/1689887293002379264

Re: Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains

#418
post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What alternative(s) do you propose? How do you think spammers and abusers will exploit those options? Again: HN works in general , and the historical record strongly confirms this, especially as compared with alternative platforms, Reddit included, which seems to be suffering its own failure modes presently.

> What alternative(s) do you propose? A forum should not do things that elbow out trustful people. That means, don't lie to authors about their actioned content. Forums should show authors the same view that moderators get. If a post has been removed, de-amplified, or otherwise altered in the view for other users, then the forum should indicate that to the post's author. > How do you think spammers and abusers will e…

Your first three points are blind assertions without supporting justification or basis. All have been 1) identified as known issues for spammers (e.g., HN used to publish its block list, it no longer does, based on observed response, which mirrors experiences at many other sites), and 2) the workarounds given. You don't accept either the fact of the first or the utility of the 2nd, however you're on parlous ground in doing so.

The fact that some spammers overcome some countermeasures in no way demonstrates that:

- All spammers overcome all countermeasures.

- That spam wouldn't be far worse without those countermeasures.[1]

- That removing such blocks and practices would improve overall site quality.

I've long experience online (going on 40 years), I've designed content moderation systems, served in ops roles on multi-million-member social networks, and done analysis of several extant networks (Google+, Ello, and Hacker News, amongst them), as well as observed what happens, and does and doesn't work, across many others.

Your quest may be well-intentioned, but it's exceedingly poorly conceived.

________________________________

Notes:

1. This is the eternal conflict of preventive measures and demonstrating efficacy. Proving that adverse circumstances would have occurred in the absence of prophilactic action is of necessity proving a counterfactual. Absent some testing regime (and even then) there's little evidence to provide. The fire that didn't happen, the deaths that didn't occur, the thefts that weren't realised, etc. HN could publish information on total submissions and automated rejections. There's the inherent problem as well of classifying submitters. Even long-lived accounts get banned (search: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>). Content moderation isn't a comic-book superhero saga where orientation of the good guys and bad guys is obvious. (Great comment on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26619006>).

Real life is complicated. People are shades of grey, not black or white. They change over time: "Die a hero or live long enough to become a villian." Credentials get co-opted. And for most accounts, courtesy of long-tail distributions, data are exceedingly thin: about half of all HN front-page stories come from accounts with only one submission in the Front Page archive, based on my own analysis of same. They may have a broader submission history, yes, but the same distribution applies there where many, and almost always most submissions come from people with painfully thin history on which to judge them. And that's assuming that the tools for doing said judging are developed.

Re: Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains

#419
post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. Unfortunately, not having any luck with any of them, including lacontrevoie. Nitter.net gives a nim error, the others don't find any tweets

If give us a Twitter username as an example I'll find an instance thats working. The tweets and the non-t.co URLs are in the RSS.

Thanks - try holly, for example.

Re: Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains

#420
post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What alternative(s) do you propose? A forum should not do things that elbow out trustful people. That means, don't lie to authors about their actioned content. Forums should show authors the same view that moderators get. If a post has been removed, de-amplified, or otherwise altered in the view for other users, then the forum should indicate that to the post's author. > How do you think spammers and abusers will e…

Your first three points are blind assertions without supporting justification or basis. All have been 1) identified as known issues for spammers (e.g., HN used to publish its block list, it no longer does, based on observed response, which mirrors experiences at many other sites), and 2) the workarounds given. You don't accept either the fact of the first or the utility of the 2nd, however you're on parlous ground in…

> Your first three points are blind assertions without supporting justification or basis.

You asked me for an alternative and I gave one.

You yourself have expressed concern over HN silently re-weighting topics [1].

You don't see transparent moderation as a solution to that?

> The fact that some spammers overcome some countermeasures in no way demonstrates that...

Once a spammer knows the system he can create infinite amounts of content. When a forum keeps mod actions secret, that benefits a handful of people.

We already established that secrecy elbows out trustful people, right? Or, do you dispute that? I've answered many of your questions. Please answer this one of mine.

> That removing such blocks and practices would improve overall site quality.

To clarify my own shade of grey, I do not support shadow moderation. I support transparent-to-the-author content moderation. I also support the legal right for forums to implement shadow moderation.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36435312

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