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An account was suspended

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Re: An account was suspended

#151

Post by fleddr »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #67

I'm a big fan of Ben Thompson, and I'm not necessarily on Twitter's side here, but this to me seems more like a case of Ben whining about "Spam is when someone else sends it". From his own words, this "Stratechery Interviews" account was a new account that only sent out tweets of links from multiple locations around the world. In other words, the only thing really distinguishing it from spam on a technical level is t…

New account. So? People create new accounts all the time. How do accounts come into existence?

Tweeting out links. So? One of the most basic use cases there are, for example a brand tweeting links to press releases.

From multiple locations. So? You mean like every multinational?

None of these factors have any smoking gun indicator to decisively and permanently suspend an account. On the other end of the spectrum we have a zillion crypto bots having the exact same avatar, name variations, auto-tweeting within the second of a main tweet being posted, and this is not spam.

Re: An account was suspended

#152

Post by ladyattis »

Zak wrote: post #18

I suspect this kind of problem is unavoidable when a large fraction of the world uses a centralized many-to-many communication platform. Moderation is always going to be a cost center for such a platform and there's a big gap between good enough moderation to prevent a mass exodus and what most of us would likely call good . Using decentralized tools might improve the situation.

A better option is to legally require all web sites that provide third party distribution of content to hire actual human beings, with a livable wage, to moderate content rather than leaving it to users to target and report everything on their own. If they don't want to handle the cost of having a labor pool then they can go into some other sector like investment banking or whatever. Social media isn't a labor free sector of business.

Re: An account was suspended

#154

Post by VyseofArcadia »

It's become pretty clear to me that then solution is to just not have an account.

If you aren't already on a service that's eager about automated bans, don't start now. If you are, keep your head low. Just lurk. Maybe as more and more people lurk, Twitter et al will be incentivized to do something.

Re: An account was suspended

#155

Post by nfriedly »

themitigating wrote: post #137
nfriedly wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem is less that they temporarily banned his account, it's more that the language of the message was completely false. There was no "careful review", and it was not permanent. Also, as others have pointed out, "suspension" implies that the interruption is temporary, so "permanently suspended" doesn't even make sense.

If you wanted to suspend a user's account for a period of time you would say "suspended for two weeks". What if you wanted to suspend a user forever but it might have been a mistake or you might change your mind?

I think that just "suspended" would be more appropriate than "permanently suspended".

Although, it seems that the reality of the situation is closer to "your account is permanently banned unless you manage to raise enough fuss that an actual human looks at it."

Re: An account was suspended

#156

Post by codesurgeon »

The repercussions of the occasional community shitstorm don't seem to warrant any investment into the scalability of support and remediation mechanisms. If this type of stuff would either drive traffic, interaction or another means of revenue generation, we'd probably see more creativity and better results.

Re: An account was suspended

#157

Post by matthewdgreen »

josephcsible wrote: post #145
somehnacct3757 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no such thing as appropriate moderation at Twitter scale. It's societal techology we as humans do not have. Underlying moderation is some shared vision of decency - morality claims that should be enforced via justice. These claims certainly don't exist across nation borders, and they barely exist within a given nation's borders. The bot moderation conundrum is a wholly second moderation question layered on to…

> There's no such thing as appropriate moderation at Twitter scale. It's societal techology we as humans do not have. Haven't Wikipedia and Stack Overflow figured out the right way to moderate at scale?

Twitter sees 829,094,400 tweets/day. Wikipedia has 166,666 edits/day. So we're already talking about a factor of nearly 5000x. The number of contributors is also spectacularly different: according to [1] Wikipedia had edits from only 122,821 distinct users in the last 30 days. Twitter claims 237.8 million mDAU (which could be a low or high count, since the "m" stands for monetizable and users may not post.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Who_writes_Wikipedia...

Re: An account was suspended

#158

Post by PeterisP »

smolder wrote: post #66
somehnacct3757 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no such thing as appropriate moderation at Twitter scale. It's societal techology we as humans do not have. Underlying moderation is some shared vision of decency - morality claims that should be enforced via justice. These claims certainly don't exist across nation borders, and they barely exist within a given nation's borders. The bot moderation conundrum is a wholly second moderation question layered on to…

> There's no such thing as appropriate moderation at Twitter scale. If you mean it doesn't exist, that's arguable. If you mean it can't exist, that's nonsense. Just imagine for a second that moderation made money somehow. Boom! A moderation force that can take on planets full of new people. Tech companies are just cheap when it comes to dealing with end users. There is no obstacle but money to them creating capable m…

No, the parent post makes a quite reasonable point that it can't exist, not because of any resource constraint but because there can't be a globally, universally acceptable appropriate moderation standard - different subcommunities have mutually incompatible requirements which can not be satisfied by any common standard; what's clearly acceptable in one place may even be illegal to say in another.

Well, perhaps you can, if you limit the discussion so that you can't discuss borders of countries, existence of certain countries, rights of certain groups, existence of certain groups, self-identity of many of your users, politicians, politics, religion and a bunch of other topics. If you ban all of these and permit just posting what you had for lunch, then perhaps you can make an universal moderation standard - but I would not call it "appropriate moderation" anymore.

Re: An account was suspended

#159

Post by lapcat »

manimino wrote: post #138
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to be aware of the origins of the stress and they are likely many. Even here on HN I find myself making the decision to not continue to engage with someone who's responded to one of my posts because I can already predict it's going to race down a rabbit hole of pointless arguments. It's simply not worth talking to some people. I think part of the problem is that people don't realize that a lot of what they a…

This is a good policy in general. Say everything you want to say in one comment, and do not reply back to anything. Replies are where people start getting defensive. Even if the discussion is friendly, once you've said your piece, it is usually best to let others reply. The discussion gets better the more unique perspectives are in it. Same goes for meetings, ideally.

> This is a good policy in general. Say everything you want to say in one comment, and do not reply back to anything. Replies are where people start getting defensive.

Easier said than done, especially when a reply criticizes you, but this is probably right. I've greatly regretted many HN back-and-forth exchanges. It almost never ends well.

Re: An account was suspended

#160

Post by MikePlacid »

efitz wrote: post #48
somehnacct3757 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no such thing as appropriate moderation at Twitter scale. It's societal techology we as humans do not have. Underlying moderation is some shared vision of decency - morality claims that should be enforced via justice. These claims certainly don't exist across nation borders, and they barely exist within a given nation's borders. The bot moderation conundrum is a wholly second moderation question layered on to…

I think the solution is opt-in curation. If someone (or 10k someones) watches and compiles quality items of interest, maybe i want one of those feeds INSTEAD of Twitter’s ML algorithm. Twitter can still monetize but now curations could monetize individually via including specific ad tweets. And i want to subscribe to multiple curations, not just one. Twitter could even have their own ML algorithm as a curation but I…

> I think the solution is opt-in curation.

That’s a nice idea, but needs just one step done before: moderation should be placed in the each user’s hands.

I need my own filter about what I see. Like:

1. I always want to read A.

2. I always want to read B, but not when he is talking to C.

3. Show me some random people from time to time, like 3 per day.

And we can share our own “filters”, that creates opt-in curation.

Echo-chamber is indeed a problem, hence rule 3. Also I hope for rule 1 to find people who talk to their opponents meaningfully. But if a person wants to stay in an echo-chamber - she can. I just to not want to be forced into someone else’s echo-chamber.

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