211–220 of 398 posts
> (edit: I said the article didn't mention. I missed the mention.) Amazing your comment is top—given you didn't read the article. > The man deserved what he got From what I've seen (I'm no expert on the subject), that's debatable.
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>The man deserved what he got No. Twitter incorrectly used him as some kind of example. They had also did temp bans on him in the past and also the immature move of removing his check mark. The harassment was happening WELL before Milo was tweeting the ghostbuster. Milo wrote the article. Milo's tweets weren't anywhere NEAR harassment level. Trolling a famous person on twitter is not harassment and brigading. And as…
Removing his blue check was especially ridiculous to me. "Because you are who you are, you can no longer be verified."
This provides a civilized version of Twitter that is mostly populated by smart and funny people.
So Twitter removed a professional jerk from the Verified streams while allowing him to continue as a rabble-rouser.
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yeah and that's a Trump specific forum and they have RULES on the side for what is banned. Contrast that with r/news where it's purported to be 'news' not some partisan subreddit. You will get banned for having an opinion mods don't like. Not only that but those same mods will simply ban you from other subreddits they are mods for. r/news and r/worldnews was hit with that the other day. You're example is false equiva…
No, that's exactly my point. They have no desire to make a concession to free speech. They don't value free speech. Their ideology does not value free speech. My point is that modern neocons (who are really just neoprogressives progressing down a different line of reasoning) don't value free speech or reasonable discourse. Having rules that say "we don't value free speech or discourse" doesn't excuse them.
Also, reddit allows you to subscribe, but twitter creates a stronger relationship between poster and followers. You'd be subscribed to a particular person but when they are banned, all their history is gone, you no longer see anything. It's like someone came into your house and took away one of your favorite TV channels, as well as anything you had recorded from that channel on your DVR.
Who is this THEY you keep referring to anyway? You keep saying 'they' like readers are just supposed to know.
True story: I was at a fundraiser in SF in about 2009, and over the course of the evening I found myself chatting about Twitter on two different occasions: once with Bill Maris of Google Ventures, and once with Joi Ito. Bill and I were actually talking about what kind of investments GV was looking to make. He stressed that GV was looking to invest in businesses that were actually good businesses. As a counterexample,…
How is Twitter not a good business? It's still worth $11 billion.
If anything happens that makes vested individuals doubt that Twitter is worth as much as it is, its value will drop, as it did right after the Q2 2016 earnings report was released.
Politics get violent, no matter where you express them, no matter the character limit. That's just the nature of the beast - half the people in the world disagree with the other half. Censorship is too difficult to execute at high level, because as it has been shown in the past, the people controlling the censorship are often biased.
The way I have found Twitter to be enjoyable is to not get involved in political threads (and yes, I have made the mistake of doing so, several times). I do not share the same political ideology as many of the people I interact with on Twitter, but I nonetheless respect their right to have an opinion. So long as I do not turn Twitter into my soapbox, I enjoy it (same thing applies to Facebook for me). If you completely block out people you disagree with (as many tweeters do), you will have a very narrow view of the world.
I think there is value in Twitter, and it could easily repair itself if it cared enough (unfortunately, it seems to care very little about improving itself at the moment).
One thing Twitter has done right: I have made more real-world friends (as in, people I have met in person) via Twitter than I have Facebook. Twitter encourages befriending people you do not know, Facebook still carries the privacy stigma.
Here are things that Twitter should do if it wants to improve:
- Fix the blue sticker. Stop handing it out to arbitrary people, and ignoring real influencers (example: thousands of video game streamers have the sticker, but Richard Garriott, one of the most influential game creators, does not). Allow people to apply for the sticker with a nonrefundable paid application (just enough money to pay the staff to evaluate whether or not they warrant the sticker).
- Monetize popularity the right way, and get rid of all the fake followers. Get rid of people who follow then unfollow just to get a high follower/following ratio. This makes people who build their follower base the honest way seem underrated/undervalued. Come up with a better ranking system than number of followers (i.e. how influential are your top 20 followers?).
- Emphasize and reward the flagging of fake accounts. Put the twitter population to work at eliminating spam and fake followers.
- Sometimes I want to express things that are not exactly advertisements, but if I want to promote them (using money) they will get marked as an ad ("promoted"). This just cheapens the value of whatever I want to promote. Its really not necessary; let users figure out what is an ad and what is not - it is pretty easy. Think of all the people willing to pay to get real exposure for their tweets (not spammy tweets, but just people that want to broadcast their ideas or content). This could be a business model on its own.
- Fix your software. I've noticed it makes my browser grind to a halt on some machines. Others have issued complaints across various platforms.
- There is much more, but I have probably already gotten too deep.
My rule is that if nobody would pay for your service, you probably don't have a worthwhile business. If Google instituted a $0.99 monthly fee to use Google search, people would line up to pay it. They don't have to, because their business model works differently, but they could do that, and it would work. I'd probably pay for an account. If Facebook instituted a $0.99 monthly fee to use that, a lot of people would do…
Is that not exactly what app.net is? They have hardly taken all of Twitter's users.
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Conservatives are ok with freedom of speech, 'safe zones' are invented by progressives.
What other people choose do with their privately-owned platforms does not limit anyone's freedom of speech, as the law currently stands.
And a "privately-owned platform" that is open to the public, used by a nontrivial amount of people, advertised by the owners as a place for public discussion, quoted in the media, etc etc etc isn't so "private" anymore.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The man deserved what he got No. Twitter incorrectly used him as some kind of example. They had also did temp bans on him in the past and also the immature move of removing his check mark. The harassment was happening WELL before Milo was tweeting the ghostbuster. Milo wrote the article. Milo's tweets weren't anywhere NEAR harassment level. Trolling a famous person on twitter is not harassment and brigading. And as…
> Milo's tweets weren't anywhere NEAR harassment level. Trolling a famous person on twitter is not harassment and brigading. Milo had tens of thousands of flying monkeys to troll and harass people on his behalf. He knew this perfectly well, and used it all the time. His tweets didn't need to be particularly harassing: all he had to do was point the finger. Which he did.
That's an plainly insane rule. How about Twitter actually ban people who actually break the site rules, act with some small measure of maturity, and stop moderating with a political bias that a child could see?
Yep. Yep, yep, yep. And Twitter's response is to ban some, but not all harassers, using the algorithm of "whoever is high profile and we don't like politically." That gives said harassers surprisingly legitimate reasons to claim censorship by Twitter as a company, despite the fact that they were in clear violation of Twitter's ToS and deserved to be banned. I refer of course to the Milo Yiannopoulos situation (edit:…
"Echo chamber" is a deliberately pejorative term, which I think is unfair here. If you use Twitter to discuss your beliefs, then, yes, it functions like an echo chamber, and that can be a bad thing because when your beliefs are wrong, they won't be constructively challenged.
But I generally use Twitter to discuss my interests. Sure, the line between the two is fuzzy, but I think there is a difference. I love pixel art, and follow a lot of pixel artists. Does that make my feed a "pixel art echo chamber"? I guess so? But that seems to me about as harmless as joining model railroad club.