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Twitter's Fucked

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Re: Twitter's Fucked

#271

Post by st3v3r »

CM30 wrote: post #257
exolymph wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What other people choose do with their privately-owned platforms does not limit anyone's freedom of speech, as the law currently stands.

Except online, all platforms are privately owned. Hence you often get de facto censorship. You can technically say something not allowed on those platforms, but then find there's no way to draw any attention to this content/those views. It's like living in a company town where anything the administration don't like isn't allowed. It's a problem with freedom of speech and private property in general, and why some peop…

So don't go to those sites/platforms. And this isn't a case of "things the administration doesn't like", this is a case of breaking the clear rules and harassing other users.

Re: Twitter's Fucked

#272

Post by scholia »

Karunamon wrote: post #252
scholia wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're ignoring the context. Milo knew what he was doing. It was deliberate harassment. And thanks to his thuggish role in gamergate, he had plenty of "previous".

Milo knew what he was doing. What objective facts do you base this on? The tweets themselves are completely innocuous . And meanwhile, people who post actual harassment and threats are left unscathed (I've personally reported a few myself), and while I'm not privy to what happens in Jack's office, it definitely quacks like it's okay to to harass if you subscribe to one political mindset, but not another.

We followed each other on Twitter, and have mutual acquaintances. I also know personal stuff about Milo that not many people know. If there were meanings that weren't obvious to you, that doesn't mean they weren't there.

Re: Twitter's Fucked

#273

Post by nostrademons »

devishard wrote: post #174
xseven wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The idea these days is, get a bunch of users and introduce ads." That's exactly what Google and Facebook did. All I can take from your comment is "if hypothetical scenario then my opinion is true"

Do you disagree with my hypothetical scenarios? That is, do you think if Google/Facebook introduced subscription fees nobody would subscribe? Would you pay to read Twitter? Do you think that anyone would?

I disagree with it when put in the context of when the product launched.

I wouldn't have paid for Google in 2000 when I first discovered it; while it was better than all the other search engines out there, it wasn't better enough that I'd break my rule of never shelling out money to visit a website. I certainly wouldn't have paid money for Facebook; I was a poor college student when I got my FB account in 2004, and all you could do was poke people. I can poke people in real life without shelling out money for it.

I think many people confuse the value they get for a service now, after it has had a decade to refine its product and become deeply embedded in our lives, with the value they get from a service at launch, which is often virtually nothing.

Re: Twitter's Fucked

#274

Post by dabockster »

xseven wrote: post #169
sievebrain wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is public and anonymous and mostly manages to not suffer this problem, due to the heavy manual labour of the moderators and a whole lot of selection bias in its userbase. To a slightly lesser extent, Slashdot has also licked that problem: for any story that attracts enough comments (more than 300) the top rated ones are often pretty good and the worthless ones start auto-collapsed. Even though Slashdot gets a lot…

HN is not as mainstream as Twitter or Reddit, so I don't think we can really compare it that way

I wouldn't necessarily consider Reddit mainstream either. Sure, it has a lot of users. But I don't hear people on the streets telling each other to look at their subreddits.

Re: Twitter's Fucked

#275

Post by visakanv »

Disruptive_Dave wrote: post #246

Has anyone ever had substantial conversations about the idea that maybe, just maybe, this is a human beings problem? As in we're not conditioned nor designed to communicate in such an environment? And that this type of access to the public and each other is so new (in the greater scheme of the world) that we have no damn clue what we're doing? Or is everyone going to continue to make arguments that are heavily based…

Those are two extreme positions, most of the substantial conversations I have lie in the middle. We typically assume that humans are not well-adapted (yet) to communicating in a digital format, and so we're still developing norms and ways of communicating tone and so on.

We're not all good little boys and girls, but we do want to have good conversations with one another, and so we try and do what we can to make things better as we go.

Re: Twitter's Fucked

#276

Post by visakanv »

Disruptive_Dave wrote: post #246

Has anyone ever had substantial conversations about the idea that maybe, just maybe, this is a human beings problem? As in we're not conditioned nor designed to communicate in such an environment? And that this type of access to the public and each other is so new (in the greater scheme of the world) that we have no damn clue what we're doing? Or is everyone going to continue to make arguments that are heavily based…

Those are two extreme positions, most of the substantial conversations I have lie in the middle. We typically assume that humans are not well-adapted (yet) to communicating in a digital format, and so we're still developing norms and ways of communicating tone and so on.

We're not all good little boys and girls, but we do want to have good conversations with one another, and so we try and do what we can to make things better as we go.

Re: Twitter's Fucked

#277

Post by cmurf »

ryanmarsh wrote: post #74
hacker_9 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People love to hate Facebook and Twitter, but they ain't going anywhere. The service they provide is too useful, and after so many years they are ingrained in people's social lives.

Exactly. They fill a need. These Monday morning quarterbacks should march up to sand hill with a prototype and build their own. Leave my twitter alone.

Well the actual quarterbacks, in the form of its owners, are selling. Today it's down 14%. It's lost 1/2 its value in 12 months. It's not profitable.

Now maybe they just haven't discovered, or innovated, a business model that'll at least stop them from taking on more water. Nevertheless, I'm curious how much it's worth to you, in dollars, per day, per month or per year. Because $0 isn't working, clearly.

Re: Twitter's Fucked

#278

Post by scholia »

dabockster wrote: post #254
scholia wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're Verified, you have access to a Verified Twitter stream, which means you can avoid seeing anything from people who are not 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.

> This provides a civilized version of Twitter that is mostly populated by smart and funny people. Twitter circa 2009 before Kutcher vs CNN? This still exists?

Only if you are Verified ;-)

I did suggest some time ago that Twitter could monetize by charging a high fee for verification (with, say, passport scans and other personal details). Sadly, they do it free.

Re: Twitter's Fucked

#279

Post by riboflava »

johncolanduoni wrote: post #142
Neetpeople wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have personally lost the belief that you can actually change someone's opinion on almost anything. So an echo chamber doesn't have to be a bad thing. I think people overestimate the value of having your beliefs challenged, does it ever really change someone's mind? If that's the case, you might as well view twitter as entertainment and to clue into the things you care about, in which case it can be pretty useful.

HN changes my opinion on things all the time. If your beliefs never have to stand up to challenge, your faith in them being correct should be very slim.

If your beliefs change all the time, they can't have been held very strongly or justifiably in the first place. Maybe you should stop having beliefs like that. That's direct evidence that you shouldn't be confident in many of your beliefs, given they change so often. A person with stable beliefs, even if they aren't ever challenged, has no such direct evidence to suggest they should be less confident, they can only have the same general blow to confidence as everyone else with arbitrary unchallenged beliefs.

Re: Twitter's Fucked

#280

Post by CM30 »

bmo311 wrote: post #117
raiyu wrote: post #41

Every platform that is public and anonmyous runs afoul of this, this isn't just twitter. You can look at Youtube comments, reddit, pretty much any forum. What's missing is that other platforms, like Facebook, took a very hard stance on this and forced people to signup as their real identities. Twitter, can easily follow suit. That won't fix all of the problems, but it will go towards improving things and it won't req…

If you think that enforcing real names induces civility and you use Facebook as an example, your argument is wrong and self-contradictory. Facebook is /proof/ that the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory doesn't need anonymity. What the Internet proves about communication is that fuckwaddery (yes, this is a word, my word) is inversely proportional to interface friction. The quicker it is to spill the contents of your min…

I'd say fuckwaddery or whatever is more proportional to the distance between the user and the person they're communicating with. If someone lives in the same town, you'll be a lot more hesitant to insult the hell out of them than if they live on another continent.

That might be why Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc are so screwed up. Because the userbase knows that there's a very slim chance they'll ever meet the person they're attacking online. That there's a slim chance there'll ever be any genuine consequences for their actions.

Of course, making it easier and more convenient like on the sites (or limiting people to only 140 characters) definitely makes it easier to be a douche. But you're not going to send a threatening SMS message to someone sitting next to you.

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