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Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

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Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

#271

Post by floatingatoll »

Twitter and Facebook and Google and others share one common concern that, if addressed, would see their staffing budgets massively reduced (and thus profits increased):

Human moderators.

Each grudgingly uses human moderators to squash the worst of the problems on their platform, and does a terrible job of it. Each underspends on human beings, using contractors without sufficient mental health care to ensure their well-being as they sift through our online sewer pipes.

Google outsources YouTube moderation to third-parties: the Content ID system is a labor shifting device designed to force the labor cost of enforcement outside of Google’s responsibility.

Twitter ended political advertisements rather than spend the human cost required to moderate them, and is now proposing a decentralized platform where Twitter is no longer responsible for content moderation for other platforms.

By doing so, they can continue to act as your “aggregator” of individual (RSS-like) Twitter accounts, so that they can continue showing you ads based on the data they harvest from you and your feeds — while outsourcing responsibility for moderation to others.

This is an effective strategy for increasing profits and if implemented correctly will permit mass layoffs of most of their content moderation workforce. This will also vastly increase the prevalence of abuse, racism, and other societal ills that infect Twitter with its underpowered moderation today.

Props to Twitter for identifying a way to externalize the cost of civility while continuing to profit from the resulting cesspool that will ensue.

Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

#272

Post by dang »

Arathorn wrote: post #144

For what it’s worth, Matrix is trying to be the protocol that Jack describes here - complete with relative reputation systems ( https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/msc2313/propos... ) and an open standard ( https://matrix.org/docs/spec ) and even an open governance process and foundation ( https://matrix.org/foundation ) - and with work progressing towards fully decentralised p2p matrix. Rather than buildin…

Can you please not post duplicate comments to HN? It lowers the signal/noise ratio of the site and creates a headache when we merge threads, like we did in this case.

If two threads are so much the same that you want to post the same comment to both, that's a strong indication that they should be merged. Sending us a heads up at hn@ycombinator.com is a forcing function to make that happen.

(Parent is a duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21763925. We merged the replies from here to there.)

Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

#273

Post by the8472 »

kixiQu wrote: post #259
the8472 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems more like an appeal to emotion to justify the creation of censorship infrastructure than an actual solution to a problem. I haven't heard of unsolicited CP being a common spam issue. And those who exchange CP intentionally can and do use encryption which makes such filters pointless.

Then you are not familiar with the Fediverse's patterns of establishing various levels of tolerance on different networks of instances for loli content (blah blah it's fiction blah blah) because otherwise it federates onto people's timelines and they're revolted. CWs do a lot to soften this.

The original argument seemed about illegal content. If you're just talking about unwanted porn, well, that's an argument for better local content filters, which is different from eradicating content at the source.

Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

#278

Post by RussianCow »

espadrine wrote: post #250
jakelazaroff wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is doomed from the start, then. There’s no way for them to work on an open standard without leaking features or contributing work to their competitors.

It depends on what goal you see being defined. I see one public and one private: Publicly, organize social engagement. As long as they are at the helm, and at the forefront of tech innovation, they won't have issues on that goal. Privately, diffuse regulatory pressure. If unlike Facebook, they can share blame with other actors, they won't singlehandedly be responsible for political mayhem, so there won't be calls to…

> If unlike Facebook, they can share blame with other actors, they won't singlehandedly be responsible for political mayhem, so there won't be calls to break up Twitter.

I don't buy this. Nothing is going to change from the user perspective, and almost nobody in the grand scheme of things will likely be aware of this open standard anyway, let alone people working in government. I don't see how this will change the public and political perception of social media websites whatsoever.

Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

#279

Post by miguelmota »

espadrine wrote: post #202
mathnmusic wrote: post #28

They should at the very least evaluate ActivityPub. It's a W3C standard that reached "Recommended" status almost two years ago, is flexible enough for future use-cases, and already has multiple implementations like Mastodon. In fact, any app can be made to act as a source, sink or both of ActivityPub events. I recently added ActivityPub support to learnawesome.org so that reviews can be consumed in any ActivityPub cl…

Three reasons why not: operational, business, and technical. Operational: they don’t control features; adding them by contributing to the standard would leak planned features, and without contributing, would be seen as embrace-extend-extinguish. Business: it would contribute work to their competitors. Technical: implementing global search on it is implausible.

Completely agree; commercial services prefer to use their own protocol over a common protocol for technical and commercial reasons. For example XMPP is a federated messaging protocol but Facebook Chat moved off XMPP, AOL AIM moved off XMPP, Google Talk moved of XMPP., even Twitter moved off XMPP at one point, because they all implemented custom features and eventually devolve from the base protocol.

Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

#280

Post by sushid »

mathgenius wrote: post #57

"the value of social media is shifting away from content hosting and removal, and towards recommendation algorithms directing one’s attention" I really wish I could hack on the youtube recommendation algorithm. It seems to be tuned for zombie viewing pleasure, and totally not for finding surprising new content. Even just having several "personas" would be a big help.

Hm I disagree with that. I think for the short term it’s obviously aligned for zombie viewing but I’ve been introduced to completely different and new content via their recommendation algorithm on the homepage (no, not trending).
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