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,…
I was a huge naysayer about the Facebook model that Joi espouses in your story. Facebook ended up being very successful with their users first approach surprising everyone. I suspect that in 10 years Facebook will be an exception rather than a rule.
Twitter's Fucked
311–320 of 398 posts
Re: Twitter's Fucked
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
> > I refer of course to the Milo Yiannopoulos situation You make reference to your first paragraph (see above) as being to do with Milo. The second para is about Milo. That's The majority of your comment. You sir, are a liar. Addendum: Presume I'm getting downvoted for calling the OP a liar. It's literally what he did. It's in writing.
No, you were getting downvoted because of your indignant hysteria and outright harassment of a commenter over something completely irrelevant, and now I suspect that will transition to being downvoted for complaining about downvoting. Don't do either.
Stating a fact is indignant hysteria? I was replying to his comment which was a lie.
> outright harassment
I'll come back to this.
> a commenter over something completely irrelevant
OK. From OP:
"The man deserved what he got, but there are dozens of accounts that were his "executors" - doing the actual harassment for him in many cases - who got off scot-free, while he remains banned. There is no consistency."
From the article:
"However, the decision to ban Milo because of the actions of a few of his 500,000 followers (if that is indeed why this occurred) is horribly inconsistent."
Both of these statements are semantically similar—there is inconsistency.
That's an example of where the comment is low quality due to the OP not reading the article. So I reject that it's irrelevant.
Back to the harassment. I stated facts as plainly as I could. If he/she finds facts intimidating then I would say it's on the OP to examine what he/she said & did, and not on me to ignore or use mental gymnastics to defend incorrect statements.
Re: Twitter's Fucked
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
So what, when you gain over some arbitrary amount of followers, you're not allowed to ever tweet about another person? What's the magic number at which you're not allowed to speak about anything but generalities? 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 s…
Dorsey & BLM's Leader are friends therefore so long as you're cheering on the murder of cops you're ok.
Re: Twitter's Fucked
#314The part about different kinds of content that get shared reminds me of this CGP Grey video that talks about what causes us to share things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
Re: Twitter's Fucked
#315Yep. 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:…
> The only "safe" way to use Twitter now is as an echo chamber "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…
Does this ever happen? It seems to me like every time someone says something unpopular, the world goes on a witch hunt to destroy that person's life. That's not what I call "constructively challenged". I call it "just short of hanging them, which is what people really want to do."
I'd love to see a world where I could debate a matter with someone without everyone getting so emotionally charged that logic gets thrown out the window, and ideas that are incorrect can be pointed out to a person without everyone hating one another.
Re: Twitter's Fucked
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see where you're going with your rule: services that provide True Value™ would likely survive if they suddenly started charging a nominal fee right now. However, as a game developer with Free-To-Play development PTSD, I think this rule rests on an implied-but-important condition: People are already using and loving the service. Imagine that some shiny new app called Spark launches tomorrow and vaguely promises to b…
> However, as a game developer with Free-To-Play development PTSD, I think this rule rests on an implied-but-important condition: People are already using and loving the service. No, that's exactly not what I'm saying. Uber did just fine starting as a pay service as do a great many games, Netflix, HBO, Amazon, etc. > Imagine that some shiny new app called Spark launches tomorrow and vaguely promises to be Twitter 2.0…
I think that's an unfair comparison for two reasons: (1) People were already comfortable with the idea of paying for cabs, cable, games, books/electronics in the old world. Whereas the current norm is _not_ to pay for social media services.
(2) A transportation service, game, streaming video service, e-retailer can deliver value to their first customer. A social network is only valuable if others are using it. If Spark / Twitter 2.0 launches tomorrow, even if they can provide a bunch of product improvements over Twitter 1.0, the first users have no reason to pay b/c they're joining an empty / worthless conversation, so at launch it's almost necessary to allow people to join for free. And this creates the norms described in (1).
Re: Twitter's Fucked
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was a huge naysayer about the Facebook model that Joi espouses in your story. Facebook ended up being very successful with their users first approach surprising everyone. I suspect that in 10 years Facebook will be an exception rather than a rule.
Instagram, WhatsApp, WeChat, Line?
I don't think it's impossible to convert a large non-monetizing user-base into a profitable company (Google, Facebook, Snapchat, etc.) but I think that strategy is not a wise one for someone interested in building a sustainable company. There's a bigger reward to scaling before monetizing, but there's also a bigger gamble.
Re: Twitter's Fucked
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
Instagram, WhatsApp, WeChat, Line?
Fair point, although I'd replace WeChat with SnapChat (WeChat being created by Tencent). I don't think it's impossible to convert a large non-monetizing user-base into a profitable company (Google, Facebook, Snapchat, etc.) but I think that strategy is not a wise one for someone interested in building a sustainable company. There's a bigger reward to scaling before monetizing, but there's also a bigger gamble.
Re: Twitter's Fucked
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fair point, although I'd replace WeChat with SnapChat (WeChat being created by Tencent). I don't think it's impossible to convert a large non-monetizing user-base into a profitable company (Google, Facebook, Snapchat, etc.) but I think that strategy is not a wise one for someone interested in building a sustainable company. There's a bigger reward to scaling before monetizing, but there's also a bigger gamble.
Ya, in general I agree with you. Just listing a few more exceptions to the rule. Also, I can't believe I left out SnapChat! Showing my age there aren't I?
Re: Twitter's Fucked
#320Speech is not violence. The author's conflation of the two trivializes actual physical violence.
Yes speech is not the same thing as actively hitting someone or throwing someone out of a club. But At the same time there are classes of speech which cause direct harm.
To be pedantic about it, words can cause physical pain, fear, stress and anxiety. So words have been demonstrated to cause physical harm.
In short: your erecting a false dichotomy/comparison. There is violent speech, and yes it's not the same as physical violence. It's not considered to be.
Additionally, I think your short sentence encapsulates a particularly incorrect assessment of the modern world, and especially life "online".
Online Life is locution. An unusually large portion of ones persona lives in words exchanged online. All actions that occur which silence someone, elevate someone else, instruct, confuse, insult or praise do so through words. Speech is everything online.