321–330 of 398 posts
Speech is not violence. The author's conflation of the two trivializes actual physical violence.
I don't think the author knows the definition of "violence"
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Well, like any good social media platform, they have no actual support. It's impossible by design to ever speak to an actual human who works at Twitter except via form-email smoke signals.
Well, having people answer phones costs money, and you are not paying for Twitter. Your "data" and "eyeballs" aren't actually worth much. Would you be ok with a premium rate number where you pay per minute?
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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.
You can change somebody's opinion, just not through one direct interaction. An opinion change requires time, internal rationalization, and repeated exposure. An echo chamber is bad because it not only repeatedly re-broadcasts beliefs, it also amplifies them. "The President is wrong and should be voted out of office" can turn into "The President is wrong and ought to be shot" in an echo chamber environment much faster…
I'm sympathetic to the author's general ideas, but also find myself perturbed by the myopic cheapening of the term "violence". (chars < 140)
I found the author's usage of the term eye-opening rather than myopic!
Does Twitter have to be Facebook to not be "fucked"? I don't understand these statements that "Twitter is fucked". Twitter could improve filtering and safety but if it never changed I'd probably still get my news from it for the rest of my life. I just can't think of a better app for my use cases. I often like Twitter Moments, like something funny or some pop culture stuff I wouldn't have picked up on. Every time the…
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> 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…
Give $10,000-$25,000 to The Clinton Foundation
http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/05/clinton-foundati...
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…
> there would be a clone written in a more scalable architecture Curious, what would be more scalable than Twitter's existing JVM based architecture? 3 years ago[1] they were able to handle upwards of 140 (edit) thousand tweets per second without any latency -- that's pretty ridiculous. [1] https://blog.twitter.com/2013/new-tweets-per-second-record-a...
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We have word-phrases for what you're talking about. More nuanced than your proposed catch-all of 'violent communication.' As someone who's been on the receiving end of a large portion of 'violent communication', it's much easier, and significantly more validating to say 'emotional abuse' or 'hate speech'. I don't understand what about asking violence to retain its definition is unrealistic. It's an important word wit…
Violent communication is an umbrella term for a variety of causes and effects. It may not be hateful. It may not be abusive. But it has the quality and characteristics of the intent to cause harm, which is what violence is. But going back to your main assertion here, you say that the word 'violence' has a particular definition, and the use of this phrase does not retain it, and that it thus harms people's interpretat…
>>" Violence is an extreme form of aggression, such as assault, rape or murder. Violence has many causes, including frustration, exposure to 𝘃𝗶𝗼𝗹𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗺𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗮, violence in the home or neighborhood and a tendency to 𝘀𝗲𝗲 𝗼𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲'𝘀 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗮𝘀 𝗵𝗼𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗹𝗲 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻 𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘆'𝗿𝗲 𝗻𝗼𝘁. Certain situations also increase the risk of aggression, such as drinking, insults and other provocations and environmental factors like heat and overcrowding."
Notice the APA's definitions includes assault, rape, and murder, and your bolded text specifically refers to the root causes of violence. The exposure to violent media predisposes people to violence, the perception of other people's actions as hostile even when they're not causes a misunderstanding that leads to violence.
1.1) from the Oxford definition is a testament to how strongly people react to violence.
The Wikipedia article is a far more compelling argument for your case, but the WHO has political interests that colors their definition of the word. Was the FDA promoting trans fats violent? It certainly is an action that was taken from a position of power which caused harm. The FDA actually might be one of the more violent domestic US institutions under this definition. Are all parents violent? Doing some harm to your child's mental health or well being is going to happen in 18 years of making decisions.
Clearly there is a difference in significance between the 'violence' of a parent who teases their child a few times and a parent who is beating their child.
We have an obvious colloquial use of the word violence that supercedes using violent as an adjective in this way. If we're going to talk about linguistic drift, this is a very poor example. Rather, this appears to be a small number of people who are attempting to expand the definition of violent. This definition has only been adopted by a few special interests groups who have a vested interest in changing how the larger population communicates. One method that they are using to do this is using rhetorical[1] tricks, like labeling everyone who does not agree with them as violent, by using overly loose definitions like the WHO example above.
[1] When an argument is nearly entirely about the way that we use rhetoric, I'll use the word rhetorical. That's the nice thing about words, when they have strong definitions, they're highly applicable to situations. You can use them and everyone will know what you're talking about!
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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've wondered how Twitter would have been different if they'd taken a similar approach: $1 per account per year. They'd certainly be smaller than they are now, but I suspect they'd still be bringing in several hundred million a year before going the advertising route--the pursuit of which seems to be at the root of a lot of their questionable product decisions over the last few years.
None of that's directly relevant to the article, of course, which is implicitly about better filtering tools. I continue to be kind of bemused that this is so difficult for modern services to figure out, given that LiveJournal essentially figured it out fifteen years ago. Yes, the two services aren't directly comparable, but it wouldn't be wildly difficult to offer controls over, for example, who's allowed to @mention you.