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Twitter, It’s Time to End Your Anything-Goes Paradise

nytimes.com

81–90 of 116 posts

Re: Twitter, It’s Time to End Your Anything-Goes Paradise

#81
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter is a business, and they get to choose what sort of business they want to be. If they want to be totally hands off, they can do that. But if they want to set a tone for how people use their service, they can do that too. Reddit is a platform for discourse too, and they've decided to evict certain communities from their platform because they don't match Reddit's goals and values. HN is a platform for discourse…

>If they want to be totally hands off, they can do that. If they want to be totally hands off, they can do that. But if they want to set a tone for how people use their service, they can do that too. Yes, they can. I'm just going to repost my canned response now: >The government supports free speech because it's important and a Good Thing. Just because private companies aren't required to do the same doesn't make it…

Posting the same canned response twice in one thread doesn't advance the discussion at all.

Re: Twitter, It’s Time to End Your Anything-Goes Paradise

#82
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If they want to be totally hands off, they can do that. If they want to be totally hands off, they can do that. But if they want to set a tone for how people use their service, they can do that too. Yes, they can. I'm just going to repost my canned response now: >The government supports free speech because it's important and a Good Thing. Just because private companies aren't required to do the same doesn't make it…

Posting the same canned response twice in one thread doesn't advance the discussion at all.

It's proposing that you read it agian, with the implication that you probably missed the point.

Re: Twitter, It’s Time to End Your Anything-Goes Paradise

#83
post #53

I feel like making a service where people can post public 140 character messages, and other people can follow them, and thats the entire app, and call it twitter classic.

Spam?

How's it spam? I select people/accounts I want to follow, and tweets from them show up in chronological order in my timeline. Sounds brilliant, someone should get on that!

Re: Twitter, It’s Time to End Your Anything-Goes Paradise

#84
post #49

I don't understand why Twitter doesn't generate some general "white/blacklist" feature that people could opt in/out of? Things like, a "porn" filter, a "n-word" filter, a "faminist"/"mysogynist" filter, etc. Some of these could be automatic (e.g. porn and spam and virus links), some manual (e.g. "all people who this particular user disagrees with"), they could be curated by Twitter itself or by any other entity/user,…

> IMO that solves most of the problems

And creates echo chambers.

That's part of the problem with Facebook, once you start posting and interacting with certain types of content you get the same type of content more often. Leaving out the opposing viewpoints and giving you the impression that everyone agrees with you.

Re: Twitter, It’s Time to End Your Anything-Goes Paradise

#85
post #59

When was the last time anyone referred to Twitter as "anything-goes"? NYT, it's time to end your "editorials are news" dystopia.

It's a columnist presenting their own views, something newspapers have always had.

That's true, except it used to be common to label such articles as "editorial" or "opinion". Granted, you and I can already recognize that it's an opinion piece, but not having an explicit distinction is obviously intended to blur the lines between fact and opinion. I'm just not a fan of this practice.

Re: Twitter, It’s Time to End Your Anything-Goes Paradise

#86

I feel like making a service where people can post public 140 character messages, and other people can follow them, and thats the entire app, and call it twitter classic.

Hm. Spin it up under a non-profit, create or build upon an open protocol. Appeal to the folks who think the Internet would be better off with something twitter-like but as kind-of a public service, and more open.

If you do allow responses/conversations, allow it only between users who follow one another. But maybe just don't allow it at all.

[EDIT] actually, if anyone's thinking about doing this and wants to chat... email's in my profile.

Re: Twitter, It’s Time to End Your Anything-Goes Paradise

#87
There's a MUCH bigger problem to talk about.

Air, it's time to end your anything-goes paradise. Your medium allows murderers, rapists and my crotchety old neighbor to create vibrations that will reach the ears of others.

Why are we allowing these criminals to vibrate molecules of air? We should be ashamed of ourselves.

I'm happy to announce Airfilter. A new device that uses machine learning-based active noise cancellation (and a blockchain reputation system) to selectively remove offensive vibrations from the entire atmosphere of the earth.

We're hiring!

Re: Twitter, It’s Time to End Your Anything-Goes Paradise

#88
post #74
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a column expressing one person's (Farhad Manjoo's) viewpoint. It isn't a news article or opinion from the NYT editorial staff.

Im not extremely familiar with how newspapers categorize their content, but wouldnt this still go under an opinion piece or be labeled as such? Honest question.

Usually repeating columns in newspapers have names next to the byline. So this one is attributed to Farhad Manjoo - STATE OF THE ART which is explained as "A column from Farhad Manjoo that examines how technology is changing business and society."

Columns are very much opinion pieces. Editorials are opinion pieces written by the editorial staff and usually are looked at as having the support of the paper (like endorsing a candidate). It definitely be more clear though.

Re: Twitter, It’s Time to End Your Anything-Goes Paradise

#89
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a columnist presenting their own views, something newspapers have always had.

That's true, except it used to be common to label such articles as "editorial" or "opinion". Granted, you and I can already recognize that it's an opinion piece, but not having an explicit distinction is obviously intended to blur the lines between fact and opinion. I'm just not a fan of this practice.

Very fair. I have seen people share opinion pieces as news articles before too. Very similar to the ads that look exactly like articles.

Re: Twitter, It’s Time to End Your Anything-Goes Paradise

#90
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can say and think whatever you like. Companies giving platforms to hate is not something that democracy requires. It's less "that idea is popular" and more "these people are inciting hatred against other people". I'm baffled that people still repeat this "free speech is important" thing when we're talking about a private service giving an audience to white supremacists.

I hate nazism as much as everyone else. Problem is they and other media companies (and often the users as well) has ridiculous problems to understand the diffence between racism (judging and treating people different depending on who their parents where etc) and scepticism towards a recent immigration wave (do we want to relocate all these humans right here, right now? Can we help more people by doing it differently?…

OK, but there are definitely plenty of clear cut cases and Twitter has historically had issues dealing even with these. This isn't an issue of media in general, we're talking about Twitter, that's what the article is about.
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