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Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social

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Re: Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social

#81

Post by throw_m239339 »

tehlike wrote: post #31
fartcannon wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowadays, maybe let's assume malice. Maybe its a false positive and a bunch of people stop using twitter, Facebook, google, apple, or Microsoft as a result. That is less harmful (some might say it's good) than the opposite, where big corps use our collective desire to forgive as a tool to exploit us. You can apply that saying to your wife and kids. Or your neighbour. Big corps that make money off exploiting peoples n…

That must be a hard life assuming things are working against you

> That must be a hard life assuming things are working against you

Yes, better be gullible all the time instead and trust all these corporations...

Re: Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social

#82

Post by [deleted] »

jmcnulty wrote: post #21

Maybe there was some content on mastodon.social they didn't like. As they don't integrate with ActivityPub they can't block individual users so perhaps they chose to block the whole domain instead. It's not like they're cutting off the whole Fediverse. There are hundreds (thousands?) of mastadon instances and none of the others will be affected by this.

[deleted]

Re: Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social

#83

Post by superkuh »

user3939382 wrote: post #19
rvz wrote: post #7

Ok? They are a private company and they can block links that they don't like. Facebook has done the exact same thing and nothing happened. You are free to complain, criticise them, scream at these companies or protest, but like I have said many times before they will not change and it is futile to believe that they ever will as long as they 'moderate' or do whatever they want to do on their own platforms. So unsurpri…

> They are a private company I've been hearing this a lot lately, surprisingly from people who consider themselves to be politically left. I say surprisingly because historically, leftist ideology has been quick to solve problems with corporate behavior with regulations, whereas traditionally it's been the right pushing laissez-faire. In any case, guys - private company doesn't mean your behaviors and policies aren't…

Definitely. The act of incorportation has one goal: to abstract away risk and liability. Human people controlling the company will not be held liable for their actions or debts. But this comes with the trade-off of having to accept regulations.

If you want to have full control over your property then do not incorporate and give the property to the corporate person. I can block links to mastadon on my truly private (ie, owned by a human person) website without consequence. "Private" corporate persons have more regulatory burdens for obvious reasons.

Re: Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social

#84

Post by carapace »

tehlike wrote: post #26
sequoia wrote: post #22

A lot of people here are jumping to conclusions based on what could simply be a bug. Why not wait 24hrs and see if this is actually some policy or just a mistake.

It's a bug but HN crowds like to talk about the evil corps all the time.

Do you remember the time that the "evil corps" conspired together to rip off their own developers to the tune of several billion dollars?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

(The suit was filed against Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay, but it turned out that "dozens" of other tech companies got involved as well (Pando Daily had good coverage https://web.archive.org/web/20200304045453/https://pando.com... ))

I figure these guys will do whatever they think they can get away with.

Re: Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social

#85

Post by pid-1 »

tehlike wrote: post #11

I bet it's likely a bug. There were times i wasnt able to post LinkedIn urls in the past. I bet it's their crawler/integrity service having hard time. Never assume malice when it can be sufficiently explained by a bug or incompetence.

> Never assume malice when it can be sufficiently explained by a bug or incompetence.

My 100% baseless opinion is that most evil in big orgs comes from emergent behavior.

Ant colonies are capable of really complex stuff, even though individual ants are somewhat simple beings.

Likewise, a corp can do evil stuff even though all individuals who are part of it aren't actively seeking to do harm.

Since we can't ask a corp its intentions, it's fair to judge them for the consequences of their actions.

Re: Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social

#86

Post by sillysaurusx »

tehlike wrote: post #31
fartcannon wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowadays, maybe let's assume malice. Maybe its a false positive and a bunch of people stop using twitter, Facebook, google, apple, or Microsoft as a result. That is less harmful (some might say it's good) than the opposite, where big corps use our collective desire to forgive as a tool to exploit us. You can apply that saying to your wife and kids. Or your neighbour. Big corps that make money off exploiting peoples n…

That must be a hard life assuming things are working against you

Pleasantly surprised that you got 8 replies saying that things are often working against us. It’s true at least some of the time. And depending on your social status, that “some of the time” can become all of the time.

Competitors have no obligation to play nicely. Is it really a surprise they don’t?

Re: Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social

#87

Post by tjpnz »

tehlike wrote: post #11

I bet it's likely a bug. There were times i wasnt able to post LinkedIn urls in the past. I bet it's their crawler/integrity service having hard time. Never assume malice when it can be sufficiently explained by a bug or incompetence.

I'm willing to bet Twitter has a whitelist for sites with user generated content to prevent whole domains from being hell banned if one person says something naughty. Perhaps Mastodon has yet to be added to this list?

Re: Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social

#88

Post by kaiken1987 »

ekianjo wrote: post #51
tehlike wrote: post #11

I bet it's likely a bug. There were times i wasnt able to post LinkedIn urls in the past. I bet it's their crawler/integrity service having hard time. Never assume malice when it can be sufficiently explained by a bug or incompetence.

> Never assume malice when it can be sufficiently explained by a bug or incompetence. I find this to be a stupid way to look at things. Incompetence and malice are not mutually exclusive.

But the difference is that incompetence is far more plentiful than malice. It's an odds game. Everyone makes mistakes, few actions people in general take are done in malice.

Re: Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social

#89

Post by ensignavenger »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #13
bombcar wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the kind of thing that's interesting to document for a potential anti-trust case. Blocking the entire domain because it's "spammy" could be argued as fair - but only blocking the main links is more suspect.

antitrust? Is twitter a monopoly now?

Not all antitrust laws require you to be a monopoly to break them.

Re: Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social

#90

Post by mypalmike »

lapcat wrote: post #74
cmeacham98 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Private company", in this context, means "not the government". The opposite would be "public sector", referring to the government or companies it owns/runs.

Except, how many government owned companies are there in the US? What's the point in saying "private company" if 99.99+% of companies are private?

Twitter is a company.

Is that statement sufficient to stop further nitpicking?

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