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I haven't hammered this point home because I've lost the graph, but have absolutely seen one breaking down user growth month by month, and there's a clear turning point around about August 2014 — which is of course the month the Gamer Gate frenzy kicked off.

If there's something in that correlation, then actually the Safety Council is unlikely to be the beginning of the end — but it may come too late to reverse the damage done by the abusers who have run rampant on Twitter for years.

>maybe you've got too many and the high volume posters drown out the good signal from the low volume posters (that's where I am at, and don't know how quite to fix it...)

One of solutions: add high volume posters to thematic lists and unfollow them. Check lists when you have time for that.

> maybe you've got too many and the high volume posters drown out the good signal from the low volume posters (that's where I am at, and don't know how quite to fix it...)

Unfollow. Seriously, that's the best way to decrease noise. Yeah, perhaps they do occasionally tweet something interesting. But if 50%+ is just noise, it's hardly worth it. I'll look for their content elsewhere.

OMG. I left twitter a while ago and now seeing that it turns into a digital nanny state makes me even happier to be out.

If you're the type of person to say something likely to be censored on Twitter, we don't want you on there anyway.

"We"? Are you the queen?

Which of Twitter's unacceptable content policies do you find objectionable? I agree with all of them, and I think the vast majority of Twitter users do as well.

https://twitter.com/rules

That's why basic rights like freedom of speech exist, to protect us from such "well-intended" attacks in favor of an alleged "vast majority". "Harassment" as in that policy or other "codes of conduct" can be pretty much anything, in particular now that it has become standard mode of operation to claim victimhood for just about anything to silence other people.

The constitutional right to freedom of speech applies to public (government) institutions, not to private (non-government) institutions like Twitter. Twitter is exercising their constitutional right to freedom of speech to disallow certain kinds of content on their platform. There is no violation of anyone's constitutional freedom of speech.

If you think it's a poor business decision, that's your call, and time will tell. But it has precisely nothing to do with "freedom of speech."

Freedom of speech and the First Amendment are two different things, but I suspect you already know this.

No, that's just how he brushes off inconvenient problems.

Instead of rules, look at what's being censored and tell us if you agree.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Twitter

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/censoring-...

And so on.

I do not have any problems with Twitter's actions in the New Yorker article. I don't find "slippery slope" arguments persuasive when there is real harassment being committed right now. I don't think the wikipedia link is relevant to this conversation; it seems to be about state censorship. The "Controversy" section as it's written now is obviously not NPOV and cites no sources.

Exactly. Give them the tools and they'll censor whatever the fashion of the day calls offensive.

I know! It starts when you can't call a woman a slut, threaten her life, and post her private details and nude pictures on Twitter, and then before you know it you can't print out her picture, ejaculate onto it, and mail the soiled photo to her family[1]. What a crazy world we're headed towards.

[1] Why yes, this does actually happen. Harassment on the Internet is no joke. http://blog.unburntwitch.com/post/139084743809/why-i-just-dr...

Exactly! So let's just pick that one thing, and then invent some "guidelines" that totally won't prevent anything like that ever, but allow you to arbitrarily censor people with the wrong opinions. Awesome! War against "harrassment", mission accomplished!

Entitlement generation.

I don't have a problem with Twitter "arbitrarily censor[ing] people with the wrong opinions." Its their platform and they don't have to give a voice to everyone who has one, they can do whatever they please and promote any agenda they want. That is their choice. If you don't like Twitter's rules you're free to start your own site, or write a book. Nobody is entitled to use someone else's site any way they wish.

People are bringing this up to say that it could annoy many users and chase them away, as well as limit their user growth, not that they don't have the right to do it. Bad business decision, in other words.

You envision some perfect censorship filter. What if reality differs from your ideal?

What if, miracle of miracles, you and I disagree on what should or should not be censored? What if Twitter straight up abuses this power? Either way, the result may be fewer users, and this could hurt Twitter as a business.

> maybe your interests have changed, so when you check your timeline its like listening to those old mp3's from the 90's that you still keep around (not your current tastes, and terrible encoding rates), so now you need to curate a new timeline, and that's a lot of work, and where to start?!?

Lists could be used as forkable alternate universes, but Twitter does not provide the tools.

- keep high and low frequency users in separate or topical lists, keeping in mind that people may change tweet frequency

- create annual (past you, future you) lists and fork each year, removing people or topics that are no longer aligned

Instead of Twitter black box curation that cannot possibly serve the millions of niche threads and communities, Twitter could enable 3rd-party analytics for refactoring lists/streams by metrics that are under the control of users. Even the curation signals could be crowd-sourced on Twitter itself, with appropriate API support.

Twitter could have an API competition to re-engage 3rd parties. Use the raw datasets already available to academia and identify new signals and APIs to enable client side, human "intelligence augmentation" innovation in curation analytics. As a side effect, curation will provide new signals for targeting.

The safety council is not likely to achieve much, but it's a very necessary step in the right direction. Otherwise the threat of driveby harrasment flashmobs is going to start driving people (especially women) off twitter.