Comment by tajen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tajen | Hacker News Reader

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Reddit is in a much less monopolistic situation. Twitter is a mandatory medium for public communication. That's which censorship on Twitter is worse than in a subreddit.

Besides, it's a long stretch to imagine that right-wing media convinces people to become right-wing. In my case it's rather the opposite: I've been super-over-surcovered with left-wing pro-women communication until my 30s (whether in media or in programmer conferences), I noted that the mantra "Women are oppressed all the time" didn't match what I witnessed in companies (e.g. men from GitHub CEO to Douglas Crockford and all the way down to colleagues are being fired upon unproven accusations by women), which made me investigate the topic only to find that 90% of feminists' arguments are incorrect, which made me search for more reasonable media, aka "right-wing media" according to left-wing media.

Liberals have made a speciality of accusing right-wingers of censorship. That left-wing media like Twitter resorts to censorship only reinforces the perception that the world isn't fair and severely biased with double-standards in favour left-wingers.

If anything, I wish Brexit + Trump meant the end of the ban on some ideas like discussing immigration or men's rights.

Arguing that Twitter is so necessary to public communication that it should be regulated as something like a common carrier (perhaps applying the same to Facebook and YouTube) is an interesting argument, but one you usually hear from the left, not the right. The right usually takes more of a hardline private-property viewpoint along the lines of, "private companies should be able to institute whatever rules they want on their platform, start your own if you disagree".

> Twitter is a mandatory medium for public communication

What makes it "mandatory" - the fact that they choose not to use an alternative, or the fact that they have not built an alternative?

The network effect. Viewers are on Twitter, so no party can succeed without using Twitter for communication.

What's your point, are you saying that new political parties are only allowed to grow if build their own Twitter competitor or have pre-approved ideas?

Twitter IMHO is a very poor medium for public communication. It is very difficult to discuss complex issues like gender relations or the dynamics of immigration in a sober, thoughtful, nuanced manner via streams of 140 characters. In the former in particular I actually feel there's a definite case where Twitter amplified division; the notorious "SJW vs MRA" storm advanced little if any productive discussion and merely put people in opposing camps lobbying grenades at the other side.

If this is now "mandatory" for public communication now, I feel that's a huge downgrade from public communication methods in the past.

I don't want to presume to tell you how to use twitter but to me, it seems to be clearly geared as a one to many broadcast channel. It is much more akin to a protocol that allows people to subscribe to events/ideas/movements/news and get succinct updates about them. It is a terrible place for discussion objectively, but I believe this was by design-- and a feature.

I do agree with you there. Twitter is great for immediate notifications like that.

For discussion, if people, say, tweeted a link to their blog entry with their thoughts, I feel that would be a great use case of Twitter. Unfortunately some chose to do the entire discussion on Twitter. That often ends up poorly.

> Twitter is a mandatory medium for public communication.

That's the precise difference.

There are two solutions I envisage for Twitter's behaviour. One is a market solution of people moving away from it (e.g. towards Gab). This might be infeasible due to network effects.

The other is regulation: communication services above a certain size be required to be an open platform. This would still allow twitter to ban people, but anyone would be allowed to re-used Twitter's data feed making it much easier to set up a competitor.

> censorship on Twitter is worse than in a subreddit

Not least because anyone can set up their own subreddit with their own moderation rules.

> Twitter is a mandatory medium for public communication

Which is why everyone should stop using twitter. A private company should never have that much control over critical infrastructure.

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