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Comment by makomk | Hacker News Reader

Twitter's problem isn't just that they have to fix harassment, it's that they have to do it without touching social justice activism that sure looks similar to it from the outside, right down to the doxing, threats, and smears. Oh, and they'll get no sympathy for getting this wrong as the difference is apparently obvious... except that everyone defines it differently (usually based on who their friends are) and simply assumes the world shares their definition. Good luck.

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> harassment

I do wonder if this word is even appropriate to the situation. Using twitter seems akin to stepping on a soap box on the town square and shouting every single word you say.

Maybe nobody will pay attention to you. Or maybe you'll get a crowd of people who think favorably of you. Maybe someone else will step on his own box and have a conversation with you, but still there for everyone to hear.

And it goes even further, you even have an official scribe who records everything you say and then pins it to the great proclamation board of the city plaza so that everyone who was not there at the time can still follow what you're saying.

This is an incredibly public mode of conversation that people don't realize what they're doing.

And well, if you say something that people disagree with you will get booing, hissing, insults, threats from a whole mob... maybe just because you're too loud. This would be the risk if you stepped on a box of a real place.

You have to realize that the mob shouting you down probably doesn't really mean to attack a person. It is verbally attacking a public speaker on the city plaza. You get treated akin to an unpopular politician, not as regular citizen discussing things with friends.

> maybe just because you're too loud. This would be the risk if you stepped on a box of a real place.

Or maybe just because you're Jewish.

https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/judgments/sentencing-remarks-of...

> You have to realize that the mob shouting you down probably doesn't really mean to attack a person. It is verbally attacking a public speaker on the city plaza. You get treated akin to an unpopular politician, not as regular citizen discussing things with friends.

The case I linked above put someone in fear of their life.

It's disappointing to see people claim this is not really an attack.

Well, actually illegal behavior is for the legal system to deal with.

But if twitter is a public, open platform with global reach then you will also get people who react to you like a public speaker. Which includes things that do not meet the legal harassment standards. Just the texual equivalent of booing, hissing and throwing insults at people to get them off the stage.

And I think people need to be aware of this when they state political opinions on the global twitter soapbox instead of doing it among their friends.

I'm sure changes can be made to dampen it. But this is the current situation. And I'm not sure harassment is a good way to describe it.

> texual equivalent of booing, hissing and throwing insults at people to get them off the stage

Which in most public speaking venues will get you thrown out, and if you do it in the open air badly enough you can also get arrested. (America is rather unusual in the amount of this it allows, not always to the good)

And if we look at this particular case it's not "booing", but "Over a period of three months .. cruel campaign of vile racist abuse".

Also: "You are currently serving a sentence of 40 months imprisonment, imposed on 17 the December 2015 for stirring up racial hatred against the Jewish comm unity in Golders Green. That offence was committed whilst you were on bail for the present offence, which in turn was committed whilst you were on bail for other offences of sending malicious communications over the internet and harassment." -- I think maybe this guy should not have been allowed Twitter while in prison.

Oh just read the whole thing on aggravating features:

1. This was extreme racial hostility over a prolonged period, 3 months.

2. There was careful planning.

3. The offence was part of a pattern of racist offending.

4. You were acting, in effect, as a member of a group promoting racist activity.

5. The impact on Ms Berger was very considerable.

6. As a Member of Parliament she was providing a service to the public.

7. The offence was committed whilst you were on bail and awaiting sentence for other offences of hate crime committed over the Internet.

I don't know if you got the memo, but HN has a pretty strong voting block of alt-right (neo-nazi) sympathizers. Sorry about your comment getting downed to hell

Everyone is equally "loud" on Twitter. And you're not allowed to hurl racist abuse at speakers in public, either.

(You know, if there was some kind of agreement that tweets containing only the wood "boooo" were definitely not harrasment, that might actually be an improvement on the current situation. It's the "I'm going to find you and murder you" and "incoherent string of racial slurs with frog emoji" that are the problem.

I don't know where you are from but in the US you most certainly are allowed to hurl racist slurs at speakers in public. It's up to the rest of the crowd to then shout back and speak truth back to the racist. As long as the racist is not shouting how to kill said public speaker or speaking libel, he's legally allowed.

Granted, we get into international situations and Twitter is private anyway. Just noting that "allowed" is not as black/white as you paint it and I wouldn't have it any other way. Would rather have minority groups be able to display their true selves to be judged than silenced.

On the "booo" comment though, you may have a helping idea. Maybe instead of a knee-jerk reaction to comment some obscenities, others would just be willing to -1 / boo / disagree in some way. One-click would be used over typing out the comment.

Don't you think services should generally strive for a higher behavior standard than the US penal code? Should anything that doesn't land you in jail be accepted?

In the US, hate speech is protected by the First Amendment "as long as it doesn't promote imminent violence".[1]

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech#United_States

> I do wonder if this word is even appropriate to the situation.

It's the word appropriate for the actual rampant harassment on Twitter: the threats, threats, verbal abuse etc.; that's literally what harassment means. It may not be appropriate for everything on Twitter. When people talk about harassment on Twitter, they don't mean the hissing and booing, but more the "we're gonna rape you", which is harassment on any other public forum as well, even if directed at someone on a soapbox.

Isn't the platform just the best medium for harassing and trolling? What else can you do with 140 chars? Have you ever heard about good tweets? It's always negativity.

Twitter's popular with journalists for some reason, most likely because it's an easy way to find potential stories and promote their work. This is probably part of the problem - it means that when ordinary users are nasty to them or their friends it's personal, and the same when they or their friends get their accounts suspended.

And twitter being popular with journalists makes it a fantastic platform for news junkies like myself. But that's mostly a one-way street.

Because only celebrities and journalists benefit from Twitter. It's boring for regular joe's, unless you like to only consume. Or troll :)

Since the election I've been spending time on HN and to a lesser extent Twitter. Every time I visit Twitter I find myself instinctively reaching for the downvote button, but there isn't one.

About the only thing you can do when someone says (or retweets) something totally idiotic on Twitter is either unfollow, or, of course, reply. In other words, there is no way to register disapproval without simultaneously calling attention to the very thing you disapprove of.

One of the absolute best features of HN is the downvote button and the way it is implemented. Downvotes are stronger than upvotes, and the downvoted content gets buried. A community that lets anyone join has to work hard to maintain a high standard. Downvotes don't kick people out, but they kick bad content off. Twitter has nothing like this, so the worst content gets the most attention. You can choose who you follow but users get no negative feedback on inappropriate tweets. So the norms shift towards whatever creates engagement, which is often outrage, fear, and strongly negative emotional content, with or without any rational foundation.

If Twitter wants engaging and constructive dialog, they need a way to take out the trash.

Unfortunately, Twitter's problem is that their potential for social good and their potential for revenue may never align. Since they are failing at turning a profit, it is unsurprising that they seem to be giving no consideration whatsoever to social responsibility.

+1. I spent a considerable amount of time on Twitter between August and November of this year. I quit cold turkey primarily because of the widespread negativity. Plus, its endless stream of tweets had a certain cheap novelty factor that coaxes you to spend more time on it than is warranted or necessary. HN and Reddit, to some extent, mitigate this in just the way I want.

I'd be interested to hear about what are the reasons and ways people find Twitter useful/interesting.

In contrast with HN, I find the most salient characteristic of Twitter is that negativity. In the days after the election I started referring to it as the national amygdala. It just became an echo chamber for fear. I mostly solved it by ruthlessly unfollowing people who are just venting their emotions and not engaging in critical thought. I made up for it by following people I disagree with and randomly following people that are followed by people I respect.

The thing I like about Twitter is who you can follow. Where else can you engage with Obama, Trump, etc. in a public forum? Without the big name political users, the press, the public intellectuals, Twitter would have nothing. The way the big shots are effectively equal to ordinary users is very democratic. I can @ the POTUS and at least in theory get a reply. There's nothing else out there that enables that kind of communication.

It's a shame that Twitter has done so little with so much. Think of the great newspapers of the past and how seriously many of them took their civic responsibility, and how they crowed about it in their editorial pages. They understood their role in society and the responsibility that came with the power they had. Yet here Twitter finds itself in possession of an unprecendented opportunity and they totally squander it. Completely oblivious to their social responsibility, they chase after ad dollars, and even there they fail.

The problem IMO is the limits. Humans can only read so many tweets and follow so many people. Beyond Dunbar's number (150 - 1500 depending on selectivity) they just blur into a big mess. Twitter's added some tools for curation (likes, user lists) but they aren't really powerful enough to filter tweets in real-time. They need something like Reddit's automod or a machine-learning filter.

The point of Twitter & other social media is empowering the user; they can encourage community members to step up and take civic responsibility, but Twitter's responsibility as such is to provide the platform rather than to run the show. I guess they could openly declare Twitter to be part of the DNC platform, but that would lose a ton of users (although not so much in terms of content). They're better off following a policy similar to Facebook of attempted neutrality.

As a counter argument I present Reddit, which as a downcote button but is even more notorious for its abusive communities. Is it possible that HN is just more heavily represented by mature people who tend to communicate better than average and the Magic isn't really in the downvote algorithm?

Yes. I believe, users are they key. I don't know many online communities, where asking for "original, peer reviewed paper" just to prove your point is common.

I should have mentioned: yes, the community is key. However the technology and the community together create the system. If the technology fails to support the community norms then the makeup of the community itself will shift. Once the elves start leaving middle-earth, it's difficult to recover.

Twitter is a little different because of its scale and the nature of its social graph. HN is a big room where everyone hears everyone else, Twitter is a giant switchboard where you plug in to choose your own mix.

Reddit seems to be something else, but I don't participate there so I don't know much.

Absolutely you are right that HN has a more mature mix of participants, but how does that situation continue? It cannot be solely by the direct efforts of the admins, however heroic, because the site is already too big for that.

The technical Magic has to complement the characteristics of the community.

Downvotes are stronger than upvotes, and the downvoted content gets buried.

I haven't seen this mentioned before, nor does it match with my observations of behavior on the site, though I admit the calculations of how down/up votes contribute to dimming is not transparent. Do you have a reference of where the relative weighting of up vs down votes is discussed?

Sorry, I don't. And I imagine that discussing the details in public would just create more work for the admins and limit their options for tweaking it; probably more trouble than it would be worth to make it transparent.

Totally anecdotal, it's just my perception that a few downvotes are enough to grey something out, a few more and it gets killed and people stop seeing it. The first-order effect is that the worst content just disappears. This is the best possible outcome for things that you just don't want to see. Of course there are community norms about what gets downvoted and so it works as well as it does partly because we have a pretty good crowd here that values rational, constructive discussion.

The second-order effect is that people don't post things that are going to get downvoted, and even delete or edit posts in response to downvoting. This is the dominant effect and the main reason why the system works so well, because really toxic stuff just doesn't get posted very often. The users that don't care about downvotes can still get banned.

The best thing about downvotes is they represent the community policing itself, so they don't generate the resentment that admin activity tends to. They are inherently democratic. They also scale, which direct moderation obviously does not.

I agree that it would be more trouble than it's worth to make all of the algorithms open. It's minor, but I think the effect you're seeing can work just as well without differential weighting of up and down votes.

The best thing about downvotes is they represent the community policing itself, so they don't generate the resentment that admin activity tends to.

Agreed!

You're probably right about the weighting. Anecdotally, again, I think most posts here get either upvotes or downvotes but not many of both. If so, the weighting doesn't much matter. That's a sign that the community has a consistent idea of what it wants and doesn't want. The guidelines here support that. I suspect these numbers would be very different at Reddit. Where this doesn't hold, the handling of "controversial" posts becomes more important. If Reddit just killed controversial posts, how would Reddit change over time? I guess it would get a bit less noisy. (Disregarding the potential for abuse. Obviously Reddit cannot really disregard this problem given their user base, so I realize I'm oversimplifying.)

A post at (+1,-0) is a very different thing from a post at (+6,-5) and treating these equivalently will tend to favor heat over light.

If you are interested, the Reddit admins discuss this at length and were planning to do this when /r/the_donald took over the entire front page. There are logs of their conversation that goes into the math.

Was the discussion public? Sounds interesting. I wouldn't know where to find that discussion as I don't follow Reddit at all.

The problem with that is that twitter is a single platform with different communities. Implementing downvotes would mean that group A could just downvote posts of group B and vice versa. If downvotes weigh heavier than upvotes then even small groups could bury larger groups into oblivion. Add in sockpuppets and it gets worse.

I don't think users attempting to moderate others is a solution. It would reduce the diversity of opinions. The largest group would just push out unpopular opinions.

Instead you need tools that allows users to give themselves peace without punishing others. Maybe with the help of the followed/followers, i.e. some assistance from the social graph.

Indeed. I didn't go into this level of detail, but this would clearly be a different problem than what we have on HN, where downvoting enforces norms across the whole community. Twitter is exactly as you said, a group of (overlapping) communities sharing a platform. We all see the same comments on HN, but on Twitter everyone has their own feed.

Downvoting on Twitter would need to have very different characteristics for the reasons you mention.

On the other hand, you actually do need users to moderate other users if you want to maintain a civil community. The alternatives are heavy moderation, which doesn't scale and introduces an institutional bias, or a free-for-all, where emotion drowns out thought, which is roughly where Twitter is today.

I absolutely agree the social graph should be leveraged. What if downvotes only by people you follow affect your feed? You already see retweets only from people you follow, so the idea that your followees influence what you see is part of the platform today. This just extends that influence into the negative direction.

Posters absolutely need to see the downvotes they are getting, the point of the feature is to moderate behavior, not just to create a filter bubble.

Obviously it's not a trivial issue and rolling out new features at Twitter's scale isn't easy either. However I'm pretty confident, with all the engineering talent they have, they could make progress if it was actually a priority.

I found "resetting" my timeline to be helpful. Post-election the entire Twitterverse felt like an indignation machine, but then I realized it was a machine I had made.

This Chrome extension worked perfectly for me: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/twitter-unfollow/m...

I've unfollowed everyone (eight years worth of following!), and have been slowly rebuilding the timeline. Strangely cathartic, and the FOMO fades quickly.

It's also nice to start from zero again, rebuilding your interests and filling your universe with thoughtful people in a deliberate and considered way. I wish more social networks made un-collecting as intuitive and organic as following/collecting.

Unfollow is the right answer! Twitter is somewhere where there is no "forum" or "topic", you have to build your own out of people you find benefit from following. If someone's posting stuff you consider bad, then don't follow them. You control the quality of your twitter feed.

Big trending hashtags are always going to have a large proportion of garbage in. Report the spam and pick out the gems with RT; it's even possible to make friends this way.

I don't think it's actually appropriate to just decide what random people who haven't @-ed you and are talking among themselves is inappropriate. If it's one person harassing another, then sure step in and/or report. The big problem is when a celebrity turns their followers on someone.

Twitter could simply "choose sides".

Yes, they could have the courage to not allow neo-Nazis to use their site as a platform.

They might have the courage, but do they have the judgement to decide who's an actual neo-nazi?

Twitter has a history of political partisanship. They'll ban "racist" conservatives but allow minority "terrorist" organizations.

There's a Pacific Ocean-sized gulf between the current policy and your nightmare scenario.

Slippery slope and all that, but they un-suspended Richard Spencer for "reasons".

After the neo-nazis, who's next? As soon as they "take sides" they are now directly putting a finger on the scale of national and international politics. That's a rathole they absolutely do not want to go down and would very likely be totally unsustainable.

On the other hand, it works pretty well for the Chinese social media.

It's not a nightmare scenario, they literally let terrorists use the platform no problem

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