A hypothesis about how you might discover the next Twitter | Hacker News Reader

A hypothesis about how you might discover the next Twitter

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50 pointsgrey-area35 comments

I see the nastiness as a necessary evil of free speech platforms. Compare that to LinkedIn where there is virtually no nastiness and virtually no interesting conversations happening.

Probably makes some sense.. I mean Reddit is probably the most vulgar site on the planet... (next to 4chan, but I'm not a 4chan fan and I think reddit has way more market share to compare)

-- and without the crazies I'm not sure it'd be as sticky as it is... Part of the fun is saying "you honestly believe that what the fuck is wrong with you?" Then getting banned from r/the_donald for being a 'libtard' /s

(disclaimer: voted for Bernie - proud libtard here)

reddit has become a collection of ideological silos where no real discussion or disagreement is allowed.

Few interesting conversations happen there, just 'circle-jerks'.

With some exceptions such as r/changemyview and r/science

/r/mechanicalkeyboards, /r/fountainpens, /r/headphones and a lot of programming language subreddits are usually friendly.

And r/neutralpolitics, and a number of business-related subreddits.

Could you list a few of those subs you find interesting, business related or otherwise?

Compare that to LinkedIn where people regularly copy&paste content I've written. Content that you cannot even report, flag, or get pulled without creating an account.

And once you've created a LinkedIn account they use dark-patterns to keep you there, and bombard you with spam.

If any site is ripe for competition it is LinkedIn.

I think PG is making a subtly different point to whether or not free speech should be allowed... He is asking how the architecture of a platform can be used to shape speech without the need for direct moderation.

Retweet was invented by the users (RT:) just as commenting with the link to the original tweet (retweet with comment) was a user custom before Twitter did anything about it. Not sure how you force users not to invent their own ways to use a service.

Obviously it's only _partially_ helpful in their case, but you could do something like Reddit does: links to other tweets on Twitter would be "read-only", with no way to post or respond from the page you end up on. Pair this with not automatically rendering retweets on the main timeline, and it could go a long way toward neutering "retweet mobs".

Prevent madness systematically? I feel like it would be like orwellian world.

You can only tweet "good", "plus good" and "doubleplus good"

Criticism is violence

From what I've seen in some circles, they believe this.

Yes, the worst is the people who feel that "call-out culture" and SJWs are some form of oppression and destruction of the right to free speech.

SJWs seem mostly harmless, if mildly annoying. Don't feed the trolls, and move on. It's a solved problem. They have as much right to free speech as anyone else.

That said, "Think of the women!" seems to be the new "Think of the children!": an excuse for pushing through terrible policies in a way that no-one can publicly object to. Frankly the most disgusting thing about that is what it implies about women's agency.

This article linked in the thread about how twitter became so angry is also a really interesting read:

https://www.fastcompany.com/3063060/a-brief-history-of-the-a...

And also this one on how to fix twitter abuse:

https://artplusmarketing.com/putting-out-the-twitter-trashfi...

FWD:Everyone is basically troll-proof because it requires the permission of each message contributor before a user can publish an email conversation. (Unless a message contributor has been anonymized.)

We've been mainly focused on building out the technology rather than promoting it so it remains to be seen how this model will work, but we made this design decision for largely the reasons that pg suggests. The theory is been to err on the side of starting with too much friction, and successively remove friction for people making positive contributions. This obviously means getting off to a much slower start than most other social sites, but with the benefit of avoiding the death spiral of negativity that kills most of the social sites that get initial traction -- Secret, Whisper, Yik Yak, etc.

I don't understand the first line. Is "FWD" an acronym, or are you imitating the subject line of a forwarded email?

It's a service that makes emails public

https://www.fwdeveryone.com

Some people have thought about this topic for years, but Twitter ignores such knowledge because destroying civilization is more profitable. http://anildash.com/2011/07/if-your-websites-full-of-asshole... http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/

Some people have thought about this topic for years, but Twitter ignores such knowledge because destroying civilization is more profitable https://twitter.com/anildash/status/898935261584801792 http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/

I think some charity is in order here - while it's easy to be mean (see what I did there), it's harder to propose real solutions that will work at scale, indeed lots of websites want to and no-one really has at scale (though many do much better than twitter). I think Paul Graham has been going on about this for years too, at least since he founded this site.

If Paul Graham was somehow associated with twitter I'd have more sympathy with your viewpoint but it's not some sudden epiphany. Ironically, the hot takes of twitter and retweet feature he's complaining about have been used here to misrepresent his views and present it as such for the sake of a cheap rhetorical point.

Also, twitter does have all three points in the article, but it's nowhere near enough (I think they fail at the third point but there are also other more concrete solutions they could try see my link below).

To me, Mastodon is the next Twitter, and there is a lot less nastiness going on because the character limit per message is 400 characters, leading to a lot more nuanced and well thought out conversations.

It also helps that it is a decentralised platform, so there is no central censorship going on like on Twitter, which has the incentive to earn money and where the user is the consumer.

Wouldn't you say that there is more to this problem than content length and centralisation?

Like what?

I find it interesting that Mastodon was built with a lot of input from communities frequently harrassed on Twitter.

It influenced early design choices (the "retweets" count is not proheminently displayed ; fine-grained options for muting/blocking/banning).

Plus, in the end, isn't per-community-moderation the only way to avoid the "one rule fits all" dictatorship?

His point is broadly accurate, but is slightly ignorant of history with the implication that we need to invent “moderating Internet forums” over again.

I expect letting bluechecks moderate twitter would turn it from a libertarian dystopia into a corporate dystopia though; when the WSJ rediscovers neo-Nazis just to write articles about how well dressed they are, it’s good that all the comments are mean to them.

The key feature of Snapchat is that it allows you to communicate emotions. If you were forced to sign all your tweets with a facial expression, you could still upload text-only, and detect nasty/hostile facial expressions and ban such communications

Then watch your mentions fill with happy, smiling, racists.

(The idea of mandatory happiness is so absurd it was the premise of a Doctor Who story, "Happiness Patrol")

I said nothing about happiness. I also didn't suggest the images should be uploaded– just that they should be a key for uploading. I just said nasty/hostility (e.g. racists) should be avoided.

So basically you are asking for a service that slowly forces older people off? As you age, your skin and muscles get flabby, and the resulting gravity-induced droop is easy to read as "unhappy".

No, I am not basically asking for that whatsoever. Automated emotion detection is NOT a solved problem (there are no services that reliably deliver prediction across untrained data sets), and the case of the elderly is clearly a case that would also need to be solved.

As an implementation note, I intuit that most of emotions could probably detected from the eyes, so the gravity-induced droop isn't necessarily problematic.

And no, don't go assume that I am biased against people with no eyes. What the hell...

I am blocked from seeing paulg's tweets, despite having never interacted with him. Perhaps the next Twitter won't arbitrarily prevent me from seeing some of its content for opaque reasons (and especially not in a way that makes it seem as though I've done something wrong, without telling me what that thing is).

That seems like a good feature for the next Twitter.

I think we fail to appreciate just how weird this feature is. Presumably, paulg at some point saw some comment of mine that he didn't like. At this point he had three choices: 1) ignore it; 2) mute me, thereby preventing my idiotic words from ever reaching his eyes again; or 3) click a button that prevents me from ever seeing his thoughts.

Wait, what? What is this crazy third option?

There's a bug (at least on mobile) that makes the "you are not authorized to view these tweets" message sometimes appear when it shouldn't. Have you tried reloading the page a couple of times?

(I'm guessing there's some authorization API endpoint that's slightly unreliable and "fails closed".)

Just screw software patents. What exactly is it about React that Facebook have a patent on ? How many patent trolls do we need before people see how ridiculous software patents are !?

F2F conversations are an awful example if you're talking about excluding meanness.

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