Comment by aaron-lebo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aaron-lebo | Hacker News Reader

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Hey man, Jack's been putting in 23 hour days for the last seven years to make this happen. Not cool to mock his effort.

But seriously that Tweet shows the usefulness. For them not to have tried it until now shows how scared they are to make any real changes. 1) Guess 2) this 3) doesn't 4) fix 5) this 6) nonsense? Those comments are absolute youtube quality cancer though. Goddamn tragedy that this is the pinnacle of human discourse right now.

These are the first five replies to that tweet:

Near deGrasse Tyson‏ @DrNeilTyson 1h1 hour ago Replying to @jack

I will reserve my full response until I get 280 characters but this is a slap in the face to everyone harmed by your lax governance 1 reply 15 retweets 109 likes Near deGrasse Tyson‏ @DrNeilTyson 57m57 minutes ago

Your platform has been co-opted and manipulated, turned into a megaphone for hate and propaganda. 3 replies 20 retweets 154 likes Near deGrasse Tyson‏ @DrNeilTyson 56m56 minutes ago

Your response? Remove the last filter forcing careful selection of words. This makes Twitter boring without making room for real thought. 4 replies 14 retweets 107 likes Near deGrasse Tyson‏ @DrNeilTyson 55m55 minutes ago

And yet again, another surface-level tweak that fails to deal with the rot inside this community. 1 reply 10 retweets 82 likes Near deGrasse Tyson‏ @DrNeilTyson 54m54 minutes ago

You have failed signally in your responsibilities to your users, investors, and frankly to all of humanity. Thanks, Jack.

What a weird platform.

"Your platform has been co-opted and manipulated, turned into a megaphone for hate and propaganda."

Yet here you are using it.....

Why do people really think that x or y company is to blame for minority opinions getting so much traction on the internet. The very definition of public speaking/communication is that it gives small individuals big voices, no matter how big or small of a following they have. They cannot be stopped from expressing their opinions unless a. The platform they use is tyrannical (picks and chooses the ideas it likes or doesn't like) or b. Is actively committing a crime ( excessive cyber harassment and doxing).

If Twitter wanted to actually fight "hate and propeganda" you would grow to hate the platform! How long untill your ideas are silenced?? I get that the Nazi and white supremacist propaganda is right at the line, but make no mistake, untill they commit acts of violence ( which of course, they have. These instances should be punished) _it is merely an opinion and does no more damage than your opinion._ If you wine about how they shouldn't have a voice, you are wasting your breath (although you have the right to do so). With the internet there are so many ways to propagate information that the Nazis and white supremacists will find a way to get their message out. Fight ideas with ideas, not censorship.

You can get so close to that line without crossing it though, plus policing 300 million users is hard enough.

The problem is that both extreme fascism and communism might actually be a very tempting response to everyday problems to a lot of people, which means that the only reason we haven't had issues with either ideology is we had a media who complied with the censorship of both those viewpoints. Online anyone can say anything and promote anything, which means people who have problems that aren't being solved by their current leaders can easily turn to ideologies which we had all previously agreed to censor out of normal discourse.

>Your response? Remove the last filter forcing careful selection of words. This makes Twitter boring without making room for real thought.

Ehhh, one of the reasons Twitter is useless for actual conversation is that you can't express a thought. You only have just enough room to say something that you can't flesh out such that you can enrage other people. Twitter is built on anger and misunderstanding, interpreting 140 chars least charitably as possible.

Then someone tries to organize their thoughts into a tweet storm, but there's no real way to respond to it without more small bite-sized misunderstood/misunderstanding comments.

Increasing the limit is a good thing in this regard.

That the 140 char limit forced people to "choose the best words" is laughable.

https://twitter.com/badastronomer/status/747503673882746880?...

Yeah, it's a parody, but why after a decade has Twitter not figured out a way to avoid giving the trolliest of trolls such exposure? It seems like 140, 200, 280, or 500 chars is the smallest and least of their problems.

For whatever reason, they do not look into impersonation reports at all. Their team is too focused on deciding the content of people's speech that it doesn't care about their actions.

For what it’s worth, they acted quite quickly when I filed a company impersonation claim.

they don't look into racist posts at all, either. I've only reported like 10 posts (that had overtly racist messages and calls to violence in 5 cases) and I was quickly informed that they were fine (despite their TOS). It really seems like the management has a bigoted bent.

They let David freaking Duke onto their platform, I think you can't accuse them of being censors beyond blocking active threats and harrassment.

This must be the backup plan when turning “Favorite” stars into “Like” hearts wasn't enough to have the world exist in harmony.

It is a parody account.

Never implied otherwise. My point was that the CEO's post announcing such a feature has multiple garbage comments from the same individual at the very top. That it's a parody account just makes it worse.

You should probably edit or delete your comment. It reads like FUD against neil degrasse tyson

HN users should have reading comprehension.

Worst thing Twitter ever did was teach you what people you once respected are really like.

Can't believe I ever looked up to him.

I believe the name says "Near" instead of "Neil", so probably not the real guy.

I don't see how the real NDT would benefit from such bad-PR comments.

As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, that is a parody account, not actually Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

O ye of little faith. Those tweeks are fake, the Neil is still awesome.

A vocal contingent think that Twitter shouldn't allow one of its users to initiate nuclear war using the platform.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com