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Comment by Kaveren | Hacker News Reader

> "The notion that harassment and negativity are important for countering echo chambers should be the first to go."

> "First, tweets from blocked users should no longer appear in the replies to a tweet."

Being able to respond with an alternative viewpoint without having your reply made invisible is not necessary for countering echo chambers?

Even on HN and Reddit, many people use the downvote button improperly. It should be a button to downvote content that doesn't contribute to the discussion, or is spam, or morally bankrupt. It's not anything closed to this in practice. I think this is how the block feature will be used if you can just block someone to delete their replies.

I'm not a fan of removing likes from Twitter.

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> this is how the block feature will be used if you can just block someone to delete their replies

But that's what it's for! The conversation is over, you have no interest in receiving further death threats from this person or letting them RT you to their attack followers.

I don't use Twitter or know quite how the blocking system currently works, so maybe I'm not getting it, but I think the proposal being discussed in the OP is changing the blocking mechanism from just being about you not seeing the blocked party's Tweets to outright preventing them from publicly replying to your Tweets and purging any replies they've already posted.

That turns it into a tool for censoring the other side of a debate, which is what the parent thread is complaining about.

On the other hand, it adds no utility to it as an anti-harassment measure - and indeed would actively undermine its usefulness at serving that goal for conscientious users, since now in order to block someone they need to be willing to obliterate any comment chain that was started by the harassing user replying to one of their Tweets. If you're not willing to do that, because there's valuable content in there that you don't think it would be right to destroy? Well, fuck you, keep getting harassed, then. By contrast, the current system would allow you to block such a user without destroying content in the process, and so wouldn't leave users facing a moral dilemma about whether to resign themselves to sustained harassment or censor a debate in which innocent third parties have participated.

If I'm misunderstanding something, I'm all ears.

Ah, I've read it again and it seems to be something between the two.

Let's start how the system works at the moment: tweets that are "in reply to" another tweet are:

1) collapsed under the original by default, unless viewed by someone who follows both parties

2) shown below the original when expanded (a "thread", although not as sophisticated as USENET)

3) not shown to followers of the person who posted the tweet in their timelines (but are visible when you look at "tweets and replies"

- beyond that, if you have blocked someone, you don't see any of their tweets unless you choose to.

Bloomberg say "tweets from blocked users should no longer appear in the replies to a tweet", but of course blocked is a transitive verb: blocked by whom? If I've blocked people then when I'm looking at a thread they don't appear. At the moment, when others are looking at it, they do.

It sounds like they're suggesting a change to (2) so that if the originator of a thread has blocked a reply that's then invisible to other people viewing the thread (although not to people specifically viewing the blocked profile)? So if Alice has blocked Bob and Charlie views the thread, Charlie doesn't see the tweet unless they follow Bob?

Actually I think the downside of this is that it leaks information about Alice's blocklist! Currently it's not possible for third parties to tell if A has blocked B, and it's completely impossible for even B to tell if A has muted them.

Really the solution to harassment has to be a more functional reporting system; if Bob is actually systematically harassing Alice or posting hate speech, ban them from the platform entirely. Unfortunately there's a big problem with both false positives and false negatives.

But blocking isn’t based directly on viewpoints. It’s based directly on users choosing to block other users. It might be unreasonable to allow a user to specify an entire viewpoint to block from their social circle, but it’s not unreasonable to allow them to block individual users for any reason they choose. I don’t have to let any random stranger into my real-life social circles, and that doesn’t mean I’m choosing to live in a real-life echo chamber.

But Twitter isn't a private space to interact with your "social circle"; it's the public square, where political debates take place in full view of the world. The best real life analogue I can think of to replying with a dissenting view on Twitter is protesting outside a political speaker's talk, which is something we very much allow.

>It should be a button to downvote content that doesn't contribute to the discussion, or is spam, or morally bankrupt

Yeah, this is never going to work, because it is all subjective.

The temptation to use it to punish for opinions we don't like is just too strong. And as soon as somebody start using it that way, everybody else follows.

I like how person mentioning a practice of downvoting for unpopular opinions got downvoted for unpopular opinion

Is it really ALL subjective? Can't SOME of these things be quantified by some objective measure as determined by science?

Why are things like (e.g.) gravity and (also e.g.) psychological disorders allowed to be quantified, whilst sociological concepts are simply "all subjective" and (presumably) not the stuff of science?

In actuality, we as a species are quite capable of creating theories for anything using science, and OP's categorical suggestions are not exempt merely because they deal with morality.

Perhaps if we did converge on a widely approved standard for some of these morally-interesting questions about censorship and moderation, the overall productivity and quality of our discourse on forums like Reddit and Twitter might improve.

I disagree, it works mostly okay on HN except for the most polarizing subjects where it seems many people lose their cold blood and start down-voting en masse.

Your average discussion here actually seems capable of exposing multiple points of views without having to dig through the heavily down-voted comment. Similarly most people here don't seem to fall into the trap of up-voting one-liner comments that add nothing to the discussion merely because they agree with them.

There's always a blurry line between what contributes to the discussion and what does not but as far as I'm concerned it's relatively clear cut for most comments. If somebody is civil, gives arguments (or even better, sources) and doesn't appear to attempt to derail the discussion then I think it doesn't warrant being downvoted.

Actually, your comment is one that would fall on the line for me: it's negative, the "yeah, but no" structure feels a bit condescending to me and you don't actually argument your point, you're just expressing your opinion.

Yet, I don't think it warrants being down-voted, instead I up-voted other sibling comments that I deemed more interesting and wrote this reply that I hope is constructive.

I think an other thing going for HN is that there are clear posting guidelines, we're here about technology and basically "intellectual gratifying" stuff. Reddit and Twitter are social network first, news aggregator second, so people use it to like/up-vote pictures of dogs, jokes, memes etc... It's not like you're going to have a profound reply on a thread about "look, here's my Halloween costume!"

But then when you're used to reward jokes (or be rewarded for writing them) and other low-effort content it tends to contaminate the rest of the website because there's no clear limit between the "serious discussion stuff" and the "basically Facebook" stuff.

> It should be a button to downvote content that doesn't contribute to the discussion, or is spam, or morally bankrupt.

I am not sure it's a viable approach. If we think a comment shouldn't be there in the first place, reporting it should be the way to go.

Then I think a lot of people have very loose definitions of 'morally bankrupt', in that from their POV people in their right mind shouldn't be disagreeing with them.

All in all having the upvote/downvote button as "push up"/"push down" button seem sensible to me. If the platform owner wishes people get more exposed to controversial ideas, they can tweak the effect of downvotes or adjust the thresholds of what is highlighted or pushed to users.

You are changing the topic. Harrasment and alternative viewpoint are not the same. Alternative viewpoints would have better chance if people did not used the expression as euphemism for something else entirely.

The idea is that if you allow someone blocking someone else to make all their replies to your tweet go away, people will just over-use the block feature for anyone they even mildly disagree with.

Why is this a problem? I'm already using it freely to block people I see posting garbage in other people's replies.

Is that ability so bad? In real life, people can refuse to socialize with you too. That is current state through. It is possible now and was for ages.

What is not possible (except for those with blue tick) is to block accounts with few followers or new accounts etc. So it is easy to create swarm of accounts even after being blocked.

> Is that ability so bad? In real life, people can refuse to socialize with you too

It depends on what you think Twitter is for. I think it’s the equivalent of the public town square.

In that context I don’t think it’s appropriate.

If you start a public conversation it’s ok to walk away from it (equivalent of ignore) but it is not ok to stop certain groups you don’t like from continuing the conversation (equivalent of a real block).

In a sense you don’t own the conversation and once you have made a contribution everyone else is free to talk about your contribution.

I don't know why you're being downvoted without comment. You'reentitled to your opinion, and it's a perfectly valid opinion to have.

Personally though, I think there is one thing you're missing. If you say something controversial in a public town square: a) it is transitory and people won't tend to remember it and harangue you about it years later; and b) people who don't like what you're saying only have a limited ability to harass you.

Online people can easily call flash mobs together to harass you en-masse if they don't like what you're saying. When people have more powerful tools online to harass other people, surely we deserve better tools to prevent ourselves being harassed.

Yes, those tools will be abused in some cases; but all tools can be abused. A knife is really useful for cutting meat, vegetables, and other things... It can also be really useful for slicing throats and plunging into chests for those with such a monstrous disposition. We don't stop people having knives and we shouldn't prevent people from having tools to stop other people from harassing and threatening them online.

> a) it is transitory and people won't tend to remember it and harangue you about it years later

I think this is a feature and not a bug. I don’t want to see a carefully curated representation of the past.

There are plenty of other social networks for you if that is what you want.

Or you could contribute anonymously if you want to say something transitory.

> people who don't like what you're saying only have a limited ability to harass you.

I think that’s true on Twitter as well for the most part.

What Twitter does that is different is it still allows the people you don’t like to participate in the general conversation.

Certain groups hate this and want to deny other groups the right to speak.

> surely we deserve better tools to prevent ourselves being harassed.

I think the problem is people want to benefit from the upside of having a public conversation but still want to carefully control it and I don’t think that’s healthy for society.

Again, if you are happy to forego the upside you can always contribute anonymously.

> Yes, those tools will be abused in some cases; but all tools can be abused

Exactly - Twitter is a great example.

If you start to follow people around in public space while yelling at them loudly or threatening them, the police will eventually stop by, id you and possibly order you to leave the place or arrest you (depending on whether you are drunk and what exactly is being said). Also, if you happen to be not in town, but in mall or other privately owned space, security will kick you out pretty soon.

Generally speaking, a lot of what goes on twitter does not actually goes on in person.

> If you start to follow people around in public space while yelling at them loudly or threatening them

Sure they do - I don’t like it but it happens all the time.

Think of all the protestors who show up on campus whenever a conservative is invited to speak.

But it is not your thread. It is Theirs. If someone doesn't want to talk to you, that is their choice, and you should leave and talk to a different person.

I don't continue talking to people who don't want to talk to me.

Actually it's Twitter's thread. You pay nothing to them and you're basically using their computational and bandwidth resources to show your content to the world for free. That's exactly what you signed up for.

And Twitter is giving this blocking right to it's users, lol.

Twitter is choosing to give this feature of blocking to people, so I don't know what people are complaining about.

>Harrasment and alternative viewpoint are not the same.

The problem isn't that this isn't true. The problem is that some people don't see the difference.

I would make a strong argument that twitter is a lightening rod for people who can't see a difference.

yup, that's wrong on so many levels.

1 it's just asking for abusing a block option.

2 Imagine someone putting up a tweet supporting nazis or something and blocking everyone who doesn't agree, now it looks like majority supports that kind of stuff.

Or to turn it around: Imagine putting up a tweet supporting the victims of the synagogue shooting, and not being able to block a bunch of nazis that showed up to harass you. That might sound bad, but who knows? Maybe someone will make an argument for genocide that will really reasonate with you.

Seriously, blocks / killfiles has been a tool to prevent harassment for decades across the Internet. It’s a tool of user empowerment.

Indeed. I think people tend to misconstrue blocking for some form of censorship, when in reality it's just an individual exercising one's right to curate one's own social circles.

Killfile is a great tool because it only affects yourself. Everybody should use killfiles and implement them in their services. What you're arguing for is that people's blocks should affect not just themselves, but make things a blocked user say invisible for everyone. Which seems like an obviously bad idea.

If you don’t want to start a public conversation that might include viewpoints you don’t agree with then go onto a platform like Facebook that allows you to carefully curate your image and social circles.

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