Hacker News Reader

Comment by theon144 | Hacker News Reader

I would agree, but the feature itself does seem interesting, I am actually looking forward to trying it - to be honest I do feel kind of a weird social pressure on Twitter given that the tweets are somewhat of a public record; it's why I still prefer IRC for instance.

I wouldn't have made the connection between misinformation problems and ephemeral tweets were it not for your comment.

View on HN

Just remember that for all intents and purposes, fleets will be just as public.

I.e. I predict politicians, activists, celebrities will stumble over them just the same.

As a thought experiment: do you think if Corbyn had fleeted his comment about that graffito, would it have really protected him? I find that unlikely.

Edit: and after typing this out, I'm pretty sure I actually think that last bit is a good thing, independent of my stance on the substance of the matter. But don't mistake "I can't see it anymore" for "nobody else will remember."

Fleets aren't to protect the Leader of the Opposition -- they're to protect the random insurance adjuster who doesn't Tweet anything except sports because he's afraid of getting fired for it. Fleets might let him open up a bit.

Sorry, in my mind even that is closing your eyes and expect nobody to be able to see you.

I'm pretty sure insurance companies, three letter agencies, and anyone else with a vested interest will make sure to have a copy of as many of these as they can get their hands on. And you won't be able to rely on yours not being in any of these stashes.

Public stays public.

Nobody will have any guarantees, but controlling the probabilities lowers the number of people affected. I know that there were multiple women in my college being serially abused by a guy who had unconsensually shared consensually recorded videos of them having sex with him, and the police were not helpful because the laws were not in place at that time. He would keep uploading to a single website with their real names. The takedown of that one website dropped to 0 their constant harassment, even if there likely are some copies of those videos still out there somewhere.

For what it's worth, I don't mean to make a link between fleets and misinformation. Kind of the opposite - it is so totally unrelated that it feels tone deaf

This barely solves anything. All public people get screenshoted and once this rolls out, I imagine someone will find a way to screenshot all tweets.

HN is a huge community and I imagine full of ex-employees of Twitter, what exactly does the organization believe the businesses core focus/value is? Like what is the framework they are growing towards?

I've never worked for Twitter, my guess is their business idea is "Well, Snapchat has it, Instagram/WhatsApp/Facebook have copied it, we should also offer it.".

I returned to browsing Twitter more after the election, and IMO it hasn't changed, it's just a place to get your dopamine hit when you see a tweet you agree with get traction, or for some adrenaline when you read something supremely idiotic. I thought about replying to 1 or 2 tweets, but geez, will anyone read it, will it change anyone's mind?

Would a screenshot of a deleted tweet hold up as evidence, either for an investigative journalist or in court? Given how easy it is to produce fake tweet screenshots, it seems it would be difficult-to-impossible to 100% verify authenticity, unless you had Twitter’s cooperation.

There's already independent recording of deleted tweets by politicians:

https://www.politwoops.com/countries

They could easily record fleets as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com