It's amazing that the reactions to this are both "should have banned him years ago for violating their rules" and "this is blatant dangerous censorship." Whichever side you're on, this is a lose-lose situation for twitter.
On the flip side, if everyone hates you equally you're probably on the right track.
I'd say @dang is pretty liked around here! Ups to the great umpire, keep it up. This shit is hard.
Just flip the showdead switch in settings and you can enjoy the infinite wisdom and feistiness of banned users. Can’t be easier. For instance, in this thread there’s exactly one banned sibling, making a gross, sexual personal attack.
I think they would be pretty pissed off to know that they've been banned for months or more because they said something that rubbed the mods the wrong way at one point.
We know, but some of us enjoy reminding Ian Murdock's friends-in-need of what they did.
Preferably before it's their turn to ask for help...
Reddit, slashdot, and a whole slew of others went through an HN-like phase of high-quality discussions and content before turning into cesspools.
I think what makes HN unique is benevolent sponsorship. There isn't pressure to grow. It's recruiting for Y-Combinator, which eliminates most of the normal pressures.
* Archived here: http://atdt.freeshell.org/k5/story_2009_3_12_33338_3000.html
Edit: People downvoting me even though I'm right. Take most of the comments you see on Twitter in subject matter and/or delivery, and they would be either downvoted or moderated off this platform. No-one in good faith (who has had reasonable exposure to Twitter) could argue this is not the case. Just to be clear, I believe this to be a good thing.
This is the false equivalence argument. Some argue that 5g spreads covid. Some argue it doesn’t. You advocate both views and everyone hates you.
Doesn’t make you right.
And you could say that this is it, but given the strong polarization and extremism around topics that involve politics it might be a good measure in this case. (Of course, depending on what exactly 'everybody' means.) By definition extremists of either side will see independent actors as hostile. But, of course, this is just a measure, not a proof.
https://www.npr.org/2020/12/30/951095644/even-if-its-bonkers...
so in the end you have to anchor this to some expertise and grounded-in-reality judgement.
For example, the majority in the aforementioned poll believed that COVID-19 was created in a lab in China. And to be honest, an average person really has no way of truly knowing this. They're not virologists or spies. They can only judge based on a gut feeling whether China is/isn't evil, and that is likely based on other things they've heard, which may include rumors, propaganda and Bond movies.
This gives pedophiles the moral high ground.
I have to say from everything I heard about the guy, and my own rare interactions with him, the hatred of him was 100% justified. Some people are just very shitty and lack any sympathizers.
Facebook, Twitter et al. built enormous platforms for speech and thus got caught up in the middle of all cultural and political conflicts on this planet. Not just American election(s), but elections in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Germany, UK, Brazil, plus religious conflicts such as Islamists vs. people who draw Muhammad.
They cannot possibly stay neutral in all those wars at once and when they start taking sides, they will be hated first and then, later, either dismembered or regulated to be a de-facto arm of the government.
Afaik, one big issue is that this account was operating under different rules then everybody else. As in, twitter was more permissive with Trump then with other people.
If he wants to tweet in the official capacity of the President of the United States of America, there is an official Twitter account for that.
Of course, the cynical reason is that Trump's tweets are responsible for a significant percentage of Twitter's "engagement" metrics; I'm sure that internally they have figures that indicate how much revenue they generate from Trump alone.
i do get the diffficult choice Twitter faced, Trump was / is the president. So everything he says is part of the official record. So I guess banning his personal account would ba quite difficult. Twitter, Facebook, YoutTube and so on could have added disclaimers already much earlier, so.
That is not being content neutral. Had it been content neutral, his account would be policed the same way as other peoples years ago.
How does outrage lead to more ad revenue? Who wants their brand advertised next to outrage? How many outraged people click on ads?
Trump and any president, on a whim can speak live to all Americans through all cable news channels. He could have called NBC, Fox, CBS, ABC etc to the Oval Office and in 5 minutes be live on basically every channel (including being streamed live on twitter). Instead he choose Twitter.
But yeah, he can always address the press and let the press disseminate his statements, which has its own pros and cons.
A month from now Trump will not be on Twitter. Nobody will actually see what he allegedly says but he'll be gone.
i think he's addicted to the attention and the chearing throngs.
You're right, no doubt. Though technically all the previous presidents do that. even Michelle Obama is on book tours and such. George W Bush does stuff with Michelle Obama as well.
>i think he's addicted to the attention and the chearing throngs.
True even before potus.
Here's the reality though. The political divide in the USA is at like 30+ year high. It used to be just democrats who divided. Republicans hadnt really changed much over the last several decades.
With platforms like twitter pushing republicans off their platform. It means the echo chamber will be becoming much worse. The political divide just begun for the republicans. The divide will become much larger than it is today because there's even less intermingling.
The joe rogan podcast #1258 with Jack Dorsey and Tim Pool is a pretty good watch. Twitter has extensively banned right-wing personalities off their platform while outright allowing left-wing people break the rules.
For example Twitter recently blocked virtually all negative news about Joe biden and hunter biden during the election. For example in place of blocking the NYpost's coverage of hunter biden's corruption. They banned people to hide the story and then put a counter news article that called it fake news as trending.
Flipside, Twitter allowed Smollet's hate crime hoax. Twitter allows celebrities calling for the death of that maga hat kid. They allowed the russian collusion stuff that turned out to be completely false.
twitter is very biased.
Banning him years ago would be censorship but with clear rules equally applied to all.
Now we are unequal censorship.
Twitter is trending down and will probably not recover but they were going to take a nosedive after Trump left. This gives them political points with the left.