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Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

> Person says bad things to whip up a mob - Twitter unsure to take him seriously or literally.

> Mob actually materializes and several people die - Twitter sure they now have to take him literally

By this logic do we not also have to delete the account of everyone prominent who tweeted anything to the effect of "no justice no peace" with respect to BLM, given that several people died there as well?

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In this case you had people with flags bearing a specific person’s name on them. Certainly muting the only person bearing that name will have a direct effect.

The direct effect being that the bulk of the people on the other side of the isle lose the last shred of respect for these institutions, and switch to or create other sites, causing each side to become part of a permanent echo chamber with a mutually irreconcilable set of accepted facts that cause members of the different groups to come into violent disagreement whenever they encounter one another in physical reality.

I thought the goal was supposed to be to do something that reduced the probability of violent conflict?

You’re underestimating the value of immediate, global, and easily accessible coordination. Trump can try to build his own Twitter but it’s nowhere near the trivial proposition you’re making it out to be. Without this coordination mechanism the mob becomes headless and decentralized.

The hardest part about creating your own Twitter is convincing enough people to switch at once to create a critical mass. Transferring the sitting President of the United States and several other prominent members of his party at the same time in a very public way is exactly how you induce that to happen.

That Parler thing was temporarily offline under the load of all the new users. That's not the problem you have when you're having the actual problem of convincing enough people to switch.

That’s one thing that’s hard about it. Scaling and running the service reliably is far from trivial and this tends to be severely underestimated by “let’s just build a competitor” crowd.

> Scaling and running the service reliably is far from trivial and this tends to be severely underestimated by “let’s just build a competitor” crowd.

This is not a trivial problem, but it's also not one that hasn't been solved a hundred times before, and seems to be something they've already handled.

But I also want to put something in juxtaposition here. You have on the one hand the argument that this isn't censorship because they're a private company and you can just make your own. On the other hand, the argument that booting them off is useful because making your own is impractical and they'll fail. If one is true then the other isn't, right?

https://parler.com/

Didn't everyone move to Parler?

that aged like fine milk

These two situations couldn’t be more vastly different.

The rally was organized by Trump, the mob that marched on the capital was there for Trump, marching with flags for Trump, encouraged and incited by Trump, and aimed at overthrowing a legitimate election in favor of Trump.

BLM was marching for lost lives that could no longer speak for themselves, organized by and for no single individual, carrying flags to honor the fallen, aimed at creating a future where less people would die unnecessarily at the hands of law enforcement.

The primary difference I'm seeing is that one group was there to protest something you don't agree with.

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