Alright, let's say you get appointed at Twitter to clean up this mess. You get full authority to do whatever needs to be done.
How would you solve this? Your solution will be criticized by the other HN-ers here :D.
How would you solve this? Your solution will be criticized by the other HN-ers here :D.
Announce a sale of intellectual and physical assets and close down. I would realize the company is a negative drain on society.
A platform so gigantic that it's impossible for humans to intelligently manage it should simply not exist.
You mean that a bunch of your friends is on one platform, and a bunch of others on another platform, and your family on still another one.
But then you have to be on all platforms, so this means everyone else also needs to be on all platforms.
So how exactly do you see this working when reality pushes everyone to use a single platform? because you know, it's a social network.
2) Somehow humanity survived without these networks pre-2007ish.
3) I have no problem with the existence of many smaller special-interest social networks. Those are manageable, and we had them before the rise of the BigCos. The problem is with the existence of a few all-encompassing, world-consuming, general-purpose social networks. They have proven to be completely unmanageable and toxic.
"Abolish Gmail", for instance, doesn't mean abolish email providers. Not at all. And it doesn't mean that "the next gmail" will replace it. Healthy competition is good, unhealthy monopolies are bad.
Your point 2 says you really want to join the Amish.
You mean smaller platforms like Parler or 4chan?
What is my "monopoly theory"? I clarified what I meant: "A platform so gigantic that it's impossible for humans to intelligently manage it". We don't really have a good term for a corporation that has undue, oversized market power. Pedants like to argue "so-and-so is not literally a monopoly!" but this is just wordplay and doesn't really address the serious social issues involved.
> Your point 2 says you really want to join the Amish.
Maybe!
> You mean smaller platforms like Parler or 4chan?
I mean smaller platforms. It would be ridiculous to suggest that your cherrypicked examples are representative. You can make anything look bad by cherrypicking.
It would work like this: by default, nothing is moderated. Instead, every post/tweet/etc. has to be labeled by the user. There can be an auto-suggestion feature to make it a quick process.
Then, other users can choose which tags they want to view or hide. If you don't want to see content tagged with X, no problem. If you do, you can.
In my mind, this would solve a few problems:
1. Justifiably ban people that try to circumvent the tagging system. You aren't determining whether their speech is allowed or not, merely ensuring that they follow the very basic rules of the site. This is much simpler than relying on an AI to interpret a nuanced comment and then moderate it.
2. Allow everyone to say whatever they want. No one will feel silenced.
Again, I'm sure there are holes in this idea, but I think it might be a better approach.
Expecting Twitter not to have their hands full with these kinds of issues is very naive. It's always a question how to spend your very limited resources.