Hacker News Reader

Comment by nanna | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I wish tweets were treated like verbal exchanges more than written. Not everything that is said needs to be recorded for perpetuity. If a politician or someone powerful tweets, then sure it might be in someone's interest to record it. Good luck to them. But unless you're someone that people really care about - it should be fine to just delete your tweet for good. If that means something problematic was tweeted but lost, then so be it.

View on HN

But they aren't and won't ever be, and people should stop treating them like they are. It's no different than going to your local public square full of 200 people holding camcorders, and making a bunch of stupid statements.

Did we all do stupid stuff when we were younger: absolutely. Would I want the entire world to see what I did as a teenager and judge me for it? Absolutely not.

Which is EXACTLY why I personally think society should just not allow people under about the age of 25 to even be on social media in the first place. I know, I know, that will never happen because insert reason - but if we don't want everyone's actions to be recorded in perpetuity we should probably stop allowing them to post those actions in a forum that's open to the entire world and easily recorded. You can make laws until you're blue in the face, it's not going to stop an individual from saving whatever stupid thing you said or did and leaking it anonymously should the moment present itself.

So your answer to "young people doing dumb things" is banning young people from doing dumb things until they reach $arbitraryAge? That seems unlikely to happen.

There's a difference between 200 people in a square watching and filming you, and between an organization doing the same thing and then making it available to all of mankind for the rest of time.

Yes... We ban children from doing all sorts of things until they're an appropriate age to make better choices. From getting married to driving to smoking cigarettes.

As I said, I doubt it will happen, that doesn't mean it shouldn't happen.

This is why Snapchat became popular, and everyone seems to have forgotten the value in that feature-set. Instagram blatantly cloned half of the Snapchat feature-set and Snapchat itself has also gone to shit.

One of the first things I did when I graduated from high school was delete my twitter account. It was in an effort to get myself together and become more focused in school. Seeing people's careers damaged by tweets when they were kids makes me feel more and more that deleting my account was one of the best decisions I have made.

If I ever have kids, I'll make a concerted effort with other parents to prevent them from joining any social media before they turn 16.

> If I ever have kids, I'll make a concerted effort with other parents to prevent them from joining any social media before they turn 16

Honestly that seems unlikely. If all their friends are on some platform they will find a way to be on it also. Best you can do is really try to educate them on how badly things can boomerang and that the internet never forgets. But even at 16, most kids don't have the life experience and perspective to really understand this.

> It's no different than going to your local public square full of 200 people holding camcorders, and making a bunch of stupid statements.

I'm afraid it really isn't the same at all. Even when I was 25 I did stupid things. I would get drunk in a night club, like everyone else in my age, and on our way home we might have a piss in the middle of a big public square at 4am because we were drunk and stupid. Does that mean I would also get my bits out in the middle of a public square when there are 200 people staring at me? No.

Doing or saying things in a public place != Publicly saying or doing things

You can do private things in a public place, and that's how many people with a very small following feel on social media.

They're doing public things, regardless of their feelings. They could publish with more privacy if they wanted, but there's always the desire of winning the five minutes of fame lottery.

I suggest email for such a use case. To have public conversations is to open the door to public criticism in perpetuity of what was discussed.

https://definitions.uslegal.com/n/new-york-times-rule/

"New York Times rule is a commonsense rule of ethical conduct that a person should not do anything arguably newsworthy in public or in private that one would mind having reported on the front page of a major newspaper. The rule ultimately protects defamatory falsehood.

New York Times rule is also known as New York Times test or New York Times v. Sullivan rule."

> or in private.

Not sure how email is an answer. It sound like the rule is "don't do/say it at all, if you didn't want it to be public."

In a sense. My point is, you cannot have public conversations and then be aghast when they are stored or captured for later retrieval and critique. That's not a logistics and storage issue, that's a breakdown of critical thinking and nuance in the public sphere (where rational participants would view a tweet or tweet discussion contextually and within the time it occurred, as opposed to present day outrage porn fuel).

The archiving should happen, even if the corpus must go into cold storage ("unavailable to the public") until a time more reasonable, civil discourse over the contents can occur, but those who participate in online conversations should do so cautiously for obvious reasons.

Tangentially, "never put something in writing you wouldn't want to see on the front page of a newspaper" is just good life advice. Have a phone call or in person meeting instead.

It used to be that a private conversation with another person was private. At worst, it was "one person's word against another" so you could operate on a basis of "don't write it down" if you wanted something to be private.

Not sure how much longer that will be the case. People will soon be walking around with the personal equivalant of a police officer's body camera, always on, recording every moment and every interaction with another person.

I would be reluctant, and probably refuse to talk to anyone wearing such a device, but it won't be long before it's not even obvious.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if, at some point, a lot of people routinely wear some sort of AR when out in public. It's possible there will be widespread social pushback (i.e. the Glasshole factor). But I wouldn't bet on it if such a thing were genuinely comfortable and useful.

The Economist stylized this as “tweets are appraised as speech, but punished as writing.”

This kind of thing can never be materially accomplished though. Whenever you post something publicly to the internet, any recipient can back it up indefinitely, separately from the origin network. This is a fundamental material reality. No amount of legislation or centralized control of the content can overcome it.

Ultimately people will have to culturally/collectively get over everyone's internet past, change their own behavior after understanding this new reality, and deal with the consequences of their speech. Even if it were possible, having the ability to remove all copies of past speech would probably produce worse social outcomes. I think I'd rather deal with a person's complicated history, than a history that has been selectively revised to deceive me.

Private, perishable communication is only possible peer-to-peer, through a secure tunnel or network you own, with a person you trust to delete it. The same applies to verbal speech honestly, if you tell somebody something in confidence, it's up to them not to tell anybody else. People just need to accept that using twitter is like making a press release and not like talking to some friends.

The very presence of retweets and likes means they can't ever be treated like verbal conversations. It is a written record mistaken as ephermeral one, period.

Perhaps, but is it really all that surprising that something not merely said but broadcast to the entire world is remembered in perpetuity?

But tweets can be important. Who decides whats important and therefore needs to be archived and what not? No one. In the digital age harddrive capacity is basicially infinite so we save everything.

This opinion always reads to me as: "I want to be able to speak in public without fear of consequence." That's never been the case and I don't know why anybody thinks it ever has. Digital technology created infallible memory, to be sure, but memory isn't a new thing.

The bigger issue is most of us said/did dumb shit 20+ years ago, but luckily there was no widespread put everything on the internet movement so we get judged by how we are now, not how we was as kids. While I agree people should be held responsible for things they say/do, I also think that at this exact moment in history, people give little to no thought to the idea that people change/grow as they age. Just look at Jenna Marbles on YouTube, she's in self exile because she wore too much fake tan in a video from 10 years ago.

Agreed! I don’t even know stuff is wrong or insensitive sometimes. Someone recently told me not to say the word “Jew.” I wasn’t saying it in a bad way - we were discussing a friend who is Jewish, but I didn’t know just saying the word “Jew” could possibly be taken badly.

When I was younger, I said something about a “Jap.” I honestly was just trying to take a shortcut by saying Jap instead of the full “Japanese” like saying burger instead of hamburger. I got a shock when I was told that was bad.

> The bigger issue is most of us said/did dumb shit 20+ years ago, but luckily there was no widespread put everything on the internet movement

Well, I found some of my conversations on BBSs or Fidonet from over 25 years ago are now on the Web...

So what you say was right as long as it was indeed just 'said', but as soon as something was written and/or recorded somewhere, it may resurface on the Internet one-day, even though it was never intended to appear on the Internet.

This is an incredibly toxic way to think about conversation.

Thinking before I speak and having consideration for how my words might be interpreted in the future is "toxic"? Words you say to others have consequences. It makes sense to take that into consideration.

That seems pragmatic and polite to me.

The ability to broadcast some random thought you have to everyone on the planet, publicly archived and attached to your name, for all of eternity, is a new ability. We've never had it before, and we're discovering the consequences of that. I think it's reasonable to have some disagreement about how that ability should be handled without reducing that disagreement to whether or not words have consequences (obviously they do).

I don't think there is any useful conversation to be had re: "forgetting" that public data. It's a matter of fact. Once data is public it's public. There no magical "forgettable" bits for special classes of digital data.

Deleting copies pof data from public and quasi-public forums isn't practically possible, short of taking away everybody's general purpose computer. I don't think that's going to happen (and I certainly wouldn't want it to).

I think it's just a world we have to live with. I don't particularly like it, but I don't have a choice in the matter.

The trouble with that is that the old tweets from an immature brain are amplified beyond their original context, intentionally, so that they hurt a lot of people, and then a punishment is applied as if the author had just deliberately blasted the world with their remark yesterday. People are using the private conversation analogy because so many teens just meant to write to a few friends or use it as a sort of diary. To make them responsible not only for their youthful immaturity their whole life, but for any mental health struggles, and for not having a perfect understanding of the nature of the service, is cruel and non-productive social behavior from the adults.

You’re having trouble understanding because you are only imagining yourself making these decisions, and you are a fully grown adult who handles life’s pressures well and you understand Twitter from a product perspective. You will need to consider how others use the service to understand why expecting perfect behavior across every person’s entire life is unwise collective behavior.

Yours and so many other posts here seem like an argument for now allowing children to use these kinds of services.

It also sounds like parenting needs to take into account this new reality. To the extent that it applies in my household I know my wife and I are.

I’m neutral on a legal intervention but I certainly agree parents should heavily educate and be restrictive until enough has sunk in. We do similarly with our family.

My main concern here is to explain why a young person’s use should not be treated like the use of a sophisticated social media user who is older and more mature.

In this context, we're specifically talking about young people, who are _literally not yet wired_ to properly evaluate consequences. It doesn't mean they get a pass for anything, but surely at some point in your life you've said/done something that wouldn't pass with modern standards, particularly if it can be cherry picked to the word.

The "words have consequences" line of thinking doesn't provide a rationale for the consequences. It is simply a way of avoiding critical thinking about harsh reactions to unpopular statements. You might as well say, "all fallout is good fallout."

Quoting Mohandas Gandhi: "Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err and even to sin. If God Almighty has given the humblest of His creatures the freedom to err, it passes my comprehension how human beings, be they ever so experienced and able, can delight in depriving other human Beings of that precious right."

Most of those words that have "consequences" nowadays aren't unlawful or even particularly malicious, and some are in fact just jokes and statements of opinion that go against the grain of the zeitgeist. Often, the reaction is more damaging than the words themselves.

It makes me sad just to think about a world where every pub conversation and class discussion I've ever had was archived for posterity. That sounds like misery to me.

On one hand, that's true. On the other hand, 10 years down the road, all you have is 140 characters, and you lose the whole context in which something was written. You know, "Qu'on me donne 6 lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre" and all that.

Everyone is triggered by different things. Your bureaucratic style "words have consequences" sends shivers down the spines of many people who grew up in the Eastern block.

We know the language that precedes cancellations by now.

Why? If what's being held against you later is so awful that it can't be explained away with "I was immature"/"I was angry in the heat of the moment"/"I have since learned that that's not correct," then it must have been a pretty toxic thing to say in public.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com