Of course, in order to help out the unfortunate website operators, people should willingly give up pii that the same companies have shown they don’t give a damn about protecting. /s
The most abused and dishonest phrase of the 21st century.
Safety, as it is commonly used, would better be translated, in French, as "sûreté". "Salut" would be a much, much stronger word.
Although I do see your point.
But I'm still not quite sure what the French word "salut" means. Is there not a simple one-word English translation? What exactly is the remit implied by the name Comité de salut public?
So, in this case, considering they considered themselves the defenders of the greatest ideology of all time and the (worthy) people, and were at war with both foreign countries and some of their own people, I’d say it'd mean something like:
"Committee in charge of delivering the country, the Republic (the idea of Republic itself; not just it’s French incarnation) and freedom / democracy (even though they weren’t quite democratic) from utter ruin and certain doom"
But that’s quite a mouthful.
Tiwtter's product is you.
A key difference is that in the Twitter case, there's no monetary penalty which can be imposed by the host class (that is, the unpaied content contributors).
Much of the "harvest as much data as possible" element is also driven by fundamental power and monopolistic differences.
That's actually an honest one, since they know exactly what the value is of the PII that they sell to third parties.
The T&C equivalent of "your call is very important to us"?
Alternatives included:
- pay a small fee but that requires a credit card
- send us government documents which is worse
- mine crypto for a while but it doesn’t stop people who are actually motivated
- send a selfie and then do some face matching, also worse.
Maybe there is room for some simple innovation here. Is it possible to do “coarse” address for tax purposes? After all I imagine they only care about which tax jurisdiction such as county / parish or something like that?
Let’s say you pay a fee for being able to view tweets without logging in. How will they know it’s you who’s trying to view a tweet if you don’t effectively log in?
Nothing. Hire more moderators maybe. it also looks dishonest to frame it this way when twitter asks these pii for "spam protection" and yet still can't ban obvious Fiverr-like spam accounts
> Like what other things can we ask for that actually work and aren’t more invasive?
Nothing, somehow plenty of websites do fine without even asking for email, including this one. It seems what you really want to say is "What can we ask from you for it not to cost us anything?".
HN works because it's niche. It can be moderated by a handful of people. Once you cross the "can't be moderated by humans" threshold of size you're solving a completely different problem.
I won't knock you for saying "well then you shouldn't exist at that scale" but that's a non-answer for the real world where giving up PII in exchange for participating in a huge social network is a trade enough people are willing to make that you feel pressure to do it in order to get in.
It doesn't follow to me, those people open thousands of account for those scams, how are they clean? They are not sophisticated, they don't even use them like real humans and it's literally for $5!
> "can't be moderated by humans" threshold
Is it a threshold or simply a cost center that starts to be big and needs to be slashed in order to please shareholders?
To me it's perfectly possible to be big and have moderators, you just can't have it cheaply.
I want Tesla to give me a free car too, but it ain't happening. At some point a company makes decisions you aren't gonna agree with and your only recourse is to not use them. If that means you can't read Twitter, then that's the price you pay. You aren't "owed" a free Twitter account solely on your own personal terms.
They're asking for a stop to major companies lying to the public. To stop harvesting people's data under false pretenses.
I think citizens can and should demand those things from companies that choose to incorporate in their country. That avail themselves of the legal systems and protections. That take advantage of the workforce present.
Companies are free to choose where they operate and incorporate.
It's funny that all those companies are trying to get so big and so central to our lives, to the point many news (including from police precincts or first responders) are only posted on twitter or fb, yet when you point out they shouldn't ask you a phone number to access them it's "they owe you nothing".
(But that's a ship that sailed long before the internet age. "Want to know the laws? Pay up!")
Public sector and publicly funded groups should be communicating through standards-based channels. Their content belongs to the digital commons. This exists today, via the ActivityPub and RSS sphere of ecosystems.
If we go that route of argumentation: Can Twitter please close shop and go away then? Their value is vastly overestimated: Most people don't want to use Twitter specifically, they are peer pressured into it because it is where everyone is. There are better free and open source alternatives without them trying to steal from me. Twitter burns all that money (do they generate a profit yet?) to stay on top, just so that nobody else can.
To stay with your analogy: Tesla rolled up and pushed every other car manufacturer out, now they are giving a somewhat free car and in return they want you to do everything they say, and the keys to your house "just in case".
We don't owe Twitter anything.
no you see, that's the problem. I don't WANT a twitter account, but I apparently need to use the site to view local updates in my town.
I'm perfectly happy continuing to not post there. I just don't see the benefit in making me find an extension around this annoyance so I can continue to not have a twitter account.
* Give us your Credit Card information
* Give us a picture of your real life self
Neither of these are solutions to the privacy and compromise potential problem that is the 'phone number or else' requirement. Its objectively worse, so that you go "oh, guess you can have my phone number instead".
- Combat spam.
- Be large.
- Allow (pseudo-)anonymous accounts.
A social network can only pick two.
Reddit has all three (no need for email even), they might not be perfect but I can't remember any time I saw "viagra links" or other obvious spam. They have problems with accounts obviously, but you can't frame it as a spam problem.
That does nothing to speak of “auto moderator”, fragmented rules/guidelines and ilk and the sheer effort involved by volunteers.
Even then: the spam gets through. But I agree that PII is not solving this.
Where? I've seens a couple of ghost subreddits with spam, but then you see the same with ghost fb groups, weird twitter profiles, youtube, etc On even moderately sized subs I've seen any that wasn't removed quickly by the mods.
People can say mods are too expensive for fb and twitter, but there is the dishonesty, instead of paying mods they pass on that cost to us with our pii while pretending it's free.
How does allowing people to read (but not post) without logging in produce "spam"?
https://herrjemand.medium.com/why-cloudflares-captcha-replac...
https://www.proofofhumanity.id/
But in the end it comes to the fact that your Google/Apple needs to have your app store account that is verified to be human enough (less fake accounts) and then a web browser confirms this via a login to this account.
Another option might be to rate-limit by things which don't require accounts, which won't strictly rate-limit individuals, but it's unlikely that's the terminal goal here. It's not actually clear what they are trying to accomplish. Reducing the amount of resources wasted on scraping bots ?
"Trust tokens" was built to deal with these issues just for this use case: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/privacy-sandbox/trust-toke...
Reddit, Qora and Pinterest all tried it, shot themselves in the foot, lost a huge readership and reversed it or will reverse it.
It's hard to realise how bad it is as only lurker don't have a sunk cost fallacy and easily quit and their quitting is invisible.
10 years ago when a government banned Twitter it was almost universally seen as bad. That's probably not the case anymore. Will it be worse in the future?
I'm sure they have. And I, being used to being in the minority of users, will likely find some 3rd party solution around the problem they created. Win-win outside of me wasting a few minutes installing another extension.
In the case of posting, rate limiting / scoring w/o a phone number without explicitly banning until you build more reputation works pretty well from what I can see, and most legit twitter users, especially new ones, don't post a lot and mostly read anyway.
And in twitter's case, I think paying a small amount of crypto would actually be something the CEO is interested in this case for the private types who won't / can't get a phone number. Some of twitter best accounts are anonymous and the CEO is into crypto. Add a monero payment option for those small amounts who aren't fraudulent and are private people and you will probably get rid of a lot of complaints.
I want them to do nothing.