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> The issue is that when people reply to my tweets, they are trying to use my audience to push their message. If they have their own followers, OK: that's them talking to their people. But they want to talk to my audience.

Your premise here is "I should be able to completely control the conversation that reaches my audience from my tweets".

I personally can't agree with this premise at all - and my suspicion is that a lot of issues with Twitter arise because the service itself is still figuring out whether or not it should adopt this as a goal or a non-goal.

The problem I see with the premise is that it leads to echo-chambers in which only the arguments permitted initial author are visible.

I don't mean we should permit abuse or brigarding, but basic criticism or counter-arguments to a tweet must be permitted. This is especially important for me as a follower, because it allows me to put a tweet into proper context.

I fear that full curation of replies could be abused by all parts of the political spectrum and also by completely unpolitical scammers: Political pundits could limit replies to enthusiastic agreement, MLM scammers to gleaming success stories, promoters of questionable cryptocurrencies could hide uncomfortable questions, etc.

I have no issue with any of these worst-case scenarios you mention because 1) these were people who opted-in to listen to these people (who might also have biased websites: "big whoop") and 2) I maintain, as I argue in more detail in my other response to someone else, that the current situation is worse for biased censorship of the platform as a whole because it implies that we are going to decide what is "abuse or brigading" as part of some centralized filter, with the result that some people are just going to either lose access to the platform entirely--even to talk to their own audience--and/or certain subjects are going to become verboten due to some disagreement with the zeitgeist.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28661600

We need to stop building centralized filters and instead push all of the moderation to the edges--even when I admit it maybe feels awkward at first glance--as it is what eventually ensures that we all have a right to communicate. You get to decide what is talked about in your Telegram channel, WhatsApp group, or (yes) Twitter sub-thread so that I have the right to decide what is talked about in mine... lest we both lose the ability to decide such after passing it off to some centralized "offensive speech" filter that ends up deciding all photos of nipples, talk of non-normative sexuality, discussion of COVID-19, or information about the latest Russian election are off-limits, because you simply can't build a centralized system for moderation without marching straight into a dystopia.

https://youtu.be/vsazo-Gs7ms

Eventually, when Twitter has become not Twitter, someone will reinvent Twitter.

The problem with doing this is that you will essentially get a social oligarch where nobody can say opposing views to people with the most followers. Big twitter handles should not have complete censorship control they should take feedback for what they say and it should be viewed imo.

The people with the most followers have the most followers for some reason, and that reason isn't as inherently biased as you would think, or there wouldn't be such caustic arguments about people trying to ban each other off Twitter. I strongly believe in your right to free speech and a right for you to say anything you want... I do not, however, believe you have any right to be heard by people who didn't care to listen.

If you have something worthy of being said, you should use that to build an audience of people who bother to follow you, so when you say something controversial you have people who will hear it... and we should be building a system that ensures that that can happen without interference. You shouldn't just get to reply to someone else and shove stuff at their audience, if nothing else because that doesn't scale.

In my case, and to show that I have some "skin in the game" here: I happen to have a rather large following of people who listen to my let's-call-them-"rants" about Apple (and sometimes Google and Facebook, but my audience mostly cares about Apple), a company with much larger resources than I do... because I have something valuable to say on the subject and have built my audience up by being a trustworthy and even unique source of information.

But, I shouldn't get to force my rants about Apple onto Apple's audience of people who don't know I exist and who only wanted to sign up to listen to Tim Cook or talk to Apple's corporate support or communication lines... that's just me clogging up their communication channels. People should get to opt-in to my content no matter what I want to say, but that doesn't mean I should get to force what I say on anyone.

Put another way: the problem with not doing this is that you get what I guess Twitter kind of is (and it sucks): a place where the people who shout the loudest and post the most message volume--almost certainly because they have too much time on their hands from having nothing else valuable to do with their lives--manage to get the most "space" on the platform by just going around replying to people who are trying to provide high-value content.

This current situation, I will then also argue, is much worse for the goal of the little guy/gal with the niche opinion: it implies that the platform and the zeitgeist get to co-determine what is shit/spam via some horrible combination of a centralized (and clearly biased) overseer reacting to a "tyranny of the majority" (or sometimes an authoritarian government), which results in a world where you don't even get to talk to your own followers, much less mine.

This much-more-serious censorship--with people losing their accounts or their tweets getting filtered by centralized moderation based on keywords in an attempt to scale this process across all accounts at once--is a downstream effect of attempting to almost provide a "right to be heard", because we do generally want--nay: need--the ability to filter shit/spam from the platform: but to scale and be fair it needs to be done at the level of individual users and their own audiences, not with centralized filters for the entire community.

> “all replies would be hidden by default and users would have to manually mark them as visible to their audience”

That sounds horrible… the opposite of “social”.

99% of the value from Facebook or Instagram--both of which we call "social networks"--comes not from seeing content from strangers but by seeing posts and comments from our friends.

I follow a bunch of people on Twitter, and they talk to each other: I find that social! (And, if someone new joins the conversation, and the people I follow want to introduce me to them by marking their content as kosher, well that's a "network"! <- In parentheses as you didn't care about "network".)

(FWIW, the reason why that parenthetical you are responding to mattered was if you follow my other complaints about how this all ties into Section 230 and how and when platforms should be held legally--or merely morally--culpable for content and why, and you tried to square that with the idea that by letting users moderate threads you shift, in my framework, the culpability around. I do happily admit that there are some use cases for existing social networks--and Twitter likely in particular!--that I don't really support... but I don't even think they should be legal more than I simply think that some UI or another is better for them. But this is a wholly different conversation that isn't really really relevant on this post and involves a ton of content I have written before: I mentioned it only so people could see that I am not being inconsistent in my beliefs set, whereas I do feel like this complaint "stands alone".)

> “ 99% of the value from Facebook or Instagram … comes not from seeing content from strangers but by seeing posts and comments from our friends.“

I personally disagree, as this is not the way i use social media.

I fear the result of your suggested method would be that ALL people who don’t have friends/a network, would be severely limited in their freedom of speech. They deserve to be heard too, and not just when they say “something nice” and you/others allow them to be heard. Ciriticism should not be muted. I feel isolating them from the rest/majority will only cause more problems.

> “platforms should be held legally--or merely morally--culpable for content“

I agree with that, and obviously something needs to change quickly. The current situation is a thread to our democracy.

FWIW, we just disagree on morals. I believe everyone has the right to say whatever they want to a willing recipient... but they DO NOT have a right to "be heard". The latter simply doesn't work, because there are too many people to give everyone the right to force random other people to hear what they say. Even with small numbers of people, you end up with some people who are simply going to spam, and you need a way to stop the spammers, so you empower someone to... strip away that right on some case by case basis :/. And then that person always always always ends up restricting actual speech in their quest to make everyone feel heard.

Literally everyone--even people you think are spammers, or people who are spewing "hate speech", inciting treasonous, telling lies, or exposing "inconvenient truths"--should get to have a Twitter account and should get to post as much stuff as they want... to their followers. As someone who tells inconvenient truths, I am telling you (through my extended example elsewhere in this thread involving Apple) that this is important: this is what let's you build an audience, and it is what prevents people in power from taking away your audience!

But it isn't possible to have freedom of speech with "a right to be heard", in no small part because "a right to be heard" is impossible to implement without utterly draconian control and rate limits on speech to prevent you from just dominating anyone's discussions by shouting louder. Seriously: people who think like you do are the reason why freedom of speech is so hard to come by in this day and age, as this mental model of "a right to be heard" fails to incorporate the ramifications of the very thing if asks for :/.