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I lean moderately left and I really disagree with #3. The explosion of voices is only ones that are "allowed". Twitter is one of the biggest offenders of cancel culture (i.e. silencing people).

Realistically speaking, Twitter has "done more good than harm (unlike Facebook)" because:

1. Younger and left-leaning outrage tends to dominate on Twitter.

2. Older and right-leaning outrage tends to dominate on Facebook.

3. Any conclusions are going to be subjective AF accordingly, and HN is a more young and left-leaning cohort.

All social media is a double-edged sword, under the most charitable view.

OK, "Younger and left-leaning outrage tends to dominate on Twitter" ^ "Older and right-leaning outrage tends to dominate on Facebook" => Twitter has "done more good than harm (unlike Facebook)?" That's ageism of first order right there.

I think his point was that because "good" is entirely subjective, and since HN aligns with Twitter, HN subjectively will consider Twitter good.

That's a weird conclusion to come to. There is a ton of alt-right, extremist content on Twitter. Not just in English, mind you.

And a lot of it is young

Meanwhile, I'm over here wishing that they actually applied their terms of service uniformly. Instead of making exceptions for famous people.

This is nonsense. I talk with my favorite furry purveyors of printable guns on twitter nearly daily. I have criticisms of how Twitter bends to the establishment left, but there's a lot of stuff on twitter that makes many blue people very angry.

Compare to before, where the only voices you heard where ones that were allowed by a hand full of media execs.

I don't see Twitter as an improvement over what we had before.

The same people controlling the media once, are on the boards of the companies that allegedly made the change possible.

On the other hand, their faces are hidden now, so we can't really say if a certain topic is legitimately important for the general public or the consensus has been fabricated or, even worse, their platform has been abused and we won't know until it's too late because it's bad PR.

At least in the past I could almost be sure that a media outlet was not easy to infiltrate so their opinion reflected their beliefs and I could take a stance pro or against.

For example

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_infiltration_of_Twitte...

Now if I think Twitter has been corrupted by malevolent entities, I can't really do a lot about it, because I risk to.lose my voice too.

There aren't many other ways I can have the same exposure.

There's a completely different set of incentives at play.

Before Twitter you didn’t have a voice you were afraid to lose.

Edit: re-reading this, I’m giving Twitter too much credit, but I hope the point I’m trying to make is still visible.

> Before Twitter you didn’t have a voice you were afraid to lose.

it depends on where and when

people with no voice are still with no voice, even with Twitter

people that had some kind of voice, still have a voice, probably more.

people with lots of voice power, still have a lot of power

except now people that have gained popularity don't want to lose it to silence potentially dangerous actors, because they are on the same boat, and entities with a lot of resources can have a voice (sometimes very convincing) where they wouldn't have before.

Think about the staggering amount of visibility the Talibans have on platforms like IG, they are influencers now!

Not entirely Twitter's fault, but the Jack Dorseys didn't think about the consequences and here we are.

They did what they are good at: built a platform, made it grow exponentially, lost control of it, but profited.

Not judging the intentions, they could have been the best ever, but the result is that they built something that we have to deal with, whether we like it or not.

> On the other hand, their faces are hidden now,

Having a name and face didn't exactly help pre-social media, see Rush Limbaugh and the rise of dishonest & polarizing media post-fairness doctrine.

Before, the voices I heard were people in my life and my local community.

The media was just the media; they'd get put in their own box for analysis and skepticism.

Twitter's great power is controlling peoples' impression of what the people around them are thinking and saying. Or, rather, allowing various aggressive agenda-driven groups to control that.

So now the corps don't just control the voice of the media; they control the voice of your community too.

That stuff is an issue, but it's nothing compared to positive effects arising from an increased ability for people to communicate and coordinate in actual oppressive states

> There are so many things that can go wrong, so many other things that will set your company on fire without warnings, and that doesn't give people the time to think strategically on how to tackle certain difficult scenarios.

> never seen such amount of power in the hands of a few companies.

These two points seem contradictory. If you are very powerful, you can draw on great resources, and you can address many things.

Twitter has more than enough resource to prevent it from being the extremely harmful manipulation machine that it is.

There is no excuse beyond “we want money more than a healthy society.”

>These two points seem contradictory. If you are very powerful, you can draw on great resources, and you can address many things.

Power isn't a single resource that can be accumulated and spent. The accumulation of soft power over public discourse isn't the sort of thing that inherently helps you put out fires, and in fact managing that growth can be one of the fires.

>There is no excuse beyond “we want money more than a healthy society.”

Which GP covered in their 4th point. Even a CEO who doesn't believe that answers to a board who does. And if the board has reservations, they answer to shareholders who do. It's a structure that continually passes the buck so no one has to consciously decide to put profits over people.

Fiduciary duty is a pretty slick moral hack, making the act of chasing the dollar feel like a communal good.

Exactly the point I was trying to make. Thanks.

> There is no excuse beyond “we want money more than a healthy society.”

Socrates's prosecutors called, they want their undisprovable accusation back! Serious any claims of "ruining" or "harming" society are specious and a classic symptom of a moral panic. You would think people would have learned from atonal music, Jazz, rock and roll, and rap alone having already ruined society. Let alone allowing women and minorities to vote and gay marriage and things getting better from a "ruined" society.

>Twitter has more than enough resource to prevent it from being the extremely harmful manipulation machine that it is.

But would you actually want them to do that? What if their idea of "extremely harmful manipulation" is different from yours?

> it has essentially enabled an incredible explosion of "voices" that can be heard

Very controlled, curated, and politically corrected explosion. "Very lively debate within allowed spectrum".

What exactly would you like to discuss on Twitter? I’ve never felt censored there regardless of what my opinion was.

This probably isn't what the parent meant, but also:

I began using Twitter a week ago after avoiding it for years. Imo it incentivizes you to gain likes/followers, but in order to do so you have to tailor your content to appeal to bots/algo/quick-digestion. And it's not fun tweeting if nobody interacts, so you end up self-censoring to post clickbaity hype content

That sounds like the dream.

> Twitter is not run by Jack Dorsey, nor that other companies are run by their CEOs. Companies are run by boards.

FB (Meta?) is run by its CEO. He controls the board. This is rare, of course (and perhaps unique for a company of this size and powe).

I don't think it is valid to say that the difficulty of running large successful companies buys moral leeway for their CEOs. They get payed the big bucks for a reason, let's hold them responsible.

> Facebook (sorry but I don't give a sh*t that its new name is Meta)

clearly, you do

> Remember that CEOs of public companies are essentially unable to say what they think or want.

Elon Musk seems pretty free. He just pays the fines time to time.

Yes. I guess Musk is the exception proving the rule.

Of course, exceptions don’t prove rules, they disprove them. Maybe Musk is showing that CEOs could say a lot more than they choose to, at least if they have charisma. And run certain kinds of businesses, appealing to a certain kind of investors and customers.

It's a reference to a popular saying: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule

The logic of which is, if something is an exception or so exceptional that it's called out as an exception, that implies the existence of a rule.

I just think it’s sometimes used when it shouldn’t be.

Well i think in your case you’re the exception proving the rule

I’m off to the island of misfit toys. :-(