When criticizing X, you cannot in good faith say — why don’t you build Y that’s like X? It just implicitly admits that criticizing X is off limits and you don’t like it.
Now, many people want them to stop doing that. Which they decline, since they KNOW what will be happening in that case.
So, if you think you can do a better platform, while disregarding the (minimal) lessons learned from Twitter (or Reddit, or...), go ahead! You will fail, not because "criticism of the original platform is off-limits", but because it's a well-known anti-pattern.
You’re right about human judgement but that’s not the topic. The central point, I repeat emphatically, is about transparency, not governance.
Twitter can continue exactly the same way but just be transparent. The intense pushback is because they’ve holed themselves into an untenable position? Not sure why people are so against transparency. Maybe they lied in congressional testimonies?
No it can't. If the algorithm was transparent the only thing you'd see is spammers who have put tons of resources into figuring out the exactly optimal way to maximize engagement. Grassroots engagement would be impossible.
Also, Twitter's spam control has been objectively bad.
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1487022342630957062?lang=en
People think that the entire platform has been hijacked by left-wing / progressives and the reason for lack of transparency is more insiduos than "spam". For example, being liable for what they told Congress.
Public knowledge of what "X" is doesn't really help, I think, other than to aid spammers? And a requirement to "talk to a human" upon hitting X would surely immediately degrade into "Google has reviewed your appeal and has determined that the infinite block of your account remains in effect. There is no further appeal"?
That secret sauce is ripe for manipulation and extremely powerful.
Against combating spam - I mean, isn't this how something gets stronger? HN has a strong view that open source software is more secure because it gets hardened through exposure, not through obfuscation.