Hacker News Reader

Comment by elicash | Hacker News Reader

Worth noting that political ads are already banned on Twitter and have been for a couple years:

https://twitter.com/jack/status/1189634360472829952?ref_src=...

In practice, this leads to weird scenarios where Exxon can run promotional ads but climate groups can't run ads in opposition.

I'm not saying this is the wrong policy necessarily, just that "politics" is a tricky thing to define. Labor unions can't run ads saying workers should demand more pay, but Amazon can run ads saying their jobs pay good wages.

Edit: Also, I tried to find the original post but the blog is down, at least for the moment for me. https://blog.twitter.com -- anyway, here's a cached version: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ADXc6W...

View on HN

For as long as money is instrumental in determining the allocation of resources and power, the goals of commercial entities (and their propaganda) are inherently political in nature. By advocating for their own profit they are advocating for a certain resource distribution strategy that they want as many people to get on board with.

What Twitter is really saying is that they are fine with political messages, just not from institutions and by means that are typically associated with democracy: for as long as you only represent your self-interest rather than constituents and members in a democratic sense you are free to propagandize as much as you want. The result is highly political, just directly anti-democratic.

They removed Danny Devito’s blue check mark when he supported the Nabisco union or whatever.

Twitter is so close to being perfect, I hope they fix it…

Twitter said that's not why they removed the blue check and it was re-added. Not that I trust press-releases but that seems like it would be a bit of a departure for them.

The timing suggests that an automated system was tripped by a deluge of malicious abuse reports.

I'd say that's pretty in character.

If that supposition is even true, Twitter removing a blue check because he publicly supported a union— the initial implication to which I replied— and twitter removing and restoring a blue check because people exploited their abuse reporting system are two very different things.

Yes, and twitter is kind of shit either way - this is being the sole implication I got from the OP.

The timing still undeniably connects the two events and in spite of it likely being due to abuse of their abuse button they still didnt admit that.

> The timing still undeniably connects the two events

Not taking any sides here, but correlation does not equal causation.

> Twitter is so close to being perfect, I hope they fix it…

LOL, I couldn't disagree more. Twitter is profoundly broken. Scams to UX, pretty much every aspect of it is subpar.

Nitter is the only way I can consume twitter now. I just took the time to make bookmarks to my top 20 people that I follow and use those. I hate responses to tweets and retweets (about 98% of the time) and nitter lets me cut out all that garbage.

Twitter is close to being the perfect perpetual rage generator, is that what you meant by calling it 'close to being perfect'? The format in combination with their nefarious algorithm makes for a nearly perfect polarisation machine where you're either 'with' or ´against' how Twitter-the-company wants you to think.

I don't experience that at all. Everybody seems to be expecting a platform that only supports posts that are up to 280 characters in length to offer nuanced takes on politics, science, and news. When it doesn't they call it shit. Most of us are using it wrong, the algos are adjusting to that to sell ads, and everybody is miserable about it.

> Twitter is so close to being perfect

That's an unusual take... Twitter is pretty widely regarded as about as far as perfect as it can get, putting it mildly - and this is across the political spectrum. I'm curious to understand your perspective on why you believe twitter is near perfect.

Perfectly so

> Twitter is pretty widely regarded as about as far as perfect as it can get ... on Hacker News.

Twitter is so close to being perfect....

I... I've never heard this combination of words before can you please let us know how you came to this conclusion?

Ash: You still don't understand what you're dealing with, do you? Perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.

Lambert: You admire it.

Ash: I admire its purity. A survivor... unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.

Parker: Look, I am... I've heard enough of this, and I'm asking you to pull the plug.

Ash: Last word.

Ellen Ripley: What?

Ash: I can't lie to you about your chances, but... you have my sympathies.

I guess this also shows the limits of communities where the topic is basically everything

It seems the best solution is to ban all advertising and money interest on the platform. Then Twitter would have a lower valuation, and they would not do that. It is a good thing we do have ad-free social media like Twitter such as Mastodon.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com