Hacker News Reader

Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

I love the arrogance of Elon and all these people who think it's so easy to make Twitter better.

If it where so easy why hasn't Facebook, Reddit, YouTube or any one else figured it out?

I have seen this over and over again. Once you reach mass global adaption it becomes practically impossible to operate a "fair" and clean platform.

This idea that one platform works for the whole world is like believing in one world government. It doesn't work. It doesn't even work within the United States. People are just too different.

IMO, if anything will ever work it's a federated platform that is self governed by its regions. Reddit is somewhat that but there is a single US centric company in control and they ultimately decide which subreddit get deleted.

View on HN

> why hasn't Facebook, Reddit, YouTube

Well, until today, Facebook, Reddit, Youtube and Twitter are all doing exactly the same things with regards to content moderation so at least Elon can try doing something different for a change.

There’s a reason all these sites have come to the same solution: it’s the most feasible one. If Musk orders Twitter to relax content moderation it’ll fill to the brim with absolute garbage (at best, at worst it’ll be child porn) and they’ll backtrack. Nothing new here.

At least the system can aim to be less selective in its application and apply all across the spectrum rather than target some groups and not others.

Why does everyone use child porn as an argument against freedom of speech? Child porn is legally required to be taken down per section 230.

the argument isn't against freedom of speech, it's against this mythical implementation of free speech in which content moderation is magnitudes better than what is known.

The only method of content moderation that has been tried recently is: upvote/downvote/report and ai-filtering.

There's a lot more out there. For example, slashdot has a unique moderation mechanism where random users were temporarily promoted to mods and could assign tags rather than just take things down.

Filtering could allow users to choose to block anonymous accounts. Feed algos could prioritize content that presents a quality differing view rather than just reinforce filter bubbles.

There's a reason that it's constantly brought up - Twitters content moderators are literally pedophiles, as are Facebook's, as are Reddits. They've figured out how to "self-police" as it were, assuring that enough is deleted and the rest is hidden in PMs and moderated with other tags when caught.

Speaking for personal experience, I met a Facebook person at Folsom Street Fair, through a friend of a friend who I had already marked as super fucking creepy. They were remarkably upfront about it, being drunk and apparently I have a good poker face. See also the "Aimee Challenor" affair at Reddit, and the fact that their initial defense was "Highly recommended by other staff" - They never looked further into that, for a fact.

>There’s a reason all these sites have come to the same solution: it’s the most feasible one.

Are you sure the reason isn't ideological? After all, the people running them are all ideological cousins.

All carmakers said the same thing about electric cars in 2005.

Old space told the same thing about reusable rockets.

Doesn’t mean Elon will get it right this time, but you cannot fault him for thinking people don’t get it and he can solve it and he has the resources to back his vision .

Better than say bezos or elision are doing with their fortunes at least he is trying something.

Losing 40 billion isn’t all that much money for him and losing twitter is not all that bad for us either so why not

that is how I look at it also. if twitter doesnt exist in a few years, the world will be a lot better place

if he somehow manages to fix it, that could be great too.

You could just not ban people for saying impolitic things about race, immigration, and homosexuality/transgenderism, or for disagreeing with scientists regarding covid or climate change, or for reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop.

It'd almost be like every single website has those problems in the first place. Do you suddenly think he's going to turn off the csam filter?

Those people would still be banned because csam content isn't free speech.

Or Musk believes it's not garbage.

Generally I think that's true, but I looked at youtube comments the other day and it seems like there have been some radical changes in the past few years.

The comments are not really more informative, but they seem a lot less offensive and somewhat more coherent than I remembered.

I found it a little unsettling actually, as though the whole community had quietly been ai-rehabilitated or re-educated or something.

> If it where so easy why hasn't Facebook, Reddit, YouTube or any one else figured it out?

The hard part isn't the technical part, but the human part. Human systems are hard. Beyond around a hundred people, the hard problem is the organizational one. I (and many of the other people on HN) can tell you what Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft, or many other organizations ought to do. If they did it, they'd be wildly more successful. On the other hand, if you made me the CEO, I (and the other armchair generals) wouldn't be able to make them do it.

* Beyond the original founder, the CEO usually doesn't care about the company, but about their annual bonus, their next job, their golden parachute, keeping the board happy, and setting up for their next job.

* Employees don't care about the abstract company. They often want to make the world a better place, a decent pay check, interesting work, and good work-life balance

... and so on.

Facebook is a bunch of people working on pet projects from monopoly profits. If you make me the CEO, I won't be able to fix that. Google is managed in crazy ways around short-term objectives which don't align to overall success. Can I tell you what it ought to do better? Sure. Could I make it do it? Heck no. Microsoft, I haven't followed in a while, but used to be torn apart by internal feuds. Etc.

The upsides Elon has are:

- He owns the thing, and has aligned incentives for himself, at least.

- He has a pretty good track record with actually getting things like this done in organizations he's been at.

From a technical perspective, I know a few people as good as Elon. That's hard, but not that hard. Elon is top 0.01%, probably, which means 1:10,000, which means I can find 30k Americans as good at him, and many more people worldwide.

On the other hand, managing thousands of people in a coherent direction? That's *HARD*.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com