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Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

> I also think the proposal to have Twitter allow all content that is "legal under US law" is a dangerous idea for the platform being a healthy community that most people actually want to participate in.

This is key. If @dang suddenly threw up his hands and said "anything goes on HN within U.S. law" this wonderful virtual discussion forum would die and most of us would sign off forever. I say that as someone whose been here for ~15 years.

I've used Twitter for the same amount of time. Despite Twitter's many faults and loopholes, the things that keep me going back day after day is there is enough good discussion, news tidbits, and photos (for me, mostly local nostalgia, birds, and retro computing) that it's a worthwhile place for me to hang out. I won't stick around if it gets too negative and my people start to leave, as they surely will under such a policy.

View on HN

That only works because HN is, mostly, politics-free.

I'm not a regular Twitter user but afaik that platform is pretty heavy on politics, more than that, it's pretty heavy when it comes to a certain political spectrum, the other side has been mostly de-platformed by now. I don't consider that as a healthy platform to comment on for the general public (even though, I agree, it might be ok for people who happen to share the same political opinions that have not been banned by the Twitter higher-ups).

> but afaik that platform is pretty heavy on politics

Twitter is what you want it to be, topic-wise, based on who you follow and what they like to talk about. Further tuning is possible using blocks and muted keywords.

However, there is bleed because people you follow and Twitter's recommendation features can't help themselves (and not just about politics; anything "newsy" pops up).

What happens when Elon's "anything under U.S. law" approach kicks in is toxic behavior and arguments will get so extreme that it will drive millions of people away, and those who are left will see the quality of their feeds decline. Then many of them will bail, too.

> That only works because HN is, mostly, politics-free.

This place holds together because the signal:noise ratio is so high and @dang and the community work to keep it that way. Toxicity and low-value contributions kill communities, regardless of the topic at hand.

> Twitter is what you want it to be, topic-wise, based on who you follow and what they like to talk about.

I've tried this. It's false. It's a myth that Twitter users tell themselves, AFAICT.

Even disregarding the trending topics and explore interfaces, all it takes is for one of the curated members that you follow to retweet something you're not interested in seeing.

> What happens when Elon's "anything under U.S. law" approach kicks in is toxic behavior and arguments will get so extreme that it will drive millions of people away, and those who are left will see the quality of their feeds decline. Then many of them will bail, too.

But that's contradictory to your claim that Twitter is what you want it to be, based on who you follow, isn't it?

Because Twitter _isn't_ what you claim it is. Twitter is optimized for outrage-oriented engagement. It _wants_ to show you things that will encourage you to engage, to return, and there's nothing quite as engaging as content that upsets you.

> I've tried this. It's false.

So I have I. I currently have about a half-dozen accounts, each following different types of accounts with limited overlap. So, what I get on the genealogy account feed is limited almost entirely to genealogists and historians posting about those topics and very little else. People that stray too much get unfollowed.

That said, my personal account has overlap with a separate startup/media/tech account because of some shared interests in the tech space. But there is also a lot of very different items I see in the personal account because of local accounts in the city I live in as well as topical news accounts relating to Asia and Europe that interest me. Naturally, anything relating to current events in those areas also touches on U.S. politics, foreign policy, and military policy, so I get that too, despite some muted keywords.

> But that's contradictory to your claim that Twitter is what you want it to be, based on who you follow, isn't it?

You missed the part in the paragraph that followed:

However, there is bleed because people you follow and Twitter's recommendation features can't help themselves (and not just about politics; anything "newsy" pops up).

And not everyone knows how to filter it, or they only have one account. Those are the most likely to leave.

Not disagreeing with your point about outrage, though. Like you said, there's nothing quite as engaging as content that gets lots of responses/RTs/shares/"likes," and this content tends to be negative.

> I currently have about a half-dozen accounts, each following different types of accounts with limited overlap. So, what I get on the genealogy account feed is limited almost entirely to genealogists and historians posting about those topics and very little else. People that stray too much get unfollowed.

> And not everyone knows how to filter it, or they only have one account. Those are the most likely to leave.

You're describing how you have general views into twitter, but which are imperfect and require _active_ maintenance on your part to retain utility.

My experience is that _while engaging in that maintenance_ Twitter rapidly depleted in utility and value for me, because the dark patterns that encourage outrage engagement infected all those that I follow. It's simply not possible, AFAICT, to actively filter Twitter for strong content and not eventually either recede into accepting outrage or reducing one's feed to uselessness.

> My experience is that _while engaging in that maintenance_ Twitter rapidly depleted in utility and value for me, because the dark patterns that encourage outrage engagement infected all those that I follow. It's simply not possible, AFAICT, to actively filter Twitter for strong content and not eventually either recede into accepting outrage or reducing one's feed to uselessness.

I reached the same conclusion. It’s garbage, and I quit. Occasionally I’ll get a text from a friend linking to Twitter and I regret following the link, every time, within 60 seconds or so.

I also quit it and whenever someone links to it, I get a physiological reaction, like nauseousness and just have to close the tab. It's toxic fumes all over. Not possible to curate. I have blocked some words and mostly follow researchers but the controversial politics are shoved in my face. Everyone bending over backwards regarding Ukraine-Russia, some are still ranting about masks pro or contra, performatively being very concerned, some gender stuff, people at each other's throats regarding privilege and inclusivity, people bragging, humblebragging about their careers, self-claimed gurus telling their communities off, hot takes, then people complaining about too much bragging and calling out hustle culture and toxic positivity, others one upping these in some way or agreeing and fuming together. People only seeing other people as caricature stereotypes, like ah you must be a techbro, you must be an sjw, everyone assuming the worst, everything too serious and no lightheartedness.

It's pure monkey emotions and it brings out the worst of otherwise intelligent people. I've lost respect for several highly regarded scientists through this.

Twitter should just run itself into the ground.

    > What happens when Elon's "anything under U.S. law" 
    > approach kicks in is toxic behavior and arguments 
    > will get so extreme that it will drive millions 
    > of people away, and those who are left will see 
    > the quality of their feeds decline. Then many of 
    > them will bail, too.

    But that's contradictory to your claim that Twitter is 
    what you want it to be, based on who you follow, isn't it?

What? It's not contradictory in the slightest.

Nobody is claiming that Twitter would somehow magically somehow continue "be what you want it to be" if most of the quality contributors leave.

    Because Twitter _isn't_ what you claim it is. 
    Twitter is optimized for outrage-oriented engagement.

I have a few accounts and I simply don't see what you describe.

I don't follow or engage with controversial crap. My follows are people in my hobbies, and funny people. My feed is pretty close to 100% strife-free.

Either it's really easy to avoid the hellscape of outrage that you describe or I'm extremely lucky/talented.

Or you have a higher tolerance for negativity and hate than I do.

Good point. Although, I don't think it's the case: mine's essentially zero.

Don't misunderstand: I've seen that stuff on Twitter. I've reported a few people. And political topics and other controversial topics are absolutely rife with it. I do not excuse it in any way.

I just find it easy to avoid?

You've just described how you haven't avoided it, but instead have actively engaged with it by availing yourself of moderation tools.

It leads me to suppose that you're underestimating how much you're exposed to that you find disquieting.

What kind of hubris would cause you to think you have more insight into my life than I do?

Your comment is extremely bad.

In its own small way, it is one of the most arrogant and incorrect things I've ever read.

> it will drive millions of people away

I don't see this happening. I see the opposite. With free reign to post "anything under U.S. law", content on Twitter will become even further optimized to get the most eyeballs. You'll see things that make you so mad that you just HAVE to reply. And on and on it goes.

Surely you've seen those Twitter/Youtube/Insta ads that would show a trivially easy puzzle (like, toddler-level easy), and show a person somehow failing it. "Can YOU solve it"? the add entices. Obviously. Of course you can solve it. It's designed to be brain-dead easy to cast the widest net, and to give you just that brief moment of discomfort while you watch someone ELSE fail (as scripted). And you want to dispel this discomfort, so you click on it (or, more likely, you scroll on, but you better believe that other people click on it).

It's like cigarettes. Everyone knows they kill you in the long run. But boy do they tickle those neurons that make you want just one more.

I also think HN survives bc rules are short and clearly set from the beginning, with examples and references. When an argument regarding moderation pops up, dang is quick to communicate, clarify, etc. this beats any “you violated our policies bye” strategy.

> That only works because HN is, mostly, politics-free.

It's only politics-free because it's heavily moderated. There's nothing magical about the people here that make them apolitical. Political posts are often removed outright, and comments that are political have to be pretty fact-based (or at have the appearance thereof) to not be removed.

I'd add 1) that HN also didn't start politics-free, that was something that was consciously imposed on it well into its life, and 2) that HN post politics-moderation is far less influential than HN was pre politics-moderation.

> HN post politics-moderation is far less influential than HN was pre politics-moderation

Influential in what way?

> That only works because HN is, mostly, politics-free.

I have to disagree with that one. This discussion -- content moderation-- is one of the most political topics possible. More things are political than most people realize.

However, I do think that the quality of the political discourse here is much better than other places; it is often just based on ideas, and even if they're plainly wrong, they're not usually presented in an inflammatory way. That is what sets things apart, rather than the lack of politics.

Hmm, are we on the same HN? I feel like I see a lot of topics debated I’d call political (“about how society ought to function”) on a daily basis.

I was going to say.... HN is full of politics. Not always the Red vs Blue kind, but there's political discussions constantly. At any given time several front page stories are explicitly political, and several more are implicitly political (e.g. cryptocurrency).

Discussions without politics are a bit like science without the mathematics field: If you take the larger definition, there's hardly any way to avoid it. Especially if you define things like crypto currency as political, it's basically impossible to have a tech discussion without scratching it.

What people mean when they say that is that political topics are usually a side concern to the technical topics at hand, not pure political discussions. The off-topic, angry and/or ad-hominem comments are also quite rare - yes, they exist, but compared to (most of) Reddit and Twitter it's very relaxed. And policy is almost never the primary topic, unless it directly affects the tech field.

Richard Stallman once said that "geeks like to think they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone." When people imply that there is such a thing as an a-political take on the world we live in, what they're saying is that they cant identify the mainstream ideology that they themselves are adherents of. As such things which adhere to it look "natural", without "bias", or "non-political."

Political comments made up about 2/3 of my upvotes. It's everywhere here, it's just moderated so that it's discussed in a very armchair manner.

> political (“about how society ought to function”)

I feel like this is a technical definition of political, but that's not how the layman uses the word.

I tend to hear the word political used as a synonym for the current arguments within a society, especially those that professional politicians feel the need to weigh in on and/or there is a significant chance of legislation around.

So, for example, a passionate essay about a Georgism and a land value tax might be political under the technical definition, I don't think it would qualify as political under the layman definition. There's not a sufficient mass of people trying to institute a land value tax for a society wide argument to occur. I don't think the average person would describe aforementioned person as political, I'd say they'd be more likely to be written off as a kook.

Could also be a regional difference. I'm not intimately familiar with all the dialects of the english language.

Right, it's an equivocation that often comes up, when people try to tell you that basically almost everything is political, ergo you are already allowing politics, ergo you must allow all politics, ergo I must be allowed to spew the generic mindless stuff on your platform too.

Orwell introduced the term duckspeak in 1984, and it best describes the way how people understand "politics". “Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all.”

People usually don't have a problem discussing societal issues, most discussion topics somehow relate to how we live and work together and is political in that way, but more people have issues with the sort of partisan politics where the point is to score points against the "other team" over all else, painting the other side with vile adjectives, generalizing them, considering your own side as obviously, axiomatically good etc. You know it when you see it.

> I'm not a regular Twitter user but afaik that platform is pretty heavy on politics, more than that, it's pretty heavy when it comes to a certain political spectrum, the other side has been mostly de-platformed by now.

Please. Despite the howls of protest this is far from true and that would be obvious to anyone who's spent much time reading political discussion on Twitter.

Everything is politics, but most of HN's comment section is sufficiently homogenized around Silicon Valley libertarian ideology that political conflict is rarely at the forefront of discussions. A much more practical reason HN survives is there are no images or videos. It is profoundly easier to filter, downvote, or ignore someone's text ramblings than it is to curate media.

> has been mostly de-platformed by now

Completely inaccurate. No one side has been deplatformed in aggregate. A few individuals have been suspended permanently for violating TOS. They should have been removed earlier, but were considered special cases due to their prominence. It amounts to Twitter removing its own inhibition on enforcing its TOS for certain prominent users.

If you want a hard-right-wing heavy experience, you can certainly get that on Twitter today (and two months ago) by following the hard right wingers. Most of them never left. The subscriber count jumps you heard about when the emerald scion announced his Twitter purchase? Very small percentages.

I totally agree with this take.

I'm also surprised that there hasn't been more strident push-back against the "conservatives are being banned from Twitter" story from conservatives themselves. If I were right-leaning I would certainly not want to be associated with the q-anon advocates for violence that are being kicked off the platform.

This is exactly the "Oh, you know the ones" take, that conservative opinions in general are not what's being banned[1]:

1: https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174...

Trump wasn't kicked off the platform for being q-anon.

Right, he was kicked off for fomenting an attempt at revolution which included urging QAnon people (who need medical treatment) to attack the nation's capital in an effort to illegally reinstate himself as POTUS and using Twitter in his effort to do so.

Much worse than just promoting QAnon conspiracies IMO!

Who had been deplatformed that isn't objectively a terrible person and wasn't violating the ToS for a long time?

It's weird they would push such a dishonest narrative.

>I'm not a regular Twitter user

followed by

>the other side has been mostly de-platformed by now.

This is probably my biggest peeve when it comes about discussions on Twitter. The media has made it seem that Twitter just routinely bans conservatives voices for "a difference of opinion" when that is not the case. Twitter's high profile bans are on Wikipedia, and they weren't banned for simply saying "abortion should be repealed".

Banning is one thing, but what about full or actually partial shadow-banning, or deleting selected specific posts which is called moderation, and the overall balance of the biases in the moderation.

>but what about full or actually partial shadow-banning,

Of all the big social networks, Twitter has been the only one to keep the use of chronological feeds. What does "shadow banning" mean when all your tweets are chronological for everyone you follow? Do you actually use Twitter?

>or deleting selected specific posts which is called moderation

Every platform moderates; but now we have moved the goalposts from de-platforming to moderating. Twitter has a few isolated incidents where everyone will beat their chests (namely Hunter Biden and COVID), but those two incidents have failed to signify that Twitter has a systemic issue or bias.

When you actually dive into it; the problem of conservatives being "cancelled" on Twitter comes from the Twitter Mob, aka, other Twitter users. What most of these people want is to post without consequence, "free speech for me but not for thee".

> the other side has been mostly de-platformed by now

This is not true, far from it. Why do you think this?

> pretty heavy when it comes to a certain political spectrum, the other side has been mostly de-platformed by now

That's what right wing has told you via sensational anecdotes. The actual studies I've seen shows that the algorithm boosts right wing stuff more than left wing stuff.

> That only works because HN is, mostly, politics-free.

That not accidental, but the result of firm-handed and aggressive moderation. My account is rate-limited because of getting into political arguments on Hacker News.

There are pro-Russian accounts on Twitter. I don’t know about right wing US but I follow Marco Rubio. I don’t know how you’d get removed just for being right wing.

I also have a reasonable expectation that HK is FOCUSED and CIVIL. I do not have that expectation on Twitter.

Twitter is just a raw society fire hose and I'm fine with that. I think the future is to give SUPER clear power to individuals to manage their own experience. Freedom of speech is both the right to speak, but also the right of the listener to hear (or not hear) as an individual.

I would also love to see twitter evolve to become more substack-ish where communities are more "owned" and moderation is delegated to communities to determine rules based on trust and shared goals vs. just blanket twitter safetytism.

> I think the future is to give SUPER clear power to individuals to manage their own experience. Freedom of speech is both the right to speak, but also the right of the listener to hear (or not hear) as an individual.

That's the road to filter bubbles and radicalization because people never realize how obnoxious they are to real society. You can always find a few hundred other extreme fringe and deranged people from all over the Internet, while if you tried saying that stuff in real life, your community would slap some sense back into you. Online you can just block and move on and never face consequences, so you develop this righteous attitude that you know it all and you get validated by other loners from all over the world.

I think the only good way forward can be a return to physical spaces. People will realize this more and more and there will be some sort of hybrid approach. Actual real life communities are important.

Sure, niche hobbies may not sustain a large enough community in each little town, but do we really need to specialize so much? Does that really improve our affairs? Couldn't people compromise and get into some slightly different but still adjacent hobby?

If you could 'subscribe' to a moderation service on Twitter, much like you used to subscribe to the editorial board of a newspaper, that might work.

It would make the right-wing less up-in-arms about censorship by unchosen companies. And create more space for various viewpoints.

At the same time, it would create even stronger bubbles.

This is actually a wonderful idea but also somewhat like giving the keys to the kingdom to theirs parties.

If a Twitter moderator is anything like a Reddit moderator, good luck monetizing those millions of tweets people post every day.

The difference between Twitter and Reddit, hacker news, or 4chan, is that on Twitter you ostensibly only see content from people you follow. If you don’t like the content someone is putting out, you just unfollow them. Twitter is more like email than Reddit in that sense, and no one is arguing for email to be moderated.

> on Twitter you ostensibly only see content from people you follow

But that seemed to becoming less and less true in recent months. I was often seeing tweets from people I wasn't following because the algorithm was starting to recommend them based on other tweets I had clicked on. I deactivated my account this past weekend and moved over to mastodon - it seems so much more chill.

Reddit is much better at what you're describing. Twitter constantly inserts content you haven't asked for in your feed and when viewing tweets.

Reddit home now shows me repulsive “suggestions” that are very toxic. The popular tab is almost unusable.

The only difference is you don’t see the toxicity in arguments as often, because any dissent is downvoted and effectively squelched. It’s more toxic righteousness, consistently.

I don't think Twitter is more like email than Reddit. Twitter is built around increasing engagement via increasing what you see and who you interact with. Which makes sense: it's a centralized platform for speech and it needs to grow its user base and their level of engagement to make money. You need to fight against that system to curate your feed so that you don't ever see something you don't like. I don't think Musk has any brilliant ideas to 10x Twitter's revenue and somehow change this characteristic about it.

Considering that, there are also many different ways you can experience harassment on Twitter. Are these ways solvable with technical solutions? Perhaps. But these are people we're talking about here, not 0s and 1s. You can't solve all people problems with technology. And as parent comments have said, anyone who's been in a position of having to guide a community knows this to be true.

I've never once thought to myself "I'm happy that the people I follow are only allowed to express some views" or any similar thought. If someone is too rude, I block the person. If I don't enjoy reading a person's Tweets, I unfollow him.

One major benefit to HN is that it is text only. There's a lot of 'legal, but horrific to look at' imagery which gets moderated out on other platforms but here is not possible in the first place (excepting external links).

It will partially solve locality/language dependency problems of following UGC laws though. There were enough of it for Mastodon devs.

I'm not sure the comparison holds up. Twitter right now doesn't moderate content, really, it only does anything about outright scams, misinformation, etc. Toxicity can mostly run wild and free. Whereas HN has various moderation mechanisms that seek to decrease the amount of low-quality interaction.

I.e., I think dropping all moderation from HN would have a much bigger effect than doing the same on Twitter

Twitter absolutely does moderate content. If you say something that the algo interprets as being a suggestion to commit suicide, you'll get an instante 24-hour ban. A tonne of really awful toxic accounts are soft-blocked and their tweets get stuck in the "more replies" box.

And if you're overtly and explicitly racist or sexist, there's a good chance you'll get straight-up banned.

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