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Comment by stjohnswarts | Hacker News Reader

Stock up on the popcorn because once he lets the nutters loose on twitter to say anything and everything they want without limit other than a direct personal threat to someone or directly advocating terrorist actions, it's gonna be a real shit hole. That is if he wants to watch his $44 billion go up in smoke, no sane person will stay there amongst the nuts and Q's

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I'm sure this kind of thing feels emotionally satisfying to say, but if you think about it for a moment, it doesn't make any sense. It's like saying that RSS is a shit hole, that no one will want to use a feed reader "amongst the nuts and Q's".

But with RSS, I only see stuff from the people I subscribe to. There can be a billion of nut jobs and one reasonable person in the whole world of RSS, but if I only subscribe to the reasonable person's feed, all the other stuff doesn't affect me at all. With Twitter, I see random stuff suggested by the algorithm and I see comments in tweets from the people I follow. I also see quote tweets and replies made by the people I follow.

One is an open protocol, the other a closed ecosystem.

So that example doesn't really hold up.

This comment honestly reads like you reached for the first difference between twitter and RSS you could think of. "No comparison to be made." Really? A lot of people use twitter and RSS for the same purpose, but there's "no comparison to be made"?

I didn't think this really needed explaining, but here goes anyway.

As a user in a closed ecosystem like Twitter, you have no control over what content will be served to you (the same goes for any filtering tools said ecosystem offers it's users). The state of a closed ecosystem today, does not guarantee that there won't be future state changes (and users have no control over those).

With a protocol like RSS you have full control over the content being served up to you. If a source you previously agreed with and enjoyed, starts souring for you then it is as simple as unsubscribing. It will not be pushed on you.

So as said before, the example doesn't really hold.

What concretely is your concern here?

Twitter might some day remove the block button? They might some day push certain people on you, without recourse? Therefore, they have to ban these people now?

There is no concern here, as I do not use Twitter.

Rather it was an attempt at an simple example to explain to you the differences in control that a user of an open protocol has, versus the control a user in a closed ecosystem like Twitter has.

Think it didn't land.

The value of your RSS feed comes from the websites you have the feeds from. The value of twitter comes from the tweets on twitter. The more terrible tweets and tweeters, either terrible in their quality or terrible in their offensiveness to the reader, the lower the value. The more terrible tweeters, the more they will inject themselves in to the dialogues that were previously considered non terrible by the reader. At a low enough value, when people are wading through the racist crackpot right wing sludge, they will stop using it.

You're forgetting the value of following people you like on Twitter. As such, you are browsing your own curated feed, without the need to see much sludge. BTW sludge and toxicity can be found in quantities across the political spectrum, in case you're implying otherwise.

What happens is that the nutters follow and reply to popular threads (see epidemiology Twitter during the pandemic, for example). If there are more of them, Twitter loses value.

Twitter has started to let you control who can reply, but that removes some serendipity, so if everyone worth following does that, Twitter loses value.

People want to control what other people are being exposed to. They don't care that it's entirely opt-in who you follow.

They say the only want to ban Q, Alex Jones, and conspiracy types but then you look at sites like Reddit who have adopted this moderation heavy approach and it's slowly becoming one giant mono-culture where the set of bannable wrongthink only ever grows larger. It's highly selectively enforced and usually does little to stop people from actually having opinions they don't like.

It's based on an ideology that treats people like sheep who can be fooled by selectively showing them information and guide them towards holding the same opinions as they do. And they want unaccountable tech companies to be the ones with this power.

>It's based on an ideology that treats people like sheep who can be fooled by selectively showing them information and guide them towards holding the same opinions as they do.

Well, marketing empirically proves this to be true...

> other than a direct personal threat to someon

twitter limiting direct personal threats would be a welcome change.

Millions of nutters are already loose on there.

This is about not wanting the "other nutters" on there along with "our nutters". Which will make things worse in some ways, so keeping it confined to one set of nutters is not without its merit.

The difference is violence advocating nutters. It’s a whole nother ball game.

Twitter is already home to violence-advocating nutters. If you don't realize this, you are deep in a (dis)information bubble.

Original nutters?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzbdBk6XQ6Y

It's already a woke echo chamber. Anything he can do to change that will make it less of a shithole.

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