For the rest of us peasants: good luck getting help.
By Ben's own description of how the @StratecheryINT account was operated [0] -- i.e. "a new account that has posted a bunch of links (all Stratechery interviews) in a short amount of time, from multiple locations around the world." -- this is exactly the kind of low-hanging fruit that we'd want Twitter spam-detectors to cull with minimal time and resources.
Not only b/c of the obvious spam characteristics, but because it was a days-old account with few (if any) followers/followings. Even if it were a mistake, very little of value has been lost, since every tweet was the result of an automated script (i.e. simple to make a new account, and recreate the content that had thus far zero engagement).
Do people seriously think every such case -- an empty days-old account suddenly doing spam-like activity -- should be manually reviewed? That's a daily waste of human resources for tens of thousands (edit: actually it's millions [1]) of trivial permaban decisions -- exactly the kind of thing that an autoban algorithm can efficiently handle.
> For the rest of us peasants: good luck getting help.
I have the same sentiment, but with a different angle. Verified accounts like Thompson's get a lot of leeway with bending/breaking the rules before facing actual punishment. If a lesser known user deployed a selenium-twitter-spam-bot on AWS, it's possible both their spam bot and their real account would be permanently suspended
[0] https://twitter.com/benthompson/status/1583062865116041229
[1] https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1526237583058952192?ref_sr...
The problem is not that the account triggered an algorithmic tripwire, but that the explanatory copy is a customer-hostile lie. It states in no uncertain terms that the suspension was further "carefully reviewed" to be found correct, and is also permanent. Obviously, it wasn't correct, and wasn't permanent.
I strongly suspect that, if there even was a human in the loop as the copy implies, they simply rubber-stamped the algorithmic flag. This is not necessarily the human's fault if their work is monitored/timed.
"Permanently suspended" seems both accurate and helpful -- it doesn't mean that the account can't leave that state, but that unlike most other suspensions, the account will not be unsuspended after a set period of time. The note that Ben posted explicitly says "you can submit an appeal", which would imply to most people the possibility of reversion.
You can reach out to support, but I don't know that support actually ever responds to any requests. Apparently according to posts on reddit if you add your number to twitter and something happens you won't even be able to ever remove it. Similarly they have weird intransparent policies regarding what numbers are allowed on twitter.
At the end of the day, most tech giants are unreachable. I hate to be that guy,but in a way it's kind of like the big chinese tech dystopia that all HN so adamantly complain about.
He promises to allow all speech that is legal under the first amendment to the US constitution, while simultaneously eliminating spam.
That's an instant contradiction, of course, because spam is perfectly legal under the US constitution.
And every attempt to eliminate spam and bots, whether human or automated, will necessarily sweep up many non-spam and non-bot accounts as false positives.
It would eliminate multiple accounts per user, make all users known for wrongspeak prosecution, and largely cure the spam issue unless you're a well funded organization that can pay poor people to risk getting a lifetime ban to promote your spam.
Similarly if you enforce it for everyone to pay for themselves, there would immediately be large parts of the world population that wouldn't be able to pay for it. Note that afford and be able to pay isn't the same thing. Which would turn it into the same western echo chamber they basically want it to be.
He's used to making these sorts of promises.
Or permanently. I once responded to an inane Kardashian tweet with a very dry restatement that she got famous for a boring porn tape and a father who got OJ Simpson off of a murder rap.
I was told that was "a threat" and perma-banned. 12 years of an account, spun into the void. I'd be angry but it's more embarrassing as an observation.
Twitter supports a usenet-on-acid model of bumrushing fan-bases on one side, and a long tail of bots and noise. It's truly strange how its become what it has.
Can you imagine Google answering a phone call or a chat line to explain how to arrange bookmarks in Chrome? Ok, Chrome doesn't cost money, so maybe that's fair. How about Microsoft helping to move the taskbar back to the bottom of the screen? How about Samsung explaining how to set DoNotDisturb? Facebook walking you through how to recover from somebody taking over your account?
Ah, the bad old good old days...
Removing it from the search results and unlinking its @handle in tweets from other accounts would have been enough, if it was spam, to prevent it from being shown at all to anyone.
If it’s useful for non-spam people who want to follow it from an offsite link, it’ll gain valid followers that can hint towards undoing its shadow ban over a long period of time — and by not doing follow activity of any sort in return, it’s clearly not playing the follow spam game in order to try and mask itself as anything other than a one-way feed account, so there’s no harm in letting active users follow it.
It just reads like Twitter isn’t able to distinguish how it treats RSS feeds from how it treats spambots, due solely to a limited stable of technical reactions.
Which rules did he break?
That's every company policy, ultimately. C-Suites and the like exist partially to do "exception handling" (or for all y'all Papists out there, "special dispensations")
"Permanently" only means there is no time limit with an automatic reactivation afterwards.
It's absolutely possible for a "normie" to get a permanent ban reviewed and lifted.
Just "suspended" is not a good option at all, because it says nothing about duration.
"Permanently suspended" (with chance to appeal the suspension in the message) means exactly what happened here.
If Twitter suspends my account, I wouldn't expect much considering it's a free service with tens of millions more users than Stripe. They're definitely going to get more things wrong.
Do we have any examples to draw from operating at that scale? Due to the Musk purchase, we have a rare public disclosure of a major tech giant's internal workings where Twitter claims (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jul/07/twitter-s...) it suspends half a million spam accounts a day. It's trivial to file an appeal, so (because the attackers are by no means disincentivized from appealing) that's probably on the order of 250,000 appeals a day if we assume even half the banned won't bother (and I think that assumption is low, since a reasonable system should probably make it trivial to file an appeal, therefore people will). How does one reasonably handle that? To scale up to thousands of humans handling it, you'd need strict rules to even approximate getting the same result across everyone, and if strict rules worked you could code them into the auto-ban system.
One solution might actually be "Stop having 'get every human being on the service' as a goal," but then sucks for the people who can't use the thing.
"We charge $100 to have a human look at this case, if the suspension was incorrect we reinstate the account and your money. If not, we tell you what actions you can take that would un-violate our policies so you could be re-instated."
Spammers doing selenium powered spam would never pay for that, but the real folks who are not tight with large audiences would have an option.
I can't imagine Twitter could get away with this without it being interpreted by the regulatory bodies of various countries as a protection racket. Which is unfortunate, because I think there's potential here.
Well yeah, it's trivial to file an appeal if you just have to click a button, but obviously that's not what I was talking about. Have they tried literally anything else?
Solve difficult CAPTCHAs, send a scan of your passport, pay a small amount of money (e.g. $1), put a large amount of money in escrow like someone else suggested, allow other well-known accounts to vouch for you, etc. etc. etc.
There's a ton of things you could do. It seems like they've given up without trying any of them.
Get off Twitter. Even better, turn off that TV.
Better to get it cheaper and less counterfeit/crappy the first time. Since delivery time from Amazon for non-Prime people has slowed to a crawl, it's a good motivator to discover best-in-class ecommerce sites rather than the mediocre-at-everything-but-sometimes-the-mediocre-thing-arrives-the-same-day-you-order-it site.
Sites that aren't paying the price of Amazon marketing, or charging an Amazon premium, so usually the prices are better. You might find that you usually use Amazon 95% of the time for just a few classes of product, and you're better served buying those from three other sites and leaving the last 5% of spontaneous purchases for which you don't have a good source with Amazon.
Parler could have rented a building, bought servers, racked and stacked those servers, networked them and gotten connectivity to the world. They didn't, they leased servers as a service from others, and then got burned when those services decided they were uncomfortable with the vitriolic anonymous speech being hosted on their hardware.
Had they truly built their own platform, no one could have taken from them. (It'd be lots harder anyhow)
And I don't think it's that hard to get office space with a real contract?
There is a discussion to be had about what services should be available under common carrier or common carrier like terms, and what should not.
I'd argue that at least in the internet sphere, at least DNS, Access (either ISP or peering), and probably payments of some measure should be. I don't think PAAS systems ought to be, you can do without them, nor do I think hosted services (email, simple hosting, whatever) should be either.
We have an issue online where unfettered anonymous free speech is largely untenable in the current regulatory environment, I think that should be changed.
I also hold the view that unfettered anonymous free speech is broadly unworkable because it removes the feedback loop between speech and response to it - but that's a separate issue for society to work out, and shouldn't really be up to big corporations to fix (often poorly) on their own.
In another vein, Scott Alexander needed (partial) anonymity not to speak truth to power but to keep his patients from finding him, finding a disagreement, and treating him as an enemy. Even if it were just him in that situation, you'd be robbing me of books worth of philosophy, politics, and science- stuff that has made me a better person and a better thinker.
And you'd be removing me from this conversation, because I have friends and family across the political spectrum who I would prefer not to offend, and I have heterodox views that would upset the right with leftness and the left with rightness. Perhaps you think I should be prevented from speaking openly, but you certainly can't say it's because I am avoiding feedback- I'm seeking feedback for positions I would otherwise quietly go on believing.
What is the value added that would justify taking away the rights of so many powerless? Of suppressing any ideas that are not already mainstream?
I'm also fairly heterodox in my views (and queer on top of that) but when you have a random dude on a couch who can reach an audience of millions at the press of a button, the math changes - algorithmic amplification of hate, wingnuttery, etc - is a serious problem for the stability of democracy.
The issue isnt anonymous speech persay, that always has existed and should - it just used to cost something before, you had to have money for a printer, convince the printer to print your screed, distribute it widely enough to have an impact. Those costs lessened the impact, and reduced the societal risks.
Elsewhere on here, I proposed a federated karma system that extends the idea of community reputation (a norm in closed communities, like HN, Furry, etc) as a transparent replacement for direct editorial control, while still persisting anonymity.
1. Early 2000s created a bunch of social media websites with free speech (then meaning protection from Christian-right censorship, which was the concern at the time) as a premise. These were fine places. There were occasional nutjobs and constant arguments, but people were generally comfortable participating. I argued with racists one day, communists the next, fascists, nazis. I developed a deeper understanding of my own beliefs on those issues. I argued against but was eventually convinced by drug legalization, trans rights, abortion rights- the list is long and embarrassing.
2. These websites saw an opportunity for growth, accelerated maybe by Facebook's IPO, but starting somewhere around the late 00s. The nutjobs and arguments were a turn-off to a potentially larger user base. So they drew a line in the sand, clefting the population into the would-be-censored and the would-not-be. The would-bes had to go express themselves somewhere else. If I wanted to argue with fringe people, I had to go into their echo chamber. It was not the place for me.
3. Opinions that were common on both sides in the 90s became opinions of the right only, and then became forbidden. The line in the sand moved leftwards. Little effort was made to convince anyone that these changes were good (I agree they were); mockery and 'educate yourself, bigot' became the norm. Extremism grew rapidly in both the de jure right-leaning spaces and the de facto left-leaning spaces, because the two groups had entered into feedback loops. Remaining holdouts were forced to move because expressing correlated viewpoints was now faux pas, and they faced guilt by association.
4. Sometime around 2015, people collectively decided that everything needed to be political all the time. This was a moral imperative. My apolitical communities were overrun by propagandists of one side or another (mostly the left, but I was on Reddit so that biases things). As Trump's campaign wore on, people concluded that the issue was not enough censorship, and added more.
5. The situation worsened, and COVID made 'misinformation' the new pro-censorship buzzword. More censorship was clearly the answer. Lab-leak theorists were suppressed and the Hunter Biden story was censored weeks before the election. Any remaining general public trust in the institutions responsible and their allies faded further. Election doubts festered the same way everything else had and we wound up with Jan 6.
6. More censorship?
7. Profit
That's just my personal experience, and I recognize that others see things differently. On top of that, fascism gained power a number of times through the 1900s, which was pre-internet, and often did so in censorious environments like Weimar Germany. Things like climate change denial and anti-vax both predate mainstream social media. All-in-all, blaming the lack of internet censorship for our polarization and extremism today falls very flat for me.
Setting all of that aside, it does not make sense to me that we should restrict human rights because some corporate algorithm amplifies hateful or extreme speech. Rewrite the damn algorithm.
I do like your federated karma system, and I have also thought about things like opt-in moderation (to enable opposing voices to occupy the same space comfortably) or a small limit on comments per user per day (to prevent things like 1% of twitter users write 80% of tweets, and encourage higher effort contributions). I don't think these solutions violate free speech, and they may produce better outcomes than 'don't censor'. But 'don't censor' would be a great start.
> 1. Early 2000s created a bunch of social media websites with free speech (then meaning protection from Christian-right censorship, which was the concern at the time) as a premise. These were fine places. There were occasional nutjobs and constant arguments, but people were generally comfortable participating. I argued with racists one day, communists the next, fascists, nazis. I developed a deeper understanding of my own beliefs on those issues. I argued against but was eventually convinced by drug legalization, trans rights, abortion rights- the list is long and embarrassing.
I started out towards the center, and remain towards the center, but because I'm not particularly lefty or conservative, I tend to hold a whole lot of heterodox opinions which makes the left consider me a conservative, and the right a lefty. I've had some look in convincing people to change their views though because of those heterodox views. I even wrote a substack about it.
> 2. These websites saw an opportunity for growth, accelerated maybe by Facebook's IPO, but starting somewhere around the late 00s. The nutjobs and arguments were a turn-off to a potentially larger user base. So they drew a line in the sand, clefting the population into the would-be-censored and the would-not-be. The would-bes had to go express themselves somewhere else. If I wanted to argue with fringe people, I had to go into their echo chamber. It was not the place for me.
See, I dont see it that way, it was the rise of algorithmic promotion of posts, and the need to monetize with advertising that caused the issue - they got embarrassed by racists or crazy ass shit going viral. The issue for me wasn't the censorship, it was that they algorithmically game the system to lift engagement every higher.
> 3. Opinions that were common on both sides in the 90s became opinions of the right only, and then became forbidden. The line in the sand moved leftwards. Little effort was made to convince anyone that these changes were good (I agree they were); mockery and 'educate yourself, bigot' became the norm. Extremism grew rapidly in both the de jure right-leaning spaces and the de facto left-leaning spaces, because the two groups had entered into feedback loops. Remaining holdouts were forced to move because expressing correlated viewpoints was now faux pas, and they faced guilt by association.
Right leaning spaces moved significantly further right as an anti-establishment backlash was unleashed. The lefties did move left, but not anywhere near as far left as the right have moved right. (and I had conservatives telling in in 2012 that dems had moved far far left over the last 8 years - and I couldn't see it, I did eventually start to see it around 2018, when I detected a drift left.)
> 4. Sometime around 2015, people collectively decided that everything needed to be political all the time. This was a moral imperative. My apolitical communities were overrun by propagandists of one side or another (mostly the left, but I was on Reddit so that biases things). As Trump's campaign wore on, people concluded that the issue was not enough censorship, and added more.
There was this point in 2012-2013 when I realized that everyone was angry all the time about basically everything all the time.
I didnt see the censorship start to crop up until 2018, 2019, most of it was silencing things that.. even by my free speech oriented perspective, was intended to incite violence. I will argue firmly as a centrist that the right's rhetoric by this point was firmly violent.
> 5. The situation worsened, and COVID made 'misinformation' the new pro-censorship buzzword. More censorship was clearly the answer. Lab-leak theorists were suppressed and the Hunter Biden story was censored weeks before the election. Any remaining general public trust in the institutions responsible and their allies faded further. Election doubts festered the same way everything else had and we wound up with Jan 6.
Thats the issue with censorship - its a coarse tool, you want the stolen election and QAnon to go away, but need to lint out news from.. weasel words and outright lying.
> 6. More censorship?
> 7. Profit
> That's just my personal experience, and I recognize that others see things differently. On top of that, fascism gained power a number of times through the 1900s, which was pre-internet, and often did so in censorious environments like Weimar Germany. Things like climate change denial and anti-vax both predate mainstream social media. All-in-all, blaming the lack of internet censorship for our polarization and extremism today falls very flat for me.
> Setting all of that aside, it does not make sense to me that we should restrict human rights because some corporate algorithm amplifies hateful or extreme speech. Rewrite the damn algorithm.
I think the answer is to force companies to only show items without algo enhancement, timeline only. That will give them a reason to try to filter out low value content.
>I do like your federated karma system, and I have also thought about things like opt-in moderation (to enable opposing voices to occupy the same space comfortably) or a small limit on comments per user per day (to prevent things like 1% of twitter users write 80% of tweets, and encourage higher effort contributions). I don't think these solutions violate free speech, and they may produce better outcomes than 'don't censor'. But 'don't censor' would be a great start.
Here is the thread that launched that conversation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33231563#33234583
I think everyone should be able to basically say whatever they want, but until you have credibility as a poster, and where your long term and short term Karma are not showing a low number, you should be able to post and be seen widely, to me there is nothing more dangerous than a random dude sitting on a couch who now has an audience of millions.
Extremists on Twitter often make calls to violence too. Why do we let Twitter stay online and just ban those individuals instead of kicking Twitter offline?
> What you’re worried about is governmental action and is not equivalent here.
My kids tried to point me in the same direction. I’ve just pointed them to the router and said: I am a private citizen paying for Internet connection in this house. In 24 hours this router will be configured to drop all connections to Amazon, Facebook and Twitter. Prepare yourself.
Boy, how worried they were. Never seen any person more worried in my life. See, they use Facebook for studies and Amazon for buying textbooks, so why I am so cruel?
I said: exactly my point. I was not that cruel though, but probably I should have.
They're both not government action, but they're very different kinds. There's a huge difference between "I will not assist this entity" and "I will stop other people from assisting this entity".
Along similar lines, I am deeply upset with the level of power that payment processors have/use around censorship. But I don't care too much what AWS does.
On one hand - exactly! This is why I hate that Amazon stops me from using Parler, instead of not using it itself.
On other hand - my kids faced much less obstacles than Parler:
1. They are adults, they could have purchased their own internet connection.
2. They are Russians, they know how to use VPN. Theoretically .
They are just busy people, they could have coped, but would have some extra unnecessary troubles to overcome. And just a possibility of these small extra troubles caused a lot of worrying. (Parler failed to cope, they were too reliant on Amazon services or something, so unprofessional).
You have twisted what I said past the breaking point. Amazon didn't stop anyone else from hosting or accessing Parler. They only refused to assist it themselves.
> they know how to use VPN.
Oh if VPN is allowed then it's significantly less of a problem. But you're still blocking it on the main network in a way that goes significantly beyond what Amazon did.
Infrastructure should not block. I don't feel like AWS is monopolistic enough to count as infrastructure.
How is taking money from me is assisting me? Amazon was not financing Parler, no providing it any discount, afaik. Me - I was assisting my kids by providing them Internet for free. Want Facebook? Pay for it yourselves.
>But you're still blocking it on the main network in a way that goes significantly beyond what Amazon did.
What is the "main network"? What I was blocking exactly? Call a provider, schedule an appointment, buy a WiFi switch... Yes, you could have missed an assignment or two, but nothing was blocked.
Exactly like Parler - it eventually coped and moved, just missed that "laptop story" bandwagon.
>I don't feel like AWS is monopolistic enough to count as infrastructure.
I think it is, I think it is. Even more worrying (to me) - Amazon participated in a coordinated shutdown of Parler on app stores and hosting sites. That was definitely an abuse of my money they "assisted" me by taking it, so they are not getting it anymore. An attitude recommended to everybody.
Getting paid to provide a service is still providing a service. If you don't like the word "assist" then whatever pick your own word. There's so many server providers that I don't think any of them should be obligated to do business. But ISPs and payment processors should be obligated, in my opinion.
> Me - I was assisting my kids by providing them Internet for free. Want Facebook? Pay for it yourselves.
> What is the "main network"? What I was blocking exactly? Call a provider, schedule an appointment, buy a WiFi switch... Yes, you could have missed an assignment or two, but nothing was blocked.
This part is a bit complicated when we're talking about all adults, but normally the head of household is in charge of the utilities and other people aren't expected to get their own. So that makes it the main network. If you want to filter the network in this situation, it's not unjustified, but you're definitely standing in between the two parties rather than refusing to interact yourself.
> Even more worrying (to me) - Amazon participated in a coordinated shutdown of Parler on app stores and hosting sites.
The app store takedowns are significantly less appropriate than Amazon's shutdown given their monopoly power.
Amazon sees fit to sell innumerable books by extremists which call to violence. Particularly, but not only, many famous religious texts and political manifestos.
You mean like how OP decided not to do business with Amazon?
Railroad period in California politics. About 187x or so.
The (only) transcontinental railroad is completed. The owners, Stanford (yes, that Stanford) and Co see the enormous economic power in their hands. They can set tariffs as they please. If a farm is owned by a relative or a loyal person - shipping oranges to Chicago is extremely profitable. A "bad" person gets a prohibiting tariff. So, only a loyal person can be elected at any post. Only a loyal person can own a (profitable) newspaper.
This continues for a couple dozen years, then there is a popular revolt and no railroad-connected person can ever be elected anywhere. And the first anti-monopoly laws are introduced. Suddenly a private business can't set private tariffs as it's pleased.
"What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun."
-- Having said that, the post you agree with is flawed on much simpler basis. The constitution protects us from government censorship. Protection from private censorship (and yes, it's a censorship) is placed in our own private hands. So to say "nothing to worry about" is extremely counter-productive. Exactly because there is no other recourse except the private action of stopping dealing with a business that engages is censorship.
1. There were bad people on the site, whom other people (you included) wanted to shut up. The site refused to do so. This speaks to the quality of the site, no? They refused to censor something while there was a strong push to censor it - that means they will probably not censor you, when your opinion will differ from the opinion of powerful people. That means that a person should rather support the site that does not censor opinions the person does not agree with.
Unless the person hopes to always agree with the opinions of the powerful people even when the powerful opinions change.
2. The logic of the federal constitution prohibiting only Congress to pass censorship laws, as far as I get it was: if a business indulges in censorship, customers can drop it and go to its competition. That's exactly what I am doing - defending the American way of life one less purchase on Amazon at a time. Suggestion not to worry is rather strange in the context: the federal constitution puts the task of stopping censorship in private businesses on private citizens, me (and you) included.
3. Actually, I live in California and California constitution protects my right of speech from private censorship too! It even works - if a private business is a shopping mall, eg. But it does not work for Google or Facebook. Because people do not think it's important. That means a piece of paper, even if it is named "constitution" can't protect the rights declared in it - if people stop thinking these rights are important. Why shouldn't I be worried - I have a "living experience" in a country with the right of free speech in the constitution only.
A clarification. 4. There were extremists on the site making calls to violence. Actually, at the moment of the de-platforming it was about "Russian propaganda". Some factual information was labelled "foreign propaganda" and censored. Again, I have and enormous "living experience" in the country with a permanent ban on "foreign propaganda".
A puzzle. 5. that is neither censorship as a society would consider it nor is it problematic.
My English is not that good but a dictionary tells me that:
cen·sorship /ˈsensərSHip/ noun 1. the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.
prob·lem·at·ic /ˌpräbləˈmadik/ adjective constituting or presenting a problem or difficulty.
To consider this neither a censorship nor problematic you should change dictionaries first (probably you all are tired of my mentioning my "living experience", but yes, I have that one too).
2. I don’t care if you choose not to do business with AWS. My comment is on your opinions on whether what AWS did were legitimate.
3. Explain? How is a mall restricting you? Stores will kick you out for being loud and obstructive. It happens all the time without legal repercussion. Actually the government does protect the rights of Facebook, Google, etc to host content by users that are calls to violence, harm, abuse, etc. there are many examples of this. The constitution will never tell a company it has to do business with an entity that hosts that content though. That’s what’s crazy about the duality of free market ideologues. They want business to have free reign but then hate when they exercise it? I’m having a hard time trying to grasp what you’re getting at here, actually.
My point about censorship is in juxtaposition to government censorship which is what society should be worried about. If a business doesn’t want to do business with people who break the law that’s entirely up to them.
That is California law because of the Pruneyard decision. Read it if you want an explanation.
Edit: that last part should read: the right to make calls to violence in addition to the rights of private entities to choose to not do business with people for non-discriminatory reasons (discrimination based on protected statuses of individuals)
It's like You know. I have not suffered enough according to those sanctions. Lost a flat of my mother in my homeland. And now loss Amazon/IMBD accounts. Seems that I will be loosing my Google account soon.
> AWS started political censorship
It is easy to see how this could happen. AWS Sanctions compliance team: ok, the government says we need to shut down Russian accounts, so we will lock any account using a Russian payment method. False positives can just call tech support to prove that they are not bots and have the offending payment method replaced.
Meanwhile over in support: Boss: remember it is corporate policy that a CSR may not make any changes to billing information for a customer’s account after the stolen cards incident.
Russian accounts are not banned. If anyone interested.
If you're running a business, you most likely need to meet people where they are at. Sometimes, your target audience are mostly on Facebook, then you most likely need to be at Facebook in order to reach them. Sometimes they are on Twitter, then you need to be there. Other times, you're doing something completely different, like running a restaurant, then you need to be visible on Google Maps/Tripadvisor, otherwise you'll lose out on ton of business.
It's really hard to just start a business without having any place for finding users for it, and sometimes the best place is Twitter but you're shit out of luck if you get banned...
Wow, that's a depressing thought.
I think I'd prefer to find a different line of business, if it were me.
Most people who run businesses opt for meeting people where they already are though.
It's almost every line of business. You probably need a mildly active twitter/facebook/instagram presence if you have a nice nail salon, or toy store. Anything not in a huge popular franchise.
edit: this sentiment puts me in mind of a watch or shoe repair shop guy in the 1960s who refuses to install a telephone because he wouldn't want customers who think that they could just loudly barge into whatever he was doing at will. Telephone culture brings a sense of unearned entitlement that attracts bad people. But you miss out on business worth far more than the irritation without a telephone. Keep the telephone outside the actual shop and hire someone else to answer it. They used to call answering machines "phone butlers."
I really wouldn't want those people as customers. Really. You get enough toxic customers through organic acquisition.
If your customers are somewhere, you could be there too, and that often has the least amount of friction or is the easiest choice, so it's understandable why so many people elect to do it. But another thing you could do is bring them to where you are.
Hint: I am not alone in this.
The trick is not to have a smart phone. When I'm coding I can pop in and out of Twitter. But then when I close the lid I'm unplugged.
That sounds like an amazing way to become slower and worse at programming...
I have a friend who is a minor public figure who gets taken down this way regularly.
The result is people get banned without objectively looking at the reasons.
That said I also know Twitter has quite odd rules about where it takes hardlines.
Anyway if that's a pattern it might have something to do with that.
So it seems like people should know at least what got them banned.
And of course the "purple app" that everyone is talking about (https://www.farcaster.xyz/) is incredible.
user: breck
created: August 24, 2007Which is a surprise right? Given how popular it is on HN:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
They weren't as enthusiastic on January 6th, 2021. That was Twitter-led too.
Once social media replaced bookmarks, people went there to find new links. And eventually, when SM de-ranked posts with external links, more and more of the feed became about exclusively in-app material, which was echo chambers and arguments and abuse.
???
Justin Hall's call to arms "HTML is easy as hell"[0] was written nearly 30 years ago. The cycle Hall promoted is non-centralized, noncommercial and read-write.
"Telephone is more detrimental to humans than radio ever was."
"Radio is more detrimental to humans than telegraph ever was."
I do think a case could be made that the changes in communication driven by the internet actually are different, but it's not the change itself, per se, as much as the speed of change. Pre-internet these changes were generational, and they generally took a generation (or more!) to be fully adopted and integrated into society. Now they're coming every decade or less, sweeping through the world in a matter of years.
A quick Google search will show that they did in fact say these things about the telephone and telegraph
> In 1858, People Said the Telegraph Was 'Too Fast for the Truth'
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/in-18...
> “The telephone is the instrument of the devil”
https://www.ericsson.com/en/about-us/history/communication/h...
On the positive side, internet has given us access to a lot of valuable information (for those who seek it out), whereas TV only makes available what the media companies want you to have access to.
I'm not going to say it was life changing, but it is stress that is now gone. Would highly recommend to anyone that has higher stress levels, it's possible SOME of it is coming from your social media use. In my case, it was work that was the big cause, but, removing myself from social media resulted in a noticeable improvement.
I think part of the problem is that people don't realize that a lot of what they are doing is contributing to their own stress.
Even if the discussion is friendly, once you've said your piece, it is usually best to let others reply. The discussion gets better the more unique perspectives are in it.
Same goes for meetings, ideally.
Easier said than done, especially when a reply criticizes you, but this is probably right. I've greatly regretted many HN back-and-forth exchanges. It almost never ends well.
Spam, bots, fake stories, constant outrage. It's miserable but people seem to become addicted.
I guess they handle appeals differently depending on the alleged infraction.
It is this kind of behavior that make me lose my trust with Twitter (or YouTube or FB, and etc).
The account was suspended for 10 days and I'm still trying to get the app (separately suspended) that runs it unsuspended...
They must be going through some kind of crazy time over there between nation-state trolls, the Musk fiasco and the run-up to midterm elections. Yeesh.
If you start a new account that behaves like spam, there's a good chance that you'll get treated like spam -- and that's probably an acceptable tradeoff because the alternative is no working platform at all.
The problem at its core is that Twitter refuses to hire appropriate levels of moderation staff for the scale it has, and that it does nothing against raid instigators. Reddit at least has subreddit mods take care of most of the bullshit and at least the large subreddit mods have direct connections to Reddit, and Reddit itself fights back against communities that "raid" other subs, but even there it's common experience on subreddits like TwoX that women get reported to the Reddit Suicide Alert.
Twitter however? Good luck if you're not in Germany where you can file for emergency civil injunctions against Twitter in the case of wrongful bans (Twitter and FB both learned the hard way to not ignore these) or have friends in media that can amplify your shitstorm. Twitter moderation teams only act on reports, they unlike Reddit don't seem to have any staff dedicated to monitoring sentiments and trends to detect abusive behavior.
The bot moderation conundrum is a wholly second moderation question layered on top of the first. How do Twitter accounts map onto human bodies? Is it 1:1, like government ids? 1:many so brands can have accounts? many:1 so humans can amplify their voice? Until this is answered all moderation actions taken in the name of 'bot policy' is capricious. As is the assignment of blue checkmarks.
Reddit struggles with these same problems at website-scale, where moderation must work across subreddits. They only appear to have a better solution because some topics at subreddit-scale make enough of the questions I raise irrelevant that you can install a goon and have them moderate via edict. Just like chat rooms and message boards did in the old days. To make that point a little clearer: you can be off-topic in a subreddit or an Orange Site thread, but you can't be off-topic anywhere on Twitter.
If someone (or 10k someones) watches and compiles quality items of interest, maybe i want one of those feeds INSTEAD of Twitter’s ML algorithm.
Twitter can still monetize but now curations could monetize individually via including specific ad tweets.
And i want to subscribe to multiple curations, not just one.
Twitter could even have their own ML algorithm as a curation but I want it to be explicit opt in.
You could browse curations by popularity or topic and opt in to the ones you like, or opt out if you don’t like one anymore.
Trolls wouldn’t get included in curations that anyone cared about.
The down side is that it magnifies the social media echo chamber effect, but it also makes everyone’s feed more personally relevant.
That’s a nice idea, but needs just one step done before: moderation should be placed in the each user’s hands.
I need my own filter about what I see. Like:
1. I always want to read A.
2. I always want to read B, but not when he is talking to C.
3. Show me some random people from time to time, like 3 per day.
And we can share our own “filters”, that creates opt-in curation.
Echo-chamber is indeed a problem, hence rule 3. Also I hope for rule 1 to find people who talk to their opponents meaningfully. But if a person wants to stay in an echo-chamber - she can. I just to not want to be forced into someone else’s echo-chamber.
For an idea of what it looks like in practice, these are my feeds on software development[2] and capitalism[3]. Interested in one but not the other? No problem, ignore the capitalism feed and just sub to the software development feed; you don't have to be hit by a train of all of my thoughts on every little topic by subscribing to an all-encompassing feed.
I'm currently working on a piece around feed discoverability that will integrate RSS subscription stats in few interesting late 90s/early 00s-web ways.
[1]: https://notado.app
Haven't Wikipedia and Stack Overflow figured out the right way to moderate at scale?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Who_writes_Wikipedia...
But you have to read all 829 M to find the abusive ones—and you have to agree on what 'abusive' means.
Right now Twitter isn't doing anything but the first part, which is why "I got mass report banned on Twitter" stories are so commonplace. They need not be, if Twitter would do their goddamn job.
I'm likely in the minority on this, but I'd rather have the control than trust others to moderate in my best interests for me.
At some point, in designing the algorithms, in instructing the human reviewers, and so on, you still need to agree on what abusive means. So there's no way around that.
As to the volume, I agree, one can deploy algorithms as a first filtering step. In this case, I don't usually trust humans to be smarter than algorithms, but I do trust humans to be better at abuse than algorithms are at recognising it—unless the algorithms have so many false positives that they're barely filtering at all.
I think their different goals make it easier (which is not to say easy!) to figure out an appropriate moderation style. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia; it is easier to impose norms on an encyclopedia than a social platform. I don't have such a pithy summary of what SO is, but, as basically a knowledge repository rather than a social platform, it, too, can afford to impose certain norms that would stifle a social space. And yet, even with this head start, they can still face considerable flare-ups of controversy!
Not sure about that. It's just more expensive than Twitter can afford. Same for Facebook and YouTube.
If you mean it doesn't exist, that's arguable. If you mean it can't exist, that's nonsense. Just imagine for a second that moderation made money somehow. Boom! A moderation force that can take on planets full of new people. Tech companies are just cheap when it comes to dealing with end users. There is no obstacle but money to them creating capable moderation or customer support. It's a choice (to put profit first.)
Well, perhaps you can, if you limit the discussion so that you can't discuss borders of countries, existence of certain countries, rights of certain groups, existence of certain groups, self-identity of many of your users, politicians, politics, religion and a bunch of other topics. If you ban all of these and permit just posting what you had for lunch, then perhaps you can make an universal moderation standard - but I would not call it "appropriate moderation" anymore.
I don't believe that anyone could moderate at Twitter's scale. More than 500 million tweets are published per day. How do you moderate that? It's like bringing an umbrella to a tsunami.
Not to mention, Reddit moderation is crap. I've tried to use Reddit several times but gave up each time, because my innocent comments — mainly writing technical help — were getting moderated. I wasn't writing anything political; I couldn't even post on r/apple! They still use a lot of automation on Reddit in the bigger subreddits.
To cite a particularly egregious example, I once saw a person banned for "giving medical advice" on /r/adhd, while not one, but multiple other moderators had also given medical advice in the exact same thread. A thread that was explicitly asking for medical advice.
Twitter doesn't make enough revenue to hire enough people to do that intelligently.
You can't operate a chemical factory without paying for adequate measures to prevent spewing toxic waste into common resources like air and water, so why should you be allowed to run a facility that spews toxic hate into societies without establishing adequate protection?!
If there is one thing that made the internet so toxic, it was services labeled as "free" that in reality were nothing more than avenues for advertisers to shove ads down our throats, with the cost being our societies breaking apart as a result of all the lone village nutcases suddenly unifying themselves and no one paying for the virtual equivalent of the police to make sure the nutcases don't create chaos.
I think they're trying. ;-)
To be clear, I'm not defending Twitter. If I was in charge, I would actually shut down Twitter for the benefit of the world. My point is just the basic financial fact that Twitter doesn't have enough money to do this, and thus they won't, indeed can't.
Are there actual cases (plural)? I only know one lawyer and one case where that happened and was decided by the BGH (federal court).
https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/4/21164687/reddit-new-suicid...
On some subreddits every other post will be reported like this.
Meanwhile, Reddit tends to do very little about reports of even direct violence threats ala "I will find you and I will kill your children" etc. which are frequently found to "not be in violation of the terms of service".
Anyways people use it all the time in every single sub for any unrelated thing, just because they hate you, downvoting is not enough, trolling etc. In sport subs it's very common to report opposing fans with this option for example