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Comment by jerojero | Hacker News Reader

This whole thing has been rather interesting to observe. I do wonder how the platform will change now that it's privately owned. I don't really care a lot about the platform itself, but it's influence on politics is very real.

Personally I don't think this acquisition is healthy for a democracy, but nonetheless, it's something I want to observe. I've always thought these platforms need more democratic structures of governance and this is a change in the opposite direction so I'm rather interested in what the future holds and the consequences of this buyout!

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Tbh the best direction for twitter to move in is to stop recommending content people did not subscribe to. And then adjust the rules to allow anything legal to be tweeted to your own page. If you object to someones tweets, don't follow them. There may still need to be rules on replying to others tweets since thats pushing content on people.

There’s very good reason why platforms like that recommend the content. Without it, it you’re not a power user (and that’s usually tiny %), your experience gets boring/empty pretty fast, as the platform ages.

Discoverability is important, but imo there should be a dedicated section for it instead of mixing it with the tweets of the people you actually follow. But on the other hand, people might not really be willing to "switch tabs" and so if you move the feature somewhere else then people will never really see it.

It's kind of a trade off. I think what's a bit annoying is that often times these discovery features are used to advertise rather than to provide actual good recommendations.

Perhaps an alternative is rather than getting banned from the platform, you can just get banned from discoverability if your posts are a detriment to the community. But your direct followers can always keep seeing your content.

I imagine they'd also have to find a solution for replies and retweets. Those also can also show up on your feed, even if the original post is not from someone you follow.

I don't see how retweets are a problem. If someone doesn't want to see retweets of a certain person, they can unfollow everyone who retweets them. Twitter even allows you to show only original tweets, and not retweets, from someone you follow.

I like that idea, but note that youtube already has that - the default "home" tab is the recommendation engine, you can go to the "subscriptions" tab to show only your subscriptions - and people still keep whining about it.

I didn't know that... Thank you.

Ps: I don't use Twitter, frequently only when a very interesting hn discussion points there

YouTube spams the "watch next" spam list on every video you watch.

I use twitter because you can switch to a chronological feed by using the "sparkle/stars" button in the upper right corner. This removes all of the suggestions and tweets from people you don't know. Basically it turns discoverablity off. You still get retweets if shared by someone you follow (you can also turn that off by going to their profile).

This is the main reason it's the only social media company I use. I can avoid the algorithm completely.

I also use Twitter lists and made a list of close friends so I can see a feed of just their tweets in case I miss them in the chronological feed.

The tools are already there. The UX to surface them needs to be better though.

Somehow I missed this (very noticeable actually) non-algorithmic toggle button until I saw your comment, so many thanks for mentioning this.

Where does liability come in once third parties start flooding propaganda/misinformation to the masses? Do you simply allow it to be a convenient platform for a foreign govt to astroturf a local population to affect a local election with misinformation as an example of moral gray area where 'Keep it blindly open!' seems to fall flat I think.

Without recommendation, I think Twitter should have the same liability as an ISP for allowing posting over the internet.

I do think Twitter should moderate what they promote and recommend but don’t think they are responsible for posts and users that users manually seek out.

True. I'm interested in hearing from people I follow, and the comments they make and even the posts they like or retweet. But to recommend other posts to me because the people I follow happen to simply follow (not interact with) other people, really screws with my feed.

Isn't he going to be bringing back people who were banned off the platform, that's more democratic. US has a bunch of problems but the one thing you used to get right is freedom of speech before big tech had so much influence, I thought the major purpose of Elon wanting to buy twitter was to uphold freedom of speech as it is written in the constitution, given it's something of a town square now.

> one thing you used to get right is freedom of speech before big tech had so much influence

Before big tech, there were no global platforms where anyone could just speak to millions/billions of people for free (as in money).

You weren't "censored" by big tech because there was nothing much to censor. In the past, if you wanted to reach a massive audience, you had to go through the traditional news media, big book publishers, major TV stations, or the like, and they were definitely selective about who was allowed to speak.

Also, the so-called "town square" where strangers gather to discuss politics in public is largely or entirely a myth. There are of course public spaces, but what happens on Twitter is not what happens in real physical town squares. And of course there are city council and other government meetings, but they are strictly controlled by government officials, not a free-for-all free speech zone.

Indeed, the fringers scraped together enough cash to mimeograph a few dozen leaflets and tucked them under cars windshield wipers; but that didn't get them far. They might be able to take out a cheap ad in a rag magazine advertising a self-published book, but that's about it. There weren't boards to put up posters, and putting a poster on a telephone pole (etc) was a crime (recent court cases have changed that without a change in the law, where I am.)

There are different views on what freedom means.

In my experience, and I used to run a "freedom of speech" channel back in IRC many years ago where I allowed anything as long as it wasn't illegal. These sort of measures end up restricting freedom of speech much more than enabling it. The reason is very simple, if people are allowed to say anything; then harassment becomes the norm and because a lot of the targets of these harassment are more sensitive then they end up leaving. You might think this is okay, but I tend to disagree, as I believe when people harass others out of a platform that it constitutes a form of violence.

Of course, I think this is actually a very complicated subject. And that's precisely my point on why I believe we need to have better conversations on what do we actually want. But as things stand now, this conversation is always reduced to what Elon Musk now thinks should happen. To me, this form of monarchic governance is sub-par to what is required for a platform as big as twitter.

Twitter is fundamentally different form and IRC channel. In an IRC channel, everyone sees every message, that's why moderation is necessary. On twitter, people themselves choose who to follow and block, they themselves moderate their own experience.

You could ignore people on IRC too, choose whether or not to join a particular channel or not, and choose which people to message in private.

The problems I've run in to on it is that that some channels on IRC were run by powertripping assholes, and you'd get banned for disagreeing with them or having different opinions.... even if you were perfectly polite, didn't threaten or harass anyone, etc.

Of course, you could just go somewhere else... on to another channel, another network, or off IRC entirely... the internet's a big place.

Still, the fact that some popular channels were dominated by assholes and there weren't viable alternatives to them sometimes is a problem for people wanting to participate in a large public space.

Yeah, I think that's a big reason we've moved on from chatrooms to networks like twitter, where everyone creates their own moderated space.

"Yeah, I think that's a big reason we've moved on from chatrooms to networks like twitter, where everyone creates their own moderated space"

You can do exactly the same thing on IRC... and IRC had that a long time before Twitter even existed.

Not quite the same thing. Yes everyone can create their own IRC channel. But in practice ... On twitter everyone tweets and blocks people.

The problem I had is that the space I created in the beginning was quite nice, and we had lots of nice people in it. But as word spread that people wouldn't get banned we started getting a lot of "undesirable" people, people that had been banned from every other place (and for good reason). In the end, it drove everyone else away and the channel died because once everyone was gone there was no reason for these undesirable people to stick either.

In many ways, these people don't really care about having a space to say things and instead they want a space to be able to say it to people who don't want to hear it. It is why they don't actually use the spaces they've created for themselves like parlor or truth social. They want to tell trans people that they are not valid, they want to tell women to stop having abortions, they want to tell black people that they're criminals, etc. They need an audience. And if you allow them to have it, what ends up happening is that these people being insulted and belittled will leave.

That happened to me on a Discord server I was a mod of. Too much fighting and genuine hatred led us to just shut the place down. While it was small it was fine, but after it grew it began being intolerable and all of us mods decided to just shelve it. Nobody can post, but now its just a place to store Discord emojis and stickers

Impressive deployment of buzz words.

People will leave pretty quickly if there is no moderation. People don't want to be in such places. Just check the missing popularity of Parler.

Network effects are a perfectly sufficient explanation for why people don't use parler. Can you name one example where people switched from a bigger to a smaller network, because the bigger one allowed too much freedom of speech?

Why don't "free speech" networks ever grow to be the bigger one in the first place?

Twitter and facebook did grow big when they were free speech networks.

I think it's somewhat more complicated than that.

Traditionally there was more friction to speech. I don't even mean just that the average person doesn't have access to a national platform like CNN. Even something like mailing out fliers had non-trivial costs. It's the same reason why junk mail is generally less of an issue than email spam.

In a traditional town square, people are not anonymous and the "square" was local enough for there to be social consequences to actions. On Twitter, many of the posters are anonymous and even those who aren't often live on the other side of the country.

How on earth can you think this is less democratic? It is by far more democratic. Twitter under previous leadership was on a banning, censoring, rampage against anything that didn’t agree with their own narrative.

It's not a "narrative", it's called the Terms of Service, which specifically forbid inciting violence and hate speech. Trump, Kanye West, and other nut cakes broke those rules and that's why they got banned, after repeated warnings.

https://twitter.com/khamenei_ir/status/22815824658

The rules should be applied wherever they are broken, but that doesn't mean we should hold Trump or Marjorie Green or Kanye West unaccountable. They have rightfully earned their bans.

Because less people are now in control of the decisions. In theory, a public company is controlled by its shareholders who are the ones that choose the board. Now the company is privately owned, meaning there are less owners than before.

Less democracy means less people are in control of the decisions, that is precisely what has happened.

But that's not really true - few shareholders or shareholder groups had enough % to choose the board.

Yes. But now it's one man, no? I don't think the situation before was in any way ideal; I simply think it is worse now.

Before these 3 elites could choose, now this 1 elite can choose... I'm not sure it's worse, it's definitely not improved, but we are still letting a class of elites have control over our political discourse.

If Elon sticks to the ideals he has espoused and open sourced more of the algorithms and policies of Twitter, that is possibly an improvement.

I think this is attributing democracy to capitalism which isn’t warranted. At best the structure moves from aristocracy to a dictatorship, neither of which are democratic.

As an example from governments: The Chinese legislator is ruled by the communist party. The National People’s Congress has almost 3000 representatives. Even though there are almost 10x more representatives then in the USA legislator (which is still more then double per capita), this doesn’t mean the China’s legislator is more democratic then the USA’s legislator. Far from it. Now if Xi Jinping would dismantle the Congress and assume dictatorial powers (like Caesar crossing the Rubicon) this would just move China from being a totalitarian republic to a dictatorship (again like Ancient Rome after the civil wars), at no point in this affair does the common population in China have any say in the laws that govern them (not even by proxy, as is the case in the USA; but by proxy of a proxy of a proxy etc. effectively thinning out any democratic say to nothing).

Ochlocracy isn’t democracy.

It seems to me that democracy relies on there being a degree of respect/safety for diverging viewpoints. Therefore, for democracy to work there has to be some restriction on behavior that doesn't follow those norms. That could be in the form of educational enculturation into those norms, social consequences for breaking them, or censorship.

I'm sorry but did you just say that democracy only works if we have censorship?

No, I said that democracy only works if there is some way of enforcing that the participants actually follow democratic norms; i.e. respecting diverging viewpoints.

One mechanism of accomplishing that would be to restrict people who are using communication platforms to violate democratic norms.

I'm not advocating that is the best way to accomplish protecting democracy. I'm just pointing out that "free speech maximalism" doesn't address the need to protect democracy.

I think we can agree to disagree.

People can respect you as a person, but no I don't think people have to respect different viewpoints. I can respect that you have a lived experience that differs from mine and that your viewpoint is X, but I do balance that against my own views and speak my own truth as well.

If you think that you have to respect every viewpoint that differs, think of the viewpoints of the party you dislike. Think of any of their views. Do you respect their _view_ or do you respect the person and want to allow their speech while disagreeing with it?

Me? I think the best way to deal with speech I don't like is not filtering or censorship its more speech. Anytime I see an implication that someones view needs to be filtered I think "You first."

>Personally I don't think this acquisition is healthy for a democracy, but nonetheless, it's something I want to observe.

This is an interesting point, curious if you could elaborate how you see elontwitter as unhealthy to democracy.

Twitter has no impact on the democratic institutions or function of the politicians. In fact, national security ensures the function of the elected politicians to continue. The only day twitter's influence can do anything to influence the democracy is election day.

The only thing that is unhealthy to a democracy on election day is anything which makes the election unfair. It's not twitter boarding up windows while the vote is being counted. Twitter does have impact on how people vote.

It's the politician and journalist's jobs to ensure the people are educated and know how to vote. This is where twitter comes in. Their current censorship of only 1 side of politics was an effective way to ensuring people didn't know how to vote. Resulting in a measurable boost to the given team. This is the unhealthiness. This is what elon at least claims he plans to fix. So to me, elon buying twitter is potentially going to be better for democracy.

> Personally I don't think this acquisition is healthy for a democracy,

Only a fascist would force free speech onto people.

> but it's influence on politics is very real.

> Personally I don't think this acquisition is healthy for a democracy

Fewer than a quarter of Americans use Twitter. Empty rhetoric is empty.

Sure, but it seems like that quarter contains, for starters, essentially all of the mainstream journalists.

Maintstream journalists write what the owners of their publications tell them to write, especially when it comes to politics. The idea that a change in ownership of a relatively small social media company is going to have a "profound impact on democracy" is stupid. Especially since nobody seems to have a similar problem when a major media conglomerate changes ownership.

> Especially since nobody seems to have a similar problem when a major media conglomerate changes ownership.

They had a problem when Jeff Bezos purchased The Washington Post.

This is assuming that political power comes from influencing all Americans rather than a small fraction who hold true power (politicians, donors, journalists, industry groups, etc.). If the small fraction is all on Twitter then viola the rhetoric is meaningful.

> politicians, donors, journalists, industry groups, etc

Do you have any reason to believe they are? Except journalists, I he obviously are.

Just look at the big bad orange man's past usage of twitter.

Every politician uses twitter. Every politician's speech is dictated by what their followers believe, it is in many cases the most direct form of communication they have with their constituents. I don't like this situation, but it is our reality.

And not just politicians, but as others have said, everyone in any sort of position of power is bound to have twitter. From corporations to personalities. Of course, there are other social medias but a lot of the speech and discussions that happen in the world are somewhat mediated by twitter.

This is a significant misunderstanding of what shareholder oversight does. All the biggest shareholders were humongous asset managers; hard to call that "democratic" governance.

Shareholder oversight is limited to addressing the agency problem (i.e., by firing executives if they egregiously harm profits). It's simply not a "democratic structure of governance", and has nothing whatsoever to do with content or moderation decisions. Even "activist investors" focus on things like dividends and buybacks, not content moderation.

Twitter's stock tanked 12% after Trump was permabanned; shareholders clearly had no say in it, or he would never have been banned.

Since shareholders' main impact is to incentivize management to maximize long-term value, and Musk will now own the majority of Twitter stock himself, the incentive has not changed. Even if Twitter was still public, shareholders would have no say in Musk's decision to reinstate (or not) Trump, for example. And importantly, a company being private doesn't mean it has no shareholders; it just means shares are not traded on public exchanges.

I don't think I ever called it a democratic governance? I think you might have misunderstood my point.

I think these platforms need to be more democratic, I don't think they're democratic at all as publicly owned companies. However, I do think control is now even more centralized residing in just one person. Which, imo, is an even worse state of affairs.

To me, democracy in these platforms is not about what speech is moderated but about taking the decision, in the first place, to do so. How is that decision taken, who is responsible for such decisions? It's about who is deciding rather than what is decided. Democracies will not always favor our personal points of view, but that wouldn't make them less democratic (think for example of the swiss people voting against face coverings, a democratic decision that goes against what I personally consider is correct).

I do consider a public company to have a more democratic structure of governance compared to a privately owned company simply by the fact that people could gain access. Of course, with such concentration of wealth it is a bit of a pipe dream. But think for example of Norway and their wealth fund; this is a country that invests in companies and steers influences them. They can't really do that with a private corporation.

In any case, this is not really a hill i would be willing to die on in any case. I want more democracy in platform governance.

Political ads are back on the table for sure. Hopefully easy to disable though.

Trump may come back but Twitter really only has bandwidth for one "narcissist" at a time. Trump would be competition for Musk plus Trump has Truth Social so Musk might keep him at arms length for a while. Then there's Kanye, all of these decisions will impact and weigh on Musk's reputation in the celeb sphere (if that's important to him). Twitter is a mainline to the media.

Subscriptions => onlyfans. There will likely be some payment p2p angle. There will be better customer service integration for a business's customers and tools that businesses will pay for. consumers will use it b/c call out culture gets you resolution vs calling into some call center.

There might be a tiktok play. Maybe better DMs that are more whatsapp like.

personally I don't think twitter is healthy for a democracy

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