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Comment by incomingpain | Hacker News Reader

1. Allow conservatives to discuss issues again. No more echo chamber. 1.1. Allow liberals to see the conservative discussion and counter it. This is a key missing point.

2. The blue checkmark - celebrity system becomes a system where you cannot be kicked or banned for anything you say but you also cannot edit or delete anything you say. Whereas without bluecheckmark you can edit it anytime lowering the quality of your post. 2.1. yes, edit button.

3. Hostile countries such as Russia, NK, Iran will be completely banned. Analysis to be done and if a country's engagement on the platform is more abusive than good, it also gets banned.

4. Far more complicated, change the algorithm to promote positivity and punish negativity.

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> 3. Hostile countries such as Russia, NK, Iran will be completely banned. Analysis to be done and if a country's engagement on the platform is more abusive than good, it also gets banned.

1) Do we really want social media corporations arbitrarily deciding which countries' citizens have an online voice?

2) Isn't it possible that allowing everybody from a "hostile" country onto Twitter will spread dissenting ideas faster? There's a reason that North Korea, as an example, basically doesn't allow most of their people any outside Internet access.

>1) Do we really want social media corporations arbitrarily deciding which countries' citizens have an online voice?

Sure why not?

>2) Isn't it possible that allowing everybody from a "hostile" country onto Twitter will spread dissenting ideas faster? There's a reason that North Korea, as an example, basically doesn't allow most of their people any outside Internet access.

This is the point. Twitter and reddit changed after the arab spring. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Twitter-Played-Pivotal-R...

This is heavily because they were responsible for it occurring.

The thing about despotic countries with dictators. They don't really care about free speech. In fact, you had greater free speech in syria than you do in canada in say 2005. The dictator keeps their people in order by threat of violence knowing their opinion is poor of them. Whereas in Canada, nobody is shooting civilians. So the canadian government is forced to have compelled speech and anti-speech laws and extensive secret snowden level surveillance to keep the peasants in order.

If you read elon's post to 'advertisers' this post was absolutely not to advertisers. It was to the government to say they get to keep their interface.

> 4. Far more complicated, change the algorithm to promote positivity and punish negativity.

How do you do that when what constitutes positive or negative is so subjective?

How does twitter make judgemwnts about whether discourse on its site (about a particular subject) is positive ir negative without making value judgements about the subject itself?

Far more complicated is the issue. The problem is even worse than you lay out. How do you deal with backhanded compliments for example. They are inherently positive while really being negative. How about sarcasm which is itself breaking.

I legit don't have an answer though. So I'm going to go with "Tensor flows!"

My dude, Richard Spencer is still on Twitter and can post!

Also, there's been a ton of Truly Harmful stuff the Blue Check brigade has posted over the years that I certainly wouldn't want to be responsible for hosting.

I'd also be careful about banning whole countries at once, Iranians/Russians != the Iranian/Russian state, though apologia/misinformation around atrocities should still eat the banhammer.

Personally, I've seen a lot better communities around smaller places like Discords/forums, so to make money I'd encourage people to group their follows into circles, like "Gamedev" or "Central/Eastern Europe foreign policy" or whatever else you're interested in, so you can be better insulated from the ragebait of the day unless you go looking for it.

> misinformation around atrocities should still eat the banhammer

Maybe this is a good idea, assuming that there's ever some way to get objective information about the world, but this always feels like a hypocritical statement.

When governments and mainstream corporations provide misinformation around atrocities that functions as war propaganda and leads to the deaths of hundreds of thousands or millions, nobody blinks an eye.

When certain social media favored media entities outright deny massive atrocities, nobody bats an eye.

It's only the politically unwanted and isolated groups that are ever rejected from social media over this.

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