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Comment by lapcat | Hacker News Reader

Delay decisions, set up a committee... wow, that was fast, he's already becoming Jack.

[EDIT:] The problem is that a "council with widely diverse viewpoints" is not going to come to consensus on moderation. They're inevitably going to disagree, just like in politics. So then what? How is lack of consensus not the inevitable outcome of a widely diverse committee?

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> How is lack of consensus not the inevitable outcome of a widely diverse committee?

That sounds fine to me if there’s actually a diverse set of view points. Getting censored should require a wide swathe of agreement. Not just a vocal minority.

They could implement quadratic voting which may solve the challenge of getting people to more-correctly express their intensity of concern.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_voting

Imagine trying to explain this complex of a voting system to the folks whose argument the election was rigged sometimes boiled down to "I saw more Trump signs, so Biden can't have gotten votes".

The more complex the system, the less it'll be trusted; something with "quadratic" in the name is gonna make eyes glaze over.

The tweet also mentions account reinstatements, so it goes both ways.

I feel like this "content moderation council" would be a fine idea if there weren't a large segment of the US population (the country which will almost certainly dominate the council) still living in a complete fantasy land where Trump won the 2020 election by a landslide and explaining the continuing effects of racist policies of the past is secretly a plot to kill off white people.

Those people might not be a majority, but they certainly aren't a "vocal minority" that can safely be ignored, either.

A whole swathe of agreement will be difficult if your diverse viewpoints include racists and bigots.

How do you decide which diverse view points are worthy of including and which aren't? Do we need a neo-nazi, an ISIS supporter, a 9/11 truther, a creationist, and a flat earther on the committee for the sake or intellectual diversity? I guess people will want conservatives on the committee, but are you happy with a normie Reagan republican or do we have to add a QAnoner and JFK Jr guy for the sake of representation?

This makes sense, but only in a world where we can trust that almost everyone is operating in good faith. Does that sound like contemporary American political discourse to you?

Those from “our side” on the committee can just unite to block anyone from “our side” from being banned. And those on “their side” can do the same. In fact, anyone who doesn’t do this will probably be branded a sellout. I just don’t see how to do this in a way that actually functions and also promotes broad-based faith that it’s a fair system.

The best theory is that this analogous to Facebook's Oversight Committee, whose purpose in practice is to serve as a scapegoat for the really tough or unpopular moderation decisions. (e.g. Trump reinstatement, which ironically the Facebook Oversight Committee refused to rule on)

Hard problems, they are hard.

“I can build a twitter clone in a weekend” is famous for a reason.

Of course any senior dev can. Isn’t being able to design Twitter a prerequisite to passing a System Design interview at any BigTech company?

Edit: I was being sarcastic. I meant to add /s

I think what the parent comment is talking about and what you might have missed out on (though maybe your remark is tongue in cheek as well) is the challenge isn't building something with Twitter's functionality, but building something with its feature fit, timing, and growth. The core platform (while impressive engineering helps keep it running) is a fairly rudimentary idea, but execution is always a totally different story.

I forgot to add the /s

You were probably including the following in your meaning for "feature fit, timing, and growth", but just to echo / amplify your comment: two extremely difficult things in building a community of Twitter's size (neither of which are technical / implementation in nature) are a) achieving network effects [1], and b) solving the Eternal September problem [2]. Both these hurdles are much more strategic than technical in nature. Andrew Chen's "The Cold Start Problem" goes into some fascinating detail about this [3].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September 3. https://www.amazon.com/Cold-Start-Problem-Andrew-Chen/dp/006...

You vote. Have an odd number of voters, and either majority or plurality gets their way.

wouldn't be surprised if he went to jack for ideas, we've seen how he texts, and not that long ago he didn't even appear to have a concrete plan on how to improve twitter

Musk is way over his head.

If you view the 4chan forums, they're already plotting racist, anti-semitic content and rejoicing. Advertisers will not be happy real quick.

Right wing provocateurs are already having their supporters posting the n-word, racist and anti LGBTQ content since Elon took over.

It is going to be fun watching it implode.

none of this is fun

Twitter was a bad idea - a global town square - humanity is not ready for such a concept.

A small minority will always be the one to fark up things for others - see griefing in MMO and why moderators and banning is needed.

You may not have noticed, but they've been posting that for years.

There has been a significant uptick today[1].

[1] https://twitter.com/ncri_io/status/1586007698910646272

Fair enough. I still think conservatives (and liberals, for different reasons) are vastly overestimating how much Musk will protect free speech. Slurs will obviously still be banned (likely automatically; I don't see why the platform relies on human moderation in those cases). These people are just getting a fast-track ticket to not-allowed-on-Twitter.

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