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Comment by nickdothutton | Hacker News Reader

I can’t help but think part of the answer is to offer users more powerful filtering, so that they may exercise their own free will over what they see and hear. Sure some would choose an extremely narrow subsection of society to hear from, but others would cast their net wider. One might even choose to monetise “smart filters” that took the legwork out of building and maintaining such filters. The “smartness” need not be an algo either, one might choose to outsource filtering to another human offering that service.

I wrote a little about this after a particularly irritating experience with LinkedIn, but the same goes for twitter or any public forum.

https://blog.eutopian.io/building-a-better-linkedin/

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You say "powerful", I hear "complicated".

If you're on Twitter and you get targeted by, say, Ben Shapiro, the horde that comes at you isn't trivially filterable/blockable. There'll be thousands of them, and they're creative; just like spammers/phishers, they make a game out of evading mitigation measures.

At volume, this is a very tough problem to solve.

Let people create whitelists as well as blacklists when it comes to letting users post replies so that they can go "whitelist only" when that happens, at least until the furor dies down.

Brilliant. Whitelist only mode would be that only the people you follow and who follow you can message you, and the ability to mention, ping, or find you is turned off.

That's so easy that a Jr. Programmer of moderate talent could whip that up in a long weekend.

They work 84h a week so yes totally doable.

I don’t doubt that the problem is a tough one to solve. This is (partly) why I suggest offering a marketplace for filters, and so a reward for those who crack the problem. Of course there are always going to be some people who which deploying any kind of filter is just too much work. There were always some for whom editing a .killfile was too much.

I expect this would end up like Netflix's algorithm bounty. It turned out no one could do much better than Netflix's own engineers. Twitter already had a system that worked in the form of sharable blocklists, but they hobbled and eventually removed it for some reason.

I could easily build my own just by iterating through the follower lists of prominent objectionable people to block them if Twitter didn't prevent it.

"It looks like you're using automation!"

No shit.

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