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Comment by phailhaus | Hacker News Reader

Oh great, more unaccountable black-box "algorithms" that invisibly classify your tweets. Machines can't detect satire, they don't understand nuance or context, they don't understand tone. This will affect platform speech in strange ways as people naturally attempt to evade the algorithm.

Twitter needs a dislike button. Every social media platform needs a mechanism for explicit negative feedback. Yes, people will use it to downvote ideas they don't like. Yes, it will come with its own challenges. That's how real life works. It doesn't make that speech disappear, it just deprioritizes it.

Given that he already wants to do this, it's better to let humans have input than to pretend as if algorithms know what's best for us.

View on HN

Humans (especially on HN where it's semi-illegal) are also sometimes bad at detecting satire.

No, there should be no like nor dislike button. Just number of replies.

4chan does this and it works surprisingly well.

Er, Twitter is most definitely not trying to be like the notoriously-toxic 4chan.

Let's see where Musk takes it... but of course one of the biggest differences is that 4chan is anonymous, while Twitter at least requires some sort of name.

Trust me, once you get the hang of it, 4chan is surprisingly wholesome. Sure I've been called a niggr/faggt/subhuman/kike/retard, I've been asked to kill myself countless times, countless people told me they had fucked my mom, etc. But when you go above that, you see that it's refreshing and lot less toxic than passive-aggresiveness and the brigading that upvotes/downvotes/retweets bring (in places such as Twitter or Reddit, or even here). There's some sort of camaraderie that goes beyond.

And the nice thing is that there's no oversight board, there's just your comment, you can always reply if you don't agree. The only measure of success is the number of replies, and funny, insightful or contrarian posts usually get those. Plus, everyone is completely anonymous so you can really be anyone.

I see what you're saying but there is just no way that you can argue 4chan is wholesome. The lack of moderation has created a community that encourages some of the worst human behaviors. The correlation between mass murderer and 4chan fanatic is too distinct to ignore.

As someone who spent way too much time there in the mid 00's, 4chan is incredibly toxic and the existence of strong intra-group cohesion doesn't make it "wholesome". Otherwise we can say a KKK chapter is wholesome because they also do potlucks.

> I've been asked to kill myself countless times, countless people told me they had fucked my mom, etc. But when you go above that

There is no going above that. That's what psychological abuse looks like, and you're justifying it to yourself

You can have a community that isn't full of passive aggressive people and also not a disgusting shithole. Look at hn as an example. You're only hurting yourself in the long run

Lol fuck no, HN wears me down. 4chan is like having a beer with buddies shooting the shit and throwing some banter.

HN is like a forced "after office" with snob coworkers you don't get along with, and you have to tiptoe around the topics and what you say, while HR is around. It has interesting moments, though.

I heavily suspect that "number of replies" is exactly the type of thing that creates an unpleasant atmosphere, unnecessary conflict and promotes ridiculously radical views and hot takes to the top. People like to argue, and the more objectionable a tweet is, the more they will argue.

Of course, this is great for user engagement, but it will also make the actual user experience pretty horrible.

Twitter has a dislike button .. for replies.

> Twitter needs a dislike button.

This IS twitters dislike button.

No it isn't. It's an algorithm using rough sentiment analysis and god knows what else to judge your tweet, unaccountably and invisibly. "I hate mondays" I tweet. Whoops! Tripped the "negative tweet detector" and my tweet is deprioritized!

No problem you say, let's just tweak the detector to let that through. So you're going to write exceptions? What happens when "mondays" becomes some sort of code word for racial epithets? How do you detect that? This has happened before, look up what happened to r/clownworld.

This is straight up an unsolvable problem. You need human labeling, which is what a dislike button accomplishes.

How do you know it will be an algorithm? He did not even say how it would be implemented yet. It may be a dislike button.

FWIW, I do not like the dislike or like buttons.

> How do you know it will be an algorithm?

Well, it seems unlikely to be human-driven, given how many of the employees and contractors who were responsible for content moderation have been laid off.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-twitter-layoffs-outso...

It will be driver by other users.

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