Twitter 2.0: Our continued commitment to the public conversation
blog.twitter.com
blog.twitter.com
It does have this gem in it:
"What has changed, however, is our approach to experimentation. As you’ve seen over the past several weeks, Twitter is embracing public testing. We believe that this open and transparent approach to innovation is healthy, as it enables us to move faster and gather user feedback in real-time. We believe that a service of this importance will benefit from feedback at scale, and that there is value in being open about our experiments and what we are learning. We do all of this work with one goal in mind: to improve Twitter for our customers, partners, and the people who use it across the world."
What a weird thing to say... A/B tests are a thing, does anyone buy that experimenting with new things by rolling out new features to all users at once is a good strategy?
Science is just observation and experimentation.
Science doesn't dictate how you do the above. Now, someone would find it impossible to reproduce your findings, but - that would just suggest bad science
For example, if your metric is "time spent interacting on the platform", then a testing of a rollout of a feature ends up with longer page load times, so users spend more time there because they're waiting for pages to load would increase that metric, and management decides it's a good idea.
That's not enough. If you don't include some sense of both 'systematic' and 'rigorous' (and yes, these terms are slippery), you aren't doing science.
Until you can objectively measure how "systematic" and "rigorous" an experiment is, your definition of science only applies to you.
We haven't been doing science for very long. The primary difference is the desire and effort to add rigor and systematic thinking. The difference in efficacy is hard to understate.
Again, this comes back to your definition. Many would disagree in that science has existed for, at least, as long as recorded human history because an actual tenable definition of science is something along the lines of "the endeavor to build knowledge by experimenting and observing the results". The rigor of the experiment is part of the quality of the science, not whether it's science itself.
No one is arguing that rigor isn't important to good science. It is important because rigor lends to reliable and valid results. What we ultimately want is results that are reproducible and can be used to predict. If you observe bad results, it's because you did a bad experiment, thus bad science, not that you didn't do science at all.
As an analogy: if I took notes during a meeting that no one can understand or use, that doesn't mean I didn't take notes. It just means that I took bad notes.
Not sensibly. Or at least; let's avoid bogging down on the semantics. We started doing something quantifiable different recently, which has had a massive impact on our world. It is quite sensible to ask "what changed?" and try to understand it. If you want to give it a different name from "science", ok, but that's mostly likely to confuse people. If you want to claim such a shift didn't happen, you've got a hard row to hoe.
Did it? The nature of Tesla and his other current businesses buffer that a bit even if it has been his approach, and it seems to have gotten him thrown out as CEO at X.com twice; among the things going on Twitter seems to be Musk trying to relitigate his failure at X.com without other investors being in a position to kick him out, but he seems to be piling up existential threats without resolving them.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Many quality studies are A/B tests. A/B just refers to the two IV states you're testing, which you're then observing a DV - sales, engagement, errors, etc.
A/B tests can be double blinded (don't tell the error monitoring people which results are from a trial), and have high number of samples, far beyond even most pharmaceutical trials.
They can also be really crappy, changing too many variables at once, etc. But they are certainly "real science".
EDIT: an example, Drug vs placebo - is an A/B test.
Science is more “what’s true if humans didn’t exist.”
Marketing is more “what widget generates more revenue?”
I put this earler in the phrase "reflection completeness": https://sdrinf.com/reflection-completeness ie there are things which stops working when people know about it.
In particular with A/B testing, this means that the initial A/B test is intermingled from at least 3 effects: specifically it measures how the naive population's behavior changes as a function of new functionality being made available. This is heavily, heavily time-dependent; specifically there's a "novelty effect" (early data collection will not be representative to long-term usage patterns); and there's "reflection effect" (once the outcome of the test is widely known, people can change their behavior based on that). Controlling for the first is difficult, but possible; controlling for the second, beyond just "keeping everything secret", is significantly more so, as the timelines for that might be years in length.
I strongly suspect GP was pointing at this timeline factor, and specifically that market engineering, as currently, generally, widely practiced, is grounded on the immediately available signal of "does it increases sales in 2 weeks of A/B test running". Which, given novelty effects, is heavily biased towards "yes"; and these people aren't incentivized (nor have the time/energy) to measure _very_ long-term effects beyond novelty, and reflection period.
An A/B test just refers to observing how a dependent variable changes when an independent variable is in two different states, State A and State B.
Drug vs placebo - is an A/B test.
To borrow the Lindy effect; whether someone likes the jacket in color A or B is of such short lived value it’s a huge waste of the resources that went into the pipeline needed to come to the conclusion.
Here’s an A/B test; rethink logistics to increase customization of outputs or continue to create design jobs who define what’s trendy and acceptable?
In the context of what we're talking about, you can A/B test more than marketing, you're can test variables like UI/UX.
Yes clothes fall in and out of fashion, but changing the placement, color, size of the "add to cart" button isn't something that's going to be changing frequently.
Another example might be adding a "trending" tab the top navigation of a page or whether the "what's trending" vs "what you like" provide more engagement as the default page.
Youtube recently tested randomly lowering people's video resolution to see who changed it back to gauge the importance of the resolution to their customers.
I disagree that I am “caught up” on anything.
I have a preference that’s been refined over time. Not a psychological error in perception.
I wish they start gauging how frustrating such tests are, particularly for the test group. I've been cursing at YouTube many times over the past weeks because of this very issue - and now I learn it's not even a bug, but an A/B test.
For example with changing the font size of a button:
Your null hypothesis is there is no difference in the number of clicks. Your alternative hypothesis is that there is an increase in number of clicks.
Your IV is the button font size. Your DV is the number of button clicks over a set period of time.
You randomly sample 50% of the population to State A (same button size) You put the other group into State B (increased button size)
You observe the number of clicks of the button.
You analyze this data, and can determine the statistical significance between your null and alternative hypothesis.
Sociologists will frequently not have as good access to such a large participant pool under near ideal experimental conditions with such good ways to observe behavior. And the stuff you have to keep in mind when running experiments is not terribly complex. A bit of statistics, a few things you absolutely have to get right, that’s it.
Obviously there are reasons why AB tests are often not run rigorously (statistical illiteracy and pressure to get things done quick as well as to produce tangible results as often as possible – all three of which might lead you to run underpowered experiments with too few participants and to stop testing early which will lead to too many false positives). However, stopping to do experiments (and instead just releasing new stuff and observing the reaction) isn’t really an improvement that leads to better outcomes compared to that.
I mean, I'm sure the parameters to the math are proprietary. But the basic math seems simple enough.
Trying to tease out the pieces that aren't coupled to Twitter's User class is probably more effort than it's worth
I guess the comment I read implied Twitter had an amazing A/B test suite, as opposed to a tightly specialized A/B test suite.
To some extent, you grow your company and codebase around your A/B testing system, not the other way around, because it has to slot into so many places: deployment, testing, front-end, back-end, analytics, monitoring, etc. Almost no two companies share the same stacks across all of those dimensions, and an A/B testing system that doesn't hook in tightly to every one of those systems is not complete. This is why I always get a bit scared when people think they can just use one of those "drop-in" services and be done with it: yeah, great, you can now fiddle your JavaScript from some third-party website, but you're going to have a big project ahead of you passing group assignments out to all of the different systems that will need to know about them, and almost guaranteed some part of your stack will not have a library available from the service you picked so you're going to be writing your own REST wrapper, and dammit they don't document that API very well and it seems to be responding differently since the last update, and man it'd be a lot easier if I could just pipe results straight from my own service into Big query rather than running a daily user export, and damn, their dashboard doesn't let me set exclusion criteria on my own metrics, I have to send activation events now, and etc, etc. By the end you've basically built your own A/B test system from scratch, you've just paid someone else to do the "int myGroup = Random.next()" call, which is the easiest part to build.
A case could be made that A/B testing is insufficiently rigorous given specific goals, resources, limitations, context, etc. But that case isn't being made here.
Thanks though. I've narrowed my original comment to more accurately represent the scope I am referring to.
[0]:https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/10178/is-math...
Where A/B studies may go wrong in my view is a few other elements:
- A/B studies have difficulty in determining differences based on multiple interacting characteristics. In fairness, so does empirical science, and the principle of "holding all else constant" is a frequent assumption of scientific processes.
- A/B studies face an inherent self-selection / exclusion bias: the participants in this round of A/B testing are those who've not been driven off the project/product from past experiments and design changes. Given that many Web 2.0 companies eventually dance with pushing people right up to the border of tolerance, it's quite possible that A/B testing has a long-term effect of pushing those participants whose tolerance has been exceeded out of the study population entirely. I don't know how large a factor this is, though loud / rage quitters are certainly a prominent (if not necessarily large) cohort. Whether or not they're also influential, or perhaps more importantly when they become influential is another question. Again, this is a fairly common problem with any social experiment, including natural social experiments, see various forms of brain-drain and social flight.
- A/B testing tends to focus on short term changes and behaviours, which may mask longer-term outcomes. This has some overlap with the above, but also with subjects' general response to change. See the classic case of this in the Hawthorne Effect (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect>).
The upshot is that A/B testing can be valid and useful, but that experimental design, particularly in the case of social and psychological experiments, where subject feed back into the study and its methodology itself, is exceptionally thorny.
I'd compare this to how evaporation rate increases with temperature, as more particles find themselves with enough energy to escape the liquid.
From my personal experience, even if I can tolerate a lot of UX abuse, each such "optimization" lowers my threshold of switching to a competitor. Software in general, and SaaS specifically, resists commoditization, but every now and then an actual alternative to a product/service I'm using shows up - and whether or not I switch (and when) is correlated with how much I resent the incumbent for their UX "improvements".
I'd add one bullet point to your list:
- Unlike regular scientific experimentation, A/B testing is a methodology primarily spread in business circles using regular hype channels. That is, the average practitioner is not qualified to execute it correctly, which is one of the reasons I see A/B testing more as tools to launder arbitrary decisions. Because consequences of doing it wrong are typically not immediately apparent or obvious, both companies and customers suffer (and a vast space for fraudsters is created).
I'm in a charitable mood, so I'm not passing judgement on people for not having PhD-level understanding of statistics - just pointing out that, to the degree much larger than in sciences (even soft ones, which suffer some of the same structural problems), there's little pressure to do such tests correctly (and there's lot of ways to make money or status by doing them without regards for correctness).
From what I hear, a common way of executing A/B test badly and getting bullshit results, is by terminating the test early when it shows the relevant metrics improving for the test group - vs. running it longer if no big improvements are observed (or the metrics start getting worse for the test group). This biases the experiment towards giving false positives. This problem was big enough that there was a debacle around Optimizely few years ago, whose UI was accused to promote this early termination of tests. The cynical take I'm still somewhat partial to is that it wasn't an accident (if not done on purpose, then possibly... a result of an A/B test!) - false positives make the (statistically naive) users feel they're getting more value from Optimizely than they actually are.
There's a reason that the technical term for "A/B testing in SaaS products" is gaslighting.
O hai werd uv yeer!
"Network Experimentation at Scale" from Facebook describes how difficult this problem is. Most A/B test frameworks don't reach this level of sophistication. It does make some sense to just ship things if you don't have time to build out something like that. (disclosure: I worked at Twitter long ago)
In my experience, they mostly just catch bugs. Stuff like "hmm, our much better looking signup flow underperforms... oh, the form is broken on Safari." That kind of thing.
This can be the case for A/B testing. Sure, you can increase ad clicks by 30% ... if you trick the user into clicking it through a carefully timed layout jump.
I think GP's argumentation may go in this direction. I'd probably not say A/B testing is the problem itself, it is a tool after all, but I could imagine it's sometimes not used very well.
Another point: Spotify's core flow changes so much (feels like almost daily) that I've lost all confidence in using it.
a double blind test can help you determine the most effective way to cause pain to a monkey, but it will never answer the question of whether you should be doing so.
This is some B-grade best-effort spin on what has been uncontrolled chaos with predictably awful effects.
The only thing keeping Twitter rolling is the majority percentage of the casual niche user in non-political and non-technical niches, who haven't been paying attention to the chaos; and who by virtue of being casual users are not notably surprised at everything that has broken both culturally, wrt safety and content, and technically.
Unfortunately for Leon the money comes from corners who HAVE been paying attention and not only see what's happened, and ongoing—they see through this kind of comedic college-try at handwaving around it.
I signed up for an account after years of refusing to do so after elon took over
Will certainly be interesting to see if there are enough of y'all willing to shell out $8/mo to have your speech boosted above the free variety to make up for the lost ad spend of the Pinochet-helicopter-meme-adverse.
I am an independent libertarian that strongly believes in free expression, beyond the idea that only governments can censor people.
>>speech boosted above the free variety to make up for the lost ad spend
I think the reduced ad spend is temporary and in some ways unrelated to Musk whom they have used as an excuse to virtue signal for something they were already going to do in the first place
Also I think the plans are to expand twitters revenue model beyond Blue and ads so it will be more interesting what Elon plans to expand twitter into
This "learn by doing" is going to end up well ... not. Especially when trying to learn by repeating mistakes with completely foreseable consequences, like that blue "verified" badge being available for anyone who pays without any verification.
Almost right.
Charging Tesla owners to beta test their autonomous driving software.
> Oct 25 - Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) is under criminal investigation in the United States over claims that the company's electric vehicles can drive themselves, three people familiar with the matter said.
> The U.S. Department of Justice launched the previously undisclosed probe last year following more than a dozen crashes, some of them fatal, involving Tesla’s driver assistance system Autopilot, which was activated during the accidents, the people said.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/exclusive-tesla-faces-us-crimi...
It's Latin so it must be smart.
Apparently Twitter had some huge problem with bots when Musk was trying to get out of the purchase. Thankfully he solved the bot problem after the purchase so he could run polls and really get the will of the people and not, you know, all those previously problematic bots.
It's perfect, in a way, that the full quote is "Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, Vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit." which translates to "And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness."
Refs: https://twitter.com/cagrimmett/status/1595967787339743232
They need to explain musks antics somehow. More polite wording than idve used.
Its just a diplomatic rephrasing of Elon’s “do lots of dumb things” tweet:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1590384919829962752?t=cc...
But advertisers who have pulled out because of distrust and lack of stability aren’t likely to be reassured by rationalizations for the policy instability, they’ll just be confirmed in their decisions to wait to see how things shake out.
And regulators concerned about noncompliance with binding rules aren't going to care about a PR rationalization at all, except insofar as it provides evidence that the failures were intentional rather than inadvertent.
It's just a CYA statement, basically saying "oops, I meant to do that...", and leaving the door open to make more oopsies as intentional "experiments".
> Unfortunately, the "move fast and break things" attitude doesn't work with rockets.
You will likely find this comment verbatim from the last 10 years. Given that is so, I can't see how someone could claim that Elon Musk is new to visible experimentation.
I wonder what would have happened, had he fired 75% of the engineers when he took control of Tesla /s.
I don't think that makes it a good idea though, seems like each failed "experiment" poisons the pool and certainly makes it possible to do experiments in isolation.
We heard almost nothing from Parag and little from Jack when he was running it and experiments were opaque from the outside.
Now we're hearing from the CEO and employees like George Hotz about what they are doing and planning, and they're involving the community, asking for feedback directly.
Reinstating accounts on the basis of a poll, on a platform you have spent months railing for having too many bots, is a good example of CYA transparency.
Regulators, too [1].
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/a07ca1ae-9f9a-46ee-9457-27bb30e18...
To state the obvious, I don't think they are reading the room very well...
This is the same "trapped enabler" pattern we saw with Trump in the early days, with his staff constantly coming out to try to paper over whatever horrible thing he did. They had no shame, and neither does the Twitter staff that wrote this blog post.
[1] https://archive.ph/xYeYY - TPM article without paywall
[2] https://theintercept.com/2022/11/29/elon-musk-twitter-andy-n...
Especially when you're trying to help someone and they are seeing something different from what you see.
Elon's late night tweets always make me think of that scene in The Office where the new CEO (James Spader) decides to close one of the branches without telling anyone and when asked about it he goes "I got into a case of Australian Reds... and... How should I say this, Colombian whites"
How though, Twitter has had week(s) to prepare this post and its so bare.
> First, none of our policies have changed. ... The team remains strong and well-resourced.
If you're Eli Lily, why would you re-advertise on twitter. Nothings changed from when you stopped!
Not only would I not buy ads, i'd rethinking even having a corporate presence considering the lack of protections against fraud.
This "going to do dumb things" is completely on brand for him with his 5 step manufacturing improvement process, step 1 of which is "make your requirements less dumb".
This is actually how Nike works, having worked there. They try all kinds of weird things aren't aren't afraid to, and then drop the ones that don't work with no regrets, keeping what works. Try new things, fail fast isn't a bad strategy for innovation.
Whether or not it'll work out for twitter remains to be seen. Especially with the rest of biased tech still upset that they lost their monopoly on the narrative arrayed against him.
The costs to "fail fast" (if we're being generous) strategy Twitter employed so far far exceed that
What it means: 'Elon looked bad when the blue checkmark fiasco happened. And more boo boos are on the way. Now Elon doesn't like to look bad. Solution? Everything we do is now covered by "it was just a test" disclaimer. Problem solved.'
I wonder why they don't have 7/12 polls in court, surely 9/12 is enough to decide a sentence already, and all americans think it's fair, why twitter doesn't freakin comply with 75% poll rule?
Our Trust & Safety team continues its diligent work to keep the platform safe from hateful conduct, abusive behavior, and any violation of Twitter's rules
including I suppose Elon's experimental approach to management.
I hope that in 10 years, we will look back at this twitter 2.0 (= musk's debacle) as the impetus that lead to more widespread adoption of social media 2.0 (= federation)
I already see the snowball effect getting momentum with all this coverage (NPR, NYT...) and big name exits (Apple...)
That instead of one poorly managed understaffed silo full of trolls and abusers you have 2000 poorly managed, even more understaffed systems with 2000 different approaches to moderation and content doesn't make anything easier or fixed for people who use Twitter today.
It is the same like we had federated chat with Jabber for 20 years now - and nobody uses it. The best implementations of it ended being the nonfederated ones - like Google Talk or I believe Whatsapp used that protocol. And apart from nerds and some engineers literally has no clue that something like XMPP even exists.
People don't care about the technology, they care where they want to communicate with their friends and network.
The Twitter issues are first and foremost human, business, management and social problems, not something you can throw some network protocols and technology at and declare it solved.
Smaller communities can be more focused and managed. Trying to get everyone in one place agreeing on one set of rules sounds impossible. At least federation has the potential to let groups exist differently as desired.
They do it to interact with the globe, and the more people on that network the better it is.
There are a million ways to create a niche site (like hacker news) that allows a Small Focused Community to interact, that is not a replacement for Twitter
Everyone was on Facebook too. We're not all looking for Facebook 2.0 currently, are we? Yea, we have different form factors of social networks, definitely. But some (not all!) of the core features of Facebook were misguided or mismanaged. Some features of Facebook aren't looking to be replaced.
I'm not saying Mastodon is a replacement for Twitter. I'm simply saying maybe some features of Twitter aren't worth being replaced for many people.
I do not agree, and it does not make me unhappy at all. I am late 70's child, I experienced the Wild West of the internet, nothing posted to twitter (or the chan's for that matter) shock me, or makes me unhappy
I think people need thicker skin, and maybe more anonymity not less...
Censorship is not the solution, never has been in history and never will be in the future.
Yea, i did say "everyone" but i didn't actually mean everyone. Lots of people enjoy Facebook in all it's glory, too.
> Censorship is not the solution, never has been in history and never will be in the future.
My comment wasn't about Censorship, though. It was about people and a possibility that they may prefer categorized focused communities like many of us grew up with. Which may or may not include moderation (aka "censorship")
I certainly enjoyed the forums of old more than the modern day global scroll feed. But i prefer focused/categorized content, clearly.
My point wasn't that you do or don't. Merely to pose a question. A question (among many) that could dictate whether or not the Forums of old have a place in the modern day. Whether or not the global attention draw that is Twitter is actually desired. edit: Desired enough to keep it alive and "successful", at least.
What a ridiculous thing to say. Actually plenty of us (and I've also been on the internet for many decades now) would like to hop online to engage with some cool folks about [insert interesting topic here] without having utter garbage and dreck thrown up in our faces like racism, transphobia, misogyny, bigotry, etc., etc.
I support giving people the power to create their own echo chambers and safe spaces, feel free to do so..
No one should be forced to communicate with anyone they do not want to, however you also should not be able to prevent me from communicating with others that I desire to
>>What a ridiculous thing to say
Not really, it is sad parents have stopped teaching "Sticks and Stones my break my bones but words will never harm me"
We really have lost the cultural axiom "I may hate what you say, but I will defend your right to say it" haven't we.
Why would i choose a platform where i have to moderate thousands of individuals? Ie what's the purpose in that lol?
Where is this world where we went from having Forums of communities to global cesspools where we want to manage what sort of nonsense shows up on the feed?
> We really have lost the cultural axiom "I may hate what you say, but I will defend your right to say it" haven't we.
I didn't say this, so your two replies in one feels odd. However, no one is stopping you from saying it. Say it all you want. I'm advocating a smaller forum where i don't have to listen to you say things to me that i'm uninterested in.
I'm not stopping you from being on the internet. From having electricity. Just like i'm fine with you yelling on the street corner.
I'm moving to the other side of the street. And you object to that, for some odd reason. Because by me moving, it doesn't give you a voice?
Edit: To sum it up, this isn't about safe spaces. This is about spam. There's only so much "Vaccines give you 5G!!!" i can put up with lol. Just like the guy on the street corner. Hard to have a conversation around that annoying screaming.
Emotions are real, and emotional pain is real. Of course words can hurt you, they evoke emotions.
“It's now very common to hear people say, 'I'm rather offended by that.' As if that gives them certain rights. It's actually nothing more... than a whine. 'I find that offensive.' It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. 'I am offended by that.' Well, so fucking what." -- Stephen Fry
You can not have free expression if the only thing required to shut down that expression is to claim emotional harm. I did not respect that position when it was the Christian right claim harms if gays spoke nor do I today when the authoritarian left claims emotional harm over the wrong pronouns
Yea, this is bunk. What do you think fuels things like mass hysteria? What do you think fuels illogical decisions made in mass?
I'm not advocating for mass censorship, but lets not pretend humans are either logical or capable of handling their own emotions. They're terrible at it. Look at any collection of humans. You can't walk forward without stubbing your toe over examples. Daily commute traffic is full of humans who can't manage their own emotions. edit: Even police know that human memory can't be trusted. What do you think fuels decisions we make, if our memory is so mutable?
Likewise, if it was just emotions up for discussion that would be one thing. But it's not, it's so much more. It's "facts". A mass information war is taking place. Standing on the sidelines saying again, people can handle it, has already been proven false. Repeatedly. People cannot nor will not handle it, at least without help.
The more quickly we recognize how horrible humans are at handling emotions and information ingestion the better we can make reasonable decisions about how to aid humans in actually making progress.
then proceed to advocate for mass censorship, you are functionally saying we need fact checkers the problem is I do not trust the fact checkers that have been appointed in the past because they have been proven to be partisan hacks that spread "approved" disinformation only dispelling unapproved disinformation
Nor do I trust government agencies (like the CDC or the WHO) to be the "source of truth"
I did not, you misunderstand.
I merely advocate for acknowledging that humans are terrible at the things i pointed at. Which conversely, you seem to advocate that we are capable there. You can both identify that we are terrible at information and not advocate for surveillance/censorship. Why do you jump to those contrasts?
To think of it differently, we have to acknowledge we have a problem before we can fix it. Information is a gun, and we have not taken gun safety. We need tools and acknowledgement of our limitations before we can wield the power you so haphazardly throw around. I do not trust young children with guns. We are nothing more than children in our current state.
My previous post advocated that we don't pretend the children can handle guns safely without training and safety tooling. edit: That we should find ways to prove gun safety training / tooling, rather than remove guns (in this analogy lol)
That is the thing, outside of mass censorship it is unsolvable problem
You either allow people to speak freely, in which case misinformation will spread, and emotions will be harmed. or you restrict speech eliminating the very concept of free expression
There is no utopia to be found here
Completely agree there. edit: Or rather, that it's an unsolved problem. I misread `able` for `ed`
> You either allow people to speak freely, in which case misinformation will spread, and emotions will be harmed. or you restrict speech eliminating the very concept of free expression > There is no utopia to be found here
Yes, those are the current available options. I'm not questioning that.
I'm challenging your assertion that we're capable. More specifically, saying we must acknowledge that we're not capable. We must acknowledge and identify the problem.
LOL. You posted this to a moderated forum.
> I experienced the Wild West of the internet
I was on USENET in the early 90s, and newsgroups like comp.lang.c.moderated were created for a reason. Unmoderated forums end up as cesspools.
It is not about short-term problem solving. It is about long-term investment in more decentralized social networks. 2000 different approaches is exactly what is needed for "natural selection" to do it job.
> are first and foremost human, business, management and social problems, not something you can throw some network protocols and technology at and declare it solved.
Agreed. But the protocols should by designed to adress and resolve those problems the best they can. This will take a lot of iterations. The more (and sooner) people jump ship, the better chance we have to test and iterate.
I don’t think users are going to participate in these sorts of experiments long term. People are signing up now out of fear and anger and hope but Mastodon still lacks the user base — people for you to follow and people to amplify your posts. (Partly because it’s still a fraction as popular as Twitter and partly because the hosts all seem to be blocking a different half of the other hosts so even if two people are both on Mastodon they may not be able to connect.)
If, on top of all that, people are expected to tolerate “a lot of iterations” before things work right I see them leaving. Let’s not forget that the Twitter/Mastodon mode of interaction can be pretty toxic so there needs to be a big carrot for people. Mastodon doesn’t have it. Twitter barely did tbh.
There are nearly 3M users across the fediverse. I can't keep up with my timeline. This genuinely sounds like the words of someone who hasn't actually looked at mastodon in the last month.
> people are expected to tolerate “a lot of iterations” before things work right I see them leaving
This is literally what Elon just said they're gonna do with Twitter.
Look, don't get me wrong, I think it's very likely mastodon remains a bit niche. But not for these reasons. I'm much more concerned about issues of search/discoverability, general usability, and the downsides of a purely chronological timeline than I am about either of the issues you just focused on.
You are right, not in the mainstream. What I'm talking about is what is already happening in the underground (and also hoping for some right people to join in). This is enough for that "natural selection" work. Don’t you feel the pace of those decentralized new projects every week on HN?
> if people are expected to tolerate.... I see them leaving
Maybe you're right? I said I'm "hoping". Deep inside, I believe this crisis is just a steppingstone (may be an important one ?). At the very least we have sown some seeds in mainstream social networks (like Tumblr's move to federate) and mainstream media (all the mastodon talk). We need more underground work to sort all the stuff you and others are complaining about. The next crisis we will be more ready.
Twitter's current issues by and large are a result of trusting corporate media silos with our precious time, data, and safety online. It's wildly unacceptable.
But it would effectively kill the various cat-and-mouse gaming of the entire system by spammers, scammers, and sub-nation-state adversaries.
I feel HN is not that moderated - bar - I don't feel like it happens that often that people's opinions get disappeared - Imo the main appeal of the site is that people of differing opinions are and worldviews are able to have informed debates about stuff here - even if limited to the world of technology.
You can be sure that if a flood of new users happens, the current system won't scale, and we'd see a diminishing quality of content and comments posted. Some old timers would probably say that has already happened, but it's still largely under control.
This site doesn't have the benefit of, say, Reddit, where niche communities can still exist in relative isolation and with their own moderation rules, even with the amount of users and low quality content on the rest of the site.
Sounds like a change in policy to me.
uh
Corporate doublespeak at its finest.
It'd count as a policy change and "we accept your resignation" would count as a firing.
This is more like a big private club.
(are those still a thing? Practically every store of any size had one in the 90s, at least, but I haven't paid attention and can't for-sure recall seeing one in years)
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/aug/04/pops-privatel...
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/privately-owned-public-sp...
They recently unbanned many controversial accounts based solely on Twitter polls. Who do they expect will believe these statements?
All of whom have now been suspended despite there being no infringement on terms of service.
Is there a source on that? Because if so, holy crap... but I'd like to see some evidence.
And note how Musk through simply engaging with these people gives endorsement to this ridiculous and baseless link between pedophiles and left-wing accounts.
Are we talking about the same Antifa? Political terrorists, violently attacking civilians for having opposing beliefs?
If inciting real-world political violence and terror is not against the TOS, why were supposedly all those right wingers banned?
[CITATION NEEDED]
Musk said they were in "clear violation of ToS." I want to see both the pro- and the anti- on that before passing judgement on the move.
https://theintercept.com/2022/11/29/elon-musk-twitter-andy-n...
But banning antifa-accounts, that is accounts held by people taking part in month long riots and looting and political real-world violence… that is bad?
Is this satire? Is this an honestly held opinion? Or am I missing something?
Maybe! Being part of a group that also holds certain opinions isn't really relevant to whether expressing those opinions violates a policy. But which opinions did you have in mind?
Here have an extremely relevant tweet.
https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174...
pure gold
And what happened here is that those left-wing accounts were banned without any such violation i.e. it was purely arbitrary and the very thing you claim you don't want.
Those left wing people that were banned, very likey supported the system that just got them banned.
Right wing people seemed to act like shitheads more often so they are banned more often.
I'd continue arguing however, conservative law, jurisprudence and overall culture seems to always boil down to that there are in groups who the law protects BUT does not bind, and out groups who the law binds but does not protect.
You can pretty much view all of twitter's new moderation capability through that lens and then it starts to make perfect sense.
He is free to do this all he wants. We are free to laugh and mock as he flails around, lying and making stuff up.
You just wanted to quickly jump in and make this comment because you "got 'em" but really you just missed the mark.
> Those left wing people that were banned, very likey supported the system that just got them banned.
Exactly, and the rules must be applied equally, which wasn't the case before.
If both sides are now angry over Twitter's moderation system and are building their own echo-chambers, then Twitter (2.0) will remain as a site for a more balanced discussion without either extreme screaming on the platform.
At the end of the day, I'm still laughing at the entire Twitter chaos and the screeching minority who are pretending to leave Twitter whilst keeping their accounts and screaming about Elon Musk elsewhere rent free unable to ignore him in their own echo chambers.
Where's the evidence for this claim? Twitter did not publish rationales for bans and there was no clarity or consistent enforcement of what did or didn't constitute a ToS violation.
The right-wingers that got banned presumably broke one of Twitter's rules - maybe they said "I wish someone would shoot (insert politician they don't like here)". Even if you take "pre-Musk Twitter had a left wing bias" as granted, that doesn't mean the right-wingers were wrongfully banned.
>But banning antifa-accounts, that is accounts held by people taking part in month long riots and looting and political real-world violence… that is bad?
The only way to boil this down to a politically neutral rule is if we banned every right-winger who was at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 alongside everyone who went to a BLM rally that turned violent in 2020. And as far as I can tell neither behavior alone was a violation of Twitter rules as they stood at the time. The rule was no inciting violence on-platform, not no being involved in violence whatsoever.
As far as I can tell, pre-Musk Twitter had two biases:
- Their moderation team was understaffed and overworked because Twitter was too big of a target to effectively moderate. Twitter moderation would overprosecute easy-to-detect cases (i.e. LMG staff getting banned for months because of them sarcastically saying "I'll kill you") and underprosecute difficult ones (i.e. everyone harassing Twitter's villain-of-the-day).
- As a direct consequence of this, right-wingers were more likely to be banned. This is because their rhetoric is inherently more violent[0] in ways that were easier to detect.
Musk has basically decided to cut the moderation team in half and unban all the right-wingers in the name of "balance". All this does is say "we are now letting right-wingers break all the rules, but left-wingers must be on their best behavior, if we let them stay on the platform at all".
[0] Specifically, left-wingers were saying to smash windows, right-wingers were saying to smash people.
Do you have any evidence for this generalization? The only overt violent threats I’ve seen on Twitter are men encouraging rape and murder of JK Rowling and other supporters of women’s rights. I don’t know if they’re “right wing” or not, but their surrounding rhetoric is what’s usually associated loosely with the “left”.
But surely this depends on what one happens to see. That’s why I’m wondering if you have any kind of random sample from which you can draw your conclusions.
Perhaps this is your inner transphobe trying to come out?
What views?
I saw some of the tweets people got banned for. Are you okay with me associating those views with right wing views?
> that is accounts held by people taking part in month long riots and looting and political real-world violence
So, you are saying that your alleged criminal activities off Twitter should feature into whether you are banned? (Note, you never claimed they violated ANY of Twitters rules in your comment)
Is this satire? Is this an honestly held opinion? Or am I missing something?
If so, check out that article. It should clear things up.
If not, and you have read the article, you probably skimmed it and mixed up antifascist and antifa. Generally the later is a subset of the former.
The Intercept article is not journalism. It’s a PR piece for the accounts that were banned and quotes spokespeople for the impacted groups totally uncritically.
Calling them antifascists seems a misnomer too, they seem to me to be actually anti-capitalist rabble-rousers and professional rioters. Educating, equipping, funding and inciting violent riots seems a clear TOS violation to me.
The “no true antifa” arguments sounds like the sort of ploy that was used when these riots kicked off and democrats in Congress and MSM talking heads were trying to laugh off the idea of “antifa” as a violent domestic terrorist organization simply because they don’t have an org chart.
So I take it you think everyone involved in the January 6 riot including Donald Trump should be banned from Twitter then?.
The “antifascists” literally wore the mark themselves while committing upwards of a billion dollars of property damage over the course of a year+ of riots.
But seriously, please just take it elsewhere. Your innuendo is borderline if not actual libel.
I also wouldn't call Andy Ngo, a gay asian journalist who's spoken in front of congress, far right. He basically records riots in Portland and uploads them to twitter, and he's only right wing in the sense that more republicans watch his videos than democrats
The Gun Club arms itself to defend against far-right violence and often appears as a security force at protests to protect against expected far-right violence.
To date, Gun Club members have reportedly not engaged anyone with their weapons during one of these protests.
https://www.counterextremism.com/supremacy/john-brown-gun-cl...
Being invited by Republicans to speak before Congress is just more evidence that Andy Ngo is far right, from my perspective.
I guess as long as you hold that being invited by Democrats to speak before Congress makes someone far left, that would be fair.
https://www.courthousenews.com/domestic-terror-still-thorny-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/opinion/sunday/police-rio...
Even when Loder is quoted he openly speculated about what happened and says he doesn’t know. The piece is just a tissue of insinuations.
In the 14 years that CrimethInc has been on Twitter, the account has never violated Twitter policies and has never been suspended. This changed last week after a Twitter exchange between Musk and Ngo.
Ngo asked Musk to suspend the CrimethInc account, calling it an “Antifa collective” and falsely claiming the group had “claimed a number of attacks.” Within hours of Ngo’s request to Musk, and without citing any specific violations of policies, Twitter suspended the @crimethinc account.
You can call this piece "a tissue of insinuations", but the evidence, taken together, is quite damning. A pattern emerges. At least for anyone who does not have tissues in their ears.
So yes, in addition to clearly misreporting and making misleading and false statements about their lead example Loder they seem to have other examples where there is circumstantial (but zero actual) evidence Musk may have done something.
Personally I like much more rigorous journalism than this even when it’s about people like Musk who I dislike.
I'm having a hard time thinking that anyone should be called a journalist -- without mocking quotes -- at this point. After the past couple of years of "reporting" about COVID, vaccines, protests, Ukraine, China, Twitter, etc., et. al., EVERYONE has taken positions at the "fringe."
For 20 years, I've made sense of the news by looking for the pieces of the puzzle where people agree. That is now literally impossible. There is ZERO overlap on ANY issue between the two sides now.
The few actual journalists remaining are known by name, and moving from newspapers to Substack.
But Andy NGO has an especially concerning history of misrepresenting facts, using misleading cuts, and closely associating with far right insurrectionary groups such as the Proud Boys.
I don't know who Andy Ngo is, and I don't care, but if we're talking about misleading cuts, let's talk about the ENTIRETY of the mass media making out like Trump said Nazis were "fine people." All it took was 2 minutes of looking at the transcript when the furor broke out to understand that's NOT what he said, but half the country still believes he somehow came out in direct support of them. And this is precisely the back and forth I was alluding to when I say that there is literally no overlap on what is considered truth any more.
The previous policy received acclaim from medical professionals: In an advisory to technology platforms, US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy cited Twitter’s rules as an example of what companies should do to combat misinformation. When journalist Kara Swisher in September 2020 confronted Musk with the possibility that many people could die if they didn’t follow public health recommendations, the man who believes he is making cars safer and saving mankind by going to Mars replied bluntly: “Everybody dies.”
The argument could be made that Elon cares more about virtual, future people than actual people living today.
This is what Longtermists actually believe.
This is bullshit on its face. The first sentence and the second sentence directly contradict each other.
Maybe Twitter really didn’t need 7500 people, and maybe having more voices speak is a good thing (there is always block button), and maybe advertisers won’t flee forever. That seems more likely to me than Twitter imploding.
This part anyway is not really hypothetical.
https://www.npr.org/2022/11/25/1139180002/twitter-loses-50-t...
Post Musk, Twitter's debt was already going for 70 cents on the dollar, and that's before the news of this week
Claims that were classified as COVID misinformation include:
- surgical masks don't work against aerosol viruses
- lockdowns and curfews will not stop covid
- natural immunity due to prior infection is more effective
- mRNA shots don't stop transmission
- mRNA shots don't stop infection
- mRNA shots cause myocarditis
One by one these have been revealed as true, with naysayers looking like ass-covering idiots, or worse, paid shills for big pharma.
If at this point you still have any faith left in the biomedical establishment, the one who doesn't belong on Twitter is you, because you will hysterically fall for the next big thing just the same.
For example, claim (6) about myocarditis is usually used to say that vaccines are dangerous and should be avoided. This is a wrongheaded examination of the risks:
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/risk-of-myocarditis-followi...
> Given that >90% of cases of myocarditis will completely recover, that means in young men the vaccines prevent six deaths per million doses while causing <4 cases of myocarditis that have less than complete recovery. In all other groups the results are much more dramatic, saving hundreds of lives for every case of myocarditis (including the mild cases).
> We also have to keep in mind that COVID-19 infection itself causes myocarditis. ... That’s 1,500 cases of myocarditis per million COVID-19 infections, vs 40 per million in the high-risk group of young men from mRNA vaccines, and 1-2 per million doses in lower risk groups. The risk is literally 1-2 orders of magnitude (10-100x) greater from getting infected than from the vaccine.
P.S. Claim (3) misses the entire point? The point of vaccines is to not get as sick and possibly avoid getting sick altogether. "Natural immunity" requires you to have a "prior infection" as you say.
An intramuscular shot cannot create a targeted immune response in the mucus membranes of the airways. This was known, and ignored, making the idea of getting a shot to protect grandma a complete lie.
The goal posts have moved so much that even the word vaccine was redefined, thus tainting the concept and creating a ton of justified skepticism. Like really, do you not realize how ridiculous you sound to ordinary people, trying to rule lawyer your way past this elephant in the room?
The point about myocarditis remains that informed consent should have been asked for, and that they shouldn't have authorized an emergency medicine when due diligence wasn't done. Quite frankly, I don't believe covid is more dangerous than the jab. I don't believe we live in an environment atm where the truth is being investigated objectively. And this is an entirely reasonable belief, given the undeniable corruption and lies.
Like, you know how it takes 2 weeks after your shot before you count as vaccinated? Guess which category vaccine injuries in the first two weeks were attributed to in many cases... that is the level intellectual honesty we're dealing with here. It's detestable.
As for natural immunity: the point here is that forcing people with prior exposure to get jabbed anyway was immoral and unnecessary. This is the _very important_ point you are missing. And you think you're making sense!
Human rights were violated, in the name of shoddy science, endorsed by people who are much more eager to dunk on the rubes and appear sophisticated, than actually establishing reasonable and objective standards.
Go sit in shame, and stfu. Nobody wants to hear it.
> I don't believe covid is more dangerous than the jab.
A million EU residents died of covid in 2 years. Even ignoring the cause of death, ~500k more EU residents died in 2020 than usual, predating the roll-out of the vaccines. (link will only plot individual countries, not the EU total).
https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid#excess-mor...
I know this isn't focused on the (supposed) harms of the vaccines, but I don't think you're really appreciating how many people Covid killed.
Was it? I read a lot of comments saying that mass-firing people is going to cause immediate degradation in some areas like content moderation (which we have seen) and eventual unpredictable failures in others. If you saw people predicting a sudden crash I'd take their opinion with a pinch of salt in the future, sounds like quite a reactionary take.
> then it was everyone would flee to Mastodon
Well some people have been trying out Mastodon, some have been tinkering with Tumblr or Instagram, and some communities have started to solidify around discord servers and other places. One near-universal thing I've seen is more popular accounts being very vocal about sharing their links to other services with the aim of making Twitter non-essential - so if it goes down, or they'd rather leave then they could do so without starting completely from scratch.
> now it’s that all the advertisers would leave.
To be fair it sounds like a lot of them have, prompting this very letter ...
> Maybe Twitter really didn’t need 7500 people
Maybe. It remains to be seen whether axing so many so suddenly was survivable in the long-term financially or operationally, though.
a lot of tech companies is laying off people. Amazon, Facebook...etc.
DoorDash is laying off 1,250 corporate workers. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/30/doordash-lays-off-1250-emplo...
i believe the winter (recession) is coming if not then something is going on that most if not all tech companies is doing layoff or freeze hiring.
either way none of what's being done or talked about recently makes me want to start using twitter, maybe they will figure something out i guess
And yeah if you weren't a Twitter user before, you're probably not signing up at this moment in time :)
Maybe people just don't need another "online community"
Pre-2015 Twitter wasn't the apocalypse before all the content moderation policies were rushed in as a response to widespread narrative that a bunch of people in swing states changed their votes because of Russian accounts.
It's not the apocalypse now. You can block hateful trolls anytime you want.
At the end of the day, there's a chunk of the US population who believes that they are much, much smarter than most of their countrymen, and that their unique ability to identify misinformation isn't shared by these buffoons in swing states who don't vote the way they want them to. There's a huge swathe of people like that in the software industry.
Exactly. 7,500 is far too much to run a site like Twitter which at the time, it was already running itself to the ground. But it seems just like the so-called mass advertiser migration from Facebook, that never happened will be no different with Twitter despite the unusual levels of vacuous claims of Twitter's immediate 'imploding', which that has been greatly exaggerated by very emotionally charged people.
Twitter was already dead. Twitter 2.0 on the other hand seems more alive than ever, and I'm laughing at both the Twitter chaos and those pretending to leave Twitter whilst keeping their accounts.
Why would they come back? Musk is the Donald Trump of tech - plenty of devoted fans, but not someone brands want to associate themselves with. Even if he wanted to, it doesn't seem that Musk can stop impulsively tweeting controversial things.
If Twitter was a new app just launched, I would think it was a seriously sketchy back alley and not a town square.
AFAIK, most of the people I follow are still tweeting; I just don't see as many now.
> ...impressions on violative content are down over the past month...
I think both of those claims are demonstrably false.
A claim was made that is not supported. It isn't unreasonable to request such a claim to be validated by demonstration.
Personally, I have not seen an increase in "hate" or violence or bigotry or any other -ism or -ist. I've seen people disagree in a much more whole-hearted way, while at the same time, seeing prompts for reducing the strength of language. For example, you get a pop up if you write "I think you are stupid" but not "I think you are silly."
Quid pro quo: what is _actually_ motivating you to comment like this?
Musk brings out the worst in some people. Hearing about him shuts down their brains and they "return to monkey", just throwing feces. And they're certainly not dumb, it just looks like those old spy movies with sleeper agents. One minute your friendly neighbor jokes and smiles and the next he hears some specific sentence on the radio and his programming takes over, his face freezes and he gets his gun and marches towards city hall. That's what I see happening to some people here when Musk gets mentioned.
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
You appear to be violating both of those guidelines.
You assert that my comment "does not engage with the topic". I disagree. I think I analyzed the submission, and found parts of it worth discussing.
Why did I make the comment I did? I should have taken more time to establish myself, and I'm sorry I opted to quickly highlight rather than to explain. Allow me (now that I have a moment) to explain.
It's a puff piece.
Despite being a puff piece, does it make any actual claims? Yes. Hmmm - maybe it would be interesting to identify the actual claims.
Are any of the claims actually falsifiable? Yes. Hmm - maybe it would be interesting to point out the claims that are actually falsifiable.
Do I think any of the falsifiable claims are demonstrably false? Yes. Hmm - here they are.
Am I sure that they are demonstrably false, and do I have the evidence to back that up? No. Darn. I can't say they're definitively false, but I can at least highlight the two that I have the strongest belief that yes, they are probably wrong.
Hence the only thing I added to them: "I think both of those claims are demonstrably false."
I'm sorry I didn't have time to go find the primary sources that would back up my belief.
1) Our Trust & Safety team... remains strong and well-resourced...
Wow. If you scan through the comments complaining about my comment, I don't see anyone who seems to have any problem with me pointing this one out. We've all seen the articles about the layoffs, firings, and resignations. I believe a recent one identified that there is exactly one (1) person left, doing an important moderation job, in a major market...? I wish I had the reference at hand, to show a primary source.
2) ...impressions on violative content are down over the past month...
If you scroll through the comments, I think you'll see some interesting discussion, including bringing up the Overton Window, and someone even provided references. (Great username, trs8080!) So, it appears folks on HN thought it was worth discussing. I'm glad to see their discussion. Maybe it would have happened without me pointing out that section, but maybe it wouldn't.
Cheers.
Never heard sealioning before, "thanks, I hate it" I guess. Reminds me of "dog-whistling", and in a way is an exact example of what PM_me_your_math is getting at.
You can decide someone is being disingenuous, but if you can't demonstrate that somehow, I'm inclined to disbelieve you. The GP said "those claims are demonstrably false", and then a follow up comment said "okay, please demonstrate", and you can claim that's being disingenuous? Don't you see how that creates an iron-clad thought bubble?
If you're going to quote me, please do it correctly. I said,
"I think both of those claims are demonstrably false."
You may not see a distinction between those two, but I see a large one.
yes, and I see zero hate or other issues with content on my feed
> What is _actually_ motivating you to comment like this?
I hate when people attribute opening the Overton window to more than just Extreme left authoritarian political opinions, which is what Political Twitter was isolated to before elon, is some how a bad thing
This is incorrect.
"Based on a massive-scale experiment involving millions of Twitter users, a fine-grained analysis of political parties in seven countries, and 6.2 million news articles shared in the United States, this study carries out the most comprehensive audit of an algorithmic recommender system and its effects on political content. Results unveil that the political right enjoys higher amplification compared to the political left."
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8740571/
"Twitter reportedly won't use an algorithm to crack down on white supremacists because some GOP politicians could end up getting barred too"
- https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-algorithm-crackdown-...
Try to actually talk about what I am complaining about
> > I hate when people attribute opening the Overton window to more than just Extreme left authoritarian political opinions, which is what Political Twitter was isolated to before elon
I literally quoted what you talked about and responded to your claim - please try to improve your reading comprehension skills.
No you did not, you responded with an unrelated fact that "right news" (which is widely over categorized in these research papers BTW) is the most shared link
This does not refute the position that twitter employee based censorship was largely in one direction, this does not refute the fact that twitter policies were written and enforced in one ideological direction, this does not even really indicate why those links where shared or the reaction to the link, where they shared for outrage or criticism, for support or derision?
No your link proves and supports nothing
Yes, on Twitter, which according to you was "Extreme left authoritarian" until recently. Odd that leftist authoritarians allow right wing content to dominate their platform.
> twitter employee based censorship was largely in one direction
Any evidence for this claim?
> the fact that twitter policies were written and enforced in one ideological direction
Evidence? Twitter's own data says that this is not the case in the links I provided.
> No your link proves and supports nothing
My links (there were two) prove and support my point - you haven't read them though.
If true, then we would not find much, if anything, that was not "extreme left authoritarian political opinions" amongst the detritus of "political twitter", right?
And yet, when shown that not only did there exist content from the political right, it was amplified more than content from the political left, you reply:
"you responded with an unrelated fact"
Let's try it this way. Let's say I make a statement that the birds at my feeder are isolated to crows. If you then point to my own videos which show not only that there are many other kinds of birds, but these other kinds of birds eat the most seed from it, what should I reply? "Oh, I'm sorry but that is an unrelated fact"? Or perhaps, "That proves nothing, how do we know the other birds were not brought there by the crows?" Or how about, "The fact that there were other kinds of birds at your feeder does not refute the fact that you prevent non-crows from coming to your feeder." Etc.
You quite literally stated that Political Twitter was isolated to "Extreme left authoritarian political opinions" prior to Musk's takeover. Which is of course both demonstratively false and a ridiculous claim on its face.
If anything, the person responding to you gave you the benefit of the doubt, presuming you may have meant that views outside the "extreme authoritarian left" were systematically de-emphasized by the recommendation algorithm. Which is also false but at least not a mindbogglingly stupid thing to actually believe.
Someone interested in an actual discussion might have taken the opportunity to clarify their initial statement. But abrasiveness and the "read what I meant, not what I wrote" approach also works I guess.
my own twitter experience has not changed at all -- i'm seeing the same tweets i was seeing before and seeing none of the hate people are seeing. but, ofc, the plural of anecdote is not data.
For all the jokes about excessive sourcing that hacker news gets it's probably one of the things that keeps it from turning into yet another hearsay platform.
This is genuinely the only place in the internet right now I can actually read and have a decent discussion about musk without it either turning into a hate circlejerk or a flamewar, would be nice to keep it that way.
Actually, I said "I think."
If I had left off the "I think," then you would be correct about what I said.
The second claim is absolutely more nuanced, and I admit, will be much harder to falsify.
Third-parties haven't confirmed this, and their data shows the opposite, so I'd wager either it's an outright lie or a function of classification.
"Nothing has changed, except..."
> Our Trust & Safety team continues its diligent work to keep the platform safe from hateful conduct, abusive behavior, and any violation of Twitter's rules. The team remains strong and well-resourced, and automated detection plays an increasingly important role in eliminating abuse.
It's undeniably less well-resourced than it was a few weeks ago, and people's experience indicate it's clearly less effective as a result.
What a non-statement. I doubt advertisers will react the way Elon hopes they will.
At least some of the banned deserve a second chance. Those who were total monsters will probably be quickly re-banned. Others have found their own echo chambers elsewhere and won't even bother coming back.
Which is basically what you described and therefore is already how it works.
https://theintercept.com/2022/11/29/elon-musk-twitter-andy-n...
"As the Los Angeles City Councilmember Mike Bonin noted on Twitter, the suspended users include Chad Loder, an antifascist researcher whose open-source investigation of the U.S. Capitol riot led to the identification and arrest of a masked Proud Boy who attacked police officers. The account of video journalist Vishal Pratap Singh, who reports on far-right protests in Southern California, has also been suspended."
"All four accounts had been singled out for criticism by Andy Ngo, a far-right writer whose conspiratorial, error-riddled reporting on left-wing protests and social movements fuels the mass delusion that a handful of small antifascist groups are part of an imaginary shadow army called “antifa.” In a public exchange on Twitter on Friday, Musk invited Ngo to report “Antifa accounts” that should be suspended directly to him."
https://theintercept.com/2022/11/29/elon-musk-twitter-andy-n...
Please provide evidence that accounts like Chad Loder were posting about imminent, direct actions to riot. I followed that account pretty closely for the last month and saw none of that.
I would think about your comment because this is pretty defamatory.
That said, Loder is not a particularly nice person. He loves to both encourage violence and do violence to anyone who doesn't share his politics.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7]
5. https://archive.ph/2z4Dd (The photo is of Aaron Danielson, who was murdered by Michael Reinoehl, a member of antifa.)
"All four accounts had been singled out for criticism by Andy Ngo, a far-right writer whose conspiratorial, error-riddled reporting on left-wing protests and social movements fuels the mass delusion that a handful of small antifascist groups are part of an imaginary shadow army called “antifa.” In a public exchange on Twitter on Friday, Musk invited Ngo to report “Antifa accounts” that should be suspended directly to him."
https://theintercept.com/2022/11/29/elon-musk-twitter-andy-n...
doesn't that just mean someone who doxes people they don't agree with? Great, i'm glad he helped arrest a criminal but the ends don't always justify the means.
... no?
It seems to me a reasonable course of action to ban people violating restraining orders on your website. I do suspect the restraining order is being misapplied here, but that maybe isn't twitters responsibility to determine? Not sure how I feel about that since twitter is aiming to be pro free-speech and this case specifically seems to be a free-speech issue. I could go either way, but I don't know enough about this Loder person, maybe he isn't high profile enough to warrant in-depth thought about his ban and otherwise would be unbanned in the name of free speech? I certainly would be more likely to think he would be unbanned if he was a right-wing activist, though, but I don't know that I've seen substantial evidence here that shows a banning bias as this particular ban could be entirely justified.
With a propaganda weapon as powerful as Twitter, it's probably better for everybody if it's destroyed, rather than continues to be used/abused to escalate political divisions by either side of the great divide. And that seems to be the way things are going.
It should never have been taken so seriously to begin with.
[0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-algorithm-crackdown-...
At first I hoped Musk would see the nightmare, give up, just pull the plug, and go home. I think that's out though, now I hope it collapses under its own weight. Hope dies last.
That these previously banned users were banned for conduct that they would consider hateful
That banning users is the only way to keep the platform safe from hateful conduct
If twitter disagrees with either of these statements, you can see why they would disagree with your point
For Musk to not lose gobs and gobs of money, it only matters whether advertisers, in their sole estimation, consider those people hateful. The guys with the nine figure ad budgets will almost certainly fall on the "cautious" side of that line.
The only thing that will help here is finding small, less PR minded brands or businesses to replace the players in the nine figure club. This won't be easy, but I think it is the only reasonable way forward to create the kind of Twitter that Musk seems to want to create. Having worked at "DDB Need'em" long ago, I'd set his chances of pulling that off relatively low, but I don't think it's impossible.
Or, more accurately, “content they don’t want their advertising seen near”.
My partner runs a small business that spends a few million on ads each year.
Why would she take the risk (and it is a huge risk) of advertising on Twitter when Facebook, Google etc. give her the confidence and results her business depends on. Smaller businesses are far less likely to take risks.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think a company with an ad budget of a few million is a "small business" anymore.
Does twitter agree that the comments were hateful, did that not change? If didn't change, then twitter agrees they were hateful comments and twitter is now happy to have them on the platform.
Musk can't keep his foot out of his mouth here it seems.. it's very confusing.
I personally, don't believe in eternal bans. I always hate the horror stories where someone has made a mistake and thus Google bans them from all non-related activities for life, then bans the account of anyone who gave that person privileges too.
With respect to Twitter, I'd say sure Trump is an insurrectionist and a shameful individual, but it's been 2 years... while we can't all rightly forgive him, we can at least him speak his thoughts in 280 characters or less.
They are entitled to that stance, and advertisers uncomfortable with either the actual or anticipated results of that stance are entitled to not advertise on Twitter.
Isn't policy enforcement a part of a separate policy? The policy for policy enforcement? They really wanted to be able to say "the policy hasn't changed." This is a bigger stretch than a taffy pull.
you have a procedure for the policy, thus procedures can change but the policy is the same.
policy's are goals, procedures are how those goals are met, and given the wide and subjective nature of all Big Tech policies, changing in procedures are more import and impactful than changes in policy, and the procedures are never open to public review
IIRC, between direct firings and resignations they got rid of the entire team shortly after the takeover, including at least the first head installed after the takeover and firing of the former head, so the impression of continuity this seeks to invoke is at best misleading.
If I were an advertiser Twitter would be on my "never advertise here again" list, and I might re-evaluate in a decade or so. Besides look at the slimy ads have been common on twitter in the last 2 weeks. I would not want my ads showing up alongside those.
In the past, exploitation victims had to literally sue Twitter to take down explicit material, because a "review" could not "find a violation of [their] policies" [1].
Now "the three biggest hashtags used by child abusers selling child sexual abuse material on Twitter have virtually been eliminated" according to a human trafficking survivor advocate [2]. They have also made it easier for users to flag such content.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/minor-lawsuit-twitter-explic...
[2] https://twitter.com/elizableu/status/1594139581045428224
[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-child-sexual-abuse-mater...
Switching from normal bans to something even shadowier than ordinary shadowbans?
"Everybody calm down, the building is not on fire, this is just a test of our fire suppresion system. After we fired staff handling it. Also due to miscommunication someone filled it with diesel.
* first joined the board then quit immediately
* made a purchase offer then almost immediately tried to withdraw it
* fired people then tried to rehire some of them
* claimed 20% of Twitter users are bots then let users decide to unban Trump
* announced absolute free speech then got angry when advertisers used their free speech to tell him they don't like how he runs the company
* allowed everyone to get verified checkmark then pulled it
* supported unlimited free speech then started banning people saying parody needs to be marked explicitly, then banned parody accounts anyway
And now they claim the moderation teams are well resourced and able to do their job just as before. How can anyone believe it?
This is the only part of the statement that might possibly be referring to the algorithms. I think the worst thing twitter (and FB as well) has done in the past was to use algorithms to boost outrage and thus boost engagement. Are they saying they're going to change how this works? I'm skeptical.
tl;dr: if Twitter doesn't get seriously hurt over the medium and long term, this entire industry is going to be a lot less fun to work in as management concludes they can put the squeeze on.
:(
Specifically, their policy around Covid misinformation changed November 23. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/29/twitter-stops-policing-covid...
The advertising model is Twitter's fatal flaw. It puts the fate of the platform in the hands of a tiny corporate mob that are themselves subject to larger mobs.
If "the mission" was truly driving Twitter, they'd drop all advertising and build enough value that some decent percentage of users would pay for it. In a few years, with a lot of work, I believe they could build a $10+ billion/yr business using paid accounts and features. With zero advertising. Twitter is an incredible "channel" for information, marketing, customer support, etc.
But unless they kick their addiction to ads, it doesn't matter if they do or don't believe in free speech, because their advertisers (customers) most definitely don't and they're in ultimate control.
Other than this I don't know - the problem with social media is that you need network effects to make the platform valuable - nobody is going to pay for an empty place, and similarly nobody will join because they'd have to pay (so the platform would need to provide value from day 1).
Twitter is in a unique position when it comes to this - it already has the network effects and a significant userbase including influential people. This is why I'm also very excited about Musk's takeover of it. Do I agree with him about everything? Absolutely not - I think the man is unhinged. Yet, a stupid, ego-driven decision is our only escape from the cancer that is advertising.
This was never really enforced.
But there weren't any real EV companies or private space companies before Elon Musk threw his hat in the ring. Whatever you think of him, he's clearly capable of doing things people previously believed to be impractical.
Taking a first principles approach, there's no reason to believe that a social network used by the most influential companies, people, and governments in the world cannot charge its users directly for the value it provides.
It does seem likely to be less profitable in the short-term but possibly more profitable (and stable) in the long-term.
Some back-of-the-envelope math:
1 million business paying an average of $100/mo is $1.2 billion/yr. That should more than pay the bills.
In addition, 10 million consumers paying an average of $10/mo = $1.2 billion/yr. That's a decent profit.
That is probably achievable in the next couple years, with potential for much more over time if they can expand the product and tools.
Social networks are valuable because of users. They gain value by attracting large numbers of users.
They have limited inherent value, and the majority have features which are easy enough for rivals to replicate.
But what matters beyond the network is how well it can be utilized by users. That layer of tools and functionality on top of the network is where Twitter could charge users. Particularly power users and businesses that can justify spending some money on it because they get so much value or even generate revenue from it.
It was not wildly successful.
Certainly not successful enough to replace advertising.
As for the network effect … that's the point of "the value comes from the users."
I think that's what we have been conditioned into believing, but I see no reason that the a sponsored post about Tide Pods has to have anything but platform coincidence to someone using the same tool to troll about how "the jews" bla bla bla.
Our selective outrage is insane. This is all political. I'm tired of it.
This linked blog post is full of half-truths, if not out right lies — and company is literally run by Elon, who has lied so many times about his plans for Twitter than it’s beyond me why anyone is still using it.
Twitter isn't in the position FTX is in, but I personally believe that the publicity that Musk and Twitter have been getting over the last month has been nearly universally bad. There is little value in increased user engagement if so much of it is centered around the catastrophic Twitter management and Elon Musk or Tesla parody accounts, particularly if there fewer companies interested in advertising to those users.
Majority of users have no awareness of any of this angst, they're just using it for its niche.
It's popcorn-worthy drama because of the headcount carnage and the culture clash with increasingly vapid corporate ESG posing, while in reality both headcount bloat (particularly non-maker roles) and corporate virtue signaling need a check.
There's a reasonable chance the image hit among various political and tech influencers is soon (months to years) offset by performance and utility gains from getting the other two under control.
All this is off the table if something with less friction gains network effects within the niche.
In that sense I'd agree with you: now's certainly a (rare) time to try to convince folks to change a habit many literally grew up with.
* Mastodon user since spring 2018.
Just because there isn't a direct alternative doesn't mean Twitter's future is bright. Twitter users can just quit Twitter without signing up for a new social media site. They can use other social media more, or find something else to do with their time.
Keep in mind, a vast majority of Twitter users don't actually post. To these users, Twitter is just a source of entertainment. And if these users aren't getting enough entertainment, they'll just stop using the site. Maybe not immediately, and maybe not in an organized fashion. But people can and do change their social media habits, and there's nothing forcing people to stick with Twitter.
There's plenty of options if you want a forum without "corporate ESG posing" - 4chan et al. They just don't make money, or interest the majority of people.
Why would someone choose you over Musk?
How would you ensure that in 5 years you will not sell out for big $$$
Not trying to be a troll, just genuinely asking as the answers may help someone who actually has the resources/time
Why choose X over musk?
- X isn't erratic and unpredictable/capricious
- X has a solid track record of working with stakeholders and partners for win-win relationships
- X doesn't lead one to discuss enforcment of morality clauses in contracts
- X cares about best-practices for all stakeholders, including employees
I could go on.
At this point, almost ANYONE with a decent resume could be considered a better steward than musk
So many people do only editorialism but call themselves journalists. Journalists who do great investigatory pieces are often independent or bounce between publications frequently. Lots of influencers posing at journalists to obtain a veneer of legitimacy. More money than ever influencing the content of what is being written about. Lots of uncredentialed civilians tweeting newsworthy things. Lots of 'news' services writing articles entirely sourced via tweet.
I think the journalism industry is so blurry and chaotic right now, it's hard to know who is worthy of platforming.
My hope wouldn't be to give people platform, so much as give media people meaningful connections. Who knows, though. I've not thought about it much. I would also leverage other unique advantages I have, in terms of other businesses, to increase the chances of those connections being built.
https://theintercept.com/2022/11/29/elon-musk-twitter-andy-n...
https://twitter.com/ThierryBreton/status/1598015892457426944
He had to quickly walk that one back by deleting the reply and pretending it never happened.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/miguel-almaguer-remains...
[checks notes]
in an era when the former president led an uprising--one which actually broke into the capitol building--to stay in power and
[checks notes]
breaks into the house of the
[checks notes]
super-vilified(1) speaker of the house, and--fining only Paul Pelosi there--attacks him.
Yes, implausible on the face of it. Of course. How could this happen?
(1) https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/30/us/politics/pelosi-attack...
Pelosi leaves the bathroom to go back this "intruder".
Pelosi opens the door for police, and goes back to the "intruder". Where this is finally an argument and he is attacked in front of police.
...
You should update your notes.
Attempts to paint it otherwise are either just covering for Musk for some reason (which I don't know why you would feel the need to do that) or trying to rewrite the narrative on what the right-wing conspiracy theory here is that Musk peddled in the first place.
I was willing to give Musk the benefit of the doubt about this initially, but that was clearly misjudged on his end.
I stand corrected.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/30/business/musk-tweet-pelosi-co...
I don't get where this line of thought comes from. Why must it be someone else who is encouraging him? He's a middle aged man who is the wealthiest person in the world by some metrics. He should own his words and actions and can't blame others.
When people show you who they are, believe them. Which means he probably is the kind of person who would, as you say: "laugh at an attack on an 80 year person with a hammer in their home."
Making electric cars and space rockets doesn't make him any less likely to be exactly that kind of person.
It's just my opinion, but I would go further and say "lol-ing at someone else's suffering" can actually help with becoming incredibly successful (though obviously it's not enough by itself). This is especially the case in spaces where success involves crossing ethical or legal lines.
You choose where and with whom you want to converse.
If you're indoors, you converse with your family/coworkers. If you're outdoors, you converse with friends or service providers + some public noise.
Privately, people can talk about whatever they want. If someone starts bothering someone, the "host" of the place can ask them to leave, kick them out, or call the police.
IRC almost figured it out like 900 years ago, but no then the centralized Hutts decided they want to control everything and "mOnEtIzE" all our interactions so now we have proprietary BS each trying to reinvent the damn wheel in its own broken half-baked way.
Surprisingly enough there's almost as many Japanese users as Americans on Twitter, not to mention everyone else, do they also get an input on the style of the public conversation?
Apparently he's having trouble with the EU now as well because he's shuttered the office in Brussels. Is this a global public conversation, a local one, is everyone going to live by one standard, pretty hard to figure that all out if you've reduced the workforce to keeping the servers running.
The order of the list says everything you need to know.
"First, none of our policies have changed."
I think it should read "none of our policies has changed" instead. But I might be wrong as I get confused about this often.
Those all sound correct to me. Zero is plural.
And yet they lock accounts for tweets like "Elon Musk should pay taxes"
Everything is currently a moving target, and subject to their owner's whims.
Not only does it look like Twitter will survive (if the mass-migration to another platform hasn't happened yet, when will it? If the site runs stable after the initial shock, why would it run less stable later?), it just might make Musk more powerful than we could ever imagine. Contrasting with other social media founders/owners he isn't shy to use the platform as a very personal thing, to actively shape the discussion and to pick and fight fights. The potential power he could potentially wield makes the purchase, as well as possibly running Twitter as a loss, worth it.
On what basis?
Elon needs cash flow to pay the loans he took to buy Twitter.
Banks don’t give a shit about politics, or mission, or popularity. Banks care about cash flow.
Fact: advertisers (read: cash flow) are leaving Twitter. How will Elon pay off his loans?
Also, I'd argue there are better/efficient ways to influence western thought. you just have to look at some other billionaires like Koch brothers to see how its done, if you have any doubts read the book titled 'dark money' by Jane Meyer.
"the line goes up"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
Last time I logged in on Twitter, I got right extremists in my suggestions to follow. There are tons of right wing trolls on the platform (check #thenoticing hashtag), one cannot follow the protests in China due to pr0n spam. Yet, everything is FINE. We are just experimenting.
I am m the opposite of a liberal, call it whatever you want. The Internet, media and corporate world is mostly always against my views. Guess what: I am still fine and believe it or not, despite two decades of massive liberal propaganda, my anti-liberal feelings are stronger than ever.
So if you are liberal you probably believe your side is the good one and can hold against facts, contradictions and fights. You should not be afraid of loosing some ground. If you are right, the stupid, opposite and wrong ideas of anti-liberals can't win. You are safe.
You seem to be afraid that allowing a bit of opposite speech will hurt your political stands. I would say: trust yourself, trust your beliefs and spread them intelligibly, and mostly, live by them.
Concrete goals are apparently to stick it to the woke, or something.
He’s banning child porn and bots though. Because that seemingly wasn’t banned before.
He’s clearly a nazi, eh?
I can’t wait to see the evidence of corruption of Twitter, but it was already visible to all conservatives.
I think that in a few months it will be already a great success.
Regardless of whether or not you agree with his actions these days, it does at least seem a significant departure from how the public perceived his actions in the past. Over the past few years his actions have steadily grown more.. loud, at the very least.
.. It's.. interesting.
Tesla, SpaceX, Boring Co have ambitious objectives with clear right/wrong answers. You put something in orbit or don't. Your car goes 500km with 70kWh of energy or it doesn't etc. You can inspire smart engineers to work hard to meet ambitious goals that require creative thinking.
Twitter has none of that, it is more like a club. Having the loudest speakers or brightest lights isn't going to make your club the best club. There is a certain baseline of technical competence required, yes, but mostly its about attracting the right crowd (being extra nice to some people, kicking others out) and making sure everybody has a good time. Musk might have actually succeeded with this using his previous person, but his new culture warrior schtick isn't gonna work.
His growing group of admirers started treating his like a messiah, and he fully embraced that role, along with the behaviors that it engenders upon someone. He's not special in that way. It's a position a lot of ambitious people would like to be in.
Technically, he was never CEO “at Paypal”. He was forced out as CEO of X.com the second time just before it took the name of the main product (which it had acquired with the company that developed it, with Elon returning as CEO with the acquisition) and became PayPal.
You'll also have to ignore that he's built companies that land rockets back on Earth and produce millions of EVs. He's objectively demonstrated ability.
It continues to look as if Musk believes a Twitter turn-around is largely a technical project--rather than tending to a community of users.
How many of you were saying "It's a private company, it can do what it wants!!" when it was a public company, and now it does what it wants... "It must be destroyed!!".
Some of you have decent points... Others are insufferable arrogant assholes who know everything about everything. I would like someone to just please admit "I'm mad that Musk isn't using Twitter to suppress the people I don't like".