Hacker News Reader

Comment by rhaksw | Hacker News Reader

> Anyone who has been in a tech company knows that there is internal lingo that refers to features we devs make. But it's presented as being an "Orwellian language"

The fact that you need different internal descriptors should be a red flag. All kinds of phrases get used like selective invisibility, visibility filtering, ranking, visible to self, reducing, deboosting, or disguising a gag. Each is a form of censorship, but that's a bad word since the days of Anthony Comstock so it is never used. Censors never describe themselves as censors. See the book "The Mind of the Censor",

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58150067-the-mind-of-the...

View on HN

> The fact that you need different internal descriptors should be a red flag

It can be, and you're zeroing on sense where vague lingo like "enhanced interrogation" replaces plain "torture".

But that's a stretch. Every profession develops their own lingo over time. They're called "term of art" (1)

An example is when one sysadmin asks another to "bounce the box" - these words have specific meanings which are opaque to outsiders, but are brief and precise to insiders.

This "internal lingo" developing is normal, inevitable, even necessary, and not in any way a "red flag".

If the admins of twitter had several different terms instead of calling them all the same thing then ... maybe they just needed to be brief and precise, to distinguish between them, in order to do the job effectively? You're trying to invent a problem where there is none.

1 )

https://www.yourdictionary.com/term-of-art

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/term%20of%20art

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/term_of_art

> Every profession develops their own lingo over time.

In this case, Twitter packages up two objectively observable things, people you follow and people who are popular, along with Twitter's own opinion about who the bad-faith actors are. It's that last subjective part that is at issue here. Yet all three are lumped together under the term "rank" [1], and we are told it is the bad actors who are manipulating, not Twitter.

I'm not calling for the demise of Twitter's former leadership, just calling out corporate speak where I see it. YouTube is at least transparent in this respect. They openly say that they "reduce" content [2].

[1] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2018/Setting-t...

[2] https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/the-four-rs-of-responsib...

OK but at the same time Elon is proposing “freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach”. Which is basically the same thing, no?

Regardless of what he says, his actions show he controls speech.

What he said, says, or will say, doesn’t matter.

Twitter is a global platform ideal for steering public sentiment, opinion, and influencing political outcomes.

https://youtu.be/RII0eBszJJ4

Steered into global sustainable energy and humans into planetary species by a tyrant!

The man who was just forced to buy a 44B company, and is liquidating shares in his self-driving car company to pay twitters rent, and is now beholden to weird Saudi financiers who bailed him out, is certainly not steering lol.

Yes, that's a great case for considering ideas for their merit rather than idolizing individuals.

I'm also curious to know what his guiding principles are but maybe we're stuck reverse engineering them based on his actions. Sticking to an ideal doesn't seem to be his style.

I'm probably missing something. I don't follow him too closely.

> Elon is proposing “freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach”

While proposing that Shadowbanning is a tool of the Woke Mind Virus destroying humanity ...

The Woke Mind Virus is actually everyone who tries to paint not being an asshole as woke.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com