New Twitter Policy May Be More Terrifying Than Mass Suspension of Journalists | Hacker News Reader

New Twitter Policy May Be More Terrifying Than Mass Suspension of Journalists

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23 pointsdoener22 comments

Six and a half paragraphs into the rant, and I think I found the argument:

“every mute and block is now treated, per Musk, as a ‘downvote’ of that account, and there is virtually no degree of positive engagement that can counterbalance a mass muting or blocking or false-reporting campaign. But the worst part is this: the ‘disappeared’ account-holder may take months to realize that they have been made virtually invisible on Twitter, or may never even find out at all.”

Unmentioned and uncited is the actual policy change: you can now pay for a downvoting account [1].

[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/16039854915057950...

Wait… are they saying what I think they’re saying, “shadow banning is unfair”

That’s fantastic. A little late but fantastic nonetheless.

The funny part is that they’re essentially arguing for you to leave now because you might not get as much engagement later… and instead you should go to their platform where you will definitely not get as much engagement and you’ll have a bunch of vague arbitrary rules applied to you that will require you to only use pre-approved speech.

But if they're invisible only to those who blocked them...

Yes, I upvoted the article, because despite being an unhinged rant, I think there is something worthy of discussion in here. How should moderation work in a community? Should everyone who wants to get their message out to an audience willing to listen be able to do so, or should a minority of people be able to deny them the ability to do so?

I think the OP author is wrong to cast this as "left" vs "right", but correct to see that allowing a vocal minority to decide how a larger group is allowed to communicate is an unstable situation. The parallels to "flagging" and "downvoting" on HN are also interesting to contemplate.

I think the answer is that such a system can mostly work if-and-only-if there is a trusted authority who can override the mob on a case-by-case basis. Dan does this as well as can be hoped, but Elon seems to still be struggling. But at Twitter's scale, they obviously need a much larger trusted team for this to have a chance of working.

This whole article could also have been written from the opposite political direction, it seems.

Is it an argument against downvoting in general? Or just paid-only downvoting I guess.

Paid downvoting has interesting incentives problems. For example, it's very attractive to foreign adversaries who want to amplify their own content via exclusion, or remove content they deem contra to their interests. These are issues with downvoting in general, but tying it to cash promotes the voices the with the most money.

This is the sort of thing that Elon rails against the mass media doing.

This is about the new Twitter policy of letting people pay to remove content from trending and high visibility portions of the site. The feature is that if an account that paid $8 a month, it has the ability to downvote your post's visibility.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603985491505795072

"Twitter will start incorporating mute & block signals from Blue Verified (not Legacy Blue) as downvotes"

Submitted this [1]. Better jumping point than this rant.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34038061

“needs to be the last straw for everyone left on the platform who is not a far-right troll or neo-Nazi.”

So if you don’t leave Twitter because we his guy told you to you are a far-right troll or Neo-Nazi? Why is this on HN?

Say what you want but twitter under Elon got that dystopian Cyberpunk vibe.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com