5 ms·
When you have absolutely objective rules, bad actors can manipulate things in bad faith. That’s much the same as when companies try to establish objective manag
by braythwayt 7y ago
When you have absolutely objective rules, bad actors can manipulate things in bad faith. That’s much the same as when companies try to establish objective management-by-metrics, it almost never turns out well, even though it seems to be “fair” in the sense that the rules are equally applied to all circumstances.
When you have subjective rules, you have a two-edged sword. When bad actors try to game the system, moderators/the judiciary/the benevolent dictator can step in and say, “I see what you’re up to, and I’m stopping it here.”
But of course, if you have bad actors enforcing rules that have subjective application, they can apply them unequally and create injustice. For example, if the police have the discretion whether to charge teenagers with a crime for possession of weed, they can overwhelmingly choose to charge members of one socioeconomic group, while overwhelmingly giving a pass to another.
My claim is that rigid rules are subject to gaming by bad actors subject to the rules, and flexible rules are subject to gaming by bad actors enforcing the rules.
Beyond ideological beliefs that “fairly applied” is more important than “just outcomes,” it comes down to looking at your threat model. In the case of Twitter, I consider Twitter’s own management to be the biggest threat.
Whereas with Hacker News, I trust the benevolence of its dictators, and consider bad faith users to be the biggest threat.
JM2C.
- ubercow13 7y agoWhat about just more transparency? You can bend the rules of you want to ban someone who seems to be gaming them, but update the rules and tell them why. "We didn't like you doing X. We have banned you and updated the rules to forbid this." That way you would not be able to hide behind vague bans to enact censorship in this way
- throwaway2048 7y agoBecause that ends in never ending (truly, never ending) litigation of the rules by bad faith parties. It dosen't matter what the rules say, or even if you point to exact rules, they will still endlessly bog down discussions, and the more rules there are, the more effectively they can achieve that, that is their entire goal from the outset. Its like a legal system, but with no penalty whatsoever for acting in malicious bad faith to disrupt the system itself, and the bad faith disruption generates even more avenues to disrupt, like some troll hall of mirrors. Only thing you end up achieving is giving bad actors more ammunition, and meanwhile nobody who is truly unjustly banned is going to navigate 100000 sub threads of "case law". Great example of how dysfunctional this ultimately becomes is Wikipedia, where you get the book thrown at you by wikilawyers (which is ironically against the rules itself, yeah ok...) for innocent infractions, but people operating in bad faith have no issues making Wikipedia say what they want it to.
- deogeo 7y agoYour entire argument assumes that if you give a reason for bans/censorship, then people are allowed to appeal. But that's not the case - Twitter could easily write "This account has been banned by order of the Chinese government/for spreading hate speech/encouraging piracy.", without the chance for appeal. They just prefer to keep their users in the dark.
- throwaway2048 7y agoIt dosen't matter if appeals are formally granted, there is still going to be a lot of informal discussion about it amongst users of the community (including banned users that are evading) that is going to generate increasing amounts of drama with time. Twitter is also never going to be honest about business case driven bans like this either, i mean do you seriously expect them to state that as the reason, even if it is their policy to do so? It would be the end of their business in China (supposing they aren't already blocked of course)
- deogeo 7y ago> there is still going to be a lot of informal discussion about it amongst users of the community (including banned users that are evading) that is going to generate increasing amounts of drama with time. It is precisely the lack of this drama, the discreet manner in which they can censor and pretend they didn't, that I object to. People should know how they're being manipulated, and then talk about it - the so-called 'drama'. But of course the censor would prefer to control the discussion without letting people know.
- throwaway2048 7y agoThe problem is that you are framing the censor as evil and the user as benign, which unfortunately isn't the norm in an online context.
- Mountain_Skies 7y agoSounds like a situation where everyone who has a differing opinion can have their views hand waved away as acting in bad faith. Which itself is acting in bad faith.
- DataWorker 7y agoWhat you fail to capture in your framing of this problem are financial incentives and concern for the user experience. Twitter and Wikipedia are very different beasts. twitter needs subjective rules that benefit their own bottom line because they need to appeal to the lowest common denominator to increase and maintain users.