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How do you do that effectively on a platform with hundreds of millions of people with wildly differing world views?

cmckn 6y ago
I think the “how” is pretty simple: the company is made up of people, the people define a set of principles, and adhere to them. They don’t have to accommodate everyone (and in my opinion, shouldn’t). I think the hard part is doing this in the face of money. We have all seen how platforms allow awful things to exist because of the economic incentives to do so.
- wyoh 6y ago
  Not elected people, not respecting the most basic of constitutional principles. Not only that, but you can't enforce your "set of principles" on billion of tweets each hour of the day, not by people at least, so you defer to bots, which are incapable of discerning what is free speech. They can't apply your principles with the discernment of a human, they can't enforce what's legal or illegal, like they can't recognize copyrighted music from public domains ones.
  - cmckn 6y ago
    I disagree with the constitutional angle. I do think enforcement is possible, it's really no different from enforcing the law IRL. I don't think having no terms and/or requiring private companies to have no terms is a better situation.
coldpie 6y ago
Yep, it's hard. Let's try to figure it out instead of just throwing our hands up and letting the trolls take over.
CaptArmchair 6y ago
Well, you start by acknowledging that by hosting hundreds of millions of people to your platform, you're also hosting the real world problems that come with them. And how you handle that a scale while mitigating the consequences turns into a nightmare. Rather then evolving along with the needs of their users, Twitter froze it's functionality years ago. Twitter could have added a range of moderation tools, allow users to opt-out from re-tweets, trends and such, allowed people to create groups and communities, foster active cooperation with key users and it's communities,... Why didn't that happen? Because those hundreds of millions of users aren't paying customers. Investing in all of those things simply isn't worth the investment or pressing enough in terms of optimizing for revenue through advertising and business intelligence. An audience is a valuable commodity, and so what Twitter doesn't want is risk losing that commodity. Tweaking the functionality of the platform is such a risk. However, hosting hundreds of millions of people who aren't customers, is also a huge liability. Worst case is having governments representing those poeple imposing hard regulatory frameworks that hurt revenue and profitability. In a way, it's akin to the lions of the circus. People pay good money to see the lions perfom, but the circus has to accept the risks that come with keeping lions. Which includes getting shut down because the lions escaped and went to town. So, why does Twitter cater to hundreds of millions of people, and why does the circus keep lions? Because the profits they gain from doing so outmatch the risks they have to accept. Getting back to your original question, Twitter is basically Humanity's stream of consciousness materialized. It's prohibitively expensive, and rather utopian, to be able to moderate that in a meaningful way which caters to everyone's contentment. By contrast, Twitter's aspiration isn't to provide the best moderation, it's to implement just the bare minimum in order to not lose it's value. Looking back at the blogpost, you'll find that most of what they propose is tweaks to how they filter content and a small tweak to how you do re-tweeting based on existing functionality. No fundamental changes to the feature set are put into place. On the scale of Twitter's operation, that's mainly targetting low hanging fruit since introducing more substantial changes would be a huge gamble that might end up hurting the business.

I think the “how” is pretty simple: the company is made up of people, the people define a set of principles, and adhere to them. They don’t have to accommodate everyone (and in my opinion, shouldn’t). I think the hard part is doing this in the face of money. We have all seen how platforms allow awful things to exist because of the economic incentives to do so.

wyoh 6y ago
Not elected people, not respecting the most basic of constitutional principles. Not only that, but you can't enforce your "set of principles" on billion of tweets each hour of the day, not by people at least, so you defer to bots, which are incapable of discerning what is free speech. They can't apply your principles with the discernment of a human, they can't enforce what's legal or illegal, like they can't recognize copyrighted music from public domains ones.
- cmckn 6y ago
  I disagree with the constitutional angle. I do think enforcement is possible, it's really no different from enforcing the law IRL. I don't think having no terms and/or requiring private companies to have no terms is a better situation.

coldpie 6y ago

Yep, it's hard. Let's try to figure it out instead of just throwing our hands up and letting the trolls take over.

CaptArmchair 6y ago

Well, you start by acknowledging that by hosting hundreds of millions of people to your platform, you're also hosting the real world problems that come with them. And how you handle that a scale while mitigating the consequences turns into a nightmare. Rather then evolving along with the needs of their users, Twitter froze it's functionality years ago. Twitter could have added a range of moderation tools, allow users to opt-out from re-tweets, trends and such, allowed people to create groups and communities, foster active cooperation with key users and it's communities,... Why didn't that happen? Because those hundreds of millions of users aren't paying customers. Investing in all of those things simply isn't worth the investment or pressing enough in terms of optimizing for revenue through advertising and business intelligence. An audience is a valuable commodity, and so what Twitter doesn't want is risk losing that commodity. Tweaking the functionality of the platform is such a risk. However, hosting hundreds of millions of people who aren't customers, is also a huge liability. Worst case is having governments representing those poeple imposing hard regulatory frameworks that hurt revenue and profitability. In a way, it's akin to the lions of the circus. People pay good money to see the lions perfom, but the circus has to accept the risks that come with keeping lions. Which includes getting shut down because the lions escaped and went to town. So, why does Twitter cater to hundreds of millions of people, and why does the circus keep lions? Because the profits they gain from doing so outmatch the risks they have to accept. Getting back to your original question, Twitter is basically Humanity's stream of consciousness materialized. It's prohibitively expensive, and rather utopian, to be able to moderate that in a meaningful way which caters to everyone's contentment. By contrast, Twitter's aspiration isn't to provide the best moderation, it's to implement just the bare minimum in order to not lose it's value. Looking back at the blogpost, you'll find that most of what they propose is tweaks to how they filter content and a small tweak to how you do re-tweeting based on existing functionality. No fundamental changes to the feature set are put into place. On the scale of Twitter's operation, that's mainly targetting low hanging fruit since introducing more substantial changes would be a huge gamble that might end up hurting the business.