6 ms·

Jack: Our communication around our actions on the @nypost article was not great

48 points by hhs 6y ago

rmason 6y ago
Did you know that the NY Post was founded by Alexander Hamilton?
- gruez 6y ago
  Why should that matter, given that was more than 200 years ago? >In 1976, Rupert Murdoch bought the Post for US$30.5 million. [...] The Post has been criticized since the beginning of Murdoch's ownership for sensationalism, blatant advocacy, and conservative bias.
  - maxharris 6y ago
    By the same token, why should the Constitution of the United States of America matter, give that was 231 years ago? I think you will find that there are many of us that are quite dismayed at the state of things here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower%27s_farewell_address https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower%27s_farewell_addres...
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - gruez 6y ago
      > By the same token, why should the Constitution of the United States of America matter, give that was 231 years ago? because in the case of the new york post, the only thing that remained after 230 years is the branding. The writers, editors, and general "culture" at the newspaper has completely changed. On the other hand, the constitution has remained static. Nothing has changed. We can argue whether this is a bad thing or a good thing, but it's fundamentally incomparable to what happened to the new york post.
      - maxharris 6y ago
        > On the other hand, the constitution has remained static The citizens and institutions and general "culture" of the United States of America has also completely changed since 1789.
        bogomipz 6y ago
        Your original comparison was a newspaper to the constitution. The constitution has in fact changed very little. There have only been 17 changes(amendments) to it since 1791. 17 changes in 229 years is pretty static and add to that any change requires that 2/3s of the states to approve. Also no New Yorker thinks the Post is a serious newspaper. Its most well known features are bad and tasteless puns cover headlines and a gossip page called "Page Six" which itself is not even on the 6th page of the paper.
      - dylan604 6y ago
        >the constitution has remained static. Nothing has changed. I believe the Bill of Rights and the rest of the amendments would disagree with you. That's supposed to be the beauty of the US Constitution is that it was designed to be able to be updated.
        gruez 6y ago
        The difference here is that the older parts of the constitution have a very big impact on our lives today, and they're constantly being discussed/argued over. On the other hand, all the discourse around the new york post is about articles published recently. Accordingly, if a constitutional amendment was passed today, the amount of reverence towards it would be non-existent.
    - dpflan 6y ago
      “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.“
    - whymauri 6y ago
      I'm not an originalist, but the reason is that the Constitution is meant to be a precedent-setting document with legal implications. The Post is no such thing.
- mxmilkb 6y ago
  It wasn't until I read https://thebaffler.com/salvos/hamilton-hustle-stoller https://thebaffler.com/salvos/hamilton-hustle-stoller that I grokked why The Federalist blog was so hard-right. Maybe your comment better helps me understand why the NYP is so hard-right also.
mellosouls 6y ago
Original action being discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24780798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24780798
0xy 6y ago
The post was nuked from the platform based on a policy prohibiting "spreading of hacked material", when Twitter has zero proof the material was sourced via a hack. If they have proof, why haven't they provided it? The majority of sources for the Washington Post and New York Times are leaking classified or privileged information without authorization, most of the time illegally. If they were caught, they'd be in jail. How is this different?
- askl56 6y ago
  And they regularly allow material obtained illegally or without a clear source of origin, including Trump's tax returns. Which twitter included in trending for 4 days.
  - kthxbye123 6y ago
    The NY Post story included personally identifiable information like addresses, e-mail addresses, SSN numbers, etc. The NYTimes story did not contain any such PII. Twitter did not block discussion of the NY Post story, and did not block stories about the contents of the emails that did not contain PII. The number of people who have completely bought the right-wing talking points around this story hook, line, and sinker - without bothering to exercise an ounce of critical thought or independently seek out any of the facts - is absolutely astonishing.
    - Rebelgecko 6y ago
      This story? [1] I didn't notice any SSNs in the article, is there a different article or am I just oblivious? Not redacting the email addresses is rude, but FWIW some of them appear to be defunct now. I only noticed one phone number, and it's not unlisted so its owner was public knowledge before it was published [1]: https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden-introduced-ukrainian-biz-man-to-dad/ https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden...
    - aksss 6y ago
      Wait, now it’s PII that caused the blackout?? The excuses are changing by the watch. We can all read the story. I recommend you check your allegations against the source material. The email addresses are material to the story, and I’m not seeing “PII” in it.
cosmotic 6y ago
ArsTechnica has a much better description of what is going on: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/10/facebook-twitter-limit-controversial-story-about-joe-bidens-son/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/10/facebook-twitter...
- golemotron 6y ago
  That story editorializes and wears its bias on its sleeve. It makes numerous statements about the intent of the story without anything to back them up.
beaner 6y ago
Disappointed in this statement, it comes off as very fake. People are not upset that this event could have been communicated better, they're reasonably pissed that Twitter is very obviously filtering news on its platform for political purposes. There is no evidence that the stuff in question was "hacked," and Twitter itself is becoming a disseminator of disinformation by stating so. But even if it were - they gave no such affordance to, for example, Trump's tax returns, which could have only been hacked/leaked/stolen to be released. That's a straight-up double standard.
- maxharris 6y ago
  I agree with you about this being a double standard. NYT has clearly stated that they obtained Trump's tax records through an anonymous source, i.e., through means no more legal than Trump's sources on Biden: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/27/us/trump-taxes-editors-note.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/27/us/trump-taxes-editors-no... I think they're all shady. Why was there a media blackout on Andrew Yang again? https://vocal.media/theSwamp/a-visual-history-of-the-yang-media-blackout https://vocal.media/theSwamp/a-visual-history-of-the-yang-me... Andrew Yang on Eric Weinstein's podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sa2f0r9W2Mg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sa2f0r9W2Mg
  - akvadrako 6y ago
    Twitter also blocked Bret Weinstein’s “3rd party” initiative in the same way, deleting the account and preventing linking to https://articlesofunity.org/ https://articlesofunity.org/ There isn’t anything objective about their moderation - they just want to help Biden win.
twirlock 6y ago
>not great That's an interesting euphemism for "exploiting lack of competition to shamelessly interfere with an election."
WalterGR 6y ago
It’s always interesting to see the average account-creation date of commenters on politics-heavy subjects. I’m not sure what it means. It seems like perspectives can be correlated with account longevity, but I have no data on this. Perhaps newer accounts are more likely to comment on politics-related articles? Has this been studied in general or on HN specifically?
- softwaredoug 6y ago
  I would guess people regularly create sockpuppet/throwaway accounts to talk about politics. Too much reputational risk to discuss political topics in the open these days...
  - popsuckit 6y ago
    Yes, exactly this. I'm not risking my main, years-old account being banned for getting passionate about a potentially political matter. And it's an opportunity to say what I really think, without being judged by HN's faux-politeness criteria. There's such a large intersection between tech and politics these days, in terms of their effects on each other, that the HN aversion to discussing politics just seems anachronistic and ill-judged.
    - jcims 6y ago
      I feel that HN is reasonably amenable to discussing direct relationships between technology, policy and society. Folks that were here when GDPR got off the ground likely remember quite a bit of the discussion was left untouched and i think we collectively did ok. However it doesn’t seem that humans have figured out how to effectively navigate our differences in the more ideological aspects of governance on a forum like this. Just think of how many times in a personal conversation you are happy to respond with nothing more than a ‘yes, but why?’ vs the same topic being discussed on HN or reddit? Or how much more information is exchanged in the ambience of that moment vs words on a page (and it’s still difficult). Online it’s nearly impossible and what you’re left with are echo chambers and vollies of insults. For my part I appreciate the wet blanket thrown on those types of conversations on HN. I just haven’t seen them yield fruit elsewhere and i appreciate the harbor.
hhs 6y ago
The OP title has limits, this is Jack’s full tweet: “Our communication around our actions on the @nypost article was not great. And blocking URL sharing via tweet or DM with zero context as to why we’re blocking: unacceptable.”
- late2part 6y ago
  But... it was accepted? This word, "unacceptable," I am not sure it means what Jack thinks it means.
  - zachrip 6y ago
    Ignoring how people generally use a word to make a point is pedantry and not useful.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - kaminar 6y ago
    I don't mean to pry, but you wouldn't by chance have 6 fingers on your right hand?
beervirus 6y ago
"Blocking a story because it's helpful to Trump is just fine, but we should have explained our pretextual basis better."
- gruez 6y ago
  Funny enough, the left also thinks twitter is biased towards them. https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/03/politics/twitter-trump-policy-ban-the-squad-politics-trnd/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/03/politics/twitter-trump-policy...
jdkee 6y ago
It reads like Twitter has had to justify their decision ex post facto.
blhack 6y ago
It seems as though several of the tweets on Trump's press secretary's [personal] account have been deleted by twitter. There's something so sad about all of this to me. I "grew up" on the internet where most of my peers would have been furious at twitter for this, and yet here, now, it seems like the pro-fee-speech perspective is the one that is going to get me in trouble for having. The culture has really shifted drastically in the last 10-15 years. Twitter could have been this incredible place where you had democratization of information. Tons of politicians and important public figures are there, and you, a normal person, can interact with them. I have my gripes with twitter, I hate the way they "tweak" the feed to optimize for rage and hatred (but I think as long as you know its there, you can ignore it), but the core idea is so cool. Unfortunately I think we're way past dead now. The world is a worse place because of twitter. There is more hatred, more confusion, more disinformation, and more normalization of the suppression of "wrong" ideas. This is not the world that we all though we were making.
- krapp 6y ago
  "Democratization of information" and meaningful interaction with public figures was never the core idea of Twitter. The core idea was top-of-mind microblogging and virality over SMS. Expecting more from a platform whose core premise is limiting communication to a paragraph or two was always going to be a bad idea.
  - blhack 6y ago
    That's fair, I guess I don't mean twitter specifically, and the shortness of communication is one of the things I don't like. I mean that there was a time when you might dream about a place on the internet where the communication mode I'm describing here (aside from the rage-creating "tweaks" like enforced shortness), where people were freely capable of communicating and interacting with people well outside of their social strata would be normal. Twitter, with it's flaws, is that place. I routinely interact with politicians in my state on twitter. I have no idea where to do that outside of that space. But the problem is that they're going to destroy it because of this stupid, short-sighted idea that they should be in control of what people on the platform are saying.
koolba 6y ago
I love how this story started off this morning getting repeatedly flagged off HN, yet ended up with both a top story with 600+ comments and a direct "we fucked up" response from @jack. Well done.
rdlecler1 6y ago
That’s great. if you’re big they’ll block a couple of articles, but Twitter inexplicably killed our twitter account with 30k followers, an account we had since 2012, with absolutely zero recourse. (we publish original and non political articles on foodtech and agtech and are the site of record for the agrifood tech industry).
- swyx 6y ago
  have you got in touch with any Twitter employees to escalate this?
dividedbyzero 6y ago
It's crazy, Twitter and its peers are now the largest public space and forum in all of history, with no precedent coming remotely close, and we're all in uncharted territory and everyone is struggling, either to get this right, or to gain power and influence through it. To make things worse, the mode of communication, too has completely changed – never before has there been a medium with that reach, such low barriers of entry and such short cycle times, it's completely novel. It's fascinating and scary and very exciting to be a small part of it, really. But as Twitter has become an occasional stage for highest-level international politics, stakes have become much, much higher – it's no longer a relatively niche platform on a medium most people may have heard of on TV, with mostly kinda sorta nerdy, strongly self-selected participants and little to no actual reach and consequence to what happens there. So I get the urge to demand something be done about the ... unintended side effects, especially from people who've been thrust into this new world over the last few years and must find this even more disorienting. Will the current knee-jerk reactions by the platforms work out well? I strongly doubt it. Yet all the the free-for-all, hands-completely-off approach has achieved is to hand vastly outsize influence to those who game it best, often without any transparency at all as to who they even are, and quiet assistance by the platforms themselves in some cases. The last bunch of elections in western societies have illustrated quite well that that's quite certainly not how we should want our democracies to work. So that's not the way to go, either. No idea what we'll end up with when the dust settles, but I expect it will have ended up being a lot harder and a lot more complex to get right than we currently expect it to be. At any rate, the old internet some of us grew up in is no more, it's dead and gone, and it cannot be brought back, in the same way that the neighborhood I grew up in and that has been massively gentrified, modernized and rebuilt, the former neighbors all driven out, cannot be brought back to what it was. The early internet was a unique experiment that may not see its equal for a long time, and it was great to be a part of it, history being made by nerdy people in front of big CRTs and all, and it turned out pretty well, actually – for all the issues the current internet raises, it is doing enormously, mind-boggingly huge amounts of good. But it's now a whole other experiment, and I feel like it's time to move on.

48 points by hhs 6y ago

rmason 6y ago

Did you know that the NY Post was founded by Alexander Hamilton?

gruez 6y ago
Why should that matter, given that was more than 200 years ago? >In 1976, Rupert Murdoch bought the Post for US$30.5 million. [...] The Post has been criticized since the beginning of Murdoch's ownership for sensationalism, blatant advocacy, and conservative bias.
- maxharris 6y ago
  By the same token, why should the Constitution of the United States of America matter, give that was 231 years ago? I think you will find that there are many of us that are quite dismayed at the state of things here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower%27s_farewell_address https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower%27s_farewell_addres...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - gruez 6y ago
    > By the same token, why should the Constitution of the United States of America matter, give that was 231 years ago? because in the case of the new york post, the only thing that remained after 230 years is the branding. The writers, editors, and general "culture" at the newspaper has completely changed. On the other hand, the constitution has remained static. Nothing has changed. We can argue whether this is a bad thing or a good thing, but it's fundamentally incomparable to what happened to the new york post.
    - maxharris 6y ago
      > On the other hand, the constitution has remained static The citizens and institutions and general "culture" of the United States of America has also completely changed since 1789.
      - bogomipz 6y ago
        Your original comparison was a newspaper to the constitution. The constitution has in fact changed very little. There have only been 17 changes(amendments) to it since 1791. 17 changes in 229 years is pretty static and add to that any change requires that 2/3s of the states to approve. Also no New Yorker thinks the Post is a serious newspaper. Its most well known features are bad and tasteless puns cover headlines and a gossip page called "Page Six" which itself is not even on the 6th page of the paper.
    - dylan604 6y ago
      >the constitution has remained static. Nothing has changed. I believe the Bill of Rights and the rest of the amendments would disagree with you. That's supposed to be the beauty of the US Constitution is that it was designed to be able to be updated.
      - gruez 6y ago
        The difference here is that the older parts of the constitution have a very big impact on our lives today, and they're constantly being discussed/argued over. On the other hand, all the discourse around the new york post is about articles published recently. Accordingly, if a constitutional amendment was passed today, the amount of reverence towards it would be non-existent.
  - dpflan 6y ago
    “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.“
  - whymauri 6y ago
    I'm not an originalist, but the reason is that the Constitution is meant to be a precedent-setting document with legal implications. The Post is no such thing.
mxmilkb 6y ago
It wasn't until I read https://thebaffler.com/salvos/hamilton-hustle-stoller https://thebaffler.com/salvos/hamilton-hustle-stoller that I grokked why The Federalist blog was so hard-right. Maybe your comment better helps me understand why the NYP is so hard-right also.

mellosouls 6y ago

Original action being discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24780798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24780798

0xy 6y ago

The post was nuked from the platform based on a policy prohibiting "spreading of hacked material", when Twitter has zero proof the material was sourced via a hack. If they have proof, why haven't they provided it? The majority of sources for the Washington Post and New York Times are leaking classified or privileged information without authorization, most of the time illegally. If they were caught, they'd be in jail. How is this different?

askl56 6y ago
And they regularly allow material obtained illegally or without a clear source of origin, including Trump's tax returns. Which twitter included in trending for 4 days.
- kthxbye123 6y ago
  The NY Post story included personally identifiable information like addresses, e-mail addresses, SSN numbers, etc. The NYTimes story did not contain any such PII. Twitter did not block discussion of the NY Post story, and did not block stories about the contents of the emails that did not contain PII. The number of people who have completely bought the right-wing talking points around this story hook, line, and sinker - without bothering to exercise an ounce of critical thought or independently seek out any of the facts - is absolutely astonishing.
  - Rebelgecko 6y ago
    This story? [1] I didn't notice any SSNs in the article, is there a different article or am I just oblivious? Not redacting the email addresses is rude, but FWIW some of them appear to be defunct now. I only noticed one phone number, and it's not unlisted so its owner was public knowledge before it was published [1]: https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden-introduced-ukrainian-biz-man-to-dad/ https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden...
  - aksss 6y ago
    Wait, now it’s PII that caused the blackout?? The excuses are changing by the watch. We can all read the story. I recommend you check your allegations against the source material. The email addresses are material to the story, and I’m not seeing “PII” in it.

cosmotic 6y ago

ArsTechnica has a much better description of what is going on: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/10/facebook-twitter-limit-controversial-story-about-joe-bidens-son/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/10/facebook-twitter...

golemotron 6y ago
That story editorializes and wears its bias on its sleeve. It makes numerous statements about the intent of the story without anything to back them up.

beaner 6y ago

Disappointed in this statement, it comes off as very fake. People are not upset that this event could have been communicated better, they're reasonably pissed that Twitter is very obviously filtering news on its platform for political purposes. There is no evidence that the stuff in question was "hacked," and Twitter itself is becoming a disseminator of disinformation by stating so. But even if it were - they gave no such affordance to, for example, Trump's tax returns, which could have only been hacked/leaked/stolen to be released. That's a straight-up double standard.

maxharris 6y ago
I agree with you about this being a double standard. NYT has clearly stated that they obtained Trump's tax records through an anonymous source, i.e., through means no more legal than Trump's sources on Biden: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/27/us/trump-taxes-editors-note.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/27/us/trump-taxes-editors-no... I think they're all shady. Why was there a media blackout on Andrew Yang again? https://vocal.media/theSwamp/a-visual-history-of-the-yang-media-blackout https://vocal.media/theSwamp/a-visual-history-of-the-yang-me... Andrew Yang on Eric Weinstein's podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sa2f0r9W2Mg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sa2f0r9W2Mg
- akvadrako 6y ago
  Twitter also blocked Bret Weinstein’s “3rd party” initiative in the same way, deleting the account and preventing linking to https://articlesofunity.org/ https://articlesofunity.org/ There isn’t anything objective about their moderation - they just want to help Biden win.

twirlock 6y ago

>not great That's an interesting euphemism for "exploiting lack of competition to shamelessly interfere with an election."

WalterGR 6y ago

It’s always interesting to see the average account-creation date of commenters on politics-heavy subjects. I’m not sure what it means. It seems like perspectives can be correlated with account longevity, but I have no data on this. Perhaps newer accounts are more likely to comment on politics-related articles? Has this been studied in general or on HN specifically?

softwaredoug 6y ago
I would guess people regularly create sockpuppet/throwaway accounts to talk about politics. Too much reputational risk to discuss political topics in the open these days...
- popsuckit 6y ago
  Yes, exactly this. I'm not risking my main, years-old account being banned for getting passionate about a potentially political matter. And it's an opportunity to say what I really think, without being judged by HN's faux-politeness criteria. There's such a large intersection between tech and politics these days, in terms of their effects on each other, that the HN aversion to discussing politics just seems anachronistic and ill-judged.
  - jcims 6y ago
    I feel that HN is reasonably amenable to discussing direct relationships between technology, policy and society. Folks that were here when GDPR got off the ground likely remember quite a bit of the discussion was left untouched and i think we collectively did ok. However it doesn’t seem that humans have figured out how to effectively navigate our differences in the more ideological aspects of governance on a forum like this. Just think of how many times in a personal conversation you are happy to respond with nothing more than a ‘yes, but why?’ vs the same topic being discussed on HN or reddit? Or how much more information is exchanged in the ambience of that moment vs words on a page (and it’s still difficult). Online it’s nearly impossible and what you’re left with are echo chambers and vollies of insults. For my part I appreciate the wet blanket thrown on those types of conversations on HN. I just haven’t seen them yield fruit elsewhere and i appreciate the harbor.

hhs 6y ago

The OP title has limits, this is Jack’s full tweet: “Our communication around our actions on the @nypost article was not great. And blocking URL sharing via tweet or DM with zero context as to why we’re blocking: unacceptable.”

late2part 6y ago
But... it was accepted? This word, "unacceptable," I am not sure it means what Jack thinks it means.
- zachrip 6y ago
  Ignoring how people generally use a word to make a point is pedantry and not useful.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- kaminar 6y ago
  I don't mean to pry, but you wouldn't by chance have 6 fingers on your right hand?

beervirus 6y ago

"Blocking a story because it's helpful to Trump is just fine, but we should have explained our pretextual basis better."

gruez 6y ago
Funny enough, the left also thinks twitter is biased towards them. https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/03/politics/twitter-trump-policy-ban-the-squad-politics-trnd/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/03/politics/twitter-trump-policy...

jdkee 6y ago

It reads like Twitter has had to justify their decision ex post facto.

blhack 6y ago

It seems as though several of the tweets on Trump's press secretary's [personal] account have been deleted by twitter. There's something so sad about all of this to me. I "grew up" on the internet where most of my peers would have been furious at twitter for this, and yet here, now, it seems like the pro-fee-speech perspective is the one that is going to get me in trouble for having. The culture has really shifted drastically in the last 10-15 years. Twitter could have been this incredible place where you had democratization of information. Tons of politicians and important public figures are there, and you, a normal person, can interact with them. I have my gripes with twitter, I hate the way they "tweak" the feed to optimize for rage and hatred (but I think as long as you know its there, you can ignore it), but the core idea is so cool. Unfortunately I think we're way past dead now. The world is a worse place because of twitter. There is more hatred, more confusion, more disinformation, and more normalization of the suppression of "wrong" ideas. This is not the world that we all though we were making.

krapp 6y ago
"Democratization of information" and meaningful interaction with public figures was never the core idea of Twitter. The core idea was top-of-mind microblogging and virality over SMS. Expecting more from a platform whose core premise is limiting communication to a paragraph or two was always going to be a bad idea.
- blhack 6y ago
  That's fair, I guess I don't mean twitter specifically, and the shortness of communication is one of the things I don't like. I mean that there was a time when you might dream about a place on the internet where the communication mode I'm describing here (aside from the rage-creating "tweaks" like enforced shortness), where people were freely capable of communicating and interacting with people well outside of their social strata would be normal. Twitter, with it's flaws, is that place. I routinely interact with politicians in my state on twitter. I have no idea where to do that outside of that space. But the problem is that they're going to destroy it because of this stupid, short-sighted idea that they should be in control of what people on the platform are saying.

koolba 6y ago

I love how this story started off this morning getting repeatedly flagged off HN, yet ended up with both a top story with 600+ comments and a direct "we fucked up" response from @jack. Well done.

rdlecler1 6y ago

That’s great. if you’re big they’ll block a couple of articles, but Twitter inexplicably killed our twitter account with 30k followers, an account we had since 2012, with absolutely zero recourse. (we publish original and non political articles on foodtech and agtech and are the site of record for the agrifood tech industry).

swyx 6y ago
have you got in touch with any Twitter employees to escalate this?

dividedbyzero 6y ago

It's crazy, Twitter and its peers are now the largest public space and forum in all of history, with no precedent coming remotely close, and we're all in uncharted territory and everyone is struggling, either to get this right, or to gain power and influence through it. To make things worse, the mode of communication, too has completely changed – never before has there been a medium with that reach, such low barriers of entry and such short cycle times, it's completely novel. It's fascinating and scary and very exciting to be a small part of it, really. But as Twitter has become an occasional stage for highest-level international politics, stakes have become much, much higher – it's no longer a relatively niche platform on a medium most people may have heard of on TV, with mostly kinda sorta nerdy, strongly self-selected participants and little to no actual reach and consequence to what happens there. So I get the urge to demand something be done about the ... unintended side effects, especially from people who've been thrust into this new world over the last few years and must find this even more disorienting. Will the current knee-jerk reactions by the platforms work out well? I strongly doubt it. Yet all the the free-for-all, hands-completely-off approach has achieved is to hand vastly outsize influence to those who game it best, often without any transparency at all as to who they even are, and quiet assistance by the platforms themselves in some cases. The last bunch of elections in western societies have illustrated quite well that that's quite certainly not how we should want our democracies to work. So that's not the way to go, either. No idea what we'll end up with when the dust settles, but I expect it will have ended up being a lot harder and a lot more complex to get right than we currently expect it to be. At any rate, the old internet some of us grew up in is no more, it's dead and gone, and it cannot be brought back, in the same way that the neighborhood I grew up in and that has been massively gentrified, modernized and rebuilt, the former neighbors all driven out, cannot be brought back to what it was. The early internet was a unique experiment that may not see its equal for a long time, and it was great to be a part of it, history being made by nerdy people in front of big CRTs and all, and it turned out pretty well, actually – for all the issues the current internet raises, it is doing enormously, mind-boggingly huge amounts of good. But it's now a whole other experiment, and I feel like it's time to move on.