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People who engage with social media do so freely. If the content wasn't what they wanted or sought out, it wouldn't be popular and successful. Would you rather

People who engage with social media do so freely. If the content wasn't what they wanted or sought out, it wouldn't be popular and successful. Would you rather have it policed? A grand council that determines which algorithms you may enjoy and which are verboten?

dmitriid 5y ago
> Would you rather have it policed It is being policed? What do think algorithmic feeds are?
- nickelpro 5y ago
  They're content referrers that people are free to engage or disengage with at their leisure. If you don't like Twitter's content you can go use Youtube, or TikTok, or Facebook, or HN. What I wouldn't want is some government agency telling me I'm not allowed to use Twitter for my own good. Or that the content I enjoy on [insert social media network] must change because HN finds it objectionable.
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    I think what you’re saying is true - We have the choice to pick another platform. But, I fear they’ll shut it down just like they did with Parlor. Besides the choice of what platform to choose, people’s lives destroyed by Twitter mob whether they have a Twitter account or not. This is just not right. Activism by cancelling people. If you’ve got issue with someone, go through the proper channels and not publicly. There are cases when that’s needed and that’s why we have whistleblower laws. But, destroying someone’s career because they don’t share progressive views!?
    - nickelpro 5y ago
      Ya man, that's social structures and public life. That's humanity. Twitter's got nothing to do with it, it's just the latest platform. Before Jack Dorsey and Twitter it was Cronkite on CBS, before Cronkite it was Pulitzer, Hearst, and their newpapers, and before them it was the Church. At least now you've got your choice of platforms, just because some movements on some of the popular ones don't align with your personal views doesn't make the platform the problem.
      - systemvoltage 5y ago
        I don’t know. I used to think social media has connected people but last 5 years of it - these platforms are creating a new compliance culture that deeply bothers me. I don’t even care about people wasting their time and adtech, fundamentally it’s creating divisiveness and eroding freedom of expression (of course not strictly, but implicitly the chilling effect is real).
dTal 5y ago
>People who engage with social media do so freely. If the content wasn't what they wanted or sought out, it wouldn't be popular and successful. That's quite an assumption, one that is frequently called into question on this very site. The very largest social media sites have growth strategies unavailable to smaller competitors - "the rich get richer". People who want to participate in any social media are forced to join the largest ones purely to follow the crowd. When I'm out and about in the real world and I see small handfuls of social media icons plastered on things, it doesn't feel like a "free marketplace of idea" - it feels like society intentionally facilitates and encourages the use of a select few services. And yes, when they get large enough to be de-facto infrastructure - like Facebook did - absolutely there should be a council of acceptable algorithms. We can't let for-profit companies decide the terms of discourse of society at large.
- nickelpro 5y ago
  How is it an assumption? Are you saying that people are using Facebook under threat of violence? Or are you saying that peer pressure wouldn't exist if it weren't for TikTok and Twitter forcing us all to become followers? These are natural human social structures being extended by technology. Celebrities existed long before they were posting their butts on Insta. And just like you could choose to not engage with celebrity culture before the internet, you can choose to not engage now. That's the definition of free association and the free market of ideas. > absolutely there should be a council of acceptable algorithms Ya we're on completely different wavelengths about how governance works then. That's insanity to me. If I don't like facebooks content I just log off facebook, I wouldn't never think it appropriate to dictate in law what speech can or cannot be produced.
  - dTal 5y ago
    >Are you saying that people are using Facebook under threat of violence Please. Nowhere in my comment did I even remotely hint at that. It's disappointing to spend time on a nuanced comment and be met with such a ridiculous strawman. People are nudged towards Facebook and other social networks in all sorts of ways, but not generally violently, no. I could spend more time replying to the rest of your comment, but honestly I'm not inclined to after that.
systemvoltage 5y ago
Uhh… try speaking against progressivism as a professor. You’ll get cancelled on Twitter followed by a letter from the Dean you’re fired. This is the fear and reality of all this freedom of expression we have. All free speech unless ofcourse you disagree. I’m only slightly exaggerating.
- nickelpro 5y ago
  That's always been true? If you say something your boss hates, your boss has always been free to fire you. If you're a cashier and all the customers hate you, you're also getting fired.
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    I don’t think this is a matter of liking someone. Replace political views with religion and we provide protections against discrimination of someone based on their religion. Let me spell out the problem more clearly, it’s not as simple as your boss not liking you. 1) Coworker gets to find out someone doesn’t share their political beliefs. 2) They try to get moral superiority over the person … because disagreeing with their wokeness is immoral and it’s escalated from a minor disagreement to full blown moral superiority campaign. 3) Publicly denounce them. Unleash the Twitter mob. 4) Eventually it gets to the top management chain and they’re gonna fire this person who just a few years ago would have just been involved in a minor disagreement about politics in the coffee room. If hope you can agree this is a problem, IMO has profound implications for the society.
    - nickelpro 5y ago
      I don't see how what your upset about is new or connected to social networks. McCarthyism existed two decades before the first networked computers and was the exact same thing as what you're describing. I agree, people are shitty, but trying to legally limit the speech of people you don't like is exactly opposite the values of free ideas that we usually try to support. Or at least the ones that I support.
oarsinsync 5y ago
> People who engage with social media do so freely. If the content wasn't what they wanted or sought out, it wouldn't be popular and successful. My local tennis club only publishes to Twitter. They do not operate a mailing list anymore. I want to play tennis, be notified of same day court cancellations, be notified when new classes are available to book. I don’t want to use social media. What do I do? Give up tennis? Move to a different district where they don’t use Twitter? Set up a gofundme to depend on strangers to stump up for private lessons? Or suck it up and be an unwilling user of social media? So I suck it up and use Twitter.
- nickelpro 5y ago
  If they only published the information via newsletter you'd need to subscribe to that. If they only advertised via newspaper spots you'd need to subscribe to the paper. These are natural social pressures that you're succumbing to and that's fine, that's how society works. None of us is an island. In any case, you're not being forced to engage with Twitter's algorithm _beyond_ what you've bought into via your engagement with the tennis club. And the tennis club wasn't forced to engage with Twitter in the first place, they chose to.
  - toomanybeersies 5y ago
    > you're not being forced to engage with Twitter's algorithm Maybe not forced, but strongly encouraged. On mobile, a quarter of my screen is taken up with prompts for me to join Twitter. Before it was made illegal in the USA and the UK in the 1930s, nobody "forced" children to work, they chose to (with the alternative of starvation). Regardless of their right to choose, child labour was seen as a harmful practice and subsequently outlawed. That being said, I'm not equating Twitter to child labour. My point is that the fact we are not "forced" to do something doesn't mean it's right, or should be allowed.
    - nickelpro 5y ago
      And my point is that your personal annoyance with the nature and content of information in public forums isn't a valid basis for legal censorship.

dmitriid 5y ago

> Would you rather have it policed It is being policed? What do think algorithmic feeds are?

nickelpro 5y ago
They're content referrers that people are free to engage or disengage with at their leisure. If you don't like Twitter's content you can go use Youtube, or TikTok, or Facebook, or HN. What I wouldn't want is some government agency telling me I'm not allowed to use Twitter for my own good. Or that the content I enjoy on [insert social media network] must change because HN finds it objectionable.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  I think what you’re saying is true - We have the choice to pick another platform. But, I fear they’ll shut it down just like they did with Parlor. Besides the choice of what platform to choose, people’s lives destroyed by Twitter mob whether they have a Twitter account or not. This is just not right. Activism by cancelling people. If you’ve got issue with someone, go through the proper channels and not publicly. There are cases when that’s needed and that’s why we have whistleblower laws. But, destroying someone’s career because they don’t share progressive views!?
  - nickelpro 5y ago
    Ya man, that's social structures and public life. That's humanity. Twitter's got nothing to do with it, it's just the latest platform. Before Jack Dorsey and Twitter it was Cronkite on CBS, before Cronkite it was Pulitzer, Hearst, and their newpapers, and before them it was the Church. At least now you've got your choice of platforms, just because some movements on some of the popular ones don't align with your personal views doesn't make the platform the problem.
    - systemvoltage 5y ago
      I don’t know. I used to think social media has connected people but last 5 years of it - these platforms are creating a new compliance culture that deeply bothers me. I don’t even care about people wasting their time and adtech, fundamentally it’s creating divisiveness and eroding freedom of expression (of course not strictly, but implicitly the chilling effect is real).

dTal 5y ago

>People who engage with social media do so freely. If the content wasn't what they wanted or sought out, it wouldn't be popular and successful. That's quite an assumption, one that is frequently called into question on this very site. The very largest social media sites have growth strategies unavailable to smaller competitors - "the rich get richer". People who want to participate in any social media are forced to join the largest ones purely to follow the crowd. When I'm out and about in the real world and I see small handfuls of social media icons plastered on things, it doesn't feel like a "free marketplace of idea" - it feels like society intentionally facilitates and encourages the use of a select few services. And yes, when they get large enough to be de-facto infrastructure - like Facebook did - absolutely there should be a council of acceptable algorithms. We can't let for-profit companies decide the terms of discourse of society at large.

nickelpro 5y ago
How is it an assumption? Are you saying that people are using Facebook under threat of violence? Or are you saying that peer pressure wouldn't exist if it weren't for TikTok and Twitter forcing us all to become followers? These are natural human social structures being extended by technology. Celebrities existed long before they were posting their butts on Insta. And just like you could choose to not engage with celebrity culture before the internet, you can choose to not engage now. That's the definition of free association and the free market of ideas. > absolutely there should be a council of acceptable algorithms Ya we're on completely different wavelengths about how governance works then. That's insanity to me. If I don't like facebooks content I just log off facebook, I wouldn't never think it appropriate to dictate in law what speech can or cannot be produced.
- dTal 5y ago
  >Are you saying that people are using Facebook under threat of violence Please. Nowhere in my comment did I even remotely hint at that. It's disappointing to spend time on a nuanced comment and be met with such a ridiculous strawman. People are nudged towards Facebook and other social networks in all sorts of ways, but not generally violently, no. I could spend more time replying to the rest of your comment, but honestly I'm not inclined to after that.

systemvoltage 5y ago

Uhh… try speaking against progressivism as a professor. You’ll get cancelled on Twitter followed by a letter from the Dean you’re fired. This is the fear and reality of all this freedom of expression we have. All free speech unless ofcourse you disagree. I’m only slightly exaggerating.

nickelpro 5y ago
That's always been true? If you say something your boss hates, your boss has always been free to fire you. If you're a cashier and all the customers hate you, you're also getting fired.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  I don’t think this is a matter of liking someone. Replace political views with religion and we provide protections against discrimination of someone based on their religion. Let me spell out the problem more clearly, it’s not as simple as your boss not liking you. 1) Coworker gets to find out someone doesn’t share their political beliefs. 2) They try to get moral superiority over the person … because disagreeing with their wokeness is immoral and it’s escalated from a minor disagreement to full blown moral superiority campaign. 3) Publicly denounce them. Unleash the Twitter mob. 4) Eventually it gets to the top management chain and they’re gonna fire this person who just a few years ago would have just been involved in a minor disagreement about politics in the coffee room. If hope you can agree this is a problem, IMO has profound implications for the society.
  - nickelpro 5y ago
    I don't see how what your upset about is new or connected to social networks. McCarthyism existed two decades before the first networked computers and was the exact same thing as what you're describing. I agree, people are shitty, but trying to legally limit the speech of people you don't like is exactly opposite the values of free ideas that we usually try to support. Or at least the ones that I support.

oarsinsync 5y ago

> People who engage with social media do so freely. If the content wasn't what they wanted or sought out, it wouldn't be popular and successful. My local tennis club only publishes to Twitter. They do not operate a mailing list anymore. I want to play tennis, be notified of same day court cancellations, be notified when new classes are available to book. I don’t want to use social media. What do I do? Give up tennis? Move to a different district where they don’t use Twitter? Set up a gofundme to depend on strangers to stump up for private lessons? Or suck it up and be an unwilling user of social media? So I suck it up and use Twitter.

nickelpro 5y ago
If they only published the information via newsletter you'd need to subscribe to that. If they only advertised via newspaper spots you'd need to subscribe to the paper. These are natural social pressures that you're succumbing to and that's fine, that's how society works. None of us is an island. In any case, you're not being forced to engage with Twitter's algorithm _beyond_ what you've bought into via your engagement with the tennis club. And the tennis club wasn't forced to engage with Twitter in the first place, they chose to.
- toomanybeersies 5y ago
  > you're not being forced to engage with Twitter's algorithm Maybe not forced, but strongly encouraged. On mobile, a quarter of my screen is taken up with prompts for me to join Twitter. Before it was made illegal in the USA and the UK in the 1930s, nobody "forced" children to work, they chose to (with the alternative of starvation). Regardless of their right to choose, child labour was seen as a harmful practice and subsequently outlawed. That being said, I'm not equating Twitter to child labour. My point is that the fact we are not "forced" to do something doesn't mean it's right, or should be allowed.
  - nickelpro 5y ago
    And my point is that your personal annoyance with the nature and content of information in public forums isn't a valid basis for legal censorship.