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FWIW, the core thing to me is that if I hide a reply to one of my tweets, it should actually not be seen by people who started from my tweet... certainly not by

by saurik 5y ago

FWIW, the core thing to me is that if I hide a reply to one of my tweets, it should actually not be seen by people who started from my tweet... certainly not by people who didn't even follow the person who left the reply. This is the feature that is really needed to help deal with horrible people, not a centralized filter mechanism for "offensive content" that will result in some weirdly-biased censorship. The issue is that when people reply to my tweets, they are trying to use my audience to push their message. If they have their own followers, OK: that's them talking to their people. But they want to talk to my audience. And they might have something shitty or spammy to say, and their coming back to my threads to say it hurts my ability to communicate with my audience. So, Twitter finally gave us a feature to hide these replies, which was almost great... except somehow it does the opposite?! It takes the message, which might have, in practice, been semi-buried in a pile of a hundred replies, and elevates it by giving the hidden replies a special icon and their own panel. I wanted to hide the hate speech, not feature it! To make it even more ridiculous, users often get a pop-up a box to remind then "hey you can find the hidden replies here"... it frankly totally undermines the point of the feature. If I hid it, it should be hidden... at least from people who started from my tweets, and at least if they don't follow the person who posted the message (I don't want to limit the ability for people to communicate with their own followers). (FWIW, I hopefully-clearly totally feel for the premise that Twitter should be something of a utility and that people should get to communicate with people who opted-in to what they had to say, but this ability to reply to someone else's message isn't that. If you have further consistency issues with my premise, I will note that in a system I would personally design, all replies would be hidden by default and users would have to manually mark them as visible to their audience, at which point they would take on the moral responsibility for the content, at which point I believe you could have truly uncensored follower-to-user and user-to-follower interaction, which I think should be a goal. I only really say any of this, though, to make my complaint consistent with my past complaints: I currently consider the premise of this complaint to stand-alone and be consistent with itself given the reason this feature theoretically exists, which it seems to not satisfy... it was like a half-assed mistake of a mitigation, and now we are seeing them start to play whack-a-mole.)

zxcb1 5y ago
Eventually, when Twitter has become not Twitter, someone will reinvent Twitter.
trident5000 5y ago
The problem with doing this is that you will essentially get a social oligarch where nobody can say opposing views to people with the most followers. Big twitter handles should not have complete censorship control they should take feedback for what they say and it should be viewed imo.
- saurik 5y ago
  The people with the most followers have the most followers for some reason, and that reason isn't as inherently biased as you would think, or there wouldn't be such caustic arguments about people trying to ban each other off Twitter. I strongly believe in your right to free speech and a right for you to say anything you want... I do not, however, believe you have any right to be heard by people who didn't care to listen. If you have something worthy of being said, you should use that to build an audience of people who bother to follow you, so when you say something controversial you have people who will hear it... and we should be building a system that ensures that that can happen without interference. You shouldn't just get to reply to someone else and shove stuff at their audience, if nothing else because that doesn't scale. In my case, and to show that I have some "skin in the game" here: I happen to have a rather large following of people who listen to my let's-call-them-"rants" about Apple (and sometimes Google and Facebook, but my audience mostly cares about Apple), a company with much larger resources than I do... because I have something valuable to say on the subject and have built my audience up by being a trustworthy and even unique source of information. But, I shouldn't get to force my rants about Apple onto Apple's audience of people who don't know I exist and who only wanted to sign up to listen to Tim Cook or talk to Apple's corporate support or communication lines... that's just me clogging up their communication channels. People should get to opt-in to my content no matter what I want to say, but that doesn't mean I should get to force what I say on anyone. Put another way: the problem with not doing this is that you get what I guess Twitter kind of is (and it sucks): a place where the people who shout the loudest and post the most message volume--almost certainly because they have too much time on their hands from having nothing else valuable to do with their lives--manage to get the most "space" on the platform by just going around replying to people who are trying to provide high-value content. This current situation, I will then also argue, is much worse for the goal of the little guy/gal with the niche opinion: it implies that the platform and the zeitgeist get to co-determine what is shit/spam via some horrible combination of a centralized (and clearly biased) overseer reacting to a "tyranny of the majority" (or sometimes an authoritarian government), which results in a world where you don't even get to talk to your own followers, much less mine. This much-more-serious censorship--with people losing their accounts or their tweets getting filtered by centralized moderation based on keywords in an attempt to scale this process across all accounts at once--is a downstream effect of attempting to almost provide a "right to be heard", because we do generally want--nay: need--the ability to filter shit/spam from the platform: but to scale and be fair it needs to be done at the level of individual users and their own audiences, not with centralized filters for the entire community.

by saurik 5y ago

zxcb1 5y ago

Eventually, when Twitter has become not Twitter, someone will reinvent Twitter.

trident5000 5y ago

The problem with doing this is that you will essentially get a social oligarch where nobody can say opposing views to people with the most followers. Big twitter handles should not have complete censorship control they should take feedback for what they say and it should be viewed imo.

saurik 5y ago
The people with the most followers have the most followers for some reason, and that reason isn't as inherently biased as you would think, or there wouldn't be such caustic arguments about people trying to ban each other off Twitter. I strongly believe in your right to free speech and a right for you to say anything you want... I do not, however, believe you have any right to be heard by people who didn't care to listen. If you have something worthy of being said, you should use that to build an audience of people who bother to follow you, so when you say something controversial you have people who will hear it... and we should be building a system that ensures that that can happen without interference. You shouldn't just get to reply to someone else and shove stuff at their audience, if nothing else because that doesn't scale. In my case, and to show that I have some "skin in the game" here: I happen to have a rather large following of people who listen to my let's-call-them-"rants" about Apple (and sometimes Google and Facebook, but my audience mostly cares about Apple), a company with much larger resources than I do... because I have something valuable to say on the subject and have built my audience up by being a trustworthy and even unique source of information. But, I shouldn't get to force my rants about Apple onto Apple's audience of people who don't know I exist and who only wanted to sign up to listen to Tim Cook or talk to Apple's corporate support or communication lines... that's just me clogging up their communication channels. People should get to opt-in to my content no matter what I want to say, but that doesn't mean I should get to force what I say on anyone. Put another way: the problem with not doing this is that you get what I guess Twitter kind of is (and it sucks): a place where the people who shout the loudest and post the most message volume--almost certainly because they have too much time on their hands from having nothing else valuable to do with their lives--manage to get the most "space" on the platform by just going around replying to people who are trying to provide high-value content. This current situation, I will then also argue, is much worse for the goal of the little guy/gal with the niche opinion: it implies that the platform and the zeitgeist get to co-determine what is shit/spam via some horrible combination of a centralized (and clearly biased) overseer reacting to a "tyranny of the majority" (or sometimes an authoritarian government), which results in a world where you don't even get to talk to your own followers, much less mine. This much-more-serious censorship--with people losing their accounts or their tweets getting filtered by centralized moderation based on keywords in an attempt to scale this process across all accounts at once--is a downstream effect of attempting to almost provide a "right to be heard", because we do generally want--nay: need--the ability to filter shit/spam from the platform: but to scale and be fair it needs to be done at the level of individual users and their own audiences, not with centralized filters for the entire community.