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There's no mention here of moderation, a key ingredient to any social network of people who lack real-world ties to each other.

by muglug 5y ago

pfraze 5y ago
It is, and we're talking with people who do trust & safety at Twitter to make sure we're approaching it right. To be clear, we're really in the early stages of the project. This post is just the stuff we have a clear concept about, and even that's just an early prototype (which we'll put on github soon). I could talk about some of the approaches we're looking at for moderation but it's just really early, and I don't want to talk out the wrong end. All I can say is, we talk about it a lot.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 5y ago
  Could you also talk to the web team about re-adding the vertical scrollbar? It's an important UI element.
- jfengel 5y ago
  I really appreciate that you're at least thinking about it. Community is a bit like security: you can't just layer it on after building the "cool parts" of your system. The name "trust & safety" makes the parallel even more clear. It's harder to set rigorous definitions for community than it is for security. So it will likely change as the project evolves. But if you ignore it entirely, and just hope it will work itself out, you'll be in a continuous state of crisis-fighting.
- leeroyjenkins11 5y ago
  It's hard to take a project that calls for decentralization using twitters trust and safety people as a source. The company that killed a relevant true story during a presidential election should disqualify them. Unless the advice is used as a template in what not to do.
  - muglug 5y ago
    One controversial decision does not define that team, which spends the vast majority of its time dealing with uncontroversially awful content.
- 6510 5y ago
  I often discover in hindsight that what I thought was the core mechanic was really not in the top 3. Distributing content is the nr 1 from the users perspective. It is what we think we want. What we really want is interesting content and interesting dialog. Getting rid of garbage should be a side effect of that. Something you get for free along with it. I imagine it easy to make the mistake to aim to get rid of trash and put much effort towards that while really it should be zero. One might even chose to tolerate a sub set of trash if the author performed sufficiently.
wolverine876 5y ago
I'd go further and say that our toxic social media environments are a far more damaging, dangerous, and unsolved problem - possibly more than litterly any problem in the world, IMHO - than decentralized communication, and this project addresses the latter. And I strongly believe in decentralized social media, far prefer Usenet (RIP) to Twitter, and have from the start. But it's a solvable problem (Signal is working toward it, Matrix, existing solutions like Mastadon, etc.), they just need to attract development investment and, most of all, the hardest part, attract users. And Twitter seems to have bought into the toxicity, bringing in one of the few leading popularizers and uses of that subculture - trolling, mis- and disinformation, manipulation, corruption of power, etc. - onto their board. And rather than decentralizing power in our society, they've concentrated more of it in the richest person in the world, who already adds to that a cult of personality, and now has significant influence over one of the largest public communication forums.

There's no mention here of moderation, a key ingredient to any social network of people who lack real-world ties to each other.

by muglug 5y ago

There's no mention here of moderation, a key ingredient to any social network of people who lack real-world ties to each other.

pfraze 5y ago

It is, and we're talking with people who do trust & safety at Twitter to make sure we're approaching it right. To be clear, we're really in the early stages of the project. This post is just the stuff we have a clear concept about, and even that's just an early prototype (which we'll put on github soon). I could talk about some of the approaches we're looking at for moderation but it's just really early, and I don't want to talk out the wrong end. All I can say is, we talk about it a lot.

ad404b8a372f2b9 5y ago
Could you also talk to the web team about re-adding the vertical scrollbar? It's an important UI element.
jfengel 5y ago
I really appreciate that you're at least thinking about it. Community is a bit like security: you can't just layer it on after building the "cool parts" of your system. The name "trust & safety" makes the parallel even more clear. It's harder to set rigorous definitions for community than it is for security. So it will likely change as the project evolves. But if you ignore it entirely, and just hope it will work itself out, you'll be in a continuous state of crisis-fighting.
leeroyjenkins11 5y ago
It's hard to take a project that calls for decentralization using twitters trust and safety people as a source. The company that killed a relevant true story during a presidential election should disqualify them. Unless the advice is used as a template in what not to do.
- muglug 5y ago
  One controversial decision does not define that team, which spends the vast majority of its time dealing with uncontroversially awful content.
6510 5y ago
I often discover in hindsight that what I thought was the core mechanic was really not in the top 3. Distributing content is the nr 1 from the users perspective. It is what we think we want. What we really want is interesting content and interesting dialog. Getting rid of garbage should be a side effect of that. Something you get for free along with it. I imagine it easy to make the mistake to aim to get rid of trash and put much effort towards that while really it should be zero. One might even chose to tolerate a sub set of trash if the author performed sufficiently.

wolverine876 5y ago

I'd go further and say that our toxic social media environments are a far more damaging, dangerous, and unsolved problem - possibly more than litterly any problem in the world, IMHO - than decentralized communication, and this project addresses the latter. And I strongly believe in decentralized social media, far prefer Usenet (RIP) to Twitter, and have from the start. But it's a solvable problem (Signal is working toward it, Matrix, existing solutions like Mastadon, etc.), they just need to attract development investment and, most of all, the hardest part, attract users. And Twitter seems to have bought into the toxicity, bringing in one of the few leading popularizers and uses of that subculture - trolling, mis- and disinformation, manipulation, corruption of power, etc. - onto their board. And rather than decentralizing power in our society, they've concentrated more of it in the richest person in the world, who already adds to that a cult of personality, and now has significant influence over one of the largest public communication forums.