6 ms·

Comedians like Stephan Fry left exactly because people were saying whatever they wanted and being abusive. You can't have it both ways.

macinjosh 5y ago
- citizenkeen 5y ago
  Do you know who Stephen Fry is?
  - oska 5y ago
    - bombcar 5y ago
      Twitter is/was unique in that there was a minuscule chance that someone rich and famous would actually read a regular response to a tweet, especially if it got a lot of traction. And that is what scares some people. The only other place I’ve seen it happen is some Reddit AMAs and it was always clear which ones were being coordinated by PR and which got unhinged and out of control.
- karpierz 5y ago
  Yes, but unironically.
core-utility 5y ago
People will be hurtful and abusive no matter how moderated the platform is. Even HN has its share of colorful commentary from time to time. If individuals here and there decide it's best for them to not be on any social media, nothing the platform can do - even if it brings more users overall - will keep those individuals.
- yvdriess 5y ago
  > People will be hurtful and abusive no matter how moderated the platform is. In a well moderated environment, only once. Or at least, once in between probations.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- tablespoon 5y ago
  >>> If elon removes bots, welcomes non-extremists back on, gets comedians and entertaining accounts back on board and lets people say what they want instead a bot army of shills repeating verbatim over and over and over... >> Comedians like Stephan Fry left exactly because people were saying whatever they wanted and being abusive. You can't have it both ways. > People will be hurtful and abusive no matter how moderated the platform is. Which only proves the point that the GGP's formula for Twitter's success doesn't add up. Also, we're not talking about a binary condition, but one of degree. If people are leaving now because of too much of "people ... saying whatever they want... and being abusive," it's reasonable to assume more people like that will leave as the moderation lightens up. Other people might join because of the policy change, but I doubt they'll be "comedians and entertaining accounts."
  - wtetzner 5y ago
    > Which only proves the point that the GGP's formula for Twitter's success doesn't add up. I don't think that proves anything. It's an example of one person.
  - wowokay 5y ago
    I think discussion chains like this showcase a lot of misunderstandings around how twitter fundamentally works. Most companies, figures, games, movies, etc have twitter accounts to convey information or offer support. If anything Musks ambitions will draw more of those entities back, especially ones that were not aligned with the twitters political views. Sure, it is social media, but the individual users that used to use twitter like Facebook, browsing trends etc have left for the next new platform, for example TikTok.
nullc 5y ago
Not clear to me that you can't have it both ways to at least a degree: The corollary of twitter's moderation practices is not "at least there is no abuse". Even though I'm not a twitter user on multiple occasions I've had to deal with impersonators there pretending to be me and acting abusively towards friends and colleagues with threats and harassment, only to have twitter dumbly respond with that no rules are being broken and only taking action after enduring months of it and rolling the report dice over and over again. In the mean time, I got to watch friends calling out abuse get suspended for harassment and forced to remove their posts. A lot of people see twitter's moderation as politically motivated, and while I don't doubt that some of it is-- a lot of it is just bad and chaotic: allowing deeply abusive behavior to persist when randomly raining hell fire down on someone who merely said something a bit controversial. That inconsistency convinces people that it's politically motivated because they notice when someone is suspended over something inconsequential while at the same time so many examples of serious abuse continue. There isn't any guarantee that it's possible to do better, for sure-- but I'd like to think that it's possible. Certainly there are other sites (like HN!) which do a much better job, but they tend to be facing challenges of an entirely different scale. All that blather aside, the obvious implication of that 5 billion dollar revenue isn't that it could be grown-- it's that much more of it could be returned to twitter's owners. For all twitter spends on development, it still manages to be a service where even its CEO posts photographs of text to tweet longer messages. Perhaps there is a good reason for all the longstanding gaps in functionality-- perhaps twitter is all it could be -- but if so, it could be returning a lot more value to its owners.
robbedpeter 5y ago
He's still on Twitter, as recently as this morning.
prvc 5y ago
>You can't have it both ways. What are the two "ways" that supposedly are in conflict?
- dento 5y ago
  1. people can say whatever they want 2. no abusive comments Content moderation is difficult.
  - anthropodie 5y ago
    Not if you make Twitter federated and let people host their own instance. For example, let Stephen Fry host his own Twitter server and he will choose what is allowed and what is not. This Twitter will integrate with other Twitter servers over ActivityPub. Something like Mastodon. It's not going to happen because this model is not going to generate any revenue unless Elon figures out something.
    - kevinmchugh 5y ago
      Wil Wheaton had a disastrous experience with Mastodon, much worse than he had with Twitter. He's been made fun of on every Internet platform for 30+ years, and found Mastodon unusable, apparently
    - Fordec 5y ago
      > let Stephen Fry host his own server that he has to actively curate I've barely had my coffee, and I've already seen the most "HN living in a bubble" comment of the day.
      - adolph 5y ago
        >> let people host their own instance Totally. Why would anyone self-host when it could be written to a blockchain and be decentralized, tamperproof and censorship resistant? Twit-coin could reward influencers for their certified engagement metrics without knowing their underlying physical identity by maintaining value flows virtually. Brave browser is 80% there already.
robonerd 5y ago
Anybody who stands in front of a crowd to say anything should expect some heckling. The bigger the crowd, the greater the risk of this. I would have expected a comedian to cope with it better than most, but if Stephen Fry decided he no longer wanted to tolerate heckling, then it sounds like leaving Twitter was the right choice for him. Can't say I see the problem here.
phendrenad2 5y ago
Now imagine if Twitter gave users like Stephen Fry the option to not see toxic comments. Let them live in their happy little bubble. But oh no, Twitter got rich off of anger porn, so they're stuck in the local maxima where every single person is subjected to the worst toxic behavior daily. They don't want people like Stephen Fry who would rather leave than feed the anger porn machine. Time for a change, I say.

macinjosh 5y ago

citizenkeen 5y ago
Do you know who Stephen Fry is?
- oska 5y ago
  - bombcar 5y ago
    Twitter is/was unique in that there was a minuscule chance that someone rich and famous would actually read a regular response to a tweet, especially if it got a lot of traction. And that is what scares some people. The only other place I’ve seen it happen is some Reddit AMAs and it was always clear which ones were being coordinated by PR and which got unhinged and out of control.
karpierz 5y ago
Yes, but unironically.

core-utility 5y ago

People will be hurtful and abusive no matter how moderated the platform is. Even HN has its share of colorful commentary from time to time. If individuals here and there decide it's best for them to not be on any social media, nothing the platform can do - even if it brings more users overall - will keep those individuals.

yvdriess 5y ago
> People will be hurtful and abusive no matter how moderated the platform is. In a well moderated environment, only once. Or at least, once in between probations.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tablespoon 5y ago
>>> If elon removes bots, welcomes non-extremists back on, gets comedians and entertaining accounts back on board and lets people say what they want instead a bot army of shills repeating verbatim over and over and over... >> Comedians like Stephan Fry left exactly because people were saying whatever they wanted and being abusive. You can't have it both ways. > People will be hurtful and abusive no matter how moderated the platform is. Which only proves the point that the GGP's formula for Twitter's success doesn't add up. Also, we're not talking about a binary condition, but one of degree. If people are leaving now because of too much of "people ... saying whatever they want... and being abusive," it's reasonable to assume more people like that will leave as the moderation lightens up. Other people might join because of the policy change, but I doubt they'll be "comedians and entertaining accounts."
- wtetzner 5y ago
  > Which only proves the point that the GGP's formula for Twitter's success doesn't add up. I don't think that proves anything. It's an example of one person.
- wowokay 5y ago
  I think discussion chains like this showcase a lot of misunderstandings around how twitter fundamentally works. Most companies, figures, games, movies, etc have twitter accounts to convey information or offer support. If anything Musks ambitions will draw more of those entities back, especially ones that were not aligned with the twitters political views. Sure, it is social media, but the individual users that used to use twitter like Facebook, browsing trends etc have left for the next new platform, for example TikTok.

nullc 5y ago

Not clear to me that you can't have it both ways to at least a degree: The corollary of twitter's moderation practices is not "at least there is no abuse". Even though I'm not a twitter user on multiple occasions I've had to deal with impersonators there pretending to be me and acting abusively towards friends and colleagues with threats and harassment, only to have twitter dumbly respond with that no rules are being broken and only taking action after enduring months of it and rolling the report dice over and over again. In the mean time, I got to watch friends calling out abuse get suspended for harassment and forced to remove their posts. A lot of people see twitter's moderation as politically motivated, and while I don't doubt that some of it is-- a lot of it is just bad and chaotic: allowing deeply abusive behavior to persist when randomly raining hell fire down on someone who merely said something a bit controversial. That inconsistency convinces people that it's politically motivated because they notice when someone is suspended over something inconsequential while at the same time so many examples of serious abuse continue. There isn't any guarantee that it's possible to do better, for sure-- but I'd like to think that it's possible. Certainly there are other sites (like HN!) which do a much better job, but they tend to be facing challenges of an entirely different scale. All that blather aside, the obvious implication of that 5 billion dollar revenue isn't that it could be grown-- it's that much more of it could be returned to twitter's owners. For all twitter spends on development, it still manages to be a service where even its CEO posts photographs of text to tweet longer messages. Perhaps there is a good reason for all the longstanding gaps in functionality-- perhaps twitter is all it could be -- but if so, it could be returning a lot more value to its owners.

robbedpeter 5y ago

He's still on Twitter, as recently as this morning.

prvc 5y ago

>You can't have it both ways. What are the two "ways" that supposedly are in conflict?

dento 5y ago
1. people can say whatever they want 2. no abusive comments Content moderation is difficult.
- anthropodie 5y ago
  Not if you make Twitter federated and let people host their own instance. For example, let Stephen Fry host his own Twitter server and he will choose what is allowed and what is not. This Twitter will integrate with other Twitter servers over ActivityPub. Something like Mastodon. It's not going to happen because this model is not going to generate any revenue unless Elon figures out something.
  - kevinmchugh 5y ago
    Wil Wheaton had a disastrous experience with Mastodon, much worse than he had with Twitter. He's been made fun of on every Internet platform for 30+ years, and found Mastodon unusable, apparently
  - Fordec 5y ago
    > let Stephen Fry host his own server that he has to actively curate I've barely had my coffee, and I've already seen the most "HN living in a bubble" comment of the day.
    - adolph 5y ago
      >> let people host their own instance Totally. Why would anyone self-host when it could be written to a blockchain and be decentralized, tamperproof and censorship resistant? Twit-coin could reward influencers for their certified engagement metrics without knowing their underlying physical identity by maintaining value flows virtually. Brave browser is 80% there already.

robonerd 5y ago

Anybody who stands in front of a crowd to say anything should expect some heckling. The bigger the crowd, the greater the risk of this. I would have expected a comedian to cope with it better than most, but if Stephen Fry decided he no longer wanted to tolerate heckling, then it sounds like leaving Twitter was the right choice for him. Can't say I see the problem here.

phendrenad2 5y ago

Now imagine if Twitter gave users like Stephen Fry the option to not see toxic comments. Let them live in their happy little bubble. But oh no, Twitter got rich off of anger porn, so they're stuck in the local maxima where every single person is subjected to the worst toxic behavior daily. They don't want people like Stephen Fry who would rather leave than feed the anger porn machine. Time for a change, I say.