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I've been using Twitter since it's main novelty was that it was a successful Ruby on Rails app, and honestly I've been trying to figure out where the exit is fo

I've been using Twitter since it's main novelty was that it was a successful Ruby on Rails app, and honestly I've been trying to figure out where the exit is for my personal use of Twitter lately. If the acquisition goes through, Twitter won't make enough money to service it's debt, and the things they will do to fix that are pretty much guaranteed to lower the quality of the platform, which frankly has never worked very well for me anyways. The fact that they're doing a leadership purge right now is not helping my opinion on this. I also think the proposal to have Twitter allow all content that is "legal under US law" is a dangerous idea for the platform being a healthy community that most people actually want to participate in. Content moderation debates have never been so ham-fisted as they are online so I won't try here, suffice to say there's some pretty horrible, disgusting things that are "legal under US law" (and as a content moderator, I've seen them all). If Twitter allows people to do them, it will make it difficult for Twitter to maintain a healthy community, and the platform could quickly devolve into a scarychan-style sewer that only the craziest people on the internet will want to dwell in. To say nothing about whether advertisers will tolerate some of it, or even Apple's app store.

wfhordie 4y ago
I hope you’re right. I hope Elon takes over and turns into a cesspit . Burn it to the ground once and for all, let the public stare into the abyss that their fellow humans.
- the_doctah 4y ago
  You're assuming it can get any worse than it already is
  - rchaud 4y ago
    It can get much worse. After yesterday's UST/Luna crash, the main Luna subreddit has stopped all posting because of the volume of suicide threats. Only a few of those posts remain and are at the top, with automated messages linking to helplines. r/terraluna The average person doesn't realize how manicured the social media experience is. People that want zero censorship are in for a nasty surprise.
  - __turbobrew__ 4y ago
    Places like 8chan are much much worse than anything twitter had to offer
anonAndOn 4y ago
How much of the DAU do you think is bot driven? I suspect it's larger than a publicly traded stock company is willing to admit and that some of that cesspool rhetoric is Aktive Measures to provoke unrest. Perhaps taking Twitter private and removing the chorus of machines will actually make it a more pleasant experience. Content Mod is never easy but expunging the bot armies is a big first step.
- nickstinemates 4y ago
  >50% would be my guess
- XorNot 4y ago
  Bot removal is going to grind to a halt if it turns out that bots were also clicking on ads though. Researchers identify bots by anomalous clustering behavior - there's probably some human accounts in there, but bots follow bots because they're a quorum which is optimized for "followers" in order to try and lure in real human users. But AFAIK there's no data from Twitter (for obvious reasons) on whether suspected bot accounts have ad-revenue activity: and they might. If a crackdown happens the first defense mechanism will be for bot operators to add more human mimic activity. I suspect at the moment they probably don't - after all why do more work - though conversely this is the sort of thing I personally would implement if I was trying to stay ahead of anti-botting measures.
ilamont 4y ago
> I also think the proposal to have Twitter allow all content that is "legal under US law" is a dangerous idea for the platform being a healthy community that most people actually want to participate in. This is key. If @dang suddenly threw up his hands and said "anything goes on HN within U.S. law" this wonderful virtual discussion forum would die and most of us would sign off forever. I say that as someone whose been here for ~15 years. I've used Twitter for the same amount of time. Despite Twitter's many faults and loopholes, the things that keep me going back day after day is there is enough good discussion, news tidbits, and photos (for me, mostly local nostalgia, birds, and retro computing) that it's a worthwhile place for me to hang out. I won't stick around if it gets too negative and my people start to leave, as they surely will under such a policy.
- paganel 4y ago
  That only works because HN is, mostly, politics-free. I'm not a regular Twitter user but afaik that platform is pretty heavy on politics, more than that, it's pretty heavy when it comes to a certain political spectrum, the other side has been mostly de-platformed by now. I don't consider that as a healthy platform to comment on for the general public (even though, I agree, it might be ok for people who happen to share the same political opinions that have not been banned by the Twitter higher-ups).
  - guelo 4y ago
    > pretty heavy when it comes to a certain political spectrum, the other side has been mostly de-platformed by now That's what right wing has told you via sensational anecdotes. The actual studies I've seen shows that the algorithm boosts right wing stuff more than left wing stuff.
  - ilamont 4y ago
    > but afaik that platform is pretty heavy on politics Twitter is what you want it to be, topic-wise, based on who you follow and what they like to talk about. Further tuning is possible using blocks and muted keywords. However, there is bleed because people you follow and Twitter's recommendation features can't help themselves (and not just about politics; anything "newsy" pops up). What happens when Elon's "anything under U.S. law" approach kicks in is toxic behavior and arguments will get so extreme that it will drive millions of people away, and those who are left will see the quality of their feeds decline. Then many of them will bail, too. > That only works because HN is, mostly, politics-free. This place holds together because the signal:noise ratio is so high and @dang and the community work to keep it that way. Toxicity and low-value contributions kill communities, regardless of the topic at hand.
seydor 4y ago
Does twitter have a community? My use case for it is that of an RSS reader. I thought reddit was for community
- nickstinemates 4y ago
  twitter is the successor of irc, it's one giant channel with a firehose of information. in the same way #yourfavtopic on your fav $irc_server, community can be the point or the problem
- ramoz 4y ago
  Yes, manufactured influencers and echo chambers.
shrimpx 4y ago
Does this deal have a serious chance of going through? My estimate, based on the direction of Tesla stock, is this deal will not go through.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  Seems unclear whether Musk actually wants it to go through, doesn't it? The presidency didn't fix Trump's relationship with his deceased father, and whatever ails Musk won't be fixed by purchasing Twitter and having to deal with all of the attendant headaches. And it will distract him from Tesla and SpaceX. SpaceX can probably get along without him; Tesla clearly cannot.
  - outworlder 4y ago
    I don't think he wants the deal to go through. Unclear what the end-game is. But paying 3x the annual NASA budget for a social media app is clearly too much. Users have value, but it's too inflated. If he broke the contract (and lost one billion), added another billion to create a new social media platform(that's quite the funding!) that measured up to his standards, spent an additional 6 billion dollars in advertising in the US (putting him in the number one ad spend – ahead of Comcast), it would still be a bargain. Heck, he could pay for people to switch from Twitter to his platform and still be ahead. Why bother? Torpedoing Twitter (by blaming the deal going south on them not wanting 'free speech') could energize his supporters – and people in the sidelines – enough to switch away from the sinking ship. And he also gets to sell TSLA shares high (ostensibly to finance the deal) and rebuy low. So, win-win? If the deal actually goes through, he gets the users, but he also gets a huge mess that he has to clean up.
ellyagg 4y ago
You'd have to be pretty naive to assume Musk would let trolls run Twitter into the ground. The most likely upshot of Musk's hints is that Twitter will stop censoring or adding warning labels to "misinformation", the classification of which is highly subject to partisan biases.
secondcoming 4y ago
> it will make it difficult for Twitter to maintain a healthy community, and the platform could quickly devolve into a scarychan-style sewer that only the craziest people on the internet will want to dwell in Twitter is the furthest from a healthy community I've ever ventured. It's full of nutters.
memish 4y ago
> and the things they will do to fix that are pretty much guaranteed to lower the quality of the platform The stated plan is to focus on making the platform more transparent and trusted. Why would that lower the quality?
pessimizer 4y ago
> I also think the proposal to have Twitter allow all content that is "legal under US law" is a dangerous idea for the platform being a healthy community that most people actually want to participate in. I'd counter that platforms like Reddit, Youtube, or Facebook grew into institutions with extremely light content moderation, and it's only after they were successful and were targeted by politicians and media panics that they moderated heavily, and with that moderation their growth slowed.
- unethical_ban 4y ago
  Correlation doesn't imply causation. They didn't /need/ to moderate heavily because they didn't attract legions of bad faith actors when they were small, and they stopped growing because growth isn't infinite. And the Internet is a lot different in 2022 than it was in 2007.
- oarsinsync 4y ago
  > and it's only after they were successful … their growth slowed. Could this simply be because it’s easy to sustain a high rate of growth when you’re small, and harder to sustain that same rate of growth when you’re large? See Apple, as another example of a firm who’s growth rate has slowed, as a natural result of their scale.
- Karawebnetwork 4y ago
  Reddit always has had community moderators which ensured that the subreddits were respecting the rules of their communities. For example, on LGBTQ issues subreddits telling people that they are groomers is not tolerated. If it was, people would quickly go away. While on some other subreddit, it might be tolerated but the targeted people are not present and will not see those messages. It is similar on Facebook where people will gather in groups that have their own moderation. This is different on a public platform like Twitter where everyone can see everything. If users can hate-speech each others within the confines of the law, it will not take long until a lot of people leave. I use hate-speech as an example because the "groomer" as a slur issue is at a peak right now and is fresh in my head. But the same concept applies to a lot of topics.
nomel 4y ago
> which frankly has never worked very well for me anyways. > The fact that they're doing a leadership purge right now is not helping my opinion on this. These two things don't seem compatible to me. The leadership created/perpetuated the twitter that didn't work well for you, so getting new leadership seems like a potential positive.
Pxtl 4y ago
Realistically, I'll go where the conversation is happening. I mostly use Twitter to follow municipal politics and YIMBY activists in my city and province. I also follow a bunch of artists and creatives see their work. So I'll stay as long as that continues. But a shitload of those creatives I follow are trans. More, now that a lot of them took the dead times of COVID shutdowns as an opportunity to transition in private. And if Twitter abandons its policy of blocking users that engage in hate-speech, I think a lot of those trans artists will be exiting the platform.
cwp 4y ago
I think the only real way to do content moderation is to delegate it to users. Let people create something like a subreddit, and then be in charge of content policy for it. Different communities can have different standards, and kicking people out of a given community doesn't ban them from Twitter entirely. There's even some informal version of this already as you can see with the "this part of Twitter" meme.
- w-j-w 4y ago
- mywittyname 4y ago
  It's ridiculously easy to get banned from some subreddits for saying truthful things. And if leftist groups make a land-grab to secure the popular sectors of this new twitter-verse (read: the portions the news will report on), then Musk is going to look very silly.
misiti3780 4y ago
generally curious, what are some examples of disgusting things legal under US law (I'm not a content moderator)?
- iudqnolq 4y ago
  Although banned in most states, sexual abuse of animals isn't prohibited by federal law. Animated depictions of humans having sex with animals is (probably) legal. Saying "I hope someone kills misiti3780" is legal. Saying "Next year I will drive to misiti3780's house at <insert correct address> and kill them and their family " is (probably) legal.
  - misiti3780 4y ago
    the animal shit is horrible, i love my pets. i weirdly dont care about hypothetical death threats as much.
    - ryan_lane 4y ago
      You don't care about death threats until they're directed at you, your family, or the pets you love. If you're being dogpiled by extremists, there's a very real possibility that it'll escalate to doxing, swatting, and/or actual attempts. This happens frequently on twitter, even with its attempts at moderation, but it would be considerably worse with no moderation. People making life-sized dolls of you, then filming themselves shooting it in the head and posting the video is legal. Them doing sexual acts to the doll, saying they're practicing for when they break into your house, filming it and posting the video is legal. A lot of things that are absolutely terrifying are fully legal. Sites don't allow them because having subsets of users scare away other subsets of users is bad for business. If you have to pick between one set of users and another, usually the one posting hateful, threatening content are the ones to (rightfully) go.
      - misiti3780 4y ago
        i agree. if someone did threaten my family and they were serious it would be a problem.
kranke155 4y ago
Musk’s idea of “anything that is legal” is a terrible idea, it comes from someone who’s clearly never moderated a community. Generally any unpleasantness and lack of civility needs to be moderated out in some extent, or the platform gets completely taken over by trolls and normal people leave. That’s just the end result. Anyone who’s been involved in online communities know this. I see this in subreddits. The subreddit of my own country is poorly moderated and virulent in trolling and insults. But you look at something like AskHistorians and you see academic level content. NeutralPolitics is the only politics subreddit that isnt instantly toxic. Why? Moderation and rules. It’s astonishing how far you can move the content with moderation. A rule I’ve learnt recently and really loved is - every community can be judged quickly by how comfortable women are in it. The first sign of lack of moderation is male sexual harassment - because that’s the first thing male assholes do. You have to deal with the assholes. Assholes exist and are relatively common. If you allow assholes, women leave, and when women leave, you can tell something went wrong.
- toolz 4y ago
  There's an extremely wide chasm between moderating trolls and banning subject experts and even the former president of the USA. It really doesn't matter what you or I think of the president, he was a democratically elected leader of arguably, the most influential nation in the world. Musk claims to be all about freedom of speech. Moderation and freedom of speech are not antithetical to one another. You can downrank or make trolls more convenient to block and not stifle their ability to say something. If you solve the bot problem you make a lot of other moderation problems much easier to solve. Essentially my point is that we don't know what Musk will do, exactly, and any speculation proposed as an understood fact is simply spreading FUD and it makes me question (not a strong concern, mind you, but a concern none-the-less) if your concerns are sincere or if you have an agenda.
  - saxonww 4y ago
    > he was a democratically elected leader of arguably, the most influential nation in the world This aspect of the discussion around Twitter constantly baffles me. They have no obligation to offer service to anyone, and they have no obligation to ensure freedom of speech, balanced representation, or any other thing you can think of that would ensure everyone gets a voice. General, universal freedom of speech in the US is not a right we have. We are protected via the 1st and 14th amendments from Federal or State governments (respectively) passing laws restricting our speech, which is not the same thing. Even with those amendments, some speech is restricted (hate speech, etc.). There's nothing preventing Twitter from moderating someone off its platform.
UncleOxidant 4y ago
It's interesting that a lot of people who are on twitter just don't like twitter already as it is. I imagine that's only going to get worse under a "no moderation" regime. I'd been wanting off of twitter for quite some time now as I'm pretty sure it was negatively impacting my mental health. Just this past weekend I decided to pull the trigger and commit twittercide - it's interesting how hard it is to push that 'deactivate' button. But I realized that that's an indication of addiction so I pressed the button and now I'm free of twitter.
- ramoz 4y ago
  Parent, Child, comments want off Twitter. Interesting how some of you make it sound like a drug. I deleted Twitter just fine over Covid period.
XorNot 4y ago
> Twitter won't make enough money to service it's debt This isn't (necessarily) true. While buying Twitter seems like a stupid investment if you want to make money, it's financials[1] very obviously point to streamlining which would make the debt serviceable. In 2021 Twitter spent USD$1.2 billion on "Research and Development". Think about number - when did Twitter actually substantially change the platform? In their financial report this is recorded as essentially all salaries, and is separate from their server/operational expenses and salaries. So right out the gate, the roughly $1 billion interest payments you take on buying it the way Musk is can be handled by essentially dropping that department which observably seems to have produced nothing Twitter needs to operate (you can even keep 15% of it to have some R&D). Stories like this tend to support the idea that their R&D is a drag and should go: https://twitter.com/n8agrin/status/1518860754757189632?s=21&t=eGkedb3txJJg43aJEgDFBw https://twitter.com/n8agrin/status/1518860754757189632?s=21&... Now, all that being the case - it's still a bad purchase, because every single one of their user acquisition graphs show that Twitter is very near saturation - their user growth has been slowing in a conventional looking sigmoid curve where they've probably hit the maximum market size. This is not a company you'd want to buy, because the purchase price doesn't justify any reasonable expectation of future growth (Twitter's 30 million US users are pretty much all they'll ever have). Except: it's probably not a bad purchase if you happen to own a vastly overvalued car company which represents a huge amount of on paper wealth, and would like to liquidate that somehow. And this is (I suspect) Musk's actual goal - or part of it. Twitter is well-established and not going anywhere - I'm embedding tweet's in this very post! It's just not growing. But if Musk were want to sell say, 40 billion of Tesla stock, the likely outcome would be that it would turn out to be worth half or less of that number and the valuation would collapse. Whereas using Tesla stock to buy Twitter - key to supporting Tesla's valuation anyway via it's memestock status (price goes up based on him, personally, tweeting about stuff). Using Tesla stock to buy Twitter doesn't look like you're selling out of Tesla because you think it's overvalued, it looks like a crazy billionaire buying Twitter so he can keep posting and "oh lol how funny". But buying Twitter, saying you'll "fix Twitter" (which you can - firing a 1000 people suddenly means other then the debt, Twitter looks profitable now) - and then liquidating your stake in Twitter, let's you cash out without necessarily burning Tesla (as it is, Tesla holders are concerned anyway - acting/being crazy has its own drawbacks). tl;dr Musk tends to look crazy, and might be crazy but his actions have plenty of rational underpinnings. [1] https://investor.twitterinc.com/financial-information/annual-reports/default.aspx https://investor.twitterinc.com/financial-information/annual...
dillondoyle 4y ago
If twitter becomes 4chan they will NEVER gain traction with brand advertisers. They already struggle, from the little I buy it's crap. But FB is forced to be worse too so maybe they'll gain some.
dawsmik 4y ago
I know many people share your view if social media platform x allows content y, then it will be reduced to anarchy. I never understood that. Reddit used to allow some pretty insane sub-reddits, but I never knew that until it was on the news that they banned them. I used the platform daily and only looked at what interested me. Vegetarians and Keto(atarians?) both go to the same grocery stores. They just pick the part that works for them and don't worry about the rest. Could you explain how you would imagine that Twitter "could quickly devolve into a scarychan-style sewer?"
emodendroket 4y ago
> I also think the proposal to have Twitter allow all content that is "legal under US law" is a dangerous idea for the platform being a healthy community that most people actually want to participate in. Content moderation debates have never been so ham-fisted as they are online so I won't try here, suffice to say there's some pretty horrible, disgusting things that are "legal under US law" (and as a content moderator, I've seen them all). If Twitter allows people to do them, it will make it difficult for Twitter to maintain a healthy community, and the platform could quickly devolve into a scarychan-style sewer that only the craziest people on the internet will want to dwell in. To say nothing about whether advertisers will tolerate some of it, or even Apple's app store. Yeah, I feel like this theory has been repeatedly tested. Anybody remember when Voat was going to overtake Reddit? Turns out people actually don't want to read a forum for people who were so noxious Reddit was embarrassed into banning them.
ed_elliott_asc 4y ago
Just delete your account, I got rid of mine a few weeks ago - can’t think of anything I miss tbh
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

wfhordie 4y ago

I hope you’re right. I hope Elon takes over and turns into a cesspit . Burn it to the ground once and for all, let the public stare into the abyss that their fellow humans.

the_doctah 4y ago
You're assuming it can get any worse than it already is
- rchaud 4y ago
  It can get much worse. After yesterday's UST/Luna crash, the main Luna subreddit has stopped all posting because of the volume of suicide threats. Only a few of those posts remain and are at the top, with automated messages linking to helplines. r/terraluna The average person doesn't realize how manicured the social media experience is. People that want zero censorship are in for a nasty surprise.
- __turbobrew__ 4y ago
  Places like 8chan are much much worse than anything twitter had to offer

anonAndOn 4y ago

How much of the DAU do you think is bot driven? I suspect it's larger than a publicly traded stock company is willing to admit and that some of that cesspool rhetoric is Aktive Measures to provoke unrest. Perhaps taking Twitter private and removing the chorus of machines will actually make it a more pleasant experience. Content Mod is never easy but expunging the bot armies is a big first step.

nickstinemates 4y ago
>50% would be my guess
XorNot 4y ago
Bot removal is going to grind to a halt if it turns out that bots were also clicking on ads though. Researchers identify bots by anomalous clustering behavior - there's probably some human accounts in there, but bots follow bots because they're a quorum which is optimized for "followers" in order to try and lure in real human users. But AFAIK there's no data from Twitter (for obvious reasons) on whether suspected bot accounts have ad-revenue activity: and they might. If a crackdown happens the first defense mechanism will be for bot operators to add more human mimic activity. I suspect at the moment they probably don't - after all why do more work - though conversely this is the sort of thing I personally would implement if I was trying to stay ahead of anti-botting measures.

ilamont 4y ago

> I also think the proposal to have Twitter allow all content that is "legal under US law" is a dangerous idea for the platform being a healthy community that most people actually want to participate in. This is key. If @dang suddenly threw up his hands and said "anything goes on HN within U.S. law" this wonderful virtual discussion forum would die and most of us would sign off forever. I say that as someone whose been here for ~15 years. I've used Twitter for the same amount of time. Despite Twitter's many faults and loopholes, the things that keep me going back day after day is there is enough good discussion, news tidbits, and photos (for me, mostly local nostalgia, birds, and retro computing) that it's a worthwhile place for me to hang out. I won't stick around if it gets too negative and my people start to leave, as they surely will under such a policy.

paganel 4y ago
That only works because HN is, mostly, politics-free. I'm not a regular Twitter user but afaik that platform is pretty heavy on politics, more than that, it's pretty heavy when it comes to a certain political spectrum, the other side has been mostly de-platformed by now. I don't consider that as a healthy platform to comment on for the general public (even though, I agree, it might be ok for people who happen to share the same political opinions that have not been banned by the Twitter higher-ups).
- guelo 4y ago
  > pretty heavy when it comes to a certain political spectrum, the other side has been mostly de-platformed by now That's what right wing has told you via sensational anecdotes. The actual studies I've seen shows that the algorithm boosts right wing stuff more than left wing stuff.
- ilamont 4y ago
  > but afaik that platform is pretty heavy on politics Twitter is what you want it to be, topic-wise, based on who you follow and what they like to talk about. Further tuning is possible using blocks and muted keywords. However, there is bleed because people you follow and Twitter's recommendation features can't help themselves (and not just about politics; anything "newsy" pops up). What happens when Elon's "anything under U.S. law" approach kicks in is toxic behavior and arguments will get so extreme that it will drive millions of people away, and those who are left will see the quality of their feeds decline. Then many of them will bail, too. > That only works because HN is, mostly, politics-free. This place holds together because the signal:noise ratio is so high and @dang and the community work to keep it that way. Toxicity and low-value contributions kill communities, regardless of the topic at hand.

seydor 4y ago

Does twitter have a community? My use case for it is that of an RSS reader. I thought reddit was for community

nickstinemates 4y ago
twitter is the successor of irc, it's one giant channel with a firehose of information. in the same way #yourfavtopic on your fav $irc_server, community can be the point or the problem
ramoz 4y ago
Yes, manufactured influencers and echo chambers.

shrimpx 4y ago

Does this deal have a serious chance of going through? My estimate, based on the direction of Tesla stock, is this deal will not go through.

KerrAvon 4y ago
Seems unclear whether Musk actually wants it to go through, doesn't it? The presidency didn't fix Trump's relationship with his deceased father, and whatever ails Musk won't be fixed by purchasing Twitter and having to deal with all of the attendant headaches. And it will distract him from Tesla and SpaceX. SpaceX can probably get along without him; Tesla clearly cannot.
- outworlder 4y ago
  I don't think he wants the deal to go through. Unclear what the end-game is. But paying 3x the annual NASA budget for a social media app is clearly too much. Users have value, but it's too inflated. If he broke the contract (and lost one billion), added another billion to create a new social media platform(that's quite the funding!) that measured up to his standards, spent an additional 6 billion dollars in advertising in the US (putting him in the number one ad spend – ahead of Comcast), it would still be a bargain. Heck, he could pay for people to switch from Twitter to his platform and still be ahead. Why bother? Torpedoing Twitter (by blaming the deal going south on them not wanting 'free speech') could energize his supporters – and people in the sidelines – enough to switch away from the sinking ship. And he also gets to sell TSLA shares high (ostensibly to finance the deal) and rebuy low. So, win-win? If the deal actually goes through, he gets the users, but he also gets a huge mess that he has to clean up.

ellyagg 4y ago

You'd have to be pretty naive to assume Musk would let trolls run Twitter into the ground. The most likely upshot of Musk's hints is that Twitter will stop censoring or adding warning labels to "misinformation", the classification of which is highly subject to partisan biases.

secondcoming 4y ago

> it will make it difficult for Twitter to maintain a healthy community, and the platform could quickly devolve into a scarychan-style sewer that only the craziest people on the internet will want to dwell in Twitter is the furthest from a healthy community I've ever ventured. It's full of nutters.

memish 4y ago

> and the things they will do to fix that are pretty much guaranteed to lower the quality of the platform The stated plan is to focus on making the platform more transparent and trusted. Why would that lower the quality?

pessimizer 4y ago

> I also think the proposal to have Twitter allow all content that is "legal under US law" is a dangerous idea for the platform being a healthy community that most people actually want to participate in. I'd counter that platforms like Reddit, Youtube, or Facebook grew into institutions with extremely light content moderation, and it's only after they were successful and were targeted by politicians and media panics that they moderated heavily, and with that moderation their growth slowed.

unethical_ban 4y ago
Correlation doesn't imply causation. They didn't /need/ to moderate heavily because they didn't attract legions of bad faith actors when they were small, and they stopped growing because growth isn't infinite. And the Internet is a lot different in 2022 than it was in 2007.
oarsinsync 4y ago
> and it's only after they were successful … their growth slowed. Could this simply be because it’s easy to sustain a high rate of growth when you’re small, and harder to sustain that same rate of growth when you’re large? See Apple, as another example of a firm who’s growth rate has slowed, as a natural result of their scale.
Karawebnetwork 4y ago
Reddit always has had community moderators which ensured that the subreddits were respecting the rules of their communities. For example, on LGBTQ issues subreddits telling people that they are groomers is not tolerated. If it was, people would quickly go away. While on some other subreddit, it might be tolerated but the targeted people are not present and will not see those messages. It is similar on Facebook where people will gather in groups that have their own moderation. This is different on a public platform like Twitter where everyone can see everything. If users can hate-speech each others within the confines of the law, it will not take long until a lot of people leave. I use hate-speech as an example because the "groomer" as a slur issue is at a peak right now and is fresh in my head. But the same concept applies to a lot of topics.

nomel 4y ago

> which frankly has never worked very well for me anyways. > The fact that they're doing a leadership purge right now is not helping my opinion on this. These two things don't seem compatible to me. The leadership created/perpetuated the twitter that didn't work well for you, so getting new leadership seems like a potential positive.

Pxtl 4y ago

Realistically, I'll go where the conversation is happening. I mostly use Twitter to follow municipal politics and YIMBY activists in my city and province. I also follow a bunch of artists and creatives see their work. So I'll stay as long as that continues. But a shitload of those creatives I follow are trans. More, now that a lot of them took the dead times of COVID shutdowns as an opportunity to transition in private. And if Twitter abandons its policy of blocking users that engage in hate-speech, I think a lot of those trans artists will be exiting the platform.

cwp 4y ago

I think the only real way to do content moderation is to delegate it to users. Let people create something like a subreddit, and then be in charge of content policy for it. Different communities can have different standards, and kicking people out of a given community doesn't ban them from Twitter entirely. There's even some informal version of this already as you can see with the "this part of Twitter" meme.

w-j-w 4y ago
mywittyname 4y ago
It's ridiculously easy to get banned from some subreddits for saying truthful things. And if leftist groups make a land-grab to secure the popular sectors of this new twitter-verse (read: the portions the news will report on), then Musk is going to look very silly.

misiti3780 4y ago

generally curious, what are some examples of disgusting things legal under US law (I'm not a content moderator)?

iudqnolq 4y ago
Although banned in most states, sexual abuse of animals isn't prohibited by federal law. Animated depictions of humans having sex with animals is (probably) legal. Saying "I hope someone kills misiti3780" is legal. Saying "Next year I will drive to misiti3780's house at <insert correct address> and kill them and their family " is (probably) legal.
- misiti3780 4y ago
  the animal shit is horrible, i love my pets. i weirdly dont care about hypothetical death threats as much.
  - ryan_lane 4y ago
    You don't care about death threats until they're directed at you, your family, or the pets you love. If you're being dogpiled by extremists, there's a very real possibility that it'll escalate to doxing, swatting, and/or actual attempts. This happens frequently on twitter, even with its attempts at moderation, but it would be considerably worse with no moderation. People making life-sized dolls of you, then filming themselves shooting it in the head and posting the video is legal. Them doing sexual acts to the doll, saying they're practicing for when they break into your house, filming it and posting the video is legal. A lot of things that are absolutely terrifying are fully legal. Sites don't allow them because having subsets of users scare away other subsets of users is bad for business. If you have to pick between one set of users and another, usually the one posting hateful, threatening content are the ones to (rightfully) go.
    - misiti3780 4y ago
      i agree. if someone did threaten my family and they were serious it would be a problem.

kranke155 4y ago

Musk’s idea of “anything that is legal” is a terrible idea, it comes from someone who’s clearly never moderated a community. Generally any unpleasantness and lack of civility needs to be moderated out in some extent, or the platform gets completely taken over by trolls and normal people leave. That’s just the end result. Anyone who’s been involved in online communities know this. I see this in subreddits. The subreddit of my own country is poorly moderated and virulent in trolling and insults. But you look at something like AskHistorians and you see academic level content. NeutralPolitics is the only politics subreddit that isnt instantly toxic. Why? Moderation and rules. It’s astonishing how far you can move the content with moderation. A rule I’ve learnt recently and really loved is - every community can be judged quickly by how comfortable women are in it. The first sign of lack of moderation is male sexual harassment - because that’s the first thing male assholes do. You have to deal with the assholes. Assholes exist and are relatively common. If you allow assholes, women leave, and when women leave, you can tell something went wrong.

toolz 4y ago
There's an extremely wide chasm between moderating trolls and banning subject experts and even the former president of the USA. It really doesn't matter what you or I think of the president, he was a democratically elected leader of arguably, the most influential nation in the world. Musk claims to be all about freedom of speech. Moderation and freedom of speech are not antithetical to one another. You can downrank or make trolls more convenient to block and not stifle their ability to say something. If you solve the bot problem you make a lot of other moderation problems much easier to solve. Essentially my point is that we don't know what Musk will do, exactly, and any speculation proposed as an understood fact is simply spreading FUD and it makes me question (not a strong concern, mind you, but a concern none-the-less) if your concerns are sincere or if you have an agenda.
- saxonww 4y ago
  > he was a democratically elected leader of arguably, the most influential nation in the world This aspect of the discussion around Twitter constantly baffles me. They have no obligation to offer service to anyone, and they have no obligation to ensure freedom of speech, balanced representation, or any other thing you can think of that would ensure everyone gets a voice. General, universal freedom of speech in the US is not a right we have. We are protected via the 1st and 14th amendments from Federal or State governments (respectively) passing laws restricting our speech, which is not the same thing. Even with those amendments, some speech is restricted (hate speech, etc.). There's nothing preventing Twitter from moderating someone off its platform.

UncleOxidant 4y ago

It's interesting that a lot of people who are on twitter just don't like twitter already as it is. I imagine that's only going to get worse under a "no moderation" regime. I'd been wanting off of twitter for quite some time now as I'm pretty sure it was negatively impacting my mental health. Just this past weekend I decided to pull the trigger and commit twittercide - it's interesting how hard it is to push that 'deactivate' button. But I realized that that's an indication of addiction so I pressed the button and now I'm free of twitter.

ramoz 4y ago
Parent, Child, comments want off Twitter. Interesting how some of you make it sound like a drug. I deleted Twitter just fine over Covid period.

XorNot 4y ago

> Twitter won't make enough money to service it's debt This isn't (necessarily) true. While buying Twitter seems like a stupid investment if you want to make money, it's financials[1] very obviously point to streamlining which would make the debt serviceable. In 2021 Twitter spent USD$1.2 billion on "Research and Development". Think about number - when did Twitter actually substantially change the platform? In their financial report this is recorded as essentially all salaries, and is separate from their server/operational expenses and salaries. So right out the gate, the roughly $1 billion interest payments you take on buying it the way Musk is can be handled by essentially dropping that department which observably seems to have produced nothing Twitter needs to operate (you can even keep 15% of it to have some R&D). Stories like this tend to support the idea that their R&D is a drag and should go: https://twitter.com/n8agrin/status/1518860754757189632?s=21&t=eGkedb3txJJg43aJEgDFBw https://twitter.com/n8agrin/status/1518860754757189632?s=21&... Now, all that being the case - it's still a bad purchase, because every single one of their user acquisition graphs show that Twitter is very near saturation - their user growth has been slowing in a conventional looking sigmoid curve where they've probably hit the maximum market size. This is not a company you'd want to buy, because the purchase price doesn't justify any reasonable expectation of future growth (Twitter's 30 million US users are pretty much all they'll ever have). Except: it's probably not a bad purchase if you happen to own a vastly overvalued car company which represents a huge amount of on paper wealth, and would like to liquidate that somehow. And this is (I suspect) Musk's actual goal - or part of it. Twitter is well-established and not going anywhere - I'm embedding tweet's in this very post! It's just not growing. But if Musk were want to sell say, 40 billion of Tesla stock, the likely outcome would be that it would turn out to be worth half or less of that number and the valuation would collapse. Whereas using Tesla stock to buy Twitter - key to supporting Tesla's valuation anyway via it's memestock status (price goes up based on him, personally, tweeting about stuff). Using Tesla stock to buy Twitter doesn't look like you're selling out of Tesla because you think it's overvalued, it looks like a crazy billionaire buying Twitter so he can keep posting and "oh lol how funny". But buying Twitter, saying you'll "fix Twitter" (which you can - firing a 1000 people suddenly means other then the debt, Twitter looks profitable now) - and then liquidating your stake in Twitter, let's you cash out without necessarily burning Tesla (as it is, Tesla holders are concerned anyway - acting/being crazy has its own drawbacks). tl;dr Musk tends to look crazy, and might be crazy but his actions have plenty of rational underpinnings. [1] https://investor.twitterinc.com/financial-information/annual-reports/default.aspx https://investor.twitterinc.com/financial-information/annual...

dillondoyle 4y ago

If twitter becomes 4chan they will NEVER gain traction with brand advertisers. They already struggle, from the little I buy it's crap. But FB is forced to be worse too so maybe they'll gain some.

dawsmik 4y ago

I know many people share your view if social media platform x allows content y, then it will be reduced to anarchy. I never understood that. Reddit used to allow some pretty insane sub-reddits, but I never knew that until it was on the news that they banned them. I used the platform daily and only looked at what interested me. Vegetarians and Keto(atarians?) both go to the same grocery stores. They just pick the part that works for them and don't worry about the rest. Could you explain how you would imagine that Twitter "could quickly devolve into a scarychan-style sewer?"

emodendroket 4y ago

> I also think the proposal to have Twitter allow all content that is "legal under US law" is a dangerous idea for the platform being a healthy community that most people actually want to participate in. Content moderation debates have never been so ham-fisted as they are online so I won't try here, suffice to say there's some pretty horrible, disgusting things that are "legal under US law" (and as a content moderator, I've seen them all). If Twitter allows people to do them, it will make it difficult for Twitter to maintain a healthy community, and the platform could quickly devolve into a scarychan-style sewer that only the craziest people on the internet will want to dwell in. To say nothing about whether advertisers will tolerate some of it, or even Apple's app store. Yeah, I feel like this theory has been repeatedly tested. Anybody remember when Voat was going to overtake Reddit? Turns out people actually don't want to read a forum for people who were so noxious Reddit was embarrassed into banning them.

ed_elliott_asc 4y ago

Just delete your account, I got rid of mine a few weeks ago - can’t think of anything I miss tbh

deleted 4y ago

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