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> 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 m

> 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.
  - dleslie 4y ago
    > Twitter is what you want it to be, topic-wise, based on who you follow and what they like to talk about. I've tried this. It's false. It's a myth that Twitter users tell themselves, AFAICT. Even disregarding the trending topics and explore interfaces, all it takes is for one of the curated members that you follow to retweet something you're not interested in seeing. > 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. But that's contradictory to your claim that Twitter is what you want it to be, based on who you follow, isn't it? Because Twitter _isn't_ what you claim it is. Twitter is optimized for outrage-oriented engagement. It _wants_ to show you things that will encourage you to engage, to return, and there's nothing quite as engaging as content that upsets you.
    - ilamont 4y ago
      > I've tried this. It's false. So I have I. I currently have about a half-dozen accounts, each following different types of accounts with limited overlap. So, what I get on the genealogy account feed is limited almost entirely to genealogists and historians posting about those topics and very little else. People that stray too much get unfollowed. That said, my personal account has overlap with a separate startup/media/tech account because of some shared interests in the tech space. But there is also a lot of very different items I see in the personal account because of local accounts in the city I live in as well as topical news accounts relating to Asia and Europe that interest me. Naturally, anything relating to current events in those areas also touches on U.S. politics, foreign policy, and military policy, so I get that too, despite some muted keywords. > But that's contradictory to your claim that Twitter is what you want it to be, based on who you follow, isn't it? You missed the part in the paragraph that followed: 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). And not everyone knows how to filter it, or they only have one account. Those are the most likely to leave. Not disagreeing with your point about outrage, though. Like you said, there's nothing quite as engaging as content that gets lots of responses/RTs/shares/"likes," and this content tends to be negative.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  > has been mostly de-platformed by now Completely inaccurate. No one side has been deplatformed in aggregate. A few individuals have been suspended permanently for violating TOS. They should have been removed earlier, but were considered special cases due to their prominence. It amounts to Twitter removing its own inhibition on enforcing its TOS for certain prominent users. If you want a hard-right-wing heavy experience, you can certainly get that on Twitter today (and two months ago) by following the hard right wingers. Most of them never left. The subscriber count jumps you heard about when the emerald scion announced his Twitter purchase? Very small percentages.
  - jkubicek 4y ago
    I totally agree with this take. I'm also surprised that there hasn't been more strident push-back against the "conservatives are being banned from Twitter" story from conservatives themselves. If I were right-leaning I would certainly not want to be associated with the q-anon advocates for violence that are being kicked off the platform.
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      Trump wasn't kicked off the platform for being q-anon.
      - myko 4y ago
        Right, he was kicked off for fomenting an attempt at revolution which included urging QAnon people (who need medical treatment) to attack the nation's capital in an effort to illegally reinstate himself as POTUS and using Twitter in his effort to do so. Much worse than just promoting QAnon conspiracies IMO!
    - ryandrake 4y ago
      This is exactly the "Oh, you know the ones" take, that conservative opinions in general are not what's being banned[1]: 1: https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/1050391663552671744 https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174...
- d23 4y ago
  > That only works because HN is, mostly, politics-free. It's only politics-free because it's heavily moderated. There's nothing magical about the people here that make them apolitical. Political posts are often removed outright, and comments that are political have to be pretty fact-based (or at have the appearance thereof) to not be removed.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    I'd add 1) that HN also didn't start politics-free, that was something that was consciously imposed on it well into its life, and 2) that HN post politics-moderation is far less influential than HN was pre politics-moderation.
    - oarsinsync 4y ago
      > HN post politics-moderation is far less influential than HN was pre politics-moderation Influential in what way?
- vincvinc 4y ago
  Hmm, are we on the same HN? I feel like I see a lot of topics debated I’d call political (“about how society ought to function”) on a daily basis.
  - turtledove 4y ago
    I was going to say.... HN is full of politics. Not always the Red vs Blue kind, but there's political discussions constantly. At any given time several front page stories are explicitly political, and several more are implicitly political (e.g. cryptocurrency).
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - Sebb767 4y ago
      Discussions without politics are a bit like science without the mathematics field: If you take the larger definition, there's hardly any way to avoid it. Especially if you define things like crypto currency as political, it's basically impossible to have a tech discussion without scratching it. What people mean when they say that is that political topics are usually a side concern to the technical topics at hand, not pure political discussions. The off-topic, angry and/or ad-hominem comments are also quite rare - yes, they exist, but compared to (most of) Reddit and Twitter it's very relaxed. And policy is almost never the primary topic, unless it directly affects the tech field.
    - ixtli 4y ago
      Richard Stallman once said that "geeks like to think they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone." When people imply that there is such a thing as an a-political take on the world we live in, what they're saying is that they cant identify the mainstream ideology that they themselves are adherents of. As such things which adhere to it look "natural", without "bias", or "non-political."
  - iudqnolq 4y ago
    Political comments made up about 2/3 of my upvotes. It's everywhere here, it's just moderated so that it's discussed in a very armchair manner.
- femto113 4y ago
  Everything is politics, but most of HN's comment section is sufficiently homogenized around Silicon Valley libertarian ideology that political conflict is rarely at the forefront of discussions. A much more practical reason HN survives is there are no images or videos. It is profoundly easier to filter, downvote, or ignore someone's text ramblings than it is to curate media.
- nemothekid 4y ago
  >I'm not a regular Twitter user followed by >the other side has been mostly de-platformed by now. This is probably my biggest peeve when it comes about discussions on Twitter. The media has made it seem that Twitter just routinely bans conservatives voices for "a difference of opinion" when that is not the case. Twitter's high profile bans are on Wikipedia, and they weren't banned for simply saying "abortion should be repealed".
  - hackerfromthefu 4y ago
    Banning is one thing, but what about full or actually partial shadow-banning, or deleting selected specific posts which is called moderation, and the overall balance of the biases in the moderation.
    - nemothekid 4y ago
      >but what about full or actually partial shadow-banning, Of all the big social networks, Twitter has been the only one to keep the use of chronological feeds. What does "shadow banning" mean when all your tweets are chronological for everyone you follow? Do you actually use Twitter? >or deleting selected specific posts which is called moderation Every platform moderates; but now we have moved the goalposts from de-platforming to moderating. Twitter has a few isolated incidents where everyone will beat their chests (namely Hunter Biden and COVID), but those two incidents have failed to signify that Twitter has a systemic issue or bias. When you actually dive into it; the problem of conservatives being "cancelled" on Twitter comes from the Twitter Mob, aka, other Twitter users. What most of these people want is to post without consequence, "free speech for me but not for thee".
- Pxtl 4y ago
  > That only works because HN is, mostly, politics-free. That not accidental, but the result of firm-handed and aggressive moderation. My account is rate-limited because of getting into political arguments on Hacker News.
- myko 4y ago
  > the other side has been mostly de-platformed by now This is not true, far from it. Why do you think this?
- kranke155 4y ago
  There are pro-Russian accounts on Twitter. I don’t know about right wing US but I follow Marco Rubio. I don’t know how you’d get removed just for being right wing.
- boplicity 4y ago
  > That only works because HN is, mostly, politics-free. I have to disagree with that one. This discussion -- content moderation-- is one of the most political topics possible. More things are political than most people realize. However, I do think that the quality of the political discourse here is much better than other places; it is often just based on ideas, and even if they're plainly wrong, they're not usually presented in an inflammatory way. That is what sets things apart, rather than the lack of politics.
- emodendroket 4y ago
  > 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. Please. Despite the howls of protest this is far from true and that would be obvious to anyone who's spent much time reading political discussion on Twitter.
garbagetime 4y ago
I've never once thought to myself "I'm happy that the people I follow are only allowed to express some views" or any similar thought. If someone is too rude, I block the person. If I don't enjoy reading a person's Tweets, I unfollow him.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
numpad0 4y ago
It will partially solve locality/language dependency problems of following UGC laws though. There were enough of it for Mastodon devs.
brundolf 4y ago
I'm not sure the comparison holds up. Twitter right now doesn't moderate content, really, it only does anything about outright scams, misinformation, etc. Toxicity can mostly run wild and free. Whereas HN has various moderation mechanisms that seek to decrease the amount of low-quality interaction. I.e., I think dropping all moderation from HN would have a much bigger effect than doing the same on Twitter
- Pxtl 4y ago
  Twitter absolutely does moderate content. If you say something that the algo interprets as being a suggestion to commit suicide, you'll get an instante 24-hour ban. A tonne of really awful toxic accounts are soft-blocked and their tweets get stuck in the "more replies" box. And if you're overtly and explicitly racist or sexist, there's a good chance you'll get straight-up banned.
throwmeariver1 4y ago
knubie 4y ago
The difference between Twitter and Reddit, hacker news, or 4chan, is that on Twitter you ostensibly only see content from people you follow. If you don’t like the content someone is putting out, you just unfollow them. Twitter is more like email than Reddit in that sense, and no one is arguing for email to be moderated.
- UncleOxidant 4y ago
  > on Twitter you ostensibly only see content from people you follow But that seemed to becoming less and less true in recent months. I was often seeing tweets from people I wasn't following because the algorithm was starting to recommend them based on other tweets I had clicked on. I deactivated my account this past weekend and moved over to mastodon - it seems so much more chill.
- phillipcarter 4y ago
  I don't think Twitter is more like email than Reddit. Twitter is built around increasing engagement via increasing what you see and who you interact with. Which makes sense: it's a centralized platform for speech and it needs to grow its user base and their level of engagement to make money. You need to fight against that system to curate your feed so that you don't ever see something you don't like. I don't think Musk has any brilliant ideas to 10x Twitter's revenue and somehow change this characteristic about it. Considering that, there are also many different ways you can experience harassment on Twitter. Are these ways solvable with technical solutions? Perhaps. But these are people we're talking about here, not 0s and 1s. You can't solve all people problems with technology. And as parent comments have said, anyone who's been in a position of having to guide a community knows this to be true.
- Drew_ 4y ago
  Reddit is much better at what you're describing. Twitter constantly inserts content you haven't asked for in your feed and when viewing tweets.
  - mrhands556 4y ago
    Reddit home now shows me repulsive “suggestions” that are very toxic. The popular tab is almost unusable. The only difference is you don’t see the toxicity in arguments as often, because any dissent is downvoted and effectively squelched. It’s more toxic righteousness, consistently.
drewcon 4y ago
I also have a reasonable expectation that HK is FOCUSED and CIVIL. I do not have that expectation on Twitter. Twitter is just a raw society fire hose and I'm fine with that. I think the future is to give SUPER clear power to individuals to manage their own experience. Freedom of speech is both the right to speak, but also the right of the listener to hear (or not hear) as an individual. I would also love to see twitter evolve to become more substack-ish where communities are more "owned" and moderation is delegated to communities to determine rules based on trust and shared goals vs. just blanket twitter safetytism.
- rocqua 4y ago
  If you could 'subscribe' to a moderation service on Twitter, much like you used to subscribe to the editorial board of a newspaper, that might work. It would make the right-wing less up-in-arms about censorship by unchosen companies. And create more space for various viewpoints. At the same time, it would create even stronger bubbles.
  - saimiam 4y ago
    This is actually a wonderful idea but also somewhat like giving the keys to the kingdom to theirs parties. If a Twitter moderator is anything like a Reddit moderator, good luck monetizing those millions of tweets people post every day.
- bonoboTP 4y ago
  > I think the future is to give SUPER clear power to individuals to manage their own experience. Freedom of speech is both the right to speak, but also the right of the listener to hear (or not hear) as an individual. That's the road to filter bubbles and radicalization because people never realize how obnoxious they are to real society. You can always find a few hundred other extreme fringe and deranged people from all over the Internet, while if you tried saying that stuff in real life, your community would slap some sense back into you. Online you can just block and move on and never face consequences, so you develop this righteous attitude that you know it all and you get validated by other loners from all over the world. I think the only good way forward can be a return to physical spaces. People will realize this more and more and there will be some sort of hybrid approach. Actual real life communities are important. Sure, niche hobbies may not sustain a large enough community in each little town, but do we really need to specialize so much? Does that really improve our affairs? Couldn't people compromise and get into some slightly different but still adjacent hobby?
bigDinosaur 4y ago
One major benefit to HN is that it is text only. There's a lot of 'legal, but horrific to look at' imagery which gets moderated out on other platforms but here is not possible in the first place (excepting external links).

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.
- dleslie 4y ago
  > Twitter is what you want it to be, topic-wise, based on who you follow and what they like to talk about. I've tried this. It's false. It's a myth that Twitter users tell themselves, AFAICT. Even disregarding the trending topics and explore interfaces, all it takes is for one of the curated members that you follow to retweet something you're not interested in seeing. > 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. But that's contradictory to your claim that Twitter is what you want it to be, based on who you follow, isn't it? Because Twitter _isn't_ what you claim it is. Twitter is optimized for outrage-oriented engagement. It _wants_ to show you things that will encourage you to engage, to return, and there's nothing quite as engaging as content that upsets you.
  - ilamont 4y ago
    > I've tried this. It's false. So I have I. I currently have about a half-dozen accounts, each following different types of accounts with limited overlap. So, what I get on the genealogy account feed is limited almost entirely to genealogists and historians posting about those topics and very little else. People that stray too much get unfollowed. That said, my personal account has overlap with a separate startup/media/tech account because of some shared interests in the tech space. But there is also a lot of very different items I see in the personal account because of local accounts in the city I live in as well as topical news accounts relating to Asia and Europe that interest me. Naturally, anything relating to current events in those areas also touches on U.S. politics, foreign policy, and military policy, so I get that too, despite some muted keywords. > But that's contradictory to your claim that Twitter is what you want it to be, based on who you follow, isn't it? You missed the part in the paragraph that followed: 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). And not everyone knows how to filter it, or they only have one account. Those are the most likely to leave. Not disagreeing with your point about outrage, though. Like you said, there's nothing quite as engaging as content that gets lots of responses/RTs/shares/"likes," and this content tends to be negative.
KerrAvon 4y ago
> has been mostly de-platformed by now Completely inaccurate. No one side has been deplatformed in aggregate. A few individuals have been suspended permanently for violating TOS. They should have been removed earlier, but were considered special cases due to their prominence. It amounts to Twitter removing its own inhibition on enforcing its TOS for certain prominent users. If you want a hard-right-wing heavy experience, you can certainly get that on Twitter today (and two months ago) by following the hard right wingers. Most of them never left. The subscriber count jumps you heard about when the emerald scion announced his Twitter purchase? Very small percentages.
- jkubicek 4y ago
  I totally agree with this take. I'm also surprised that there hasn't been more strident push-back against the "conservatives are being banned from Twitter" story from conservatives themselves. If I were right-leaning I would certainly not want to be associated with the q-anon advocates for violence that are being kicked off the platform.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    Trump wasn't kicked off the platform for being q-anon.
    - myko 4y ago
      Right, he was kicked off for fomenting an attempt at revolution which included urging QAnon people (who need medical treatment) to attack the nation's capital in an effort to illegally reinstate himself as POTUS and using Twitter in his effort to do so. Much worse than just promoting QAnon conspiracies IMO!
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    This is exactly the "Oh, you know the ones" take, that conservative opinions in general are not what's being banned[1]: 1: https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/1050391663552671744 https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174...
d23 4y ago
> That only works because HN is, mostly, politics-free. It's only politics-free because it's heavily moderated. There's nothing magical about the people here that make them apolitical. Political posts are often removed outright, and comments that are political have to be pretty fact-based (or at have the appearance thereof) to not be removed.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  I'd add 1) that HN also didn't start politics-free, that was something that was consciously imposed on it well into its life, and 2) that HN post politics-moderation is far less influential than HN was pre politics-moderation.
  - oarsinsync 4y ago
    > HN post politics-moderation is far less influential than HN was pre politics-moderation Influential in what way?
vincvinc 4y ago
Hmm, are we on the same HN? I feel like I see a lot of topics debated I’d call political (“about how society ought to function”) on a daily basis.
- turtledove 4y ago
  I was going to say.... HN is full of politics. Not always the Red vs Blue kind, but there's political discussions constantly. At any given time several front page stories are explicitly political, and several more are implicitly political (e.g. cryptocurrency).
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Sebb767 4y ago
    Discussions without politics are a bit like science without the mathematics field: If you take the larger definition, there's hardly any way to avoid it. Especially if you define things like crypto currency as political, it's basically impossible to have a tech discussion without scratching it. What people mean when they say that is that political topics are usually a side concern to the technical topics at hand, not pure political discussions. The off-topic, angry and/or ad-hominem comments are also quite rare - yes, they exist, but compared to (most of) Reddit and Twitter it's very relaxed. And policy is almost never the primary topic, unless it directly affects the tech field.
  - ixtli 4y ago
    Richard Stallman once said that "geeks like to think they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone." When people imply that there is such a thing as an a-political take on the world we live in, what they're saying is that they cant identify the mainstream ideology that they themselves are adherents of. As such things which adhere to it look "natural", without "bias", or "non-political."
- iudqnolq 4y ago
  Political comments made up about 2/3 of my upvotes. It's everywhere here, it's just moderated so that it's discussed in a very armchair manner.
femto113 4y ago
Everything is politics, but most of HN's comment section is sufficiently homogenized around Silicon Valley libertarian ideology that political conflict is rarely at the forefront of discussions. A much more practical reason HN survives is there are no images or videos. It is profoundly easier to filter, downvote, or ignore someone's text ramblings than it is to curate media.
nemothekid 4y ago
>I'm not a regular Twitter user followed by >the other side has been mostly de-platformed by now. This is probably my biggest peeve when it comes about discussions on Twitter. The media has made it seem that Twitter just routinely bans conservatives voices for "a difference of opinion" when that is not the case. Twitter's high profile bans are on Wikipedia, and they weren't banned for simply saying "abortion should be repealed".
- hackerfromthefu 4y ago
  Banning is one thing, but what about full or actually partial shadow-banning, or deleting selected specific posts which is called moderation, and the overall balance of the biases in the moderation.
  - nemothekid 4y ago
    >but what about full or actually partial shadow-banning, Of all the big social networks, Twitter has been the only one to keep the use of chronological feeds. What does "shadow banning" mean when all your tweets are chronological for everyone you follow? Do you actually use Twitter? >or deleting selected specific posts which is called moderation Every platform moderates; but now we have moved the goalposts from de-platforming to moderating. Twitter has a few isolated incidents where everyone will beat their chests (namely Hunter Biden and COVID), but those two incidents have failed to signify that Twitter has a systemic issue or bias. When you actually dive into it; the problem of conservatives being "cancelled" on Twitter comes from the Twitter Mob, aka, other Twitter users. What most of these people want is to post without consequence, "free speech for me but not for thee".
Pxtl 4y ago
> That only works because HN is, mostly, politics-free. That not accidental, but the result of firm-handed and aggressive moderation. My account is rate-limited because of getting into political arguments on Hacker News.
myko 4y ago
> the other side has been mostly de-platformed by now This is not true, far from it. Why do you think this?
kranke155 4y ago
There are pro-Russian accounts on Twitter. I don’t know about right wing US but I follow Marco Rubio. I don’t know how you’d get removed just for being right wing.
boplicity 4y ago
> That only works because HN is, mostly, politics-free. I have to disagree with that one. This discussion -- content moderation-- is one of the most political topics possible. More things are political than most people realize. However, I do think that the quality of the political discourse here is much better than other places; it is often just based on ideas, and even if they're plainly wrong, they're not usually presented in an inflammatory way. That is what sets things apart, rather than the lack of politics.
emodendroket 4y ago
> 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. Please. Despite the howls of protest this is far from true and that would be obvious to anyone who's spent much time reading political discussion on Twitter.

garbagetime 4y ago

I've never once thought to myself "I'm happy that the people I follow are only allowed to express some views" or any similar thought. If someone is too rude, I block the person. If I don't enjoy reading a person's Tweets, I unfollow him.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

numpad0 4y ago

It will partially solve locality/language dependency problems of following UGC laws though. There were enough of it for Mastodon devs.

brundolf 4y ago

I'm not sure the comparison holds up. Twitter right now doesn't moderate content, really, it only does anything about outright scams, misinformation, etc. Toxicity can mostly run wild and free. Whereas HN has various moderation mechanisms that seek to decrease the amount of low-quality interaction. I.e., I think dropping all moderation from HN would have a much bigger effect than doing the same on Twitter

Pxtl 4y ago
Twitter absolutely does moderate content. If you say something that the algo interprets as being a suggestion to commit suicide, you'll get an instante 24-hour ban. A tonne of really awful toxic accounts are soft-blocked and their tweets get stuck in the "more replies" box. And if you're overtly and explicitly racist or sexist, there's a good chance you'll get straight-up banned.

throwmeariver1 4y ago

knubie 4y ago

The difference between Twitter and Reddit, hacker news, or 4chan, is that on Twitter you ostensibly only see content from people you follow. If you don’t like the content someone is putting out, you just unfollow them. Twitter is more like email than Reddit in that sense, and no one is arguing for email to be moderated.

UncleOxidant 4y ago
> on Twitter you ostensibly only see content from people you follow But that seemed to becoming less and less true in recent months. I was often seeing tweets from people I wasn't following because the algorithm was starting to recommend them based on other tweets I had clicked on. I deactivated my account this past weekend and moved over to mastodon - it seems so much more chill.
phillipcarter 4y ago
I don't think Twitter is more like email than Reddit. Twitter is built around increasing engagement via increasing what you see and who you interact with. Which makes sense: it's a centralized platform for speech and it needs to grow its user base and their level of engagement to make money. You need to fight against that system to curate your feed so that you don't ever see something you don't like. I don't think Musk has any brilliant ideas to 10x Twitter's revenue and somehow change this characteristic about it. Considering that, there are also many different ways you can experience harassment on Twitter. Are these ways solvable with technical solutions? Perhaps. But these are people we're talking about here, not 0s and 1s. You can't solve all people problems with technology. And as parent comments have said, anyone who's been in a position of having to guide a community knows this to be true.
Drew_ 4y ago
Reddit is much better at what you're describing. Twitter constantly inserts content you haven't asked for in your feed and when viewing tweets.
- mrhands556 4y ago
  Reddit home now shows me repulsive “suggestions” that are very toxic. The popular tab is almost unusable. The only difference is you don’t see the toxicity in arguments as often, because any dissent is downvoted and effectively squelched. It’s more toxic righteousness, consistently.

drewcon 4y ago

I also have a reasonable expectation that HK is FOCUSED and CIVIL. I do not have that expectation on Twitter. Twitter is just a raw society fire hose and I'm fine with that. I think the future is to give SUPER clear power to individuals to manage their own experience. Freedom of speech is both the right to speak, but also the right of the listener to hear (or not hear) as an individual. I would also love to see twitter evolve to become more substack-ish where communities are more "owned" and moderation is delegated to communities to determine rules based on trust and shared goals vs. just blanket twitter safetytism.

rocqua 4y ago
If you could 'subscribe' to a moderation service on Twitter, much like you used to subscribe to the editorial board of a newspaper, that might work. It would make the right-wing less up-in-arms about censorship by unchosen companies. And create more space for various viewpoints. At the same time, it would create even stronger bubbles.
- saimiam 4y ago
  This is actually a wonderful idea but also somewhat like giving the keys to the kingdom to theirs parties. If a Twitter moderator is anything like a Reddit moderator, good luck monetizing those millions of tweets people post every day.
bonoboTP 4y ago
> I think the future is to give SUPER clear power to individuals to manage their own experience. Freedom of speech is both the right to speak, but also the right of the listener to hear (or not hear) as an individual. That's the road to filter bubbles and radicalization because people never realize how obnoxious they are to real society. You can always find a few hundred other extreme fringe and deranged people from all over the Internet, while if you tried saying that stuff in real life, your community would slap some sense back into you. Online you can just block and move on and never face consequences, so you develop this righteous attitude that you know it all and you get validated by other loners from all over the world. I think the only good way forward can be a return to physical spaces. People will realize this more and more and there will be some sort of hybrid approach. Actual real life communities are important. Sure, niche hobbies may not sustain a large enough community in each little town, but do we really need to specialize so much? Does that really improve our affairs? Couldn't people compromise and get into some slightly different but still adjacent hobby?

bigDinosaur 4y ago

One major benefit to HN is that it is text only. There's a lot of 'legal, but horrific to look at' imagery which gets moderated out on other platforms but here is not possible in the first place (excepting external links).