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I bet it's likely a bug. There were times i wasnt able to post LinkedIn urls in the past. I bet it's their crawler/integrity service having hard time. Never as
by tehlike 4y ago
I bet it's likely a bug. There were times i wasnt able to post LinkedIn urls in the past. I bet it's their crawler/integrity service having hard time.
Never assume malice when it can be sufficiently explained by a bug or incompetence.
- fartcannon 4y agoNowadays, maybe let's assume malice. Maybe its a false positive and a bunch of people stop using twitter, Facebook, google, apple, or Microsoft as a result. That is less harmful (some might say it's good) than the opposite, where big corps use our collective desire to forgive as a tool to exploit us. You can apply that saying to your wife and kids. Or your neighbour. Big corps that make money off exploiting peoples negative emotions like twitter? No. I assume malice.
- tehlike 4y agoThat must be a hard life assuming things are working against you
- fartcannon 4y agoNah, its good. Lots of dopamine from being right all the time.
- tehlike 4y agoSounds good. You must also not be learning anything new. Let this be first.
- roenxi 4y agoIf you go over to the Wikipedia article for "genocides by death toll" we currently have 2 ongoing - one in Sudan, one Myanmar. And possibly Xianjing although that doesn't meet Wikipedia's standards. There are really few limits to how nasty a group of humans can get after they identify an in- and out- group. That is genocides, in 2022. The idea that a social media company is out to crush competitors and make money is really not that far out there, and certainly not an idea that can be reasonably mocked. These companies are going the way of the more corporate news organizations - they've got influence, they want to be political actors. They are not trustworthy.
- tehlike 4y agoYou are mixing a bunch of things. I do think twitter has too much moderation problem, i don't think this particular issue is.
- mavu 4y agoNot if they actually are. Then it helps to make informed decisions.
- throw_m239339 4y ago> That must be a hard life assuming things are working against you Yes, better be gullible all the time instead and trust all these corporations...
- tehlike 4y agoOr do the correct thing and be somewhat skeptical but also logical, and think of things in context, weight potential causes for an issue and pick the likely one. Speaking from experience: 1. size of mastodon is such a small thing that i doubt twitter even worries about it, among other things they have to worry about - like monetization. 2. My guess is integrity system incorrectly marked a url or link crawler/preview/whatever service is failing to crawl the page, or something along those lines. It can be something else, but my overarching claim is that it was not someone going into admin UI and typing mastodon to block them explicitly to cut the competition out. It may still be a lowly paid employee incorrectly doing something, but it's not for cutting the competition out and very very likely an honest mistake.
- mattbrewsbytes 4y agoSounds like maybe fartcannon saw the anti-competitive things large companies have done in the past.
- tehlike 4y agoWe all have. But assuming everything is of that nature is what I am against.
- fartcannon 4y agoIt just doesn't hurt to assume greed exists and big corporations are behaving greedily. Otherwise you're either in denial, or walking around perpetually shocked.
- BeetleB 4y agoA masterful example of the strawman and false dichotomy.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- colordrops 4y agoOf course, but we aren't talking about everything, just sociopathic mega corps.
- AndrewUnmuted 4y agoAmazon used to take down its EC2 servers where Netflix streamed their content during the early days of the streaming wars. What of it? Are you actually so naive to think things aren't working against us?
- nosefrog 4y agoSource?
- AndrewUnmuted 4y agoUh, me. I worked at Amazon when this happened.
- sillysaurusx 4y agoPleasantly surprised that you got 8 replies saying that things are often working against us. It’s true at least some of the time. And depending on your social status, that “some of the time” can become all of the time. Competitors have no obligation to play nicely. Is it really a surprise they don’t?
- fartcannon 4y agoI don't care if they don't play nice. I assume they don't. I also don't turn a blind eye to things working against our collective interest.
- timcavel 4y ago
- brnt 4y agoBig tech has earned the assumption.
- dokem 4y agoNot as hard as getting taken for a ride at every turn.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoThere are a lot of people that have no interest in cultivating an objective and accurate world view. "sounds plausible" goes in the "objective evidence" pile and nobody follows up to see if they were correct. What is a hypothesis here? That twitter thought they could block Mastodon and no one in the world would notice? That no one would care?
- fartcannon 4y agoDamage control is cheap and easy.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoSo do you really think a team at twitter sat down and thought, lets block mastodon for a day to avoid some customer bleed, then we can do damage control, but it will be worth it in the end?
- fartcannon 4y agoYes.
- tehlike 4y agoIn the command center, while drinking a glass of wine... Let's kill it, board said.
- abnry 4y agoI would qualify this by saying the priors matter. Twitter has torched their credibility in a flaming dumpster fire. That changes how one might make assumptions.
- colpabar 4y agoIt also just looks suspect. Mastadon is a competitor to twitter, right? It's obviously good for twitter that no one can post links to the mastadon sign up page, right? Do I still have to assume it's just a bug? I sure wish the bugs in my code ended up benefiting my company :)
- tehlike 4y agoMastodon is a very very small surface for twitter...
- somenameforme 4y agoAnd not long ago Facebook was a very small surface for MySpace. And Reddit was a very small surface for Digg, and so on. Network effects can cause competition to rapidly snowball.
- tehlike 4y agoI root for mastodon, but i don't think it becoming big enough to challenge any current social media platform. Twitter may die, but i don't think mastodon would grow as much as you make it sound.
- clumpthump 4y agoHanlon's Razor is, I believe, a good rule of thumb, but people keep using it in situations such as this one where it's not just potentially malice (wanting to harm someone for little other reason than wanting to see them hurt or wanting to hurt) but also greed/self-interest. Hanlon's Razor as stated makes sense to me. I see a lot more stupidity in the world than I see people wanting to hurt for no other reason. But greed? I see a lot of that.
- daenz 4y agoYeah, I think Hanlon's Razor was intended to apply to individuals, not organizations. Often the "stupidity" of an organization is a shield for malice or greed.
- tehlike 4y agoOrganizations are made up of people. When you have 5000 people making small decisions with 0.1% possibility of being wrong, if have 40% of chance having at least one mistake over 5000 decisions.
- daenz 4y agoPeople are not independent coin tosses. They coordinate, manage, overrule, scheme, discuss, and process information in strategic ways that render these kinds of extremely simplified models impossible.
- tehlike 4y agoThey don't work on every single decision collectively.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tehlike 4y agoThis issue is such a small thing that it is much more likely to be an unintended issue than otherwise.
- derbOac 4y agoFor me personally when large quasimonopolies are involved I give it a 50-50 prior over the incompetence-malice distribution.
- loceng 4y agoWith a dash of expected plausible deniability that it was a bug - unless someone outright whistleblows otherwise.
- Osmose 4y agoNot everything needs to be an absolute rule, this totally looks like a small bug on Twitter's part, and if it takes like weeks to fix then you can decide "okay that's a little more suspicious". What's the point of making this particular moment an immediate, gigantic moral issue?
- fartcannon 4y agoI prefer the other way around. Twitter is probably acting bad. If they update it immediately, apologize, then we can assume its not an issue. What value do you get by giving them the benefit of doubt? You just give them a way to gently manipulate you if you assume every little thing that's bad is an accident.
- Osmose 4y agoThe alternative to "Twitter is acting bad" doesn't have to be "Twitter is completely innocent", it can be "Huh that sucks, wonder what caused that". You don't have to make an immediate judgement call on the morality of every tiny bug. The value I get from that is not spending energy judging everything immediately as soon as I see it, which, in a world with social media, is a significant savings.
- fartcannon 4y agoI would prefer to draw attention to their bad behaviour. I'll expend my energy. You can enjoy the benefits.
- spicybright 4y agoIt seems like people many people today aren't satisfied with saying "I don't know" when it's the most reasonable answer. Every little action apparently has to be blamed on something (usually based on very little or no evidence). It doesn't even matter why as long as twitter is aware of it, and it gets fixed soon.
- skybrian 4y agoSo you're saying that you don't care about the truth and would prefer people to act on misinformation.
- jdauriemma 4y agoMaybe this is a bit too forgiving of Twitter, but do they even see Mastodon as a threat worthy of stifling in this manner?
- colpabar 4y ago
- tehlike 4y agoNo. This is different and smells either a crawler that can't crawl a page for integrity purposes, or it can crawl and somehow the url got blacklisted. I assume hunter Biden story is more of the "disinformation" moderators blocking wrongfully, or them shutting down Wuhan lab leak theory, but this smells very different.
- weberer 4y agoWow, I had no idea they backpedaled on that and tried to claim it was a "process error" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controversy#Social_media_corporations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controvers...
- stimpson_j_cat 4y agoIt's not a bug to disallow "distribution of hacked material" in your Terms of Service. If you think it was political, you should certainly inform the FEC! They found that Twitter had acted "for commercial reasons and not for the purpose of influencing an election" so they'd appreciate the heads up.
- colpabar 4y agoah yes, because when a federal agency doesn't punish a multi billion dollar corporation, we all know it's because they definitely didn't do anything wrong. They're so trustworthy!
- TAKEMYMONEY 4y agoPlease refrain from replies without content. Why did the FEC fine the DNC and Clinton for violating rules related to the Steele dossier? My understanding is that the DNC also has a few dollars. Did they forget their bias?
- saurik 4y agoBuilding systems that occasionally set themselves up for mistakes like this is the malice.
- tehlike 4y agoPlease build a system with 100% availability under load and with no false positive. I'll wait.
- saurik 4y ago> Please build a system with 100% availability under load and with no false positive. I'll wait. Seriously? This is absolutely trivial: you don't build a system like this in the first place, as whatever is failing here--and 100% if it is a system actively designed to prevent people from posting links to their own timeline--isn't providing value: it is just a bigger surface in which there are going to be random bugs and false positives. I will thereby repeat: building systems that occasionally set themselves up for mistakes IS THE MALICE. I am not claiming that making a mistake is malicious, or that only malicious people make mistakes: we all make mistakes, so we should thereby do everything we can to limit our power and refuse to build systems that might fail. (edit: I added a paragraph here but it came after a reply, so I moved that paragraph--without further edit--to my comment reply to that reply comment.)
- tehlike 4y agoPlease do so. "Absolutely possible" is showing me you are way too confident of things and this usually is a sign you actually never done so.
- saurik 4y agoThe idea that you believe that a system I am saying shouldn't be built will somehow have a bug in it despite not existing is ridiculous. I will once again repeat, therefore, with more context: I am not claiming one should or can build systems without mistakes... I am claiming that, because we make mistakes--and because we all know that we all (including myself) make mistakes--we should not build certain kinds of systems, and that building systems that put us in a position where making mistakes cause these kinds of effects "is the malice". Regardless, if it IS a mistake, we can assume Twitter will offer a formal apology indicating that they made a mistake that accepts fault for the impact it had on others, explain how they think that mistake occurred in enough detail that we can agree that it was a mistake and not an excuse, they will take steps to prevent that similar mistake from happening in the future, and they will further attempt to "make it right" somehow to the mastadon community (particularly so, as this was a competitor) with some extra benefit or concession... right? I will note that going around making mistakes and neither apologizing for them not taking responsibility for them--instead just flippantly hiding behind "we all make mistakes" while continuing to put yourself in a position where your mistakes matter to people--is itself a malicious act.
- ekianjo 4y ago> Never assume malice when it can be sufficiently explained by a bug or incompetence. I find this to be a stupid way to look at things. Incompetence and malice are not mutually exclusive.
- gjvc 4y agoIncompetence and malice are not mutually exclusive. Very good point. The latter may be used to distract from the former.
- kaiken1987 4y agoBut the difference is that incompetence is far more plentiful than malice. It's an odds game. Everyone makes mistakes, few actions people in general take are done in malice.
- res0nat0r 4y agoIs it a competitor though? The amount of developer salary it would take to implement such a feature and push it out at Twitter vs. the close to zero threat Mastadon poses to Twitter, seems like a bad tradeoff if we're being conspiratorial.
- ekianjo 4y agoTwitter has been known to block certains URLs on short notice. Its hardly difficult to do it for one more...
- supernes 4y agoIf there's a backlash, then it's a bug. If no one cares, then it's a feature.
- masukomi 4y agoit wouldn't be a very _good_ feature because if it was, because there are SO MANY INSTANCES. Blocking one large one is not going to stop anything, and there's no pattern to domains, and .... just no. I mean yes, you could go "oh this looks like a sub-url of a mastodon server let's block that but there's side-effects to that and also it's pretty easy for mastodon devs to circumvent
- can16358p 4y agoPlausible deniability. Design the system in a way that it'd pick up competitor links as spam (without directly blacklisting them explicitly) using fine-tuned training data. In case of media attention, tell it's an error and ML algorithms are blackboxes, and take action to "whitelist" those domains only when needed. Yeah, we buy it, Twitter.
- tehlike 4y agoDesign a better one and there will be companies looking to acquire you. Problem solved, in a more constructive way.
- can16358p 4y agoWell it's not my job, though even by looking at spam accounts on Twitter I can easily pinpoint common patterns that can be extremely successful at preventing spam at Twitter, MUCH better than blacklisting domains. It's dead obvious that they do not want it. The reasons why is beyond me.
- tehlike 4y ago"it's not my job". Someone whose job it is made a few mistakes. you must have made a shit ton of mistake too. Claiming otherwise is stupid. What you and i can pinpoint on twitter spam is independent of "everything is evil". Difference.
- can16358p 4y agoOf course everyone does mistakes, but that's not the point. Twitter is just too powerful with all those engineers and access to ML to have this just as a mistake. Whoever is responsible for that flagging is either: - Incredibly incompetent and not knowing what they were doing (which I honestly don't want to believe) - Knew exactly what they were doing and it's intentional with a benefit of doubt with plausible deniability. Unintentionally blocking a whole domain "by mistake" falls into the first point above. Knowing track record of social media companies hiring good engineers and being evil, also knowing Mastodon being a competitor to Twitter, I don't think I need to tell much more.
- kps 4y agoHanlon's razor does a good job of masking malice. I have to assume that's accidental, though.
- kzzzznot 4y agoBravo. This made me chuckle
- pid-1 4y ago> Never assume malice when it can be sufficiently explained by a bug or incompetence. My 100% baseless opinion is that most evil in big orgs comes from emergent behavior. Ant colonies are capable of really complex stuff, even though individual ants are somewhat simple beings. Likewise, a corp can do evil stuff even though all individuals who are part of it aren't actively seeking to do harm. Since we can't ask a corp its intentions, it's fair to judge them for the consequences of their actions.
- colordrops 4y agoThere is usually at least one person behind a decision at a corp that fully understands what is being done. Humans aren't ants.
- ufo 4y agoOne story that often comes up: automated ML systems will have false positives every once in a while. But when the false positive affects a big customer it is fixed more promptly than when it affects a competitor...
- bogwog 4y agoOne of many examples of why we shouldn’t hold corporations to the low standards we hold individuals. I.e. never give a corporation the benefit of the doubt. They’re the most important producers of our economy, and doing so allows them to be lazy (aka the complete opposite of “productive”)
- tehlike 4y agoSee my comment above.
- tehlike 4y agoYou should talk to your congressperson to voice your opinion. I agree there should be ways to get things fixed in a timely manner. I got locked out of my old Google account once as a Google employee and i got 0 help and it was frustrating, so i understand.
- tjpnz 4y agoI'm willing to bet Twitter has a whitelist for sites with user generated content to prevent whole domains from being hell banned if one person says something naughty. Perhaps Mastodon has yet to be added to this list?
- vel0city 4y agoI've been trying to make an email with a gTLD my primary personal email address. Its so annoying having so many forms say "that's not a valid email!" just because they didn't get the message things like .ninja, .dev, .duck, .fun are all valid TLDs these days. No, their form says emails can only be .com, .net, .org, .mil, or maybe a handful of ccTLDs.
- alaricus 4y agoIt doesn't matter either way, the end result is the same.
- MrPatan 4y agoYes, but: Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistiguishable from malice
- personjerry 4y agoTo the people disagreeing with this - Twitter is orders of magnitude bigger than Mastodon. Why would they draw attention to this tiny competitor with the entirety of their media attention? Don't you think that Twitter knows that they have a lot of watchdogs?
- barkingcat 4y agoWe are in an age when incompetence and bugs have the same effect as malice, and by the time the bug is fixed, the malicious aftereffects have already taken place and irreparable. Assuming malice by default is the very least we could do to fight back. For example, a cop can be incompetent when accidentally firing a gun at a person, and they can be punished for the mistake, but the victim is already dead.