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I think you're jumping into the technical bits right away without thinking through requirements/features. Maybe we (the royal 'we' as in all of humanity) should

I think you're jumping into the technical bits right away without thinking through requirements/features. Maybe we (the royal 'we' as in all of humanity) shouldn't have a public town square? When you build something to have marginalized voices be heard you are also including all marginalized voices. The MarginalizedVoice super object has EqualRightsForSquirrels as well as HatefulRacistUncle child objects. There are very valid points, that people don't like to hear, about how the concept of someone/group choosing what MarginalizedVoice gets heard and what doesn't isn't fair. If the basis of a platform is "public town square" you're going to have to deal with all MarginalizedVoices. Content moderation (incl comments) doesn't scale so don't build something with public town squares. That's only a feature platform builders want in order to sell advertisements. If the thought of not having an ad-driven platform leads you to "users won't pay for it" then maybe think of a platform users would pay for or some other way to have it be sustainable.

istinetz 4y ago
This reminds me of a short story Kurt Vonnegut mentioned in a novel of his: >“You know — “ said Eliot, “Kilgore Trout once wrote a whole book about a country that was devoted to fighting odors. That was the national purpose. There wasn’t any disease, and there wasn’t any crime, and there wasn’t any war, so they went after odors.” “This country,” said Eliot, “had tremendous research projects devoted to fighting odors. They were supported by individual contributions given to mothers who marched on Sundays from door to door. The ideal of the research was to find a specific chemical deodorant for every odor. But then the hero, who was also the country’s dictator, made a wonderful scientific breakthrough, even though he wasn’t a scientist, and they didn’t need the projects any more. He went right to the root of the problem.” “Uh huh,” said the Senator. He couldn’t stand stories by Kilgore Trout, was embarassed by his son. “He found one chemical that would eliminate all odors?” “No. As I say, the hero was dictator, and he simply eliminated noses.” ========= Your solution is somewhat similar. You want to solve the problem of people saying racist things, so you decide to destroy the public square. Going for the root of the problem, I suppose.
- dimva 4y ago
  We gotta build things for the humans we have, not the humans we wish to have. Maybe global public squares don't work for the humans we have. That's ok.
  - jstummbillig 4y ago
    But is it. The world is very clearly (more clearly than at any other point in the past) one. It is entirely not obvious that our current level of global communication is sufficient to support this setup.
  - istinetz 4y ago
    Okay, humble suggestion - remove yourself from the public square, but don't destroy it for me. That way, you get to not hear racist stuff, and I get to not have my morality chosen by random americans.
    - humanrebar 4y ago
      Right. Maybe we're much, much worse without public fora. There are valid concerns about social bubbles, fake news, and alternative facts already.
    - naravara 4y ago
      TBH the issue is not that I can't stand to hear racist stuff, it's that there's well understood incentives to fear monger that have tangibly eroded social trust across the board and degraded the actual real life public square in the process. That's not just the heightened threats of terrorism and acrimonious political systems either, those are just the tips of the iceberg and there's a whole host of social maladies, mental health disorders, depression and anxiety symptoms, etc. coming out of this.
    - pjc50 4y ago
      Not hearing the stuff does not prevent someone who does hear the stuff from breaking into your house with a hammer, as Paul Pelosi discovered.
annowiki 4y ago
You have me thinking about kind of a cool board idea. 150 person twitter boards. Cap it at 150. People in that group can all vote on their own moderation, they can't interact with groups in other boards through quote tweeting or voting, though obviously they can copy paste. You might get racist boards, but then its easy to get rid of all of them at once. 150 being https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number of course. I have no way to distribute anything. I tried to do my own annotations board on literature but no one joined. I just think it sounds cool to be in a personable board like that.
- eterps 4y ago
  But that is also a recipe for echo chambers. Anyway, from a technical point of view, this is what Mastodon instances already can offer.
  - lstodd 4y ago
    You can't fight echo chamber effect with technical measures, forget about it.
- balaji1 4y ago
  Inventing some protocol around the Dunbar number is interesting. There was something similar in the Weatherford's book on Genghis Khan [1][2]. This system was described to be very effective for communicating and coordinating the huge military. > In Genghis Khan's military system, a tumen was recursively built from units of 10 (aravt), 100 (zuut) and 1,000 (mingghan), each with a leader reporting to the next higher level. Note: I am not aware of how good the Weatherford book is, it felt one-sided to me. So I am not sure how good the civic system that depended on the Tumen was in the mongol era. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mingghan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mingghan [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumen_(unit)#Genghis_Khan's_organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumen_(unit)#Genghis_Khan's_or...
  - pjc50 4y ago
    Pretty much every effective military in history has had this kind of hierarchical structure, by both imitation and convergent evolution. I'm sure there's a post on https://acoup.blog/ https://acoup.blog/ about it.
jefftk 4y ago
> don't build something with public town squares. That's only a feature platform builders want in order to sell advertisement Why would advertisers prefer public town squares? They just want people to see their ads. (I also like "public town square" places, as a user)
- mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
  A "public town square" that allows anyone to post and comment is going to be paid by page views. The way to get more page views is to have controversial or viral content because it will bring the comments and page views. That will get the most advertisers. A closed/private group platform isn't going to get as many advertisers.
  - Gordonjcp 4y ago
    STOP! DON'T CLICK SUBMIT! DID YOU INSTALL GRAMMARNAZI?!!? No, the adverts are going to go in your private posts and messages, so you have to see the advert before you get the message. Like this one.
- eddieroger 4y ago
  Because why market to some people when you can market to all people for the same cost? Particularly if that square can tell you that tech people look in a certain direction but cooking enthusiasts look in another, so you can pick where to put which sign since you've already paid to post your signs. I don't have a problem with the local public town square, but I do agree that giving equal voice to all the bad ideas, while also making it easier for those with bad ideas to find each other, is dangerous. It's made more dangerous in an era where our elected leaders also say bad ideas out loud, which emboldens others to do the same. Even in a public square, you can't just yell "fire" without consequence.
  - jefftk 4y ago
    > why market to some people when you can market to all people for the same cost? It wouldn't be the same cost. Publishers charge advertisers in proportion to the number of people who see the ad.
ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
But we already have a "public town square": it's called DNS, Domain Name System, and it's great. With about $20/year you get "verified" and everyone knows you own "foo.com", or .whatever [1]. It's just that we, as in we the users, failed this great "public town square" because as soon as we get in the public we get scared and need to belong to a tribe: the Twitter tribe, the TikTok tribe, the Instagram tribe, and so forth. [1] https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt
- dimva 4y ago
  The internet is not a public square for the same reason the world isn't a public square - it requires effort to see things from outside your own community. Twitter (and Facebook), on the other hand, will regularly push things to me from fascists, communists, "environmentalist" degrowthers, and other weirdos who I have no interest in hearing from.
  - ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
    DNS is not tantamount to the internet: you can very well have a TCP/IP connection to a computer through the internet, i.e. wires and waves, and not use DNS at all. Having a DNS domain is akin to going into a public town square and setting up your stall selling whatever vegetables you grew in your garden. But just as the individual farmers were run over by large corporations who invented the hyper-market, just as so the individual users have been fleeing, increasingly in the past 15 years, to be under the umbrella of big-corp-du-jour.com. Making another-service.com with the façade of a "public town square" is just making another hypermarket. And also, it's called a "public town square", with accent on town, as in "group of houses" [1], because it's meant for a relatively small population. There is perhaps a reason we don't have "public megacity squares" (stampedes and crowd crushes aside). And there is perhaps something inherently wrong when an individual has 100+ million "followers": in a public town square a stall could not sell vegetables to 100+ million people since there aren't that many people in the town in the first place. [1] https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=town https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=town
- marcusverus 4y ago
azangru 4y ago
> the royal 'we' as in all of humanity Sorry for being a prick; but the royal 'we' is the exact opposite of the 'we' in all of humanity. Royal 'we' is when the speaker refers to him-or-herself with the first-person plural pronoun, as was common among sovereigns ("we the Emperor of the French"). These days most commonly seen in academic articles, where single authors refer to themselves as "we" for some reason.
- cnity 4y ago
  > single authors refer to themselves as "we" for some reason They mean "we" as in "you (the reader) and I (the author)". "We can see that", etc. It's as if the author is a guide on a journey.
  - tough 4y ago
    Oh, nice, would have never guessed
  - meowface 4y ago
    Are you certain that's the intention? That's not how I've interpreted it in papers.
    - feoren 4y ago
      I'm sure conventions differ, but in Mathematics papers, yes, that is the idea behind "we".
    - cnity 4y ago
      You know, I'm not actually certain. But it's how I've interpreted it and been taught to interpret it in academic circles, albeit unofficially. If anyone has any formal indication that it means otherwise I'd love to read more about it. I'm also interested in your interpretation.
matthewdgreen 4y ago
One of the great/terrible things that's happened to communication over my lifetime is watching shared experience fragment. When I was a child most people used to read the same newspapers, watch similar TV. (It was boring!) Nowadays we're fragmented into different pieces of the Internet, which sucks even more. Twitter is part of that fragmentation, but it also accomplished something decent that competitors like Reddit don't: while there are individual communities, the follow interface made them somewhat porous. People can slide into conversations or get boosted by just about anyone. Making this work without local "subreddit-style moderators" was really technically remarkable, just from a spam perspective. Making moderation work to the point where a company could actually run advertising was extremely impressive. I don't know what you're calling for exactly, but it sounds a whole lot more fragmented than what Twitter accomplished. I don't know that this will be a better outcome.
wufufufu 4y ago
What if we let people design their own content filters? That way the platform itself doesn't have to. You can easily select popular filters from a marketplace and the number one option will probably be "hide hate speech" or "hide all politics".
- mindcrime 4y ago
  Bingo. This is exactly what I recently proposed for Twitter. The idea of user defined "filter-sets" where the user chooses what they want to be exposed to. And even further, I proposed the ability to name those filter-sets and share them with others. So if a given user is, for the sake of argument, a "raging Liberal" they can choose a "raging Liberal" filter-set. Likewise, a "raging Conservative" can choose the "raging Conservative" filter-set, a Libertarian can choose the "Libertarian" filter-set, and so on. Much like your market-place idea mentioned above. "But, but, what about filter bubbles / echo chambers???" one says. To which I say "it's not a problem I'm trying to solve, or particularly interested in. I'm not even sure that's actually a problem per-se to begin with." Seriously, the world is too big, there are too many people and too many ideas, for any one of us to accept being exposed to everything that's "out there". Filters are a good thing, in fact a necessary thing. Of course we'd like to think that in a well educated, civilized, rational society, people would choose to make some effort to gain exposure to new and contradictory ideas for the purpose of expanding their minds and adapting and learning and what-not. But be that as it may, you still have to accept that some people will choose to filter out things to a lesser or greater degree than some others, and that some people will choose to filter things differently than you will. And that's OK.
- dalmo3 4y ago
  Until your list of "popular filters" include ones such as "hide jews" or "hide blacks", following clamours for a central authority to ban those filters, or to shut down the entire platform.
kspacewalk2 4y ago
Let's think one level of abstraction higher - do we want to marginalize voices in the first place, given that some of them are fighting oppression and injustice, and others are advocating for bigotry and hate? That is, if we cannot effectively discriminate between those two types of voices, whether because "moderation doesn't scale" or any other valid technical reason, or because it's not always possible to disentangle "legitimate" from "illegitimate" marginalized voices. It's not a binary category, because people who advocate for stuff are not one-dimensional caricatures. Do we accept the bad in the name of $good_stuff_that_comes_with_making_marginalized_voices_heard, or do we marginalize it all straight into oblivion by going after the forums of spreading ideas? The answer to this question seems almost implicit for you, but it's far from obvious to me.
rdevsrex 4y ago
> When you build something to have marginalized voices be heard Why do we have to do that? Isn't the idea of having easy access for all enough? What people are so marginalized that they can't mute hateful speech and get on with their day?
- chipotle_coyote 4y ago
  One of the big problems with harassment on a platform like Twitter, and this seems to be pretty hard to get across to people who haven't been subject to it -- or don't know someone who's been subject to it, at least -- is the speed and intensity of what's coming at you if a true pile-on happens, or if a particular group decides you are The Enemy. You can mute and block a handful of jerks and get on with your day, perhaps, but if everything you post is greeted with hundreds (or even thousands!) of responses along the lines of "we're going to dox you and I hope someone rapes you to death," we're talking about something very different than "people are being mean to me on the internet." I'm not sure if all of Twitter's problems come from mere scale; it suffers from what analyst Ben Thompson has called the Pollyannaish Assumption: we focus on the upsides of the "global public square" without accurately evaluating the downsides, and bluntly, I see this a lot in discussions on HN. It's the subtext of "why can't people just block and move on." Arguably, focusing on the downsides without accurately evaluating the upsides, which I also increasingly see a lot on HN, isn't really an improvement -- but if we're going to have platforms like Twitter and Facebook, the question of "what do you do about harassment, hate speech, and stochastic terrorism on those platforms" needs a better answer than "suck it up, buttercup."
  - somethingreen 4y ago
    The reason this particular problem still exists is not technical. But solutions are not compatible with engagement-graph-go-up business model. You are correct to point out the downsides and dangers of "public square" platform, but we haven't really even started trying to implement any reasonable solutions to them.
ianai 4y ago
Agree. If anything I'd make it like a cross between FB-early days and twitter. i.e. whatever a post is only immediately view-able by direct contacts. Maybe even top off how many direct contacts an account can have and require payment (monthly/yearly, tiered) above that threshold. Also give users the ability to mute/delete posts unilaterally - from their view but also possibly from the site entirely. Maybe have an "auto-disconnect" available above a threshold. Trying to think of ways around the mob mentality stuff.
cplusplusfellow 4y ago
There are plenty of hateful and racist things said on Twitter like : “all I want for Christmas is white genocide.” But no one blinks an eye. So HatefulRacistUncle might be “HorriblyMisguidedAndRacistYoungCollegeStudent” and that’s also not ok to some of us. So who polices this? Maybe we just go back to not reading things we dislike. You can block people on Twitter ya know.
Vox_Leone 4y ago
I think one of the key problems with twitter is the presence of constituted authorities interacting with the populace free from the formal mediation of official channels. I am in Brazil and I bring as an example the disastrous presence of Bolsonaro in the social networks, directly instructing his followers, completely free from institutional constraints. In the case of Brazil, this was a major element of destabilization of public discourse. I am convinced that the presence of authorities on social media has to be regulated, and if I were to launch an alternative to Twitter I would consider [and look for ways to] build ethical safeguards [concerning public officials] into the system.
- jpadkins 4y ago
  This is an interesting point! Can you give more detail or examples of 'institutional constraints' moderating public officials interactions with the public (in the past)? Are there rules or policy written down about what can/cannot be said that the institution enforces that goes against what the public leader wanted?
  - Vox_Leone 4y ago
    >> Are there rules or policy written down about what can/cannot be said that the institution enforces that goes against what the public leader wanted? Well, I can't give an answer from a legal point of view, because I'm looking for it myself. But in various instances of life we see the requirement of formality between authorities and the public. In fact, all public interaction with the state is formal. Here's a problem: the state has a set of international commitments, but the head of that state makes personal statements that go against the very official line of the government he leads [the case of Bolsonaro in Brazil]. Catalyzed by the dynamics of the network This quickly turns into another front of disinformation. The public is completely at the mercy of the machinations of the powerful entity. I don't think there is anything in the Republican rules that precludes proper legislation on this subject.
kenjackson 4y ago
People saying hateful things isn’t the problem. The inability of some to be reasonable after reading them is the problem. It’s a much harder problem to fix. There are some partial solutions, IMO. Although none are all that practical to implement.
abeppu 4y ago
I don't think it's necessary to totally kill the 'public square' concept. Rather, I think comparison with other social media products highlight that different product decisions encourage different behavior for most people. People just use Twitter differently from TikTok, Snapchat, LinkedIn, etc, because of the informational and social environment these products create. These natural experiments can give us hypotheses about more explicit A/B tests for product changes: - Does LinkedIn show us that people have less hostile posts if their real world professional connections are watching? If Twitter tried to show your posts to people it thinks you know, whether or not you follow each other, would we all be more civil? - Does the higher bar of needing to generate an image or video to post (and a 2nd class presentation of comments) on some platforms, and lack of explicit 'reply' functionality stop arguments or bickering? The bar of typing a post in Twitter is just too low? - Does TikTok's recommendation based on behavior rather than "interests" create less polarized bubbles? Showing you a funny dance video just because it knows you'll watch it may disrupt you from seeking out The Enemy just to disagree with them. - Does removing an asymmetric "follow" relationship in favor of symmetrical "connections" disarm people whose hobby is having incendiary positions? If you can only have more "audience" by opening yourself up to see stuff from more people, do you then choose to connect with people that add value rather than valuing followers who will amplify you?
i_like_pie 4y ago
think this is spot on. allude to this here https://acehigh.substack.com/p/operatingproduct-plan-for-twitter https://acehigh.substack.com/p/operatingproduct-plan-for-twi... to add to your point: 1/ tech stack/architecture isn't #1 or even #10 issue. think everyone (all) agree on this 2/ larger issue is how to handle open discourse. given how we are wired as species, is there a social network that is truly open that doesn't descend into vitriol? if so - what behaviors are rewarded, what are the policies etc. - this is #1 question
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pookeh 4y ago
This was a very intelligent and targeted way of not answering the question.
throwawaylinux 4y ago
Hmm... If all of humanity would be better off as you say, then then why should the royal we have have to deal with racist voters? Or racist people going about free in public at all?

istinetz 4y ago

This reminds me of a short story Kurt Vonnegut mentioned in a novel of his: >“You know — “ said Eliot, “Kilgore Trout once wrote a whole book about a country that was devoted to fighting odors. That was the national purpose. There wasn’t any disease, and there wasn’t any crime, and there wasn’t any war, so they went after odors.” “This country,” said Eliot, “had tremendous research projects devoted to fighting odors. They were supported by individual contributions given to mothers who marched on Sundays from door to door. The ideal of the research was to find a specific chemical deodorant for every odor. But then the hero, who was also the country’s dictator, made a wonderful scientific breakthrough, even though he wasn’t a scientist, and they didn’t need the projects any more. He went right to the root of the problem.” “Uh huh,” said the Senator. He couldn’t stand stories by Kilgore Trout, was embarassed by his son. “He found one chemical that would eliminate all odors?” “No. As I say, the hero was dictator, and he simply eliminated noses.” ========= Your solution is somewhat similar. You want to solve the problem of people saying racist things, so you decide to destroy the public square. Going for the root of the problem, I suppose.

dimva 4y ago
We gotta build things for the humans we have, not the humans we wish to have. Maybe global public squares don't work for the humans we have. That's ok.
- jstummbillig 4y ago
  But is it. The world is very clearly (more clearly than at any other point in the past) one. It is entirely not obvious that our current level of global communication is sufficient to support this setup.
- istinetz 4y ago
  Okay, humble suggestion - remove yourself from the public square, but don't destroy it for me. That way, you get to not hear racist stuff, and I get to not have my morality chosen by random americans.
  - humanrebar 4y ago
    Right. Maybe we're much, much worse without public fora. There are valid concerns about social bubbles, fake news, and alternative facts already.
  - naravara 4y ago
    TBH the issue is not that I can't stand to hear racist stuff, it's that there's well understood incentives to fear monger that have tangibly eroded social trust across the board and degraded the actual real life public square in the process. That's not just the heightened threats of terrorism and acrimonious political systems either, those are just the tips of the iceberg and there's a whole host of social maladies, mental health disorders, depression and anxiety symptoms, etc. coming out of this.
  - pjc50 4y ago
    Not hearing the stuff does not prevent someone who does hear the stuff from breaking into your house with a hammer, as Paul Pelosi discovered.

annowiki 4y ago

You have me thinking about kind of a cool board idea. 150 person twitter boards. Cap it at 150. People in that group can all vote on their own moderation, they can't interact with groups in other boards through quote tweeting or voting, though obviously they can copy paste. You might get racist boards, but then its easy to get rid of all of them at once. 150 being https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number of course. I have no way to distribute anything. I tried to do my own annotations board on literature but no one joined. I just think it sounds cool to be in a personable board like that.

eterps 4y ago
But that is also a recipe for echo chambers. Anyway, from a technical point of view, this is what Mastodon instances already can offer.
- lstodd 4y ago
  You can't fight echo chamber effect with technical measures, forget about it.
balaji1 4y ago
Inventing some protocol around the Dunbar number is interesting. There was something similar in the Weatherford's book on Genghis Khan [1][2]. This system was described to be very effective for communicating and coordinating the huge military. > In Genghis Khan's military system, a tumen was recursively built from units of 10 (aravt), 100 (zuut) and 1,000 (mingghan), each with a leader reporting to the next higher level. Note: I am not aware of how good the Weatherford book is, it felt one-sided to me. So I am not sure how good the civic system that depended on the Tumen was in the mongol era. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mingghan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mingghan [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumen_(unit)#Genghis_Khan's_organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumen_(unit)#Genghis_Khan's_or...
- pjc50 4y ago
  Pretty much every effective military in history has had this kind of hierarchical structure, by both imitation and convergent evolution. I'm sure there's a post on https://acoup.blog/ https://acoup.blog/ about it.

jefftk 4y ago

> don't build something with public town squares. That's only a feature platform builders want in order to sell advertisement Why would advertisers prefer public town squares? They just want people to see their ads. (I also like "public town square" places, as a user)

mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
A "public town square" that allows anyone to post and comment is going to be paid by page views. The way to get more page views is to have controversial or viral content because it will bring the comments and page views. That will get the most advertisers. A closed/private group platform isn't going to get as many advertisers.
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  STOP! DON'T CLICK SUBMIT! DID YOU INSTALL GRAMMARNAZI?!!? No, the adverts are going to go in your private posts and messages, so you have to see the advert before you get the message. Like this one.
eddieroger 4y ago
Because why market to some people when you can market to all people for the same cost? Particularly if that square can tell you that tech people look in a certain direction but cooking enthusiasts look in another, so you can pick where to put which sign since you've already paid to post your signs. I don't have a problem with the local public town square, but I do agree that giving equal voice to all the bad ideas, while also making it easier for those with bad ideas to find each other, is dangerous. It's made more dangerous in an era where our elected leaders also say bad ideas out loud, which emboldens others to do the same. Even in a public square, you can't just yell "fire" without consequence.
- jefftk 4y ago
  > why market to some people when you can market to all people for the same cost? It wouldn't be the same cost. Publishers charge advertisers in proportion to the number of people who see the ad.

ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago

But we already have a "public town square": it's called DNS, Domain Name System, and it's great. With about $20/year you get "verified" and everyone knows you own "foo.com", or .whatever [1]. It's just that we, as in we the users, failed this great "public town square" because as soon as we get in the public we get scared and need to belong to a tribe: the Twitter tribe, the TikTok tribe, the Instagram tribe, and so forth. [1] https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt

dimva 4y ago
The internet is not a public square for the same reason the world isn't a public square - it requires effort to see things from outside your own community. Twitter (and Facebook), on the other hand, will regularly push things to me from fascists, communists, "environmentalist" degrowthers, and other weirdos who I have no interest in hearing from.
- ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
  DNS is not tantamount to the internet: you can very well have a TCP/IP connection to a computer through the internet, i.e. wires and waves, and not use DNS at all. Having a DNS domain is akin to going into a public town square and setting up your stall selling whatever vegetables you grew in your garden. But just as the individual farmers were run over by large corporations who invented the hyper-market, just as so the individual users have been fleeing, increasingly in the past 15 years, to be under the umbrella of big-corp-du-jour.com. Making another-service.com with the façade of a "public town square" is just making another hypermarket. And also, it's called a "public town square", with accent on town, as in "group of houses" [1], because it's meant for a relatively small population. There is perhaps a reason we don't have "public megacity squares" (stampedes and crowd crushes aside). And there is perhaps something inherently wrong when an individual has 100+ million "followers": in a public town square a stall could not sell vegetables to 100+ million people since there aren't that many people in the town in the first place. [1] https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=town https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=town
marcusverus 4y ago

azangru 4y ago

> the royal 'we' as in all of humanity Sorry for being a prick; but the royal 'we' is the exact opposite of the 'we' in all of humanity. Royal 'we' is when the speaker refers to him-or-herself with the first-person plural pronoun, as was common among sovereigns ("we the Emperor of the French"). These days most commonly seen in academic articles, where single authors refer to themselves as "we" for some reason.

cnity 4y ago
> single authors refer to themselves as "we" for some reason They mean "we" as in "you (the reader) and I (the author)". "We can see that", etc. It's as if the author is a guide on a journey.
- tough 4y ago
  Oh, nice, would have never guessed
- meowface 4y ago
  Are you certain that's the intention? That's not how I've interpreted it in papers.
  - feoren 4y ago
    I'm sure conventions differ, but in Mathematics papers, yes, that is the idea behind "we".
  - cnity 4y ago
    You know, I'm not actually certain. But it's how I've interpreted it and been taught to interpret it in academic circles, albeit unofficially. If anyone has any formal indication that it means otherwise I'd love to read more about it. I'm also interested in your interpretation.

matthewdgreen 4y ago

One of the great/terrible things that's happened to communication over my lifetime is watching shared experience fragment. When I was a child most people used to read the same newspapers, watch similar TV. (It was boring!) Nowadays we're fragmented into different pieces of the Internet, which sucks even more. Twitter is part of that fragmentation, but it also accomplished something decent that competitors like Reddit don't: while there are individual communities, the follow interface made them somewhat porous. People can slide into conversations or get boosted by just about anyone. Making this work without local "subreddit-style moderators" was really technically remarkable, just from a spam perspective. Making moderation work to the point where a company could actually run advertising was extremely impressive. I don't know what you're calling for exactly, but it sounds a whole lot more fragmented than what Twitter accomplished. I don't know that this will be a better outcome.

wufufufu 4y ago

What if we let people design their own content filters? That way the platform itself doesn't have to. You can easily select popular filters from a marketplace and the number one option will probably be "hide hate speech" or "hide all politics".

mindcrime 4y ago
Bingo. This is exactly what I recently proposed for Twitter. The idea of user defined "filter-sets" where the user chooses what they want to be exposed to. And even further, I proposed the ability to name those filter-sets and share them with others. So if a given user is, for the sake of argument, a "raging Liberal" they can choose a "raging Liberal" filter-set. Likewise, a "raging Conservative" can choose the "raging Conservative" filter-set, a Libertarian can choose the "Libertarian" filter-set, and so on. Much like your market-place idea mentioned above. "But, but, what about filter bubbles / echo chambers???" one says. To which I say "it's not a problem I'm trying to solve, or particularly interested in. I'm not even sure that's actually a problem per-se to begin with." Seriously, the world is too big, there are too many people and too many ideas, for any one of us to accept being exposed to everything that's "out there". Filters are a good thing, in fact a necessary thing. Of course we'd like to think that in a well educated, civilized, rational society, people would choose to make some effort to gain exposure to new and contradictory ideas for the purpose of expanding their minds and adapting and learning and what-not. But be that as it may, you still have to accept that some people will choose to filter out things to a lesser or greater degree than some others, and that some people will choose to filter things differently than you will. And that's OK.
dalmo3 4y ago
Until your list of "popular filters" include ones such as "hide jews" or "hide blacks", following clamours for a central authority to ban those filters, or to shut down the entire platform.

kspacewalk2 4y ago

Let's think one level of abstraction higher - do we want to marginalize voices in the first place, given that some of them are fighting oppression and injustice, and others are advocating for bigotry and hate? That is, if we cannot effectively discriminate between those two types of voices, whether because "moderation doesn't scale" or any other valid technical reason, or because it's not always possible to disentangle "legitimate" from "illegitimate" marginalized voices. It's not a binary category, because people who advocate for stuff are not one-dimensional caricatures. Do we accept the bad in the name of $good_stuff_that_comes_with_making_marginalized_voices_heard, or do we marginalize it all straight into oblivion by going after the forums of spreading ideas? The answer to this question seems almost implicit for you, but it's far from obvious to me.

rdevsrex 4y ago

> When you build something to have marginalized voices be heard Why do we have to do that? Isn't the idea of having easy access for all enough? What people are so marginalized that they can't mute hateful speech and get on with their day?

chipotle_coyote 4y ago
One of the big problems with harassment on a platform like Twitter, and this seems to be pretty hard to get across to people who haven't been subject to it -- or don't know someone who's been subject to it, at least -- is the speed and intensity of what's coming at you if a true pile-on happens, or if a particular group decides you are The Enemy. You can mute and block a handful of jerks and get on with your day, perhaps, but if everything you post is greeted with hundreds (or even thousands!) of responses along the lines of "we're going to dox you and I hope someone rapes you to death," we're talking about something very different than "people are being mean to me on the internet." I'm not sure if all of Twitter's problems come from mere scale; it suffers from what analyst Ben Thompson has called the Pollyannaish Assumption: we focus on the upsides of the "global public square" without accurately evaluating the downsides, and bluntly, I see this a lot in discussions on HN. It's the subtext of "why can't people just block and move on." Arguably, focusing on the downsides without accurately evaluating the upsides, which I also increasingly see a lot on HN, isn't really an improvement -- but if we're going to have platforms like Twitter and Facebook, the question of "what do you do about harassment, hate speech, and stochastic terrorism on those platforms" needs a better answer than "suck it up, buttercup."
- somethingreen 4y ago
  The reason this particular problem still exists is not technical. But solutions are not compatible with engagement-graph-go-up business model. You are correct to point out the downsides and dangers of "public square" platform, but we haven't really even started trying to implement any reasonable solutions to them.

ianai 4y ago

Agree. If anything I'd make it like a cross between FB-early days and twitter. i.e. whatever a post is only immediately view-able by direct contacts. Maybe even top off how many direct contacts an account can have and require payment (monthly/yearly, tiered) above that threshold. Also give users the ability to mute/delete posts unilaterally - from their view but also possibly from the site entirely. Maybe have an "auto-disconnect" available above a threshold. Trying to think of ways around the mob mentality stuff.

cplusplusfellow 4y ago

There are plenty of hateful and racist things said on Twitter like : “all I want for Christmas is white genocide.” But no one blinks an eye. So HatefulRacistUncle might be “HorriblyMisguidedAndRacistYoungCollegeStudent” and that’s also not ok to some of us. So who polices this? Maybe we just go back to not reading things we dislike. You can block people on Twitter ya know.

Vox_Leone 4y ago

I think one of the key problems with twitter is the presence of constituted authorities interacting with the populace free from the formal mediation of official channels. I am in Brazil and I bring as an example the disastrous presence of Bolsonaro in the social networks, directly instructing his followers, completely free from institutional constraints. In the case of Brazil, this was a major element of destabilization of public discourse. I am convinced that the presence of authorities on social media has to be regulated, and if I were to launch an alternative to Twitter I would consider [and look for ways to] build ethical safeguards [concerning public officials] into the system.

jpadkins 4y ago
This is an interesting point! Can you give more detail or examples of 'institutional constraints' moderating public officials interactions with the public (in the past)? Are there rules or policy written down about what can/cannot be said that the institution enforces that goes against what the public leader wanted?
- Vox_Leone 4y ago
  >> Are there rules or policy written down about what can/cannot be said that the institution enforces that goes against what the public leader wanted? Well, I can't give an answer from a legal point of view, because I'm looking for it myself. But in various instances of life we see the requirement of formality between authorities and the public. In fact, all public interaction with the state is formal. Here's a problem: the state has a set of international commitments, but the head of that state makes personal statements that go against the very official line of the government he leads [the case of Bolsonaro in Brazil]. Catalyzed by the dynamics of the network This quickly turns into another front of disinformation. The public is completely at the mercy of the machinations of the powerful entity. I don't think there is anything in the Republican rules that precludes proper legislation on this subject.

kenjackson 4y ago

People saying hateful things isn’t the problem. The inability of some to be reasonable after reading them is the problem. It’s a much harder problem to fix. There are some partial solutions, IMO. Although none are all that practical to implement.

abeppu 4y ago

I don't think it's necessary to totally kill the 'public square' concept. Rather, I think comparison with other social media products highlight that different product decisions encourage different behavior for most people. People just use Twitter differently from TikTok, Snapchat, LinkedIn, etc, because of the informational and social environment these products create. These natural experiments can give us hypotheses about more explicit A/B tests for product changes: - Does LinkedIn show us that people have less hostile posts if their real world professional connections are watching? If Twitter tried to show your posts to people it thinks you know, whether or not you follow each other, would we all be more civil? - Does the higher bar of needing to generate an image or video to post (and a 2nd class presentation of comments) on some platforms, and lack of explicit 'reply' functionality stop arguments or bickering? The bar of typing a post in Twitter is just too low? - Does TikTok's recommendation based on behavior rather than "interests" create less polarized bubbles? Showing you a funny dance video just because it knows you'll watch it may disrupt you from seeking out The Enemy just to disagree with them. - Does removing an asymmetric "follow" relationship in favor of symmetrical "connections" disarm people whose hobby is having incendiary positions? If you can only have more "audience" by opening yourself up to see stuff from more people, do you then choose to connect with people that add value rather than valuing followers who will amplify you?

i_like_pie 4y ago

think this is spot on. allude to this here https://acehigh.substack.com/p/operatingproduct-plan-for-twitter https://acehigh.substack.com/p/operatingproduct-plan-for-twi... to add to your point: 1/ tech stack/architecture isn't #1 or even #10 issue. think everyone (all) agree on this 2/ larger issue is how to handle open discourse. given how we are wired as species, is there a social network that is truly open that doesn't descend into vitriol? if so - what behaviors are rewarded, what are the policies etc. - this is #1 question

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

pookeh 4y ago

This was a very intelligent and targeted way of not answering the question.

throwawaylinux 4y ago

Hmm... If all of humanity would be better off as you say, then then why should the royal we have have to deal with racist voters? Or racist people going about free in public at all?