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Everyone who starts a social media site begins with the premise of "I'll allow all legal speech". Facebook, Twitter, reddit. They all started out unmoderated.

Everyone who starts a social media site begins with the premise of "I'll allow all legal speech". Facebook, Twitter, reddit. They all started out unmoderated. But then as you get into it, you realize that you just can't do that if you want to make money. Take reddit for example. Shaming fat people is legal. Being antisemitic is legal. Being a racist is legal. Most pornography is legal. But it turns out almost no one wants to spend money supporting that. So it makes sense to block things that hurt the bottom line if you are running a business. To 4chan's credit, they never cared about money, and so they were probably the freest platform out there that somehow didn't devolve into nothing but racist hate, which is usually how absolute free speech social media go (although they certainly have their fair share of it). Musk was like any other social media outsider looking in -- "Why can't they just allow all legal speech??" And then his pocketbook was on the line and he realized why.

dragonwriter 4y ago
> Musk was like any other social media outsider looking in – “Why can’t they just allow all legal speech??” And then his pocketbook was on the line and he realized why. Musk started new, though different, active moderation from very early on, and as he has escalated that it hasn’t been mostly in ways that contribute to Twitter profitability (it may be in his financial interest more indirectly, through currying favor with a particular political faction, but that’s not indicative of a discovery rather than his initial motivation for buying Twitter.)
azangru 4y ago
> But then as you get into it, you realize that you just can't do that if you want to make money How do other networks survive? Gettr, Rumble, Truth.social? Locals? Is parler still around by the way? Arent these crowds sufficiently large to want to advertise to, or to monetize in some other way?
- bmarquez 4y ago
  I use Rumble and Locals frequently. Basically they're large enough now that normal creators (and not just those banned for extreme content) will post there, so if someone has both a YouTube and a Rumble, I watch the Rumble to support competition to Google. Locals has more of a Patreon-like model and isn't affected much by advertising. Gettr and Truth.social seem to be declining (IMO those two should merge because their user demographic is the same.)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- scarface74 4y ago
  They “survive” by lighting money on fire.
  - ilyt 4y ago
    So same as twitter did for majority of its existence
- burkaman 4y ago
  They have lots of moderation, even if they tell you they don't. Gettr: https://gettr.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4833222621587-GETTR-Community-Guidelines https://gettr.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4833222621587-GE... Rumble: https://corp.rumble.com/blog/rumble-proposes-an-open-source-content-moderation-policy-process-to-improve-transparency-put-creators-first/ https://corp.rumble.com/blog/rumble-proposes-an-open-source-... Truth Social: https://help.truthsocial.com/moderation/moderation-faq https://help.truthsocial.com/moderation/moderation-faq Locals: https://support.locals.com/en/article/how-to-moderate-posts-in-my-community-1ly49ay/ https://support.locals.com/en/article/how-to-moderate-posts-... I've never heard of Locals before, but the other three networks remove far more content than just what is outlined in those policies. Also, they probably don't make money.
  - emporas 4y ago
    Indeed they do a lot of moderation all of them. My opinion is that misaligned economic incentives cause all of these services to be a bundle of smaller services. The wrong economic incentives discourage protocols from forming in the smaller services to be bundled afterwards to the whole, which is called social networking site. The smaller services could be: UI <protocol> Algorithm (Cpu, Gpu) <protocol> Disk Space. If the whole service was designed like this using well defined protocols, then we could use, the UI of facebook, the algorithm of twitter, and the disk space of instagram, or any combination. The same could be applied to cars. It could be defined like Engine <protocol> Hood (car shell) <protocol> Peripherals (lights etc). That way we would be able to use one's car engine into another car's hood etc. I think eventually that's the way everything is going to be designed, alongside with cars, buses etc, using protocols (ISO etc), and software as well. It is just that, it takes a while for the right economic incentives to get established.
bachmeier 4y ago
> But it turns out almost no one wants to spend money supporting that. Naturally. If you're a business, why would you pay for advertising that makes those things part of your brand? If you're a consumer, what would be the motivation to pay for those things, unless you happen to agree with those values, rather than paying for a site that doesn't have them?
UncleOxidant 4y ago
> But it turns out almost no one wants to spend money supporting that. So it makes sense to block things that hurt the bottom line if you are running a business. Sure, but this doesn't seem to explain why he would want to shut out Substack entirely. Is it because he considers it competition? But Substack is for longform blogging (and authors being able to monetize that) so it doesn't seem to compete at all with Twitter - it seems completely orthogonal.
- supriyo-biswas 4y ago
  Twitter blue has a long-form tweet option.
- burkaman 4y ago
  They were directly competing until recently: https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/revue https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/revue Twitter Blue allows posts up to 4000 characters, and a lot of people use Twitter to "blog" with very long threads. Substack competes with that, even if it's so much better that it doesn't really feel like a competition. And now Substack is adding a short-form feature almost identical to Twitter, as the article explains.
md_ 4y ago
Most of them change their minds when they realize their customers--viewers, subscribers, advertisers--don't want to see all legal speech. It's amusing that Musk's incentive appears to be fear of what his viewers will see--namely, competitive services they might consider using instead of Twitter. I do think that's fairly different than the incentives for Facebook and Reddit.
- vuln 4y ago
  Substack is not a competitor to Twitter. Two completely different use cases. You can use Twitter to drive traffic to your substack. Doesn’t really work the other way around imho.
  - TheCleric 4y ago
    Elon's decision is dumb, but SubStack is expanding it's use case: https://on.substack.com/p/introducing-notes https://on.substack.com/p/introducing-notes
    - cinntaile 4y ago
      This is likely a bigger threat to Twitter than Mastodon is. Well played Substack.
      - ttctciyf 4y ago
        I can't see them gaining traction. As one billionaire[1] opined: > you can totally delete things from the Internet – that works perfectly and doesn’t draw attention to whatever you were trying to hide 1: https://nitter.net/elonmusk/status/1644174878382215170#m https://nitter.net/elonmusk/status/1644174878382215170#m
        cinntaile 4y ago
        I don't understand what you mean. What does his ironic tweet have to do with you claiming it's unlikely they gain traction?
bena 4y ago
I'd hesitate to bring in 4chan as a good example of anything. It's not technically "all" racist hate, but the number of users who don't engage it is probably an insignificant percentage. Anything good you could find on 4chan is available elsewhere, without the deluge of shitty behavior.
skrtskrt 4y ago
> 4chan's credit, they never cared about money, and so they were probably the freest platform out there that somehow didn't devolve into nothing but racist hate yeah, not "nothing but racist hate", just a lot of racist hate, good on 4chan for keeping it under 100%
- autoexec 4y ago
  There'd probably be a bit less of it on 4chan if the racists had other popular platforms to spend their time on. The more places they get chased away from, the more concentrated they'll be in the few places they have left. It sucks for 4chan, but at the same time it's kind of nice having them in easily to find/ignore places.
gmd63 4y ago
you mean, his 44 billion dollar (20,000 average lifetime american earnings) deficit was on the line. you can totally start a social media company that doesn't require you to recoup 20,000 lifetimes worth of human labor and allow free speech.
scarface74 4y ago
There is a huge difference between. > Shaming fat people is legal. Being antisemitic is legal. Being a racist is legal. And not allowing a competitor and then claiming to be “pro free speech”. There is no societal good that comes out of the topics you cited.
rurp 4y ago
Most of Musk's moves, like unbanning thousands of white supremacists or firing employees for asking simple questions, aren't being done to increase revenue. That fact that revenue has cratered so dramatically is further proof that spite and grievance are driving these decisions.
t0bia_s 4y ago
Online free speech is faceless. Which is different than in real life where you are more responsible for what you are actually say. It's not about legality. It's more about responsibility that lacks in online conversations with anonymous avatars.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Online speech is also weirdly dangerous. A lot of people especially in the UK have been arrested for commenting things you’d say between friends without consequences. Even though they didn’t post under their real name.
  - t0bia_s 4y ago
    I didn't mean responsibility oppressed by authorities. This leads to be even less responsible for yourself. Which is another topic. I mean responsibility that naturally come from social connection between people in dialogue. Mimics, body language, relationships, word expression... All of it is eliminated in online chatting.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Incipient 4y ago
>Shaming fat people is legal. Being antisemitic is legal. Being a racist is legal. True but it's entirely reasonable for platforms to prevent themselves becoming a cesspool of hate and vile discussion. It's very different to banning any and all discussion on things that may be commercially competitive.
jscipione 4y ago
Bait and switch, these platforms only got as big as they did because they allowed unmoderated content, and then once established they bit the hand that fed them, and now they are milking it for all it’s worth as the audiences move on to where they are allowed to speak.
Shekelphile 4y ago
> Take reddit for example. Shaming fat people is legal. Being antisemitic is legal. Being a racist is legal. Most pornography is legal. Are they actually blocking speech like that though? I don't see much harassment of overweight people since FPH got banned but antisemitism and racism and similar bigotry (especially transphobia) is not uncommon at all and is a daily sight in any remotely politically bent discussion.

dragonwriter 4y ago

> Musk was like any other social media outsider looking in – “Why can’t they just allow all legal speech??” And then his pocketbook was on the line and he realized why. Musk started new, though different, active moderation from very early on, and as he has escalated that it hasn’t been mostly in ways that contribute to Twitter profitability (it may be in his financial interest more indirectly, through currying favor with a particular political faction, but that’s not indicative of a discovery rather than his initial motivation for buying Twitter.)

azangru 4y ago

> But then as you get into it, you realize that you just can't do that if you want to make money How do other networks survive? Gettr, Rumble, Truth.social? Locals? Is parler still around by the way? Arent these crowds sufficiently large to want to advertise to, or to monetize in some other way?

bmarquez 4y ago
I use Rumble and Locals frequently. Basically they're large enough now that normal creators (and not just those banned for extreme content) will post there, so if someone has both a YouTube and a Rumble, I watch the Rumble to support competition to Google. Locals has more of a Patreon-like model and isn't affected much by advertising. Gettr and Truth.social seem to be declining (IMO those two should merge because their user demographic is the same.)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
scarface74 4y ago
They “survive” by lighting money on fire.
- ilyt 4y ago
  So same as twitter did for majority of its existence
burkaman 4y ago
They have lots of moderation, even if they tell you they don't. Gettr: https://gettr.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4833222621587-GETTR-Community-Guidelines https://gettr.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4833222621587-GE... Rumble: https://corp.rumble.com/blog/rumble-proposes-an-open-source-content-moderation-policy-process-to-improve-transparency-put-creators-first/ https://corp.rumble.com/blog/rumble-proposes-an-open-source-... Truth Social: https://help.truthsocial.com/moderation/moderation-faq https://help.truthsocial.com/moderation/moderation-faq Locals: https://support.locals.com/en/article/how-to-moderate-posts-in-my-community-1ly49ay/ https://support.locals.com/en/article/how-to-moderate-posts-... I've never heard of Locals before, but the other three networks remove far more content than just what is outlined in those policies. Also, they probably don't make money.
- emporas 4y ago
  Indeed they do a lot of moderation all of them. My opinion is that misaligned economic incentives cause all of these services to be a bundle of smaller services. The wrong economic incentives discourage protocols from forming in the smaller services to be bundled afterwards to the whole, which is called social networking site. The smaller services could be: UI <protocol> Algorithm (Cpu, Gpu) <protocol> Disk Space. If the whole service was designed like this using well defined protocols, then we could use, the UI of facebook, the algorithm of twitter, and the disk space of instagram, or any combination. The same could be applied to cars. It could be defined like Engine <protocol> Hood (car shell) <protocol> Peripherals (lights etc). That way we would be able to use one's car engine into another car's hood etc. I think eventually that's the way everything is going to be designed, alongside with cars, buses etc, using protocols (ISO etc), and software as well. It is just that, it takes a while for the right economic incentives to get established.

bachmeier 4y ago

> But it turns out almost no one wants to spend money supporting that. Naturally. If you're a business, why would you pay for advertising that makes those things part of your brand? If you're a consumer, what would be the motivation to pay for those things, unless you happen to agree with those values, rather than paying for a site that doesn't have them?

UncleOxidant 4y ago

> But it turns out almost no one wants to spend money supporting that. So it makes sense to block things that hurt the bottom line if you are running a business. Sure, but this doesn't seem to explain why he would want to shut out Substack entirely. Is it because he considers it competition? But Substack is for longform blogging (and authors being able to monetize that) so it doesn't seem to compete at all with Twitter - it seems completely orthogonal.

supriyo-biswas 4y ago
Twitter blue has a long-form tweet option.
burkaman 4y ago
They were directly competing until recently: https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/revue https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/revue Twitter Blue allows posts up to 4000 characters, and a lot of people use Twitter to "blog" with very long threads. Substack competes with that, even if it's so much better that it doesn't really feel like a competition. And now Substack is adding a short-form feature almost identical to Twitter, as the article explains.

md_ 4y ago

Most of them change their minds when they realize their customers--viewers, subscribers, advertisers--don't want to see all legal speech. It's amusing that Musk's incentive appears to be fear of what his viewers will see--namely, competitive services they might consider using instead of Twitter. I do think that's fairly different than the incentives for Facebook and Reddit.

vuln 4y ago
Substack is not a competitor to Twitter. Two completely different use cases. You can use Twitter to drive traffic to your substack. Doesn’t really work the other way around imho.
- TheCleric 4y ago
  Elon's decision is dumb, but SubStack is expanding it's use case: https://on.substack.com/p/introducing-notes https://on.substack.com/p/introducing-notes
  - cinntaile 4y ago
    This is likely a bigger threat to Twitter than Mastodon is. Well played Substack.
    - ttctciyf 4y ago
      I can't see them gaining traction. As one billionaire[1] opined: > you can totally delete things from the Internet – that works perfectly and doesn’t draw attention to whatever you were trying to hide 1: https://nitter.net/elonmusk/status/1644174878382215170#m https://nitter.net/elonmusk/status/1644174878382215170#m
      - cinntaile 4y ago
        I don't understand what you mean. What does his ironic tweet have to do with you claiming it's unlikely they gain traction?

bena 4y ago

I'd hesitate to bring in 4chan as a good example of anything. It's not technically "all" racist hate, but the number of users who don't engage it is probably an insignificant percentage. Anything good you could find on 4chan is available elsewhere, without the deluge of shitty behavior.

skrtskrt 4y ago

> 4chan's credit, they never cared about money, and so they were probably the freest platform out there that somehow didn't devolve into nothing but racist hate yeah, not "nothing but racist hate", just a lot of racist hate, good on 4chan for keeping it under 100%

autoexec 4y ago
There'd probably be a bit less of it on 4chan if the racists had other popular platforms to spend their time on. The more places they get chased away from, the more concentrated they'll be in the few places they have left. It sucks for 4chan, but at the same time it's kind of nice having them in easily to find/ignore places.

gmd63 4y ago

you mean, his 44 billion dollar (20,000 average lifetime american earnings) deficit was on the line. you can totally start a social media company that doesn't require you to recoup 20,000 lifetimes worth of human labor and allow free speech.

scarface74 4y ago

There is a huge difference between. > Shaming fat people is legal. Being antisemitic is legal. Being a racist is legal. And not allowing a competitor and then claiming to be “pro free speech”. There is no societal good that comes out of the topics you cited.

rurp 4y ago

Most of Musk's moves, like unbanning thousands of white supremacists or firing employees for asking simple questions, aren't being done to increase revenue. That fact that revenue has cratered so dramatically is further proof that spite and grievance are driving these decisions.

t0bia_s 4y ago

Online free speech is faceless. Which is different than in real life where you are more responsible for what you are actually say. It's not about legality. It's more about responsibility that lacks in online conversations with anonymous avatars.

Gigachad 4y ago
Online speech is also weirdly dangerous. A lot of people especially in the UK have been arrested for commenting things you’d say between friends without consequences. Even though they didn’t post under their real name.
- t0bia_s 4y ago
  I didn't mean responsibility oppressed by authorities. This leads to be even less responsible for yourself. Which is another topic. I mean responsibility that naturally come from social connection between people in dialogue. Mimics, body language, relationships, word expression... All of it is eliminated in online chatting.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Incipient 4y ago

>Shaming fat people is legal. Being antisemitic is legal. Being a racist is legal. True but it's entirely reasonable for platforms to prevent themselves becoming a cesspool of hate and vile discussion. It's very different to banning any and all discussion on things that may be commercially competitive.

jscipione 4y ago

Bait and switch, these platforms only got as big as they did because they allowed unmoderated content, and then once established they bit the hand that fed them, and now they are milking it for all it’s worth as the audiences move on to where they are allowed to speak.

Shekelphile 4y ago

> Take reddit for example. Shaming fat people is legal. Being antisemitic is legal. Being a racist is legal. Most pornography is legal. Are they actually blocking speech like that though? I don't see much harassment of overweight people since FPH got banned but antisemitism and racism and similar bigotry (especially transphobia) is not uncommon at all and is a daily sight in any remotely politically bent discussion.