
Jack Dorsey says in an interview he's rethinking the core of how Twitter works - okket
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/08/15/jack-dorsey-says-hes-rethinking-core-how-twitter-works/
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OedipusRex
Twitter is a master class in how not to run a social media platform. They
alienate their power users by shutting down APIs which break 3rd party apps.
Their censorship seems to have no rhyme or reason to it. They simply do not
listen to their users. No one wants "In case you missed it", or to know what
someone just liked, we just want to read tweets in order they came in.

~~~
michaelanckaert
I'm just curious how a social media platform should be run. In my opinion none
of them do a good job or deliver a likeable experience. If you look at the big
ones they all have negative points: FB, Twitter, G+, and so on. Maybe Reddit
is the one exception since I can still find what I want and AFAIK they still
offer unrestricted API access.

~~~
creaghpatr
The decentralization after reaching a certain scale is I believe the key to
Reddit's success

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oblio
How is Reddit centralized? The global admins are still there.

By this criteria, Facebook Groups are decentralized.

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toolatenohate
I quit Twitter a while back when it was showing me anti-Muslim tweets. Mostly
retweets and likes by some of right leaning tech leaders that I respected and
followed. Many of these influential accounts were spreading obviously false
tweets. Even when it was true, they would retweet if suspect was a Muslim. But
if suspect turned out to be not Muslim, then these accounts would stay quite.

I support free speech but I don't want to see hateful speech when I eating my
breakfast. Especially when I am the target of hate & harassment.

Sorry cannot hide behind freedom of speech when your real motive is money. Now
people are leaving your platform, so you all of sudden care about controlling
hate and harassment on your platform.

There are real life victims because of hate and harassment that these
companies protected for so long.

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eahman00
That is funny. The reason I don't follow tech people on Twitter is that they
spend all day posting about left-leaning US politics, feminism, LGBTQ-
whatever, etc. which are things I couldn't care less about.

That's one of the bad things of social media: you want to read about tech or
movies or sports or whatever so you follow someone in the field but you also
have to read his political opinions, see pictures of his kids, see the latte
he just ordered, etc. Insufferable.

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dev_dull
Exactly one of the few reasons I still enjoy coming to hacker news. I hope we
can keep our little community here.

~~~
busterarm
That's been increasingly less likely though, as some of our more prominent
posters freely post their politics.

I've taken to flagging politically motivated topics with some amount of
success.

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happyrock
Jack's continued unwillingness to state in concrete terms what Twitter intends
to change sure looks a lot like he's trying to deflect scrutiny around
censorship while still engaging in it.

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aplummer
Wait, isn’t most of the criticism at the _lack_ of censorship? I personally
hate that half the platform is nutty conspiracy bots and hate speech.

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vkou
There's a group of people whose value system places "I want everyone to be
able to say everything they want, with no repercussions" to be their most
important value. From that point of view, Jack is a horrible person, and what
he's doing will destroy Twitter.

From the point of view of someone who doesn't want to wade into that cesspit,
doing nothing will destroy Twitter. The two viewpoints are largely exclusive.

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detaro
But for the second category "features that would promote alternative
viewpoints in Twitter’s timeline" also isn't a clear good: it could easily
mean "show my tweets to more people that don't want to see them and will react
badly to it, and show me more tweets from people I want to avoid". Limiting
who you interact with is also a _feature_ , not just a bad _echo chamber_.

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Mindwipe
Quite. "Inserting tweets into my timeline to turn it into less of an echo
chamber" seems like it cannot do anything other than insert tweets from the
far right about how people with darker skin colours should be second class
citizens (or worse).

There is an entirely reasonable reading that Twitter is not competent enough
to do this without making the platform more toxic, not less. I'm personally of
the opinion that asking Twitter to do more moderation is not a great idea,
because it's proven beyond all doubt that Twitter is no good at it and has no
mechanism for improvement where it would ever get better. All they're going to
do with more moderation is make more mistakes.

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aplummer
I don’t know if it’s that slippery a slope. Couldn’t you start with
conspiracies about child victims of shootings and see how it goes.

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abnry
What do we do when the 1 out of 100th conspiracy theory turns out to be true?

Just months ago there were massive conspiracy theorizing about the first
lady's absence over a period of days. Should that discussion have just been
shut down?

It's not a clear judgment call, even for one person, for what to allow and
what not to allow. That's the problem.

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happytoexplain
I agree with your description of what the real, practical problem is, but I'd
like to hear your opinion about solutions. Personally, I do think a viable
answer could involve rule-makers/enforcers making subjective judgements on
sometimes unclear issues (even if that group must be small to feasibly
operate). The practice is necessarily common because that's the nature of many
of our social systems. We introduce as many abuse-curbing objective elements
as possible, but in the end there will always be some amount of human
judgement. If the balance tips one way, the system loses effectiveness, and if
it tips the other way (the "slippery slope"), it becomes a new problem.
Personally, in the example given, I don't think it would be impossible to find
a balance that allows the mean-spirited speculation about why the first lady
wasn't around, but disallows the borderline calls to violence and direct calls
to hatred of people whose children have been murdered. Again, I agree that the
problem is "how", but I absolutely am not pessimistic about it. I think we can
use content moderation, despite its subjectivity, to find a balance -
certainly not a perfect balance, but a better one than exists today.

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pavel_lishin
> _Dorsey’s openness to broad changes shows how Silicon Valley leaders are
> increasingly reexamining the most fundamental aspects of the technologies
> that have made these companies so powerful and profitable. At Facebook, for
> example, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has commissioned a full review of his company’s
> products to emphasize safety and trust, from mobile payments to event
> listings._

Why yes, business leaders are absolutely open to making changes to ensure
their products stay powerful and profitable. Why does this paragraph try to
make them seem like the paragons of open-mindedness and virtue?

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clarkmoody
I heard an interesting angle on a podcast recently: If these social media
platforms continue to narrow the scope of allowable viewpoints, then it could
be considered editorial discretion and the companies may be on the hook for
defamation lawsuits.

A court may also hear a case for damages against the censored parties.
Interesting times.

Also, we should probably stop calling these networks "platforms" if they
continue to shape allowable speech.

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creaghpatr
What about just showing everyone you follow's tweets in the reverse order they
were tweeted?

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strictnein
It's funny that there have been a number of tweets from Twitter Product
Managers over the past couple of days saying "We want to hear from you why you
used these third party clients" and "What can we do better?" and the like, and
almost every single response is the above.

They're not actually listening of course. Twitter, as a company, just doesn't
seem to understand large segments of their users, and it's really strange.

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_zachs
"...reduce “echo chambers"" a.k.a get rid of non-left leaning opinions.

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growlist
Haven't you heard? It's ok to be racist as long as you say 'just kidding!'
afterwards, but don't forget, this doesn't apply to racism targeted at anyone
other than white people.

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busterarm
Are you following racist peoples' twitter accounts? Why are you seeing it? Or
are you even seeing it?

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growlist
I'm referring to this Sarah Jeong character and similar overtly anti-white
messaging. Whatever the supposed justification, I fail to see how this
coarsening of public discourse can be considered constructive.

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eahman00
>One solution Twitter is exploring is to surround false tweets with factual
context

I quit Twitter because they started choosing for me what they show me. Before
it was all what I chose to follow in chronological order, nowadays you get lot
of other stuff that you didn't ask for. It's a salad of content. And now they
want to add even more unwanted stuff. Way to go.

~~~
pavel_lishin
> _More context about a tweet, including “tweets that call it out as obviously
> fake,” could help people “make judgments for themselves,” Dorsey said._

Yeah, I'm sure Dorsey envisions the surrounding tweets gently explaining what
a parody account is, or that something isn't factually supported - but the
reality is going to be that every tweet will be surrounded by a buzzing cloud
of nazi-gnats, gnashing their teeth about crisis actors and virtue signaling.

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eahman00
I doubt you'll get right-wing stuff, this looks like it will be handpicked by
some human, and only enabled for tweets they deem too controversial. i.e. Alex
Jones says something, and then some human at Twitter HQ slaps a CNN tweet and
a Snopes article next to the tweet without any permission from Alex Jones.

But in truth I don't really care if they want to shove tweets from nazis or
communists or liberals or potato salads in my face. I only want to see what I
follow. Is that too much to ask for?

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sleepybrett
try "some algorithm". Twitter would never be able to hire enough people to
hand curate that.

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eahman00
As I said above, I believe this will be some kind of emergency measure to
discredit handpicked tweets that have an enormous amount of retweets or made
by specific users with an enormous amount of followers. It doesn't matter if
it doesn't scale because it won't be used at scale.

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Karishma1234
Twitter censorship is pretty extreme. My Libertarian friends and Islam critics
get partially banned almost every week. It is pathetic and I think there is a
larger market for more free speech. Twitter is probably becoming like SF, a
shoddy hipster town full of junkies all around.

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dreen
Too little, too late.

