The issue with Dorsey is that he acknowledges how toxic Twitter is, but has no idea how to fix it nor did he seem ready to do so, and this made investors very nervous.
I don't think this is ... necessarily the wrong thing.
Acknowledging that it is a difficult problem and you don't know how to solve it might be better than thinking you know how to solve it and doing something worse.
People are also quick to blame platforms without acknowledging that a lot of people are awful, the venue in which they practice their awfulness isn't necessarily at fault but it's easier to blame a thing which could be destroyed (religion, organization, social network, etc) than to acknowledge that this is a feature of humanity.
"the problem is unsolvable nothing can be done" is obviously false, because things were not always this divisive. Of course it's people's fault that twitter is awful, but twitter isn't in charge of people, it's in charge of twitter. Investors won't take "not our problem" as an answer here.
They absolutely did. Twitter et al. just change the shape of who you socialize with, humans weren't in solitary confinement before the Internet. The platform was more local more community based for example there were often awful people at church.
You're choosing an overly generous definition of platform.
A surly neighbor, a dreaded personage at church, has limits on their influence based on simple geography. They experience pushback against their behavior via ostracism (exclusion from events and groups) and non-verbal cues (facial expressions, body language).
The same type of character on a massive online platform has the opportunity to reach a much broader audience, aided by engagement-focused algorithms that can suggest similarly cantankerous personalities to commiserate with. There is less opportunity for negative feedback against their opinions and actions, because there are seldom any "unlike" buttons, and bans and mutes are usually invisible to the originator of the speech: they can opt to interpret silence as acceptance.
Twitter and similar platforms aren't just bigger versions of a soap box in a town square, or gossip circles in a small community. They're categorically different things, with categorically different effects on society.
HN is not what I'd call cancer. Social media doesn't need to be an engagement-obsessed, emotionally charged misinformation hose. Social media is broader than the category that twitter and FB live in. It can be less toxic, but less toxic platforms are less exciting and don't get the same kind of attention, which is what all the toxic stuff optimizes for.
I don't think that's a contradiction personally. Most reasonable people accept that some level of censorship is necessary for a good discussion, especially when hundreds or thousands of people are involved. HN style moderation doesn't exactly scale to twitter size easily though.
People try to make the argument that Twitter and (maybe to a lesser extent) Facebook are akin to a "town square", whereas I don't think people consider the HN comments section a "town square".
HN as a platform is effectively dedicated to a narrow set of topics, with a largely homogeneous user base (compared to any mainstream social media at least). I don’t think the consensus here is particularly favourable towards free speech, and it certainly has a very narrow Overton Window of acceptable ideas. The user moderation features also heavily reinforce whatever groupthink is popular, you have to “accepted” by accumulating a large amount of karma to influence voting, and 4 in-group users disagreeing with a comment is enough to remove it from the discussion.
I think Dang’s moderation is usually pretty decent, but I really don’t think this is a place where free speech is championed. In any thread on the topic, calls for increased speech regulation seem to be very popular.
I've been lurking on HN for about the last 8 years or so but only a few years ago made an account and I sparsely comment. Only a couple of weeks ago was my account considered worthy of being able to vote down. Meanwhile I've seen users essentially "game" their comment karma to high amounts within a few weeks.
I don't really agree with the idea that this place is an echo chamber, but I do sort of see it as similar to an IT meetup. You generally don't go to an IT focused meetup and start talking about abortion, religion, etc. and nobody would be surprised if you were kindly asked to leave the venue if you insisted on soap-boxing. If someone came and carted you off in a black van for speaking in a public place about your feelings on abortion I'd expect there to be a lot of push back from the public.
I think it's discussed only where it's considered "on-topic". In my experience, many politcal articles are quickly removed as off-topic unless there's some technological bend to it. For example, politics in a thread about Julia 1.7 release would be "off-topic", politics in a thread about net neutrality might be on-topic but only up to a certain degree.
Not the OP, but your examples of bot level garbage and trolling content are perfect for Twitter. I would include self promotion, but that is such a core part of social media.
As a long time /lit/-izen I wanted bring up 4chan as an counter-example of a toxic platform that hasn't been optimized for attention. But the longer I thought about it, the more I grew sure that it isn't as toxic as it seems to be. Sure people will respond to your post calling you a bundle of sticks or the n-word. But in the end I had more heart-to-hearts with people that have widly different opinions than on any other platform. Some anon on /wg/ even convinced me to see a therapist about my suicidal-ideation. Hearing that from a voice in the void where there was no karma/likes/hearts/reblogs/etc. attached seemed more genuine, honest and caring than any other "help" I experienced online.
HN it's both highly regulated, and focuses on a few niche topics. I can tell you how to create a mobile app using flutter and firebase. I can't tell you how to handle a relationship.
I can argue flutter is easier than react native without getting personal. I don't argue about my relationships, or anyone else's relationships. I have extremely strict criteria for anyone I let into my life, whether that be a friend or a partner. This has worked very well for me.
You're not going to find what you want in every single city, life can become drastically better just by moving.
But that's it. I don't need to argue about why I live where I do.
I don't need the validation of random people when it comes to my life decisions. However if you want to argue with me that I can get better server-side performance via a Rust backend rather than firebase, I might listen.
HN is not for profit. In fact, it's purposely a loss leader. They can afford to be heavily moderated because they aren't trying to appease anyone but their specific small, targeted audience.
It's toxic if you're actually an expert in the subject at hand. People here would rather feel smart than wrong. Lots of armchair experts here touting misinformation but you don't notice it unless there's a topic you know well.
If HN is "toxic" then you'll have to define the word toxic, because generally this is one of the best-behaved discussion forums on the internet. Even jokes get downvoted.
I mean, I work in tech, and even I find it very difficult to read the comments sections here on anything related to racial justice, gender equality, etc. People post nasty stuff and it gets upvoted to the top.
I agree. To me, the definitive negative characteristic of Social Media is the "feed," where each person has a unique view of content. There's no good way to "curate" that for engagement (or monetize for advertising) without creating toxic incentives.
HN is a forum because everyone sees the same discussion.
That's a really important distinction I hadn't thought about.
When you can make a feed that "feeds" you own preconceived ideas as reality, you get told the world is just as you imagined, you're always right, and those who disagree are obviously evil and/or stupid.
That's really insightful. Maybe that's one reason that I like MeWe: it has a feed, but it's so useless that I ignore it completely and use the chats attached to the various groups I joined. I use it like a hub of forums.
Do you think it's possible forums can make a true comeback? They are overall healthier, but can they be profitable? Also if anyone has more research on social media alternatives, I'd love some references.
Reddit is kinda-sorta a forum site. You can treat a single sub as a forum by ordering posts chronologically. phpbb style forums still exist and are the best place to discuss some topics. In the RV/truck space there are still many forums that have been bought and consolidated under a few holding companies. They still operate as distinct boards, however.
I don't think a binary definition is meaningful. Instead, what I focus on is the continuum of how much control you as a user have over the content that is presented to you.
At one end, you have the default Reddit front page. You get a torrent of posts completely unrelated to your specific interests or people you care about. It's as close to "the front page of the Internet" as you can get. Like staring into the collective psyche of the web.
At the other end, you have Google search. You only see pages you specifically request for by an explicit search query at that point in time. If you don't search, nothing is given to you. You have almost complete control over your attention.
Social media sites/apps are generally points between those. Critically, most give you more flexibility in how you use them than users get credit for. If you use Reddit by just browsing the front page and not even logging in, yes, it's the worst of all possible worlds. But if you create an account, unsubscribe from all the default subreddits, and only follow subreddits that are interesting to you and well moderated, then you have a lot more control. My Reddit experience is uniformly positive and enriching.
Twitter can also be a nourishing experience, but you have to be careful about who you follow, and turn off retweets for most of the people you follow.
Facebook is harder but if you disable all posts from sites that users often reshare, that removes a ton of clutter. Unfollowing people also helps.
Complete control over attention maybe, but not complete control over what you see. Google targets your results like Twitter and Facebook target your feed. Reddit and HN don't do this.
I don't think a continuum along a single axis can reveal what's truly pathological about social media. If you break it up into multiple axes, I think problematic tech will cluster into quadrants where algorithms are targeting you personally in various ways.
I think there's a few well-moderated large subreddits that I read periodically that are pretty similar to HN. Like if you go to r/linux, I doubt most people would say that's toxic. It's probably worse than HN, but that might be down to dang be good at moderating.
I guess it's a social medium but it feels different.
I appreciate this level of blatant obviousness. It is wildly thought provoking. Someone might take this flat statement as being antagonistic, but these 5 words are exactly the point!
You're right, HN is a social medium. It suffers from many of the same issues as Twitter. Much of the negativity and positivity it creates is similar to what I can see on Twitter. Perhaps that's the human condition "at scale"?
I think somehow, for the time being, the audience and size of HN is "okay" and most of the devils haven't leapt out of their lightly corked bottles just yet within the community.
Nothing is published on HN, it's just a content aggregator. Importantly, the content that appears on HN is submitted by the same users who leave the comments. That makes it markedly different from, say, someone's blog with a comment section.
HN is unappealing to the average internet user. It's topical, nerdy, lacks images and video, has zero engagement algorithms, and the "karma" is hidden.
It's also aggressively moderated. I can only post ~4 times a day since my account got flagged / rate limited for participating in flame wars about China, Apple, monopolies, etc. There's probably no way out of this except to create a new account.
Remove Section 230 protections for profit driven social networks, carve out exemptions for public goods and other sites operated without a profit intent (Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, Hacker News, etc) and the problem solves itself (the cost to police/moderate the platform rises above a point where the revenue returned is no longer sufficient to make the endeavor worthwhile). Social media is toxic due to the social fabric impact being externalized and socialized while the profits are privatized.
I could get behind some more restrictions on websites of a certain size, but putting any burden on brand-new web site owners beyond urgently dealing with problematic content is too much of a burden. It just acts as a moat for powerful incumbents, and they have far too deep moats as it is.
You can't know the quality of content before it is submitted. It would effectively turn the internet into TV. Did you forget web hosting is also protected by section 230? Web hosting as we know it would go away. Every site update would need to be pre-approved by the web hosting company.
No disagreement that free speech is important, but the solution proposed up-thread wouldn't safeguard it. In practice, it would instead limit controversial content to only a small set of sites while everything else (for fear of lawsuits currently headed off by S230 protections) would either close shop or become more moderated than it already is.
... This is in addition to the legal / philosophical criticism that the government repealing S230 protection for all but a few websites would be equivalent to the government providing libel-lawsuit protection to only a few state-sanctioned media outlets. Wholly incompatible with the first amendment.
It really doesn't matter the system - people are already upset that people they don't like are doing things like selling NFTs (please don't buy NFTs, they're cringe)
OK, Facebook is now a non profit which only income comes from selling ad space to "Definitely Not Facebook Inc" at such a price which avoids racking up profits. (Like ad house of old.)
All of those do count, but many people have a narrower definition because of how the term "social media" is often shorthand for Twitter, FB, IG, and similar when used in the traditional media.
My point is that if you want to ban something then you need a specific dividing line other than "like Twitter." Otherwise either everything is banned or nothing is banned since everyone just uses loopholes. And if everything is banned you better be sure you actually want everything banned.
I could survive without HN. The internet existed before it. We had things like webrings and mailing lists that were highly personal forms of communication & aggregation.
You could even find content that you wanted online before Google made search pay-to-play.
Killing social media and requiring services (like email, etc) not be an ad-supported free model (where the product is the user) would completely transform the internet (and its balance of power) as we know it and for the better.
SomethingAwful charging $10 for an account was always/accidentally the right idea.
My consistent answer to the "if companies weren't allowed to spy on you and do other horrible shit, and if ad dollars dried up, all these sites would go away!" argument is that all those sites have value approaching zero anyway. So they go away. Oh well.
The Web loses 1% of its decent content, while the remaining 99% gets higher visibility, more funding, more interest/attention (which can improve quality, as in, say, collaborative communities like Wikipedia, or open source). The rest of the cost is the loss of a bunch of shit content that most people could/would replace with time-wasters like sudoku or Tetris or entertainment magazines, and carry on with life. Seems like a bargain to me.
You also couldn't have megalithic companies like Google that bait you into their ecosystem with "free shit" like Gmail and search completely bankrolled out of their other primary enterprise.
Google uses Ads to unevenly compete with every other software company on the planet. Google can buy your company and outpay you for engineers with what is essentially their financial fingernail clippings. The thing that's gained in this scenario is all of the talent that could be going to other things besides optimizing ads.
They use those advantages to compete with other companies and with volunteer efforts. That's another reason I'm not too worried about doom-and-gloom predictions of what would happen if we killed the ads (and spying-fed ML) golden goose: we do not know how much better protocols, free (open source) products, non-profit services (as in Wikipedia), and paid software/services would be without ad-fed giants sucking all the air out of the room at best, and deliberately using their advantages to kill things (competitors, protocols, et c.) at worst. I suspect all of those would be a whole lot better, absent the money-firehoses dependent on bad & dangerous behavior.
Excellent point, it is easy to forget the minor miracle of FOSS. Plus, without the ad revenues there would be no mega-corps vacuuming up all the new grads, so I would anticipate a significantly greater rate of innovation and FOSS contribution broadly.
There's even an interest or social-reward factor to participating in these kinds of things. Working on an open-protocol messaging client for free is a lot less rewarding when the userbase of the entire protocol is 1% or less of all online messaging, because most of that market's captured by closed platforms that forbid and/or discourage other clients, than when it works with 20+% of clients and even your non-geek friends are using the protocol, if not your particular client.
I truly think we couldn't launch something like the email protocol these days and have it gain traction, and I don't mean because of its flaws. I judge that a pretty crappy state of affairs, and I think the #1 cause is that it's so lucrative to keep your users in a position where you can track & spy on them very well, while avoiding leaking anything they're doing so that competitors can see it—IOW incentives are set up to greatly reward successful closed platforms while discouraging interoperability, so we get even more of that than we otherwise might.
> I truly think we couldn't launch something like the email protocol these days and have it gain traction...
Sadly it's worse than you expect here. Enter ElasticSearch.
The company behind the innovation you propose will piggy-back on open source projects (Lucene), add a novelty to it (clustering) and choose a permissive open-source license to encourage contributions. Once hitting a significant market penetration threshold, the project then will move to a mixed-source, enterprise license model with intentionally-crippled community versions (think Neo4j, JFrog, etc).
ElasticSearch isn't even alone here, it's just the most obvious example. I've actually been insisting for a long time that we need an Apache-licensed standard solution for clustering generic applications...something useful enough that anyone can connect part A & part B to get "clustered Lucene" instead of "ElasticSearch". Something reasonably deployable (read: is monitorable, has RBAC) without massive licensing costs (read: Neo4j). Not an easy problem, for sure.
I was around at the time, and webrings were useless from the start. Mailing lists, usenet and IRC were fine but they were just as viciously combative and abusive as any social media we have now. You're looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses.
You might also be forgetting that Google first became big because they created a search engine that actually worked. Getting Altavista or Lycos to find what you were looking for was a real skill.
Webrings definitely were not useless from the start, but they were useless after a couple of months. For a very short while though, they were great, and there are even some efforts to revive the concept today.
I'm not out celebrating when a country like Turkey or something blocks Twitter.
No, I'm advocating the Amish approach. It's perfectly reasonable and noble for a society to get together and decide "we're not going to use X". There's nothing censorial about that. It's the same kind of logic people use to advocate against things like ICEs and eating meat. Are vegans trying to "censor" your meat-eating? No. It's the same kind of reasoning behind us having _any_ laws to begin with.
And I'm not even talking about blocking Twitter. I'm saying that legislatively we should make sure that no company with a product like it can do business in our country(-ies). The same way that we have laws in place that prevent companies from business practices like "dumping toxic waste next to your housing development" under threat of force (like we will fine you to hell and back and then throw you in prison). Is that censorship too?
Come back with a more thoroughly-reasoned argument, please.
Twitter does a have a large "health" department tasked with figuring how to measure and improve the quality of the content and discourse in the platform. I don't have details since I only interviewed for a role in that team, but I do know it exists and it has a large number of PMs, Data Scientists, and Researchers. They have even collaborated with academia on the topic and a recent open RecSys competition (recommender system) was organized by Twitter with their data.
His directness and ability to say what he doesn't know is a good thing.
I enjoyed his interview with Sam Harris. He was honest and direct in answering tough questions about Twitter. He explained how they try to balance free expression but also want Twitter to be a safe place for people to interact.
Compare this to Zuckerberg who is never candid or forthright in public.
The big tech CEO attitude is that all of these issues stem from human behavior. They just sit back and stroke their beard at everyone blaming them. They ignore it and move on.
It's important to remember that in common usage “activist” doesn't mean anything other than trying to change how a company is run — there isn't the connotation of social values or similar which the term has in common usage.
Twitter's not immune from ending up on this list (on a long enough timeline):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_network...