AnilI am trying to talk less about social media drama on here, but I will say it is sort of my personal hell to have spent roughly two decades thinking deeply about decentralized social media, content moderation policy, managing bad-faith actors, systematic online abuse, and the role of journalists in the architecture of generative online platforms, and see a broad public discussion going on where the loudest voices are all approaching this with “I don’t know much, but here’s my first thought!”
Like, I’m far from the only one, but credentials at a minimum? Has run a platform with millions of users that has no fascist presence, has been doxxed/stalked by the currently-active bad actors in the mainstream ecosystem, understands the role of policy (including global policy) in impacting network design, knows both non-profit and VC-backed economics, has been a working writer at a mainstream media outlet, has deep visibility into current coding practice & culture. And… didn’t go to Stanford?
Anyway, here’s a subset of my writing about Twitter in just the last 10 years; I’ll have another couple tens of thousands of words from the archives online shortly. https://anildash.com/tags/twitter
sayrer@anildash Well, you didn't really work on it. The hard part about Twitter is the expectation of immediate updates, far faster than email or RSS.
Having worked in both non-profit and VC platforms, I would say you know more than most, but less than me, and I know people that know a lot more than I do.
@anildash The platform has minimal text with which to detect abusive content, and the users expect it to be instant. It is faster than television, let alone something like Movable Type. Signed, bored engineer that knew about the World Cup goals before the TV showed them...
@sayrer indeed! I’m not saying “I’m the best at this”, I’m saying “I’m minimally credible in this area and yet still head and shoulders more fluent than those being cited”. And to be clear — this isn’t just a technical problem. I do have more social/cultural experience than a lot of folks with deeper tech chops, including what’s involved in being targeted for coordinated harassment campaigns.
@anildash yes, most of it is really dumb.
I do know the reason Twitter is faster than TV, though. It's because TV is delayed ~10 seconds at the source, so they don't inadvertently air snuff films (Messi's knee bending forward, toddler killed in car chase, etc).
I think Musk actually focused on a lot of the right issues, just did it very wrong. I'd be in favor of $1/yr for Twitter, like WhatsApp used to do.