Mastodawn

Rich Jul 5, 2023

I know we all hate on Space Karen, but Jack is probably the second worst person on the site because like Elon, he's built up a pseudointellectual mystique and people legitimately think he's a Smart and Interesting Person. He's not. He's a mediocre rich guy who thinks walking an hour every day and meditating in silence makes him better than you.

It makes me tired, how much navel gazing went on at Twitter about how to moderate and who to moderate. Most of it seemed to stem from Jack wanting to be philosophical about shit he didn't need to get that deep about, and then it got inherited down the line by a bunch of business types.

Harassment is harassment is harassment and if people are having mental breaks when they use their site, something is deeply wrong with the protocol. You fucking fix it.

And on that note, I'm signing off for a few days. Social engineering is hard, but with as much talent and wealth as Twitter had -- well, it's sad to see what it's become.

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Derek Powazek 🐐Jul 4, 2023

@onalark you are 100% correct

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❓ucblockhead Jul 4, 2023

@onalark The only moderation you need is the same moderation bouncers have used since bars existed: kick the shitheads out.

Unfortunately, this
1) Costs money because you need real people to do the kicking, and they need to be completely empowered
2) Offends "important" people who are shitheads.

Because of these factors, they'll never even try it.

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Dr Power Nap, DDS ✅️Jul 4, 2023

@onalark
This just in, untalented Peter Dinklage wants to get the band back together after solo career fails to launch

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i_.o._i Jul 5, 2023

@onalark I’ll be the devils advocate on this one (and I know that I risk being very wrong on this and I know it’s an unpopular opinion, but hear me out).

Launching a social network of any kind is very, very hard. Look at this article that outlines it pretty well: https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-twitter-acquisition-problems-speech-moderation

Welcome to hell, Elon

Elon Musk now owns Twitter — and a huge number of impossible political problems around speech, content moderation, and trying to make money.

The Verge

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Steph (Paddock || Shaver)Jul 5, 2023

@i_o_i I’m going to be brief and also do the bad thing of responding and then disappearing; I apologize. I’m on vacation, but you responded very thoughtfully and I wanted to answer.

Many times I watched people get dog piled on like Zoë Quinn. All they’d do was post about their dog, and a hundred posts would follow telling them to DIAF or unalive themselves.

And it is NOT hard to write tools to deal with that. But Twitter never did.

They never banned the antivaxxers.

These were decisions the platform made. That all these shitty platforms make. Horrible people feel empowered because the platforms give them a voice. They shouldn’t.

At the very least, accounts like Zoe’s should have triggered a commenting or keyword lockdown. It never did. It’s a sludge pit of harmful thoughts. Just one of many.

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i_.o._i Jul 5, 2023

@onalark As it turns out, keeping racist nazi’s in check is crazy hard when you have to deal with dozens (hundreds?) of posts per second. One can say “hire more moderators”, but then you have a huge personnel and quality control issue to deal with as well (are some of the moderators nazi’s too? Do many just don’t care either way? Etc.).

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i_.o._i Jul 5, 2023

@onalark I wasn’t a fan of how the old Twitter was run. I had big problems like keeping trump on for so long, but I also liked a lot of what they did, like eventually kicking trump off. If Jack’s Twitter was one of the best networks at that time (Zuck’s Facebook, Reddit, China-run TickTock), then maybe that was about the best that anyone could do while also dealing with Wall Street.

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i_.o._i Jul 5, 2023

@onalark The fediverse is better (serious UX issues aside) and I think that a Wikipedia-like model would be best, but I suspect that he did the best he could under the circumstances. I’m not sure, only suspect.

Also, can we leave the mediation retreats out of it? They’re really helpful and I think we need more of that, not less. Just because a rich guy goes to one doesn’t make them evil.

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Pauxlll Kruczynski Jul 5, 2023

@onalark well-said!

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guenther Jul 5, 2023

@onalark so anyway, i heard bluesky is the cool new thing. anyone got an invite? pleeeaaase?

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Jamie Mason Jul 5, 2023

@onalark

This!!

Jamie