Yes, basically. OP apparently also thinks that what constitutes community is a central authority handing out badges.

the company should issue badges of status or of shame based on signals about how people actually use, or abuse, Twitter. In other words, Twitter should begin to think of itself, and its users, as a community

And believes that Facebook or Linkedin profiles are markers of online reputation.

These people (he's not alone) are watching their authority eroding and believe that it could be stopped with another status symbol. Doubtful.

Aside, which online communities has Anil Dash created?

> Aside, which online communities has Anil Dash created?

Stackoverflow? https://stackoverflow.com/company/management

If you don't like the way a social platform is heading, then leave it. You are not entitled to a safe space.

At the end of the day twitter is going to cater to its biggest and most influential users.

It costs you nothing to ignore the users who are saying things you don't like.

What??? There are people out there getting death threats, getting doxxed, being attacked with all manner of epithets on Twitter. It stands to reason that maybe the experience would be better for those people without that sort of content directed at them.

> If you don't like the way a social platform is heading, then leave it. You are not entitled to a safe space.

Yes. And as a business, Twitter has a vested interest in not letting their platform drive away swaths of users due to toxicity. Indeed, one of the key reasons Facebook was successful is that users have the ability to restrict communications to the people they want to.

Spoken like someone who's never been the victim of a targeted harassment campaign. It's a little hard to take that view when people are posting pictures of your children's school along with their death threats.

Those who actually make the threats should be dealt with, but last time I checked it's "innocent until proven guilty" not "guilty until proven liberal".

It's less "that idea is popular" and more "these people are inciting hatred against other people".

I'm baffled that people still repeat this "free speech is important" thing when we're talking about a private service giving an audience to white supremacists.

But indiscriminately providing services to everyone (within the laws of your country), without booting people based on a personal agenda, is the ABC of gaining the trust of your users.

It's not always easy to draw a line on conduct, but I think there is plenty of behavior on Twitter that 99% of people could easily identify as toxic.

Example: Do you trust Washington Post or Twitter more?

Twitter would immediately lose all utility to me if it transitioned out of the business of being a forum/socialization platform to a poorly sourced algorothmic newspaper. (They're flirting with it -- and frankly, it doesn't seem to be going well, because that's not what people want.)

It seems outright disingenuous to suggest that Twitter and the NYT are in the same business, and seems to be based entirely around a false equivalence about "publish". There are multiple kinds of businesses that publish things, and the solution to problems in one domain aren't just to be a differemt type of business.

Think about what you're saying: corporations have the power to prevent you from saying anything online. Twitter and Facebook can ban you for your political opinions. Fine, you say: get your own website. Well, we've seen that your registrar, CDN, and hosting providers will also kick you off if they find your speech sufficiently offensive (or if enough pressure comes down on them to do so.) In the end, your ISP can do the same thing. Corporations own the commons we all use. Yes, the FA only protects you from government censorship, but the societal principle of free speech is not so limited. If you cannot speak because every commons is owned by a private corporation, or where any speech can be banned because a mob is threatening to protest you, you do not have free speech in any meaningful sense.

I don't believe the solution to our problems is to blithely conclude that corporations can do whatever they want, it's their platforms, and that anyway, it's about "hate" (who gets to define that?) We need to look very seriously about how communication has evolved since the 18th century and what "freedom of speech" means now, and how to settle it in a way that at least leads to democratically elected institutions having the power to restrict it, rather than corporate overlords.

I would also argue that repression of speech is a contributing factor to the rise of violence. As long as all speech is legitimized, there's a relief valve for despicable beliefs. The Nazi Party was born in an environment where political violence was already commonplace, and where nationalist rhetoric resulted in the nationalists being severely beaten. Consequently, only the most violent and committed people remained, who then organized their own violent mobs. Ultimately, the perception of being "repressed" by both mob violence and the state (the Nazi party was later banned) only lent support by people who felt for the "underdog" and radicalized supporters who felt that legitimate, nonviolent means would never be enough.

Problem is they and other media companies (and often the users as well) has ridiculous problems to understand the diffence between racism (judging and treating people different depending on who their parents where etc) and scepticism towards a recent immigration wave (do we want to relocate all these humans right here, right now? Can we help more people by doing it differently?)

Slippery slopes is usually a fallacious argument, decidedly so in this case where plenty of successful examples exists.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Keegstra

(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Covenant_on_Civi...

It means "intense dislike". If that is directed at an intrinsic property of a group of people, that's hate speech.

Example: black people as opposed to smokers.

No, because that's not an intrinsic property.

Hating people who take too long at the register isn't the same as viewing all redheads as inferior.

Free speech is so critical to a functioning free society that I'd rather err on the side of allowing bad speech rather than banning not-bad speech by mistake.

In my experience, they're much more dangerous to the well-being of society than the people they're trying to silence, as they're generally authoritarians of the worst sort without a shred of remorse because they're doing it for The Right Reasons(TM) and are sure of it.

But if I tolerate you speaking, someone I view as an immediate and visceral threat to my society, I suppose I can tolerate just about anyone using words.

It's a shame we'll likely come to violence because you can't show the same tolerance, and use words not force on people you disagree with.

Newspapers and TV are controlled so you don't see too much of it. But any public internet site cannot avoid this without heavy moderation which at Twitter, Youtube, Facebook scale are not easy problems to solve.

But I think suppressing a viewpoint is counterproductive. Instead, the holders of those viewpoints should be held to the light, and it's a Twitter problem in that such people can be completely anonymous or even fake. Hard to have a public debate when some of the participating citizens are fictional.

The government supports free speech because it's important and a Good Thing. Just because private companies aren't required to do the same doesn't make it any less important and a Good Thing.

Is it a good thing if someone at your job shouts racial epithets at you all day? Should woman have to tolerate being jeered and catcalled at every private business they patronize? Should a restaurant turn a blind eye to a belligerent customer that curses at the wait staff and everyone in ear shot?

Of course not. A private business has a vested interest in creating an environment where customers feel welcome. They could also choose to do nothing and let the chips fall where they may, but if enough bad actors make things bad for everyone else, that business will fail.

You have a right to not face retaliation from the government for speaking your mind. It doesn't mean everyone else has to accommodate whatever it is you have to say.

No. It's reasonable to fire someone who berates other employees. It's reasonable to kick patrons out of your store if they harass women. It's reasonable to kick out a belligerent customer.

But Twitter is none of these things. Twitter is a platform for discourse.

If they want to be totally hands off, they can do that. But if they want to set a tone for how people use their service, they can do that too.

Reddit is a platform for discourse too, and they've decided to evict certain communities from their platform because they don't match Reddit's goals and values. HN is a platform for discourse and there is a reputation system that controls how people interact with it. Facebook is another platform where users can decide who they interact with, and how.

Yes, they can. I'm just going to repost my canned response now:

>The government supports free speech because it's important and a Good Thing. Just because private companies aren't required to do the same doesn't make it any less important and a Good Thing.

When subgroups of trolls have gotten booted from larger communities and tried to start their own social media enclaves, they've never gotten to a truly large scale because most people don't want to be part of that kind of community.

A better way, in my view would be for twitter to allow people to subscribe to groups and those groups have their own moderation. Obviously some things would be subject to regular laws like immediate threats of violence, doxxing, etc.

Tolerance is generally a useful tool for social discourse, but when your "peers" are actively working to recruit and organize a movement to silence/deport/kill your friends it's generally not useful to tolerate that behavior.

Tolerance only works when you have at least the smallest and most fundamental amount of social cohesion.

As for illegals, every major country in the world deports illegal immigrants, even good old Canada, to the chagrin of many who thought they'd walk over and be granted immigration status without any further effort.

Brexit?

Helpfully Brexit is a multi-faceted movement, so you can't pin down people as supporting or opposing any particular policy. But it seems a large part of it was driven by opposition to "eastern europeans" - who are in the UK legally under freedom of movement.

If Brexit happens without a new rule being introduced, suddenly millions of people who legally immigrated to the UK will become "illegal". (They can try the naturalisation process, which is long, expensive, not at all guaranteed to succeed, and closed to many categories of people)

In the end it's still taking political sides.