> Twitter is a community

Twitter has 330 million monthly active users and 145 million daily active users. Is that a community? It seems more like an unruly mob. :-)

I agree with the point that all online forums should have moderation, but for me the question is, should something like Twitter even exist? A centralized world discussion forum is not necessarily a good and healthy thing. Can humanity handle having Twitter?

> Can humanity handle having Twitter?

Even if the answer is no, pandora's box is opened. If twitter disappeared, 5 copycat sites/apps would emerge from the ashes overnight.

> If twitter disappeared, 5 copycat sites/apps would emerge from the ashes overnight.

5 is not necessarily a problem. 1 is a problem. :-)

It's not easy to reach "critical mass" though. Many social networks have tried and failed. Certainly the Twitter alternatives (e.g., App Dot Net) tried and failed. And hopefully we've all learned some lessons from Twitter and won't make the same mistakes again.

Or if we did make the same mistakes again, then humanity is truly doomed, and there's nothing we can do to stop it...

Yes, this would be my next point.

Twitter is absolutely a community, it's just buckling under the weight of its scale. The problem we're facing right now, to me, is that Twitter and Facebook have built communities that they are incapable of moderating effectively because of their scale, but they ask us to give them time to manage this difficult problem and we give it to them, absorbing more damage while they make billions. How much time do they need? They've all been around for over a decade. It's time to start demanding results.

These platforms aren't required to exist. If they can't prevent their services from causing damage to societies across the world, then they should be required to fix that. If they can't fix it, then they should be shut down.

Good moderation sets standards for how we communicate that everyone is honestly able to meet regardless of their worldview. Taking this site as an example, the guidelines focus on the tone, relevancy, and novelty of your responses. It encourages civility and curiosity, it does not try to calculate the truth value of what I'm saying.

I see many "it's just moderation" takes on what Twitter is doing, but what Twitter and other platforms are now doing goes beyond what most platforms have traditionally enforced in their moderation. Hiding user content that the platform unilaterally perceives to be untruthful is really a new milestone.

But because this forum has guidelines for those aspects of speech, and its members abide by it, it opens up space for disagreements to take place and truth to surface.

Twitter has guidelines rules for things you can and can't say but since the users don't all agree to the same guidelines, and Twitter enforces them very inconsistently, there's no pressure to follow them except to the point you may get suspended or banned from the site.

How do you do that effectively on a platform with hundreds of millions of people with wildly differing world views?

Well, you start by acknowledging that by hosting hundreds of millions of people to your platform, you're also hosting the real world problems that come with them. And how you handle that a scale while mitigating the consequences turns into a nightmare.

Rather then evolving along with the needs of their users, Twitter froze it's functionality years ago. Twitter could have added a range of moderation tools, allow users to opt-out from re-tweets, trends and such, allowed people to create groups and communities, foster active cooperation with key users and it's communities,...

Why didn't that happen? Because those hundreds of millions of users aren't paying customers. Investing in all of those things simply isn't worth the investment or pressing enough in terms of optimizing for revenue through advertising and business intelligence.

An audience is a valuable commodity, and so what Twitter doesn't want is risk losing that commodity. Tweaking the functionality of the platform is such a risk.

However, hosting hundreds of millions of people who aren't customers, is also a huge liability. Worst case is having governments representing those poeple imposing hard regulatory frameworks that hurt revenue and profitability.

In a way, it's akin to the lions of the circus. People pay good money to see the lions perfom, but the circus has to accept the risks that come with keeping lions. Which includes getting shut down because the lions escaped and went to town.

So, why does Twitter cater to hundreds of millions of people, and why does the circus keep lions? Because the profits they gain from doing so outmatch the risks they have to accept.

Getting back to your original question, Twitter is basically Humanity's stream of consciousness materialized. It's prohibitively expensive, and rather utopian, to be able to moderate that in a meaningful way which caters to everyone's contentment. By contrast, Twitter's aspiration isn't to provide the best moderation, it's to implement just the bare minimum in order to not lose it's value.

Looking back at the blogpost, you'll find that most of what they propose is tweaks to how they filter content and a small tweak to how you do re-tweeting based on existing functionality. No fundamental changes to the feature set are put into place. On the scale of Twitter's operation, that's mainly targetting low hanging fruit since introducing more substantial changes would be a huge gamble that might end up hurting the business.

I think the “how” is pretty simple: the company is made up of people, the people define a set of principles, and adhere to them. They don’t have to accommodate everyone (and in my opinion, shouldn’t).

I think the hard part is doing this in the face of money. We have all seen how platforms allow awful things to exist because of the economic incentives to do so.

Not elected people, not respecting the most basic of constitutional principles. Not only that, but you can't enforce your "set of principles" on billion of tweets each hour of the day, not by people at least, so you defer to bots, which are incapable of discerning what is free speech. They can't apply your principles with the discernment of a human, they can't enforce what's legal or illegal, like they can't recognize copyrighted music from public domains ones.

I disagree with the constitutional angle. I do think enforcement is possible, it's really no different from enforcing the law IRL. I don't think having no terms and/or requiring private companies to have no terms is a better situation.

Yep, it's hard. Let's try to figure it out instead of just throwing our hands up and letting the trolls take over.

> We already do this as a society, so why shouldn't that extend to Twitter?

We don't do this in the US, it's called the 1st amendment.

https://youtu.be/-OhyBJxg9RA?t=170

Our libel and slander laws say otherwise.

And, you know, the pressures of social interaction.

> There's never a situation where you let people say whatever they want

What? There are tons of places where the only restrictions on what you say, is determined by the law.

> You have to set some of sort of standard

The standard could be "Whatever is allowed by US law", which is extremely non restrictive on speech.

>> There's never a situation where you let people say whatever they want

> What? There are tons of places where the only restrictions on what you say, is determined by the law.

So there are still restrictions then and people can't say whatever they want?

> The standard could be "Whatever is allowed by US law", which is extremely non restrictive on speech.

voat.co is a clone of reddit where the only difference is no restriction on speech. The top posts are usually extremely racist and antisemitic. It is a horrible horrible platform and the only change is no restriction on speech.

> So there are still restrictions

The amount of speech that is allowed by US law is so extremely broad that those restrictions may as well not exist.

IE, lets say someone were to argue "I think it is totally OK for the government to arrest and execute people who disagree with the government in any way!", and then backed up this belief by saying "Well, you support restrictions on free speech as well! You don't think that people should be able to send mass death threats to everyone, 100 times a day! Therefore, since you support restrictions on free speech, it is totally OK to arrest anyone who disagrees with the government in any way!"

This is the argument that you are making. And it is a bad one.

The reason why it is bad, is because the restrictions on speech, in the US are almost non-existent, and that is not a good justification to do other things that are much more restrictive, such as in my extreme example of arresting anyone who disagrees with the government.

You made some huge leaps in what I was arguing. I never said the government should expand their freedom of speech restrictions or anything like that. I simply said there are still restrictions, even if they are small and that sites without restrictions are horrible.

> . I simply said there are still restrictions

But the point is that the fact that they are so extremely small and minimal restrictions on speech in the US, is not a good excuse to justify much larger restrictions.

If the existing restrictions of US law are so minimal, it makes no sense to bring it up, as any sort of justification for much larger restrictions.

It is just not relevant to anything, to mention that, because those restrictions are small, and are therefore not related to much larger restrictions.

> The standard could be "Whatever is allowed by US law", which is extremely non restrictive on speech.

That would result in 90% of user generated content being spam. There's no law against me sending you 10 spam DMs a day on Twitter. Is that really what you want?

> There's no law against me sending you

Giving people the choice of whether they want to accept moderation or not, seems reasonable.

For example, if twitter allowed everything that is allowed by law, but also gave people control over content that they see, then that seems fine.

There is a fundamantal difference between disallowing something, and giving a user the option of not seeing certain content.

IE, I do not believe that the block feature is censorship, for example.

> Is that really what you want?

I'd want to have the option to control the content that I see, as opposed to twitter forcing its own decision. I don't see a problem with someone choosing to allow spam to themselves, if they are OK with that.

The law is part of my point. It's how we as a society limit free speech in places where it's damaging to other people.