I apologize if I was unclear - the post I was replying to was making a general statement about moderation, and so was I. Some level of moderation is essential to keep good user experience. I do not know enough about twitter’s particular moderation policies to comment on them. It is possible (and likely) that they could be improved - but I do not think removing all moderation would be an improvement.

Nearly all of the useful "moderation" on Twitter is me choosing who I follow. Some of it is me choosing who I block. Everything else is a rounding error by comparison. Or at least it should be. I've no idea how involved Twitter's algorithms are in my experience and that scares me a little bit.

I don't mind if Twitter wants to offer me their own opinion about which posts are bad and which people are bad, but I should be allowed to opt out of that. Better still, they could have multiple competing paid services offering filtering/blocking tailored to different themes. Paid—because if they have an economic incentive to satisfy their subscribers, they'll satisfy their subscribers. The problem with the free filtering done by Twitter today is that they have an economic incentive to satisfy their shareholders.

> Nearly all of the useful "moderation" on Twitter is me choosing who I follow. Some of it is me choosing who I block. Everything else is a rounding error by comparison. Or at least it should be.

Not really.

…you appreciate the point being made by the parent post right?

Unmoderated communities devolve, in practice, to porn, scams, flame wars and trolling. There’s lots of evidence that’s how things turn out.

What you’re after is different moderation, not no moderation; what you see as excessive moderation can’t be replaced with no moderation without creating a clone of 4chan.

So.. I guess.. just remember what you’re asking for is actually a bad thing. What you actually want isn’t what you’re asking for; unless what you want is 4chan, in which case, you can just go hang out there instead of on twitter..

For what it's worth, my day job is running a reasonably large discussion forum (whirlpool.net.au) which is relatively famous for its heavy-handed moderation. We aren't shy on banning people and we stamp down on trolls hard.

But I don't see the parallel between that kind of moderation and a firehose like Twitter. My experience of twitter is almost entirely defined by the people I follow. Yes there's junk and the occasional troll, but I'm an adult capable of making observations about the properties of any "bad" content I might see. Expecting other people to sanitise my experience for me is unhealthy and doomed to failure.

> My experience of twitter is almost entirely defined by the people I follow

This is probably, broadly speaking, false.

Maybe it was once true, and maybe it should be true, but I guess it’s more likely that most people (including you) see and interact with all the people you follow, interacting with all the people they follow (retweets, etc.) interacting with all the people they follow.

3 degrees of separation.

If you never saw any tweets other than the immediate people you follow tweeting to each other, then perhaps… but, that’s not how twitter works.

…and then on top of that, how did you end up following those people? Personal friends? Or perhaps, via twitters moderated hash tags?

That’s different moderation, not no moderation.

What you’re describing is something closer to signal/WhatsApp groups; different, much less moderated personal groups. Sure. Good for what it is…

There’s an app for that; it’s just not twitter.

> Maybe it was once true, and maybe it should be true

Which is pretty much exactly the point I was making in my original contribution to this thread.

Yes to the degrees of separation. That's the point of following people—to be exposed to their curation. I followed many people because they were friends of friends; I've unfollowed many people because I wasn't impressed with the people they interacted with, even if I had no problem with them.

There are certain topics on twitter that if I say anything about them, even in passing, I'll get dozens of automated @ replies trying to spam something to me. Blocking accounts who use @ to spam would be an example of worthwhile moderation.

On the other hand, blocking someone for making jokes about a celebrity's weight (which Twitter has done!), is something that, in my opinion, is an example of an overreach.

The existence of spam is an immutable fact of any platform, the only question is how sophisticated they need to be to clear whatever hurdles are placed in front of them. Smarter filtering of spam will only lead to more sophisticated spammers.

Thanks for clearing that up. Moderation is definitely important but moderation, apart from the obvious abuse and illegality, should be done on the smallest level possible. Banning someone from a platform for expressing an offensive view is not moderation; its censorship. Creating customizable user filters or groups that hide these people is a better answer. Reddit has a lot of their own problems, but the federated model of subreddits works. The problem arises when some subreddits are banned or the overlap of mods on each subreddit, but in principal its correct.

I would love shared filters on twitter. For instance, if I don't want to hear things about topic X, I can download a topic X filter that's community maintained that hides posts from troll accounts or keywords. You can mix and match filters. This is better than banning people. Is twitter going to allow back all those people that were banned for discussing lab theory?

> Moderation is definitely important but moderation, apart from the obvious abuse and illegality, should be done on the smallest level possible.

That's your opinion, and you're absolutely welcome to hold it. I understand that position, but I don't agree, and I would prefer a more strongly moderated platform. That's my opinion. If a platform has too little moderation for my tastes, I may choose to leave it, and that would be bad for an ad-based platform's profitability, not to mention network effects, etc. Given enough users (and employees!) who think like me, the platform has an incentive to perform stronger moderation.

I think we should have more platforms to choose from, and maybe even require some kind of inter-operation between them. We should enforce existing anti-trust law on these big platforms, not try to force them to change their moderation policies.

" apart from the obvious abuse.."

"Banning someone from a platform for expressing an offensive view is not moderation"

What if an offensive view creates abuse? Who defines obvious?

Abuse is spam, doxxing, fraud, etc. Very narrow. I don't think this should include something like banning someone for saying "learn to code" because its a "targeted harassment campaign" [0]. However you can pose with the severed head of a sitting US president and that'll be okay and still standing up today [1] . Come on.

[0] https://reason.com/2019/03/11/learn-to-code-twitter-harassme...

[1] https://twitter.com/kathygriffin/status/1323893513226870786

Show me people banned for only discussing the lab theory. There was a global mistake in harshly categorizing the lab leak theory as wrong, but the people who were banned were banned because they used the theory (which it still is) to advance dangerous views that Twitter decided not to engage with.

There’s the word media in social media. A newspaper will carry a theory, but not an article using the theory to spuriously decry public health mesures.