Not clear to me that you can't have it both ways to at least a degree: The corollary of twitter's moderation practices is not "at least there is no abuse".

Even though I'm not a twitter user on multiple occasions I've had to deal with impersonators there pretending to be me and acting abusively towards friends and colleagues with threats and harassment, only to have twitter dumbly respond with that no rules are being broken and only taking action after enduring months of it and rolling the report dice over and over again. In the mean time, I got to watch friends calling out abuse get suspended for harassment and forced to remove their posts.

A lot of people see twitter's moderation as politically motivated, and while I don't doubt that some of it is-- a lot of it is just bad and chaotic: allowing deeply abusive behavior to persist when randomly raining hell fire down on someone who merely said something a bit controversial. That inconsistency convinces people that it's politically motivated because they notice when someone is suspended over something inconsequential while at the same time so many examples of serious abuse continue.

There isn't any guarantee that it's possible to do better, for sure-- but I'd like to think that it's possible. Certainly there are other sites (like HN!) which do a much better job, but they tend to be facing challenges of an entirely different scale.

All that blather aside, the obvious implication of that 5 billion dollar revenue isn't that it could be grown-- it's that much more of it could be returned to twitter's owners. For all twitter spends on development, it still manages to be a service where even its CEO posts photographs of text to tweet longer messages. Perhaps there is a good reason for all the longstanding gaps in functionality-- perhaps twitter is all it could be -- but if so, it could be returning a lot more value to its owners.

People will be hurtful and abusive no matter how moderated the platform is. Even HN has its share of colorful commentary from time to time. If individuals here and there decide it's best for them to not be on any social media, nothing the platform can do - even if it brings more users overall - will keep those individuals.

>>> If elon removes bots, welcomes non-extremists back on, gets comedians and entertaining accounts back on board and lets people say what they want instead a bot army of shills repeating verbatim over and over and over...

>> Comedians like Stephan Fry left exactly because people were saying whatever they wanted and being abusive. You can't have it both ways.

> People will be hurtful and abusive no matter how moderated the platform is.

Which only proves the point that the GGP's formula for Twitter's success doesn't add up.

Also, we're not talking about a binary condition, but one of degree. If people are leaving now because of too much of "people ... saying whatever they want... and being abusive," it's reasonable to assume more people like that will leave as the moderation lightens up. Other people might join because of the policy change, but I doubt they'll be "comedians and entertaining accounts."

I think discussion chains like this showcase a lot of misunderstandings around how twitter fundamentally works.

Most companies, figures, games, movies, etc have twitter accounts to convey information or offer support. If anything Musks ambitions will draw more of those entities back, especially ones that were not aligned with the twitters political views.

Sure, it is social media, but the individual users that used to use twitter like Facebook, browsing trends etc have left for the next new platform, for example TikTok.

Is there any evidence that "companies, figures, games, movies, etc" have stopped using Twitter to promote their products and/or use Twitter as a support channel? And doubly so that they did this because of their own political views?

I find it really hard to imagine that there is a significant number of such companies that is just waiting for Milo Yiannopoulos, Steve Bannon, and Alex Jones to be unbanned, so they can finally resume using Twitter for their commercial purposes.

> I find it really hard to imagine that there is a significant number of such companies that is just waiting for Milo Yiannopoulos, Steve Bannon, and Alex Jones to be unbanned, so they can finally resume using Twitter for their commercial purposes.

Perhaps My Pillow?

But yeah, the claims just don't pass the smell test. You bring in more people like those (and more of the TheDonald.win crowd), and you'll either polarize the platform by driving off existing users or have more of a toxic, polarized, trollish, bitchfight that isn't good for anyone or anything except maybe Twitter, Inc.

> Which only proves the point that the GGP's formula for Twitter's success doesn't add up.

I don't think that proves anything. It's an example of one person.

> People will be hurtful and abusive no matter how moderated the platform is.

In a well moderated environment, only once. Or at least, once in between probations.

He's still on Twitter, as recently as this morning.

Now imagine if Twitter gave users like Stephen Fry the option to not see toxic comments. Let them live in their happy little bubble. But oh no, Twitter got rich off of anger porn, so they're stuck in the local maxima where every single person is subjected to the worst toxic behavior daily. They don't want people like Stephen Fry who would rather leave than feed the anger porn machine. Time for a change, I say.

Anybody who stands in front of a crowd to say anything should expect some heckling. The bigger the crowd, the greater the risk of this. I would have expected a comedian to cope with it better than most, but if Stephen Fry decided he no longer wanted to tolerate heckling, then it sounds like leaving Twitter was the right choice for him.

Can't say I see the problem here.

>You can't have it both ways.

What are the two "ways" that supposedly are in conflict?

1. people can say whatever they want

2. no abusive comments

Content moderation is difficult.

Not if you make Twitter federated and let people host their own instance. For example, let Stephen Fry host his own Twitter server and he will choose what is allowed and what is not. This Twitter will integrate with other Twitter servers over ActivityPub. Something like Mastodon.

It's not going to happen because this model is not going to generate any revenue unless Elon figures out something.

> let Stephen Fry host his own server that he has to actively curate

I've barely had my coffee, and I've already seen the most "HN living in a bubble" comment of the day.

>> let people host their own instance

Totally. Why would anyone self-host when it could be written to a blockchain and be decentralized, tamperproof and censorship resistant? Twit-coin could reward influencers for their certified engagement metrics without knowing their underlying physical identity by maintaining value flows virtually. Brave browser is 80% there already.

I literally can’t tell if this is a joke. I’m going to treat it as earnest, because even if you’re trolling this is HN and every mention of cryptocurrency will get _someone_ nodding along in support.

Censorship resistance is only meaningful if there are actual people exchanging ideas and building community. Cryptocoin and 100% free speech is a perfect recipe to create an online space even more dominated by trolls, bots, and conspiracy theorists than Twitter is today.

Unfortunately, between Musk’s obvious enjoyment of manipulating markets however he can and Dorsey’s increasing focus on dWeb/Web3/“magic crypto sprinkles” I imagine they will run full speed towards more or less exactly the model you describe.

“Every tweet is an NFT now! Popular accounts charge Twitcoin to follow them! Advertisers can pay people Twitcoin to follow and retweet!” Etc. Etc.

> I literally can’t tell if this is a joke.

Ambiguity is a spice in life. I was thinking the name "twit-coin" would give the game away.

> actual people exchanging ideas

I enjoy exchanging ideas with ideas and with people. Anyone here may be an actual person or a biological process hosting a meme collection.

> conspiracy theorists

Are "conspiracy theorists" individuals who theorize about conspiracies or groups of people conspiring to promote a theory?

Thanks for bringing up the NFT. I had that in mind to add in but got distracted during composition. Imagine the possibilities of fractional ownership of 144 characters--it would open up a whole new world of ETFs.

Glad this blockchain/crypto thing did not exist over a decade ago. Otherwise we would never have something as cool as BitTorrent. There are so many people who neither understand decentralisation properly nor crypto but wanna somehow become part of conversation so they link the two and derail the conversation.

Amen.

But.. Bittorrent is actually about 20 years old. Maybe getting on for 25.

You forgot “Clients, of course, should be written only in Rust.”

Why on earth would Stephen Fry want to spend his time operating and moderating a social media site?

No he won't. Make it so easy that his PR could manage his own server instance. That is what originally use to happen when actors still had their own websites and forums.

Ok so he doesn't have to manage it himself, he could employ a team. Great, so how much is Stephen going to be paying to this team to moderate the content of his 12.4 million followers? A dozen people? A hundred maybe? It sounds like an expensive venture.

He could just use the tools that come with the service. Tools that could filter out words, phrases that he chooses to omit or he could choose to disable replies altogether. He can also choose who gets to follow him based on certain parameters. I'm pretty sure if better minds than mine chose to solve this problem, they can.

BTW the site you are currently on has two moderators.

Why do any of those things require a "federated Twitter"?

Hackernews has two moderators and several orders of magnitude fewer users. I would argue that the amount of moderation required increases exponentially with the number of eyeballs.

Ok, so once users discover 1990s leetspeak what happens then?

Better mind than yours have chosen to solve this problem, they work at facebook and twitter and it's been a disaster! Twitter has been impotent, and facebook have been a public danger. The hard truth of it is that HN just isn't a scalable solution. It ropes in users to self-moderate which results in some really unehealthy issues at scale.

So... a blog?

Ok so if you change Twitter entirely to some other thing that others have tried and failed at numerous times then you will....have it both ways? Wat?

> Not if you make Twitter federated and let people host their own instance. For example, let Stephen Fry host his own Twitter server and he will choose what is allowed and what is not. This Twitter will integrate with other Twitter servers over ActivityPub. Something like Mastodon.

Moderation is hard work, and making users do their own moderation themselves defeats the purpose from a user perspective (e.g. exposing Fry to toxic comments so he can theoretically moderate them away himself on his own instance is not practically different that giving him an unmoderated platform).

> It's not going to happen because this model is not going to generate any revenue unless Elon figures out something.

Musk isn't going to figure out anything. If anyone does, it will be someone working for him and he'll get all the credit.

Doing this would have zero impact on the bedrock fact that content moderation is difficult.

You can't wave that away with a wand and an incantation.

So fracture the community into a bunch of moderated instances with varying rules?.... Sounds like reddit

Wil Wheaton had a disastrous experience with Mastodon, much worse than he had with Twitter. He's been made fun of on every Internet platform for 30+ years, and found Mastodon unusable, apparently

Even if Fry could run his own instance, how the heck is he going to write his own moderation code?

Next week on "command line" with Stephen fry

I think user content moderation should be enforced. If I do not want to see tweets that contain certain words or phrases, block it. Treat abuse like spam. Block, isolate, and it will go away.

If I only want tweets that contain the words “Zaphod Beeblebrox” then that’s all I want to see, and should have that ability.

> If I do not want to see tweets that contain certain words or phrases, block it.

You can already mute words on Twitter.

Do you know who Stephen Fry is?

Twitter is/was unique in that there was a minuscule chance that someone rich and famous would actually read a regular response to a tweet, especially if it got a lot of traction.

And that is what scares some people.

The only other place I’ve seen it happen is some Reddit AMAs and it was always clear which ones were being coordinated by PR and which got unhinged and out of control.

Yes, but unironically.