> taking an axe to the things that keep the lights on at Twitter: effective content moderation and talent.

I have experienced the 'effectiveness' of Twitters moderation team on multiple occasions where they were very ineffective at upholding the very clear cut rules surrounding things like doxxing on their website. I had my personal information made public, and they ignored me. Multiple times. I even created a new account with no way for there to be any publicly available personal info; and yet I was still doxxed somehow, and they still ignored me.

So, in the spirit of HN's rules, I just want to say this, since end user experience should be allowable to share (I hope.).

Effective moderation at twitter is a myth as far as I see it, and their only talent is making it look like they have effective moderation when they care.

P.S. I also was doing nothing wrong in any case where this happened. It was all conversations which should have been considered civil (mostly) and one situation where it had nothing to do with politics or philosophy at all. Yet they did nothing.

Nothing.

I agree that Twitter's content moderation is mostly a vibe, and not really effective. Musk purchasing Twitter is already killing that feeling that content moderation works at Twitter, and I wouldn't be surprised if advertisers put a freeze on their plans the day the purchase went through (hence Musk's panicked-sounding tweet to advertisers).

Honestly, if what they though Twitter was before was fine to advertise on, despite the lack of actual coherent moderation; then we are all blessed by the lack of those advertisers.

And if that makes Elon panic, then we are blessed doubly in that way as well, because he might either actually do something useful to make it a nicer place to be; or he might burn it to the ground.

Both are ideal in my personal opinion.

I think you are making the other poster's point for them, as Musk seems to have no interest in increasing the moderation.

Not really, since the other poster was saying Elon would be axing things like moderation. I'm saying essentially it doesn't matter if he does or doesn't, because it barely exists at all anyways.

So axe away I guess, cause there is no wood to chop. The tree is hollow, from all the woodpeckers eating the grubs.

> Elon's talking about taking an axe to the things that keep the lights on at Twitter: effective content moderation and talent.

I don't think it's clear this is the case. It's just the network effect that keeps it in such a dominant position. Plenty of Twitter clones have been created, yet neither conservatives have migrated to Truth/Parler/Gab/whatever, nor have or will liberals/the anti-Musk contingent to Mastodon, or whatever the left-leaning equivalent Twitter clone coming in the next few weeks is.

Honestly, Twitter's biggest draw to most users is probably the lack of content moderation on something that gets buried beneath the politics and culture discussions: porno, porno, porno. Twitter is one of the few social media sites where porn is still allowed, for the most part. It's always funny to see a "viral" politics/culture war tweet that has "blown up" with 50k, 100k likes; any given lewd picture of Ganyu from Genshin Impact by a popular artist is going to run double those numbers.

> It's just the network effect that keeps it in such a dominant position.

Exactly. Just ask Friendster or MySpace or any of the other failed social networks how deep and wide the network effect moat is in the long run. I'd argue that for all the hype, Twitter was already in the 'long goodbye' phase before Musk bet the farm on it.

> Twitter is one of the few social media sites where porn is still allowed, for the most part.

And they're completely at the mercy of Google and Apple's policies here. Both of those app stores could put their feet down next week and this 'feature' of Twitter's suddenly becomes a liability.

I don't know much about it, but I've always assumed Mastodon was apolitical. What makes it 'left-leaning'?

If you think Twitter can be easily cloned then you know everything about tech and nothing about business.

Exactly! Every web dev framework beginner tutorial is a “twitter clone”

Pretty sure that's 85% of the people who comment on this site. Only thinking about the purely technical side of things, never the issues and limitations that come from other people.

> effective content moderation

That's very subjective. "Misinformation" is more moderated than child porn and literal terrorist organizations.

It was an eye opener to see official Taliban accounts.

As abhorrent as I may find their ideas, if they play the rules, I'd actually prefer to allow them on the platform.

The eye opener was seeing others cheer on the silencing of academics, politicians,and physicians who's ideas may be out of step with the zeitgeist (or the mob's interpretation of what's apprpos).

To a lesser extent, same thing with ISIS. When LiveLeak was gone, and their propaganda videos were pretty much scrubbed from the web, we lost a lot of actual history, as abhorrent as it all was. It's going to be easy for people to forget how bad all of that was, and more importantly for me- most of the countless videos of them using American supplied TOWS against Assad while also filming the mass genocide...all that is gone, and it's much harder to prove the connection was ever there.

Same thing with Libya and Gaddafi, gruesome stuff was done by western backed rebels, including a revival of the black African slave trade and just killing black immigrants in Libya, and all of that is nigh impossible to prove now.

Exactly. Regardless of how horrible war videos are, they are still directly true history, and their loss is seriously concerning. I knew people who, despite knowing very little of the war, were cheering on FSA attacks against civilians, because of "Assad support".

When a video of them throwing a teenage boy into the back of a pickup truck and sawing his head off started making the rounds, their opinion changed completely. Even if they were full of crackpots, these sites documented objectively just how terrible and extremely brutal these wars are.

> Twitter wasn't doing anything special, and it's easy to launch a clone of their business model. And yet nobody has done it? People think social media is easy to start and succeed. FYI, its like catching lightning.

They don't have effective content moderation or talent though.