Yishan does a great job of explaining why social media is a different animal[0] and how when people try to fix one problem, they invariably create 3 more. It’s also unclear whether Elon would bring Jack back.
I think Yishan wrong, at least in the case of Reddit.
> They would like you to stop squabbling over stupid shit and causing drama so that they can spend their time writing more features and having to adjudicate your stupid little fights.
There is a community on Reddit that is currently at risk of being banned according to the admins. The community is a heavily moderated location to respectfully discuss controversial topics, one that is fairly insular and doesn’t advertise itself, and takes pride in respectful and nuanced discussion.
They regularly have innocuous posts removed, while nearly all posts with truly dangerous ideas stay up — we can attribute that to one-off moderation errors, but repeated threats from the admins cannot be.
The admin threats seem related to a specific issue which is not even in the top five most controversial things discussed on the subreddit. They’ve made it clear that any discussion on the topic is unacceptable, no matter how civil.
Is this the right place for me to raise my gripe about reddit's new approach to user bans? As of the most recent changes, once User A bans user B, B cannot reply to any comment replying to any thread or subthread originating from User A. So if User A is OP of a crowded post on the front page of a sub, User B can't reply to any comment that itself replies to the OP. This means that in the case of subreddits like /r/virtualreality (as one example), the conspiracy theorists who post hypernegative meme takes about facebook are gradually oversaturating the front page by simply banning every user who calls them out for acting like a wackjob in the comments.
It puts a lot more burden for content moderation on the sub mods, since the community doesn't have as much ability to voice disagreement in replies (once a resident troll bans enough dissenting repliers, the only people who can reply are the remaining community minority that agree). It's also hard for the mods to detect, since they don't get any visibility to the ban system from their side. I would be hesitant to take advice on how to manage a social media communication platform at scale from anyone presiding over recent decisions at Reddit, since they seem to have equipped the most toxic users with the tools to pseudo-organically poison the well for open discussion.
That's a very vague comment to make without naming the subreddit and the topics being discussed on it. What are the "controversial topics" and what are the "truly dangerous ideas"?
Fair enough. I’m hesitant to name the subreddit because mentions of it only hasten its decline.
Sorry for keeping it vague. The communities loves to write endless heapings of words, so I’m sure if and when it is banned, much ink will be spilled. Perhaps another member of the community will recognize which it is I am talking about (there is overlap with the HN crowd) and be able to summarize better than I.
I just looked at that subreddit for the first time. It seems completely harmless. I didn't read a single thing that was controversial. It does probably contain some of the longest and most structured comments I've seen on reddit. But I'd be surprised if this was the subreddit the original poster was talking about (unless all of the "good stuff" was already banned).
It sounds like we’re aligned that that subreddit is in danger because of its political opinions, not its communication style? Which is exactly counter to Yishan’s claims.
Thanks; that was insightful read. I try to be fairly... neutral, not objective (as I'm not inhuman) but aware of multiple sides, and this helped reinforce that perspective.
(FWIW, if it'll save anybody else either eye strain or 5 min on Google, I ended up parsing it through Twitter Reader App to read end-to-end and print to PDF; not affiliated, never heard until 20min ago, no clue if it'll work for anybody else)
Some great points, but he's in deep denial about censorship. Here's what Paul Graham, who started this very forum, said about that thread:
I read @yishan's thread about Twitter and agree, as I think anyone who's run a forum would, that Elon is "in for a world of pain," or at least for a type of pain both much nastier than hard engineering problems, and with far less upside as well.
Where I think he's mistaken is his claim that the left and right both want to ban each other roughly equally. Among the elite, and within Twitter specifically, there is much more inclination to ban the right.
I say this as someone whose political views, if you force them onto the left-right spectrum, probably end up about 80% toward the left. E.g. I've spent millions over the past several elections supporting the Democrats.
It used to be that censorship was something the right did, and free speech was something the left were in favor of. But over the last few decades, banning "problematic" ideas has become a huge component of left culture (http://paulgraham.com/heresy.html).
Plus tech companies in general, and especially Twitter, lean to the left. Imagine walking around Twitter pre-Covid. You'd find plenty of openly far-left employees. How many openly far-right employees would you find? I don't think you'd find any.
The combination of (a) the left's recent focus on banning heretical ideas, (b) the leftward lean of tech companies generally, and (c) the leftward lean of Twitter even among tech companies, means that right-wing speech is much more likely to get banned on Twitter than left.
That's why people on the far right keep starting lame Twitter alternatives. You don't see people on the far left doing that. They don't need to. They have Twitter.
0. https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514938507407421440