Memo to Musk: Run twitter like an NFL football game.
To wit:
1) Everyone knows who the players are.
2) Everyone knows what the rules are.
3) Everyone gets to watch the referees do their job.
Then let the players play subject to the rules never mind the outcome.
Argue balls and strikes and you get tossed from the platform?
Oops I read that as MLB not NFL. My bad. Flag thrown, 5 paragraph penalty for irrelevance and careless readership.
1) Open Source™ the Moderation Rules.
2) Make it Open, Transparent and Accessible 24/7/365.
3) Mark down whose “brilliant idea” in wielding the Ban-Hammer 9000 is…. no hidden cabal of facelass censors.
Bureaucrats hate the cleansing power of bright sunshine!
An interesting bit about stake-based complaints:
All acts of moderation other than warnings should be appealable to a human. Many moderation actions today are conducted algorithmically. The appeal to human review should take no longer than 24 hours. A second level of appeal should permit a user to stake anywhere between $100 and $1million and demand a review by a professional independent arbitrator to determine whether the specified post(s) actually violated the referenced section of the Terms of Service. As in “baseball arbitration,” the arbitrator must find for the user or for the platform in a binary manner. If the user prevails, the platform pays the user 10 times their stake (minus the $100 arbitration fee). If the platform prevails, the user loses their stake, the first $100 of which goes to the arbitrator.
Yeah, I’m not a big fan of pile-on stakeholders however. This seems like an invitation to fraud.
How do I know that the arbiter is fair and neutral? Why should I trust it any more than the service who issued the ban?
One of the biggest sins of our self-selected aristocratic class is how they have destroyed trust everywhere.
How do I know that the arbiter is fair and neutral?
Because they are the CCP!
True. But just having a defined process that tells you in detail what rule you’ve broken and sets a defined appeal path is better than the Kafkaesque mess that exists now.
For over 40 years, I have been involved with moderating online communities, designing community software, and operating online community businesses. I have also been a power user in every generation of online community platforms from 1981 to today.
Nothing there I really disagree with. Nor anything really Earth shattering either. But Twitter doesn’t really operate much like the old online communities. Immediacy is an important element to Twitter you don’t see in social networks like FaceBook. And certainly weren’t factors in the old BBS systems. Speaking of which….
That’s quite a resume. That dates back to the days of dial-up modem connected S-100 boxes over POTS. The first of which was apparently CBBS. I can remember the days of bazillions of on-line dial-up BBSes which allowed you to exchange ASCII text messages with other dial-up users of the ‘bulletin board’ IF you were OK with long distance connect charges, or paid a fee to use a service with an 800 number (and often time busy signals!). These eventually included services like CompuServe and then eventually USENET through an ISP (for me anyway and Rand, although he’ll hate to admit it 🙂 ). But then I’m also antique enough to remember PLATO Notes. It was a built-in public notes system, the predecessor to the dial-up BBSes of the 80s. Only problem with it was you needed a $4000 terminal to connect to a $1M dollar mainframe (1972 dollars) or a University Student ID with access to an account. If you have access to the old PLATO Notes archives, (enter >platonotes then hit the LAB key from Author Mode) you’ll find me in there somewhere after 1974 I think.
-Methusela Of UIUC
The Lord bless Mr. Musk for his public spirit, but isn’t Twitter a distraction from his Big Idea of enabling the colonization of Mars?
Should not Elon focus on getting Starship operational? Or is “rescuing” Twitter a necessary predicate?
He can multitask.
If the FAA would stop with these repeated, one-month delays, he’d be spending all his time on on Starship and not have free time to waste on things like Twitter.
Between that, Tesla, and the SEC, are why he bought Twitter. (Imo)
SpaceX is in the very capable hands of Gwynne Shotwell and the others on the BOD; I’m sure they’re on schedule, or will be once the FAA stops dragging it’s collective feet. Now Tesla, that could stand a little more attention.
What would Elon do if he was forced not to work as hard? He does what everyone else does, sits on the couch and puts on a show.
It’s either free speech or it ain’t. Choose one.
“Experts” dreaming up more and more labyrinthine methods to moderate remind me of Yahoo and Altavista burning billions on human indexers. There are two problems: messages no one wants, and censorship. The first will always be a war of escalation but the next front seems to be related to micropayments. The second is one of the most fundamental and timeless in human experience, and I’m doubtful that clever algorithms can fix it. Honestly the fix seems to be to let the platforms erode their own network effect until Metcalf’s law starts working against them. Open sourcing as much as possible can delay that process, but eventually all institutions succumb to bureaucratic decay.
Algorithms are meant to be used as a scapegoat. They only do what their creators want but all the bad things are always blamed on them, oopsies.
Twitter’s background is white. So is Elon’s. Coincidence?
Think of it this way; out of every million tweets some number will trip some sort of algorithm. If every one requires some sort of human intervention, that costs real money. What’s the value of a tweet to Twitter? How many milliseconds per tweet of human time before each tweet, on average, costs more than it’s worth? That way lies bankruptcy.
No holds bared free speech sounds fine because you and I aren’t imaginative enough to conceive just how vile that will become from the first day. How long do you think it would take YouTube to become overrun wit porn if they allowed that?
There are going to be rules, the question is what are they and how are they enforced? Now come up with something you can program into a computer.
Memo to Musk: Run twitter like an NFL football game.
To wit:
1) Everyone knows who the players are.
2) Everyone knows what the rules are.
3) Everyone gets to watch the referees do their job.
Then let the players play subject to the rules never mind the outcome.
Argue balls and strikes and you get tossed from the platform?
Oops I read that as MLB not NFL. My bad. Flag thrown, 5 paragraph penalty for irrelevance and careless readership.
1) Open Source™ the Moderation Rules.
2) Make it Open, Transparent and Accessible 24/7/365.
3) Mark down whose “brilliant idea” in wielding the Ban-Hammer 9000 is…. no hidden cabal of facelass censors.
Bureaucrats hate the cleansing power of bright sunshine!
An interesting bit about stake-based complaints:
Yeah, I’m not a big fan of pile-on stakeholders however. This seems like an invitation to fraud.
How do I know that the arbiter is fair and neutral? Why should I trust it any more than the service who issued the ban?
One of the biggest sins of our self-selected aristocratic class is how they have destroyed trust everywhere.
How do I know that the arbiter is fair and neutral?
Because they are the CCP!
True. But just having a defined process that tells you in detail what rule you’ve broken and sets a defined appeal path is better than the Kafkaesque mess that exists now.
For over 40 years, I have been involved with moderating online communities, designing community software, and operating online community businesses. I have also been a power user in every generation of online community platforms from 1981 to today.
Nothing there I really disagree with. Nor anything really Earth shattering either. But Twitter doesn’t really operate much like the old online communities. Immediacy is an important element to Twitter you don’t see in social networks like FaceBook. And certainly weren’t factors in the old BBS systems. Speaking of which….
That’s quite a resume. That dates back to the days of dial-up modem connected S-100 boxes over POTS. The first of which was apparently CBBS. I can remember the days of bazillions of on-line dial-up BBSes which allowed you to exchange ASCII text messages with other dial-up users of the ‘bulletin board’ IF you were OK with long distance connect charges, or paid a fee to use a service with an 800 number (and often time busy signals!). These eventually included services like CompuServe and then eventually USENET through an ISP (for me anyway and Rand, although he’ll hate to admit it 🙂 ). But then I’m also antique enough to remember PLATO Notes. It was a built-in public notes system, the predecessor to the dial-up BBSes of the 80s. Only problem with it was you needed a $4000 terminal to connect to a $1M dollar mainframe (1972 dollars) or a University Student ID with access to an account. If you have access to the old PLATO Notes archives, (enter >platonotes then hit the LAB key from Author Mode) you’ll find me in there somewhere after 1974 I think.
-Methusela Of UIUC
The Lord bless Mr. Musk for his public spirit, but isn’t Twitter a distraction from his Big Idea of enabling the colonization of Mars?
Should not Elon focus on getting Starship operational? Or is “rescuing” Twitter a necessary predicate?
He can multitask.
If the FAA would stop with these repeated, one-month delays, he’d be spending all his time on on Starship and not have free time to waste on things like Twitter.
Between that, Tesla, and the SEC, are why he bought Twitter. (Imo)
SpaceX is in the very capable hands of Gwynne Shotwell and the others on the BOD; I’m sure they’re on schedule, or will be once the FAA stops dragging it’s collective feet. Now Tesla, that could stand a little more attention.
What would Elon do if he was forced not to work as hard? He does what everyone else does, sits on the couch and puts on a show.
It’s either free speech or it ain’t. Choose one.
“Experts” dreaming up more and more labyrinthine methods to moderate remind me of Yahoo and Altavista burning billions on human indexers. There are two problems: messages no one wants, and censorship. The first will always be a war of escalation but the next front seems to be related to micropayments. The second is one of the most fundamental and timeless in human experience, and I’m doubtful that clever algorithms can fix it. Honestly the fix seems to be to let the platforms erode their own network effect until Metcalf’s law starts working against them. Open sourcing as much as possible can delay that process, but eventually all institutions succumb to bureaucratic decay.
Algorithms are meant to be used as a scapegoat. They only do what their creators want but all the bad things are always blamed on them, oopsies.
Twitter’s background is white. So is Elon’s. Coincidence?
Think of it this way; out of every million tweets some number will trip some sort of algorithm. If every one requires some sort of human intervention, that costs real money. What’s the value of a tweet to Twitter? How many milliseconds per tweet of human time before each tweet, on average, costs more than it’s worth? That way lies bankruptcy.
No holds bared free speech sounds fine because you and I aren’t imaginative enough to conceive just how vile that will become from the first day. How long do you think it would take YouTube to become overrun wit porn if they allowed that?
There are going to be rules, the question is what are they and how are they enforced? Now come up with something you can program into a computer.