I think that all these platforms: Parler, Gab, etc, will end up with one of two fates.
They'll either fail to make it big and remain a niche thing for those trolls who enjoy the edginess, like 4chan and its newer alternatives, or...
They'll grow big and end up having to deal with "trust and safety" issues when the majority of users on the mainstream end of the spectrum demand protection from those users who would otherwise be on 4chan/etc. This is pretty much what Twitter and Facebook are going through now, but shifted more towards the right, in the case of Parler/Gab.
We can already see hints of this in the fact that their terms of service prohibit inciting terrorism or acts of violence – issues that 4chan/etc deal with by allowing it, reducing their reach, and Twitter (attempt) to deal with by banning it, increasing their reach as they provide a "safe space".
Parler has the same issues as Twitter, it's just shifted to the right of the political spectrum. They can either deal with those issues and move closer to Twitter, or not and be irrelevant in the long term.
> fail to make it big and remain a niche thing for those trolls who enjoy the edginess,
It would fail on those terms as well due to irrelevance: When your political agenda consists of annoying and offending "the other", they need to be present to take offence. If they're not listening, where's the fun?
The "echo chamber" aspect takes all the fun out of the performative cruelty.
You are making an assumption that it's primarily about performative cruelty. But I would guess a non-trivial amount of them are just looking for a place where they feel safe talking about what they believe. Every slice of the political/cultural spectrum has it's trolls but they trolls are not representative of the general population.
I may think much of what the other side says is reprehensible but I can generally tell when the speaker is trolling vs just speaking their mind.
I like both points here. Twitter gets traction because professional trolls / grifters use it to build their personal brand.
They are frequently newspaper columnists, authors, and TV pundits who benefit directly or indirectly from have a large number of followers (whether they following in agreement or follow out of outrage, it matters not).
Sadly this is true of the left as well as the right; they are all selling something.
These Professionals need large mainstream audiences, which is why they love twitter and twitter loves them, but they are a different animal to the tribalists who want to satisfy their need to mix with like minded people.
Until the fringe sites enable the former as well as the latter it's not immediately obvious how they remain viable.
Is this a serious question? Do you honestly believe the left has no agenda or that “mainstream news” is not effectively propaganda?
The news business depends on division to thrive. Division and anger drives clicks and eyeballs. Oh, and let’s not forget the billions of dollars in political advertising that goes into the pockets of corporate news organizations and social media companies — the very same entities that are fomenting the division that necessitates the advertising in the first place. It’s a rage cycle.
As a starting point I would recommend reading Matt Taibbi’s Hate Inc and subscribing to Glenn Greenwald’s substack. They’re two of the only left-of-center commentators who have not lost their integrity over the past five years, and their ideas are worth listening to.
I've seen what they post when they're "speaking their mind"
It almost always devolves into "jokes" about getting state approval to shoot immigrants, refugees, minorities in open ranges, or providing "helicopter rides" - a reference to dropping people from helicopters.
This is what currently unifies the right wing of US politics.
do note that this isnt that hard a barrier. The earliest reports of bad behavior were from the BBS days, with nazi forums targeting Jewish or holocaust focused boards/sites.
> When your political agenda consists of annoying and offending "the other", they need to be present to take offense.
I'm not sure what you mean by "the other". "The other" is an actual concept signifying people who are somehow excluded from society. Rarely do people get banned for going after "the other". Most of these people get banned for going after mainstream journalists and politicians. Many don't get banned for going after anyone at all. And many get shadow banned without any notice or explanation.
Secondly, I don't think people on the right consider what people like Milo (for instance) do to be performative cruelty. They see it as exposing hypocrisy. They see it as exercising their god-given right to free speech.
There's a "history rhymes" kind of dynamic to this.
The first recognizable, critical-mass online social media(broadcast, topic driven, message posting) came from BBS operators, mailing lists, Usenet and proprietary variants.
The moderated ones gradually disappeared as users migrated; the unmoderated ones drowned in noise over time. Pieces of it still survive as relics.
The next generation was website driven: home pages, forums and weblogging. Again, a similar pattern: moderated places disappeared, unmoderated ones drowned. But, this time the scale was larger, with different dynamics. Self-publishing was getting easier: at first there were web rings, later a "blogosphere" emerged. Forums were more varied.
But again, some relics were left over.
And from there, social media platforms started emerging, aggregating the space. And each one in turn has followed this life cycle, on slower or faster timelines. Moderating keeps the signal alive, but after a few years people tire of the status quo and look for the next thing, somewhere with fewer gatekeepers, perhaps, or more structure, or stronger or weaker identity models. The signal decays in amplitude rather than drowning in noise.
What tends to be overlooked in social networking and virtual worlds discussions is that there's always a quality-of-service tradeoff dynamic to them. If you engineer the rules to improve one area you may lose some others. This is true even when looking at search systems: they retrieve correlated info that often has an intentionally wrong meaning.
> their terms of service prohibit inciting terrorism or acts of violence – issues that 4chan/etc deal with by allowing it
4chan and similar communities typically comply with local laws[1], which means no incitation to violence/terrorism (and if you spent some time there vs. only reading articles about it, you'd see this is enforced).
4chan's only infrastructure is in California, so they really only have to abide by California and US laws. Only way for other countries to make them abide is via blocking them, which may not really be worth the effort if there are only a smattering of users in your jurisdiction using it
I don,t know about the future, and I,m not into the content, but voat/gab/tdw already have better ui/ux than any of the big players like fb/tw/reddit, whose user experience has devolved to barely tolerable for me. I think a mass exodus to private communities is coming.
I don,t think gab will grow to the size of reddit, rather reddit will be picked apart into a billion pieces like a dinosaur after the astetoid.
I agree that these mechanics will always play out at scale, unless users are in charge of moderation/curation/governance.
Successful cases in point:
Discord: Closed bubbles, users in absolute control of entry and moderation. Still going strong.
8chan: Open bubbles, users in absolute control of moderation. You also had conservative alt-right and LGBTQ communities, cleanly separated, mostly just ignoring each other. Only got killed by "black-swan" events and the subsequent pressure from press attention.
Tumblr: Organic user-powered curation via likes and reposts (vs Twitter/FB style "AI" algorithms having their way), you had LGBTQ, neo nazi, porn/conservative communities existing in parallel with effective but organic and moving boundaries. Only got killed by external pressure from advertisers.
> We can already see hints of this in the fact that their terms of service prohibit inciting terrorism or acts of violence – issues that 4chan/etc deal with by allowing it, reducing their reach, and Twitter (attempt) to deal with by banning it, increasing their reach as they provide a "safe space".
Inciting terrorism or acts of violence are typically crimes. If Parler's position is to disallow criminal activity in its TOS, that's one hell of a limiting principle, especially compared to Twitter.
In my (right-wing) experience, Twitter became a toxic place after the "trust and safety" moderation was adopted. Before that, when it was "the free speech wing of the free speech party," users with ill intent could not attempt to get others deplatformed. Today, we still have harassment on Twitter, but with the added threat of user mobs brigading those who have the wrong opinions.
The one point I think is important is that the "blue checkmarks" indeed demand protection from the unwashed masses, and that is why the rules are so selectively enforced and biased. Journalists and public figures are typically of one political persuasion (in the US at least), and sometimes perceived alternative ideas as "violence" or just wrongthink no matter what.
Parler had to avoid being beholden to its highest-value users in this way. If Twitter were not so intolerant, I might use it more. But these days, it feels like you need to walk on eggshells to avoid a shadowban.
It will fail for two reasons: A) If you want advertising, you're going to have to censor. B) People like to argue. If it is 100% people agreeing, then it loses stickiness. Might as well just watch Fox News. They need to see the "wrong" people for validation.
Also, there will be trolls that will push the envelop of what non censored can be.
> majority of users on the mainstream end of the spectrum demand protection from those users
This “demanding protection” is one of the root problems with online discourse today. I refuse to concede that words on a screen will ever be something anyone “needs protection” from (short of actual doxxing, stalking and IRL harassment).
Have people forgotten “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me?” A block/ignore button should be sufficient. We don’t need platforms editorializing or censoring content.
People seek out content that makes them angry (ragebait) and then blame the platforms for disseminating it.
That doesn’t mean they don’t have a massive potential market. All the centre right people who see Twitter banning people for questioning unlimited immigration, or trans men competing against women in sport, and feel like current social media companies aren’t for them.
I think in this election Twitter definitely, but also Facebook have taken sides. There are a lot of normal, decent right wing people out there, despite the rhetoric of the left, who also wouldn’t mind a social media platform.
It's not exactly the same but this article talks about a gay guy being banned for (supposedly) pointing out that there are very non-binary people in the world, and objecting to the idea that language should be changed to accomodate them:
Now that is something I wish all the social media platforms would enforce on their moderator staff.
Every ban should be accompanied with at least one sentence of explanation, a quote from the relevant law or ToS, and the text or image (with a nice red circle if required) in question. If the content was illegal then a summary instead.
It should be a choice to view it, as public as the posting itself, and subject to comments also.
As best I can tell, Facebook bans are done by monkeys hitting buttons randomly to get through their queue as quickly as possible. I don't think Twitter is much better.
My point is that I think those people will end up realising that they need some form of moderation that will likely conflict with the core premise of the platform.
Moderation is not binary... There's a hell of a difference between banning misgendering and banning someone who spends all day sending unsolicited replies or shock images.
I'm not going to comment on this example, as we may disagree, but I think that there's more than unsolicited replies and shock images that will happen here, there will be significant rallying against certain groups, and members of those groups will feel unsafe around that.
The problem for Parler is that many of their target market (the right) are in fact in one of these groups. Women, ethnic minorities, the rich, the poor, veterans, the less abled, conservative voters, libertarian voters, the list goes on and more examples will arrive.
Building a platform on being a safe space for division and exclusion can't succeed because that same force will make it an unsafe space for all but the small niche that win the territory.
We've already seen hints of women on the conservative right having a problem with misogyny from others in the community...
It reminds me of how reddit went through a period of turmoil with claims of censorship and mods acting too aggressively and all the freedom of speech zealots decided to jump ship over to voat.co. I like to check in from time to time to see how that site is doing, and well...it's not pretty.
I know parler is pulling in some pretty big names to give it some legitimacy, but it's probably going to succumb to the same problem where only the most aggressive and angry users survive, while the more moderate users gravitate back to places like facebook and twitter
reddit could still retain "freedom of speech zealots", which I think still have the better arguments for that matter. They are just in other subs now, but they are still there. The admins know about it and leave them their place. Ironically they often are more civilized and often have a higher quality discourse. That isn't always the case though.
My main issue with all these platforms supposedly being born to defend "free speech" is that they're a reactionist measure from certain ideas being deemed inappropriate by the common populace, so it's less about all kinds of free speech and more about protecting their speech.
I'm convinced that no centralized platform is able to provide true free speech and even if it does, people should not be denied of the benefits of moderation/curation so I do think distributed/federated platforms are the way to go, even if they have issues scaling up. True, in the end, they may just end up being bubbles and echo chambers, but you ultimately get to choose which ones to engage in, instead of leaving that choice to someone else and their fickle mood to appease shareholders.
There is at least a tension between those who want to say tough controversial things and those who don't yet dare to speak out their inner feelings and insecurities.
To construct a space that can handle both is probably impossible. Tough hard arguing has it's merit and value, but often it can turn into a contest who is the most stubborn, most convinced and least principled actor in the discussion. This kind of "war with words" scares away a whole other world of speech that could never happen in it's wake.
I am not saying that we should go without one or another, but saying a space for free speech is one where you can say controversial in a rough voice is not necessarily an indicator for the value of the conversations that take place. Think about HN: how would the conversations on here work without the restraint everybody shows by staying on topic?
>contest who is the most stubborn, most convinced and least principled actor in the discussion. This kind of "war with words" scares away a whole other world of speech that could never happen in it's wake.
There are many games people play in conversation. Nothing about preventing "tough arguing" actually gives way for "principled actor[s] in the discussion."
In fact, "tough arguing" is probably the MOST-desirable game, because it's the least disingenuous. The value of conversations can go negative when someone is using socially-acceptable bullying or just plain lying and manipulating. And the people using those tactics will leverage the norms of polite conversation to outright avoid/dodge being called out.
> I'm convinced that no centralized platform is able to provide true free speech
Signal is centralized and provides true free speech. End to end encryption means they don't know what you're saying, so they have no way to know what to block. That is comparing apples to oranges though, I assume you meant a Facebook or Twitter type of social network.
Exactly. I deleted my accounts on both since you don't get anything out from echo chambers anyway.
I returned back to look at Twitter again after blocking it for months and it is just as bad as Parler, but with more lunatics and rabid bots everywhere.
There are still very crazy users on Twitter especially those who fancy taking down 'The oppressive capitalist system™' if that suits you more.
All I can say to those who enjoy this is, let's see if you're willing to pay for it all soon. [0]
> There are still very crazy users on Twitter especially those who fancy taking down 'The oppressive capitalist system™'
I mean, if my only two choices are a fairer form of capitalism or the resurgence of neo-Nazism, I guess I'll pick the former.
If the only two choices are the abolition of captialism or the resurgence of neo-Nazism, I'd still pick the former.
I'm being facetious, but to be fair to Twitter, there's a lot of "sub-cultures" within it. All extremes appear to be well represented. Parler appears to be 4chan with a nicer user interface.
> Obvious and dead horse beaten issue. I’m working on solving this and will report here when I’ve got a prototype.
Surprising insights arise from pondering the philosophy of show and tell-specifically how listening is involved in order to “earn” your turn to speak.
Do you ever look at what you've written and ask yourself: "Would somebody else understand this"? Could you say it again, but using enough words this time?
It was very early in the morning. Apologies for being obscure.
When platforms ban assholes and other platforms arise in the guise of decreasing censorship, said assholes flock to new platforms and infest them a la Ruqqus (though I believe the developer/founders have positive intent)
We need more clever ways of finding the assholes. I mentioned show and tell in my comment above. When you think about how show and tell works, you must earn your right to show and that works fairly well, even when you scale the idea. Does that make more sense?
Twitter alternatives will all fail because they try to be an application for millions. They see Twitter and see the volume of users so build something for the numbers and hope that they are less bad.
But Twitter and every other thing that has grown big has 1) started small 2) was not initially created to be big and 3) was attractive to use.
Twitter succeeded because (and I'm not au fait with the details of how exactly) they managed to onboard a lot of high profile users from a variety of different walks of life. Everybody else came to hear what they had to say. This must have been a huge amount of work, and not something that's talked about much and I can only presume you'd have to do something similar to mount any kind of credible opposition. That's a lot of work for people who's prime motivation is chasing dopamine hits.
EDIT can't reply to below cause I've used up all my commenting credits for now: My word selection (au fait) relates probably to cultural context. This is a phrase that people around me use frequently. Sorry not trying to be obscurantist or anything. I just have a life outside the Internet where people talk in non-Internet ways.
In English Twitter, the "anchor celebrity" seemed to have been Stephen Fry.
I'd love to see a good anthropological survey of how Twitter became popular enough that by the time of the Arab Spring it was the default "public communications" app.
It’s just a phrase that’s in standard usage in some dialects (like mine) but I guess not in others. I don’t think it’s deliberately obscurantist, just people writing as they talk. I’m happy with people letting having some flavour or colour to their speech rather than aiming for germanic recidivism as an ideal of purity. (Though yeah clear simple plain writing can be good to aim for, what that means depends on who yer talkin to).
Not sure how to feel about it. I think there will be a concentrated mass of user with certain viewpoints. On the other hand the censorship of Twitter is not attractive for many users and alternatives are always good, although I think Twitter is losing relevance for media exposure. Seems we are getting two distince bubbles.
Do they really want just an echo chamber though? As I understand it they are catering to the far right. Some of the fun they have on FB or Twitter is probably arguing, feeling controversial, etc.
That's not really true though. The viewpoints that are extreme enough to actually get banned from twitter are probably only those that the most extreme views. If you're excluding the 10% of the most extreme content that isn't really an echo chamber, there's still a vast space for discussion and disagreement.
That’s exactly what a large group of people want. Rather engage in discourse, one side cancels and the other tolerates just outright fabrications as reasonable and meriting discussion.
Probably easier to recruit people to conspiracies, white nationalist organizations, anti vaccine propaganda groups, cults or whatever, if there isn't anyone fact checking.
Also because the corporate media in general and the left leaning companies, don’t really respect facts anymore. Entire networks ignore valid stories. And they subtly and aggressive distort and deflect, “There is no explicit evidence of overt corruption and to suggest otherwise is dangerous to our institutions.”
I’m a big defender of intelligence agencies but people like John Brennan are widely hated within the Intelligence Community. The political operatives masquerading as intelligence officials are leading CNN — which is disturbing.
Reality has been conflated. We’re all living in a conspiracy theory.
I have a genuine question: why is it that left-leaning companies dominate media and/or nearly all other walks-of-life? I hear this all the time, but I’d like to know how it came about. I would guess, knowing nothing else, that companies would tend to lean right.
> why is it that left-leaning companies dominate media and/or nearly all other walks-of-life?
... I mean, they don't. The largest media network by most metrics (at least in the sense that people normally mean by media; Comcast and Liberty Global would be bigger, but are mostly comms companies, really) is News Corporation and its affiliates. This owns Fox and the Sun and various other right-wing gutter press, along with some more respectable, but certainly right-leaning, organs like the Times and WSJ.
Other top tens include Sinclair Broadcasting Co (hardly left-leaning), and the Daily Mail and its affiliates.
Geography has something to do with it. New York and Washington are liberal leaning, and that's where the origins of many of the big media companies lie.
The other piece is likely the motivation to be a journalist, as well as the college experience. Journalism programs tend to have lots of students and staff that want
to be seen as "fighting for the little guy", which tends
to line up more directly in a liberal context. You can see this pretty clearly by looking at the news stories that have won Pulitzers in the past.
My guess is that it's about education levels. Americans with a 4-year college degree are much more likely to be liberal... and people with 4-year college degrees are, in turn, more likely to be decision-makers in business / academia / the media.
It couldn't be because those colleges promote left wing ideas? I honestly couldn't tell you because I haven't been to one in over 10 years. However there is this idea that left-wing ideas are correct because those that are educated have them as if they came to these ideas because they are better educated.
I see no evidence of this at all. Most people who are educated at a University level seem to be just as misinformed as those that aren't about political issues.
The difference I find is that those that are University educated have a particular hubris about their political views whereas those that aren't typically don't.
Also poor (logical) reasoning doesn't dissapear because someone is university educated. They are typically better at defending their bad reasoning.
The parent post wasn't trying to insult people without four year degrees. It's just saying that most major news companies will be led and staffed by people with college degrees (business, journalism, whatever). And, because those with four year degrees tend to lean left in the US, it makes sense the companies they lead and staff will do the same. Venn diagrams, and all that.
Personally, I don't believe this. In fact, I don't believe "the media" is a useful phrase at all. It's like pigeonholing Trump supporters. It can make you feel superior or smart, but it's not actually informative. I think the Republican Party has chosen the tactic of discrediting media sources after Fox News showed it could work. No news organization is perfect, and it's best to consume a balanced diet, but avoiding all "mainstream media" just leaves us with dregs.
> The parent post wasn't trying to insult people without four year degrees.
I didn't say they were. However there is a particular line of thinking that follows. It goes something like this:
1) Group A are university educated.
2) They typically vote for X
3) Group B aren't unviersity educated.
4) They typically vote for Y.
5) X must be better than Y because Group A are better educated then Group B.
I think the line of reasoning is very dangerous. As it allows you to dismiss the other side as "dumb" even if some of their concerns are legitmate.
> And, because those with four year degrees tend to lean left in the US, it makes sense the companies they lead and staff will do the same. Venn diagrams, and all that.
But why does having a four year degree make you lean left? That was what I was commenting on. I don't think it is simply having a higher level of education.
> Personally, I don't believe this. In fact, I don't believe "the media" is a useful phrase at all. It's like pigeonholing Trump supporters. It can make you feel superior or smart, but it's not actually informative.
I think you are conflating having a healthy skepticism of what you are told by journalists, politicians or large corporations to those that go completely off the deep end.
The news media at the beginning of COVID said it was a nothing burger. I knew it wasn't. Why was that? Because I was on a discord that had a twitter feed from Falun Gong reporter in China that was reporting on the virus, I then cross checked that with stuff from other sites and news groups on my own account and I was fairly certain this maybe serious. I was proven right much to the chargrin of my coworkers.
I was right this time. Maybe I will be wrong in the future. However it is better than blindly believing what you are being told.
> I think the Republican Party has chosen the tactic of discrediting media sources after Fox News showed it could work.
That maybe the case. However they (the MSM) exacerbated the sitation themselves.
It wasn't uncommon for mainstream media outlets contradict their position on a particular issue after Donald Trump (it was Boris Johnson here) was for (or against) something. If Trump/Boris liked it (almost didn't matter what it was) it was automatically bad. It was petty and pointless. If there is legitimate criticism I am quite happy to hear it. But it was quite obvious they were just taking the contrarian view.
The other thing they have done is selectively edit or quote what people have said. Both the left and the right do this so both sides are guilty of doing this.
There is an infamous quote of Sadiq Khan (Mayor of London and an important member of the Labour party) from several years back in the UK where they quoted him as saying "Terrorism is part and parcel of living in a city" which would be outrageous if he said it. The context was totally removed. IIRC correctly he said (obviously I am paraphrasing) "We have to be vigilant about Terrorism. It is part and parcel of being in a big city". But you would only know that by going out of your way to find the original clip.
Both MSM and independant media (that were more right leaning) left out the complete context of the quote.
So these parties either knowingly took the quote out of context, or they didn't bother to find the original clip (which IIRC I found on after a few minutes of using the search function on youtube). Either way I cannot trust these new outlets because at best they are lazy or at worst they are lying.
In short they discredit themselves.
> No news organization is perfect, and it's best to consume a balanced diet, but avoiding all "mainstream media" just leaves us with dregs.
I spend a lot of time listening to various news outlets and those that criticise them (mostly independant people). I think you can split the news media into two segments "mainstream news media" and "independant media". Fox News, BBC, ABC, Sky News etc are part of the mainstream. There are other outlets that are independant or are just guys doing analysis on the news.
Both groups are full of bad actors as far as I can tell and will play to the cognitive bias of their audience. I will freely admit I've been duped a few times (from both MSM and independant media). So now I am extremely skeptical of anything I am told and I make sure I check everything out.
However there are those that will go through an issue in a logical and point out the inconsistencies and list their sources. These people in my opinion are great. If I feel something is off, I can always check it myself.
A lot of mainstream media outlets appear to repeat a similar narrative (irrespective whether this is true). This from what I can tell is because they simply just copy one another articles, another part of this is that many of the new companies are owned by the same corporations. I speak to a Belgian friend and from what he tells me their news media just copy and paste articles from English speaking news outlets and translate articles into Flemish.
It not about that being "perfect". I don't expect that. I don't even expect them to be unbiased. The problem is that they appear to promote a particular narrative.
So it isn't about a balance diet of MSM and other stuff. You need to actively check everything (especially if it too one sided) and find the original sources. You cannot trust anyone.
Obviously this isn't true; any analysis would require first trying to establish where "left" and "right" might be, then looking at media ownership, and also referencing the extreme Overton Window effects of the US.
Biden/Harris are center-right candidates, which probably contributed to them winning the election, and definitely contributed to them winning the primaries.
(also you'd need to disentangle "left" and "liberal"!)
The most hilarious part about Parler is that they ban "content posted by or on behalf of terrorist organizations", which seems reasonable at face value until you realize that the admins consider "Antifa" to be a terrorist organization, and purge any content related to anti-fascism.
They also, until recently, had a zero-tolerance policy on nudity and eroticism, only compromising by forcing users who want to post NSFW content out of view entirely. This includes content related to LGBTQ+ people and sexual health.
Parler is not a "free speech" website. Parler is a safe space for right wing extremists who got tired of getting banned from traditional social media sites for posting hate, and who prefer an environment that is as hostile to minority groups as they are.
This was my question as well. It’s actually sort of funny that people complain about the “left wing media” when the BBC and others are uncritically parroting a press release from a right wing echo chamber.
So given 68 million USA twitter users, if this rate continues, it wouldn't take long to get half the USA switched over. I am assuming most of the new users are USA. I suspect a fair number will use both systems for awhile. There could also be events like say a famous person moving over or being forced to move over that could result in even higher switching rates.
That assumes people use Twitter solely for politics. It's a social media app, people are on there to look at animal videos, celebrity gossip, answer dumb polls etc.
Parler's growth is happening directly due to the impact of the election, and Twitter adding disclaimers to claims of ballot interference. It won't continue at this rate, because besides political kinship, there is nothing there for users to do. Nobody enjoys the political zones of Twitter, unless they're 'dunking' on the opposition. On Parler, there is no opposition.
I don't think it's ominous. Different platforms serve different interests and demographics - some people want the barely moderated edgelord chaos of 4chan, most people don't.
What's ominous is the growing media separation between the two political sides leading to ever-increasing difference in worldviews. How can we negotiate and compromise when viewpoints are so diametrically opposed that no middle-ground can be made?
>I don't think it's ominous. Different platforms serve different interests and demographics
Split into two separate social networks dramatically increases the echo chamber effect.
e.g. on reddit someone from /r/conservatives might still interact with /r/liberals because they both have an interest in /r/succulents
They may not be speaking about politics but they're still interacting. If you're on two different platforms even that minor overlap falls away & that allows for the two to drift further apart and harden in their views
I wouldn't worry. It's basically like a gigantic "always sunny in philadelphia" in there. People regular twitter could do without. I'm sure it would be funny to watch though.
Another tip: Twitter instantly flags your tweet for mentioning any of the words 'hammer', 'vote' and 'you' in the same sentence.
Sounds like someone needs to recalibrate their so called 'misinformation' detection systems. For the ministry of truth, they want you to believe 'their' facts. Not 'the' facts.
That isn't what the comment you are replying to said. It said that before you claim that thing X and thing Y are related, take a look at this page that goes through the claims and debunks them.
If the answers on that page are mistaken and it is relevant to a topic on HN then it seems logical (to me) that you could discuss it here (but unfounded political allegations should be off-topic in most HN chats in my opinion).
I have showdead on and I don't see any "flagged" links. Are you claiming a link you tried to shared is being silently suppressed beyond HN's normal moderation tools?
HN does not suffer fools gladly. Speaking as a fool, I find this challenging at times, but overall I think it is a distinctive feature. I'm free to go to reddit and find a sub with fellow wingnuts if I fancy something more whimsical.
Benford's law only applies to numbers drawn from a distribution with a wide spread over multiple orders of magnitude. So, financial transactions in a big company would show this. Votes in US districts, not so much.
So there, we've spoken about it.
(I think the technical term for the distribution is scale-free but I could be wrong. The law follows reasonably intuitively from thinking about the fractional part of logarithms.)
"The total numbers of votes per voting area
in the MOI’s data vary from about 10^4 to 10^6, i.e. by two orders of magnitude
(powers of 10). This suggests that Benford’s Law may
be applicable"
The issue, as I understand it, is that the US districts that the "law" is being applied to are too small, uniform, and uniformly sized, and therefore the "law" doesn't apply.
Additionally, many of the graphs being shared have obvious biases (change of scale between one candidate and the other) which suggests bad faith of those making the graphs (see the skeptics.stackexchange link a sibling shared).
> Why are you so against discussing it?
I'm not especially against discussing it. I am against presenting it as a fait accompli that the election was rigged, when thirty seconds of Googling and critical thought show it to be a red herring.
Most of the images that involve the graphs are just memeing. I have a Discord with a bunch of users and for want of a better term people are just shit posting them.
I just read about this "alternative" here, so whats the benefit of joining this instead of a mastodon instance which has probably better moderation and community support other than the cool factor ?
for cultural reasons I don't fully understand yet, mastodon instances are becoming the type of places where the word "stupid" is an ableist slur, among other examples of extremely heavy-handed moderation. at this point I don't understand who mastodon is for besides the small community vibe. this doesn't match up with the culture of pleroma instances, where anything goes. pleroma also uses activitypub and the instances do sometimes federate with mastodon but most of the mastodon instances have a very long blacklist.
I don't think that enough people are ready for the concept of federated social networking since they still tend to gravitate heavily towards centralized services like parler. they're more familiar.
For myself, I was one of those new users, but not by choice. Someone created a Parler account using my email. I guess that's one way to bump up your numbers?
They did, via Gab. It was a big deal for a while. Other instances started to defederate from them and apps blocked them. but then even Gab de-federated itself and now sits in its own echo chamber.
Just like Parler is going to.
Not stating an opinion either way to the platform or it’s constituents but naming the result of rebroadcasting a message to ones followers has no effect whatsoever on its effect.
A retweet, share, and apparently an echo are all semantically close enough to be called identical functionality, save for perhaps upstream metadata associated with the source.
eg on Facebook I don’t know if, once you share a post, the total share count is displayed on the post itself. However on Twitter this share count is shown.
They’re all the same sheep with isomorphically identical data just dressed up in different pairs of clothes.
Indeed. If he has silenced, we wouldn't be hearing about it, would we? And even "fact checked" is somewhere between Orwellian and jargon.
He is being asked to provide evidence for the truth of his claims; and other alternative evidence is being presented alongside what he claims. I would call it "reporting".
(And the claims are nuts. On the radio in the UK, one of his lawyers claimed to have 9000 affidavits from NV voters who said they had turned up to vote in person but a mail-in ballot had been done in their name. 9000! Yet not a single one has been provided to give an interview. I would be worried if 9 people had made such a statement, never mind 9000.)
Twitter is covering up many of his tweets, saying that they are debatable, you can't just scroll down his feed and see what has been said, you need to click on each one by one, click back again to see what he has said, hindering the user experience massively.
Meanwhile the flat earth society doesn't have any of it's tweets disputed.
> you can't just scroll down his feed and see what has been said, you need to click on each one by one, click back again to see what he has said, hindering the user experience massively
So silenced means "you need to click a few more times to see what he said". What if they added another click—would you call that "super silenced", or something else?
> Meanwhile the flat earth society doesn't have any of it's tweets disputed.
Well, at least you have an idea of his peer group in bullshittery.
Apart from various "trust and safety" censorship and moderation activities, what new features or updates has Twitter done in the past 3 years? I can't think of many changes they've made beyond those things, except for adverse ones (like breaking Firefox compatibility for months).
Is it a conscious choice for them to actively do nothing?
MySpace died because it didn't innovate and refused to invest in the core platform. While Facebook was spiking in popularity, MySpace was still a slow ad-plastered mess. Twitter seems to be that sleepy giant who has stopped all progress.
I've actually seen quite a few updates from twitter the last couple of years, most of them quality of life related.
Not a lot of new features (although let's not forget they increased tweet size) but personally I don't mind that. It'd be like complaining HN is not getting enough new features.
They have given the option to disable the algorithmic timeline. This has been a game changer for me. I can use twitter without fear of being exposed to unction.
Really? That was the single most annoying thing they had done. I switched to using tweetdeck just to escape that change. Is it disabled permanently when you turn it off now? The "you can turn it off but we'll automatically turn it back on" bit was mind blowingly terrible.
Yes it was awful wasn't it. It pretty much turned me off twitter altogether. These days there is an icon on the top right of the app, or web page that looks like a constellation of stars. If you click that you get the option to go back to good twitter.
The stars option will switch back automatically though after some period of time, which is why I switched to https://tweetdeck.twitter.com for my interface.
If you switch back enough times it will stop trying. Same with other things like suggested tweets in your notifications or likes from others, if you see those just click on the top right arrow on the option that says I'm not interested and after a few days it will stop showing them.
Yeah that's too much effort to turn off a feature. I spent over a year trying to keep it off. To the point I actually scheduled a recurring event in my calendar to check and turn it off.
I'll stick with tweetdeck until they support a real offswitch.
Does tweetdeck handle threads properly? I tried a few different 3p clients but found them all lacking. Just gave up then and just used the web client every now and again.
They'll either fail to make it big and remain a niche thing for those trolls who enjoy the edginess, like 4chan and its newer alternatives, or...
They'll grow big and end up having to deal with "trust and safety" issues when the majority of users on the mainstream end of the spectrum demand protection from those users who would otherwise be on 4chan/etc. This is pretty much what Twitter and Facebook are going through now, but shifted more towards the right, in the case of Parler/Gab.
We can already see hints of this in the fact that their terms of service prohibit inciting terrorism or acts of violence – issues that 4chan/etc deal with by allowing it, reducing their reach, and Twitter (attempt) to deal with by banning it, increasing their reach as they provide a "safe space".
Parler has the same issues as Twitter, it's just shifted to the right of the political spectrum. They can either deal with those issues and move closer to Twitter, or not and be irrelevant in the long term.