Twitter and Facebook and Google and others share one common concern that, if addressed, would see their staffing budgets massively reduced (and thus profits increased):
Human moderators.
Each grudgingly uses human moderators to squash the worst of the problems on their platform, and does a terrible job of it. Each underspends on human beings, using contractors without sufficient mental health care to ensure their well-being as they sift through our online sewer pipes.
Google outsources YouTube moderation to third-parties: the Content ID system is a labor shifting device designed to force the labor cost of enforcement outside of Google’s responsibility.
Twitter ended political advertisements rather than spend the human cost required to moderate them, and is now proposing a decentralized platform where Twitter is no longer responsible for content moderation for other platforms.
By doing so, they can continue to act as your “aggregator” of individual (RSS-like) Twitter accounts, so that they can continue showing you ads based on the data they harvest from you and your feeds — while outsourcing responsibility for moderation to others.
This is an effective strategy for increasing profits and if implemented correctly will permit mass layoffs of most of their content moderation workforce. This will also vastly increase the prevalence of abuse, racism, and other societal ills that infect Twitter with its underpowered moderation today.
Props to Twitter for identifying a way to externalize the cost of civility while continuing to profit from the resulting cesspool that will ensue.
The problem is online social networks. There is no fix.
Any medium supported by ads is toxic. This predates online social networks.
Any news feed (recommenders) is intrinsically toxic. Such feedback loops are just outrage machines.
It's highly doubtful that likes and ratings can be redeemed either. I'm fresh out of goodwill, so I don't care to try.
So what's left? The graph. Maybe that could be useful.
Meanwhile, it's hysterical that anyone tainted by Twitter imagines they have anything constructive to contribute. Now were he to completely renounce the whole effort, acknowledges it's deleterious impact on democracy and society, turn it off, and beg for our forgiveness. Well. That'd be a good start.
Google decided scale was more important than civility when they positioned text search - Pagerank - as a competitor to curation, rather than as a beneficiary of curation.
We used to have curated content indexes with human moderators guiding them - in print, Yahoo/DMOZ, AOL keywords, web rings, LiveJournal. Those required significant human labor compared to algorithmic text searching, and were not able to scale as rapidly as content creation tools did.
Was that lack of scaling a problem? No, not necessarily. Some percentage of people enjoy curation (thus Pinterest) and we could have celebrated their efforts and given them top billing in search.
Instead, we “democratized” search by harvesting all of those human rankings and feeding them into a machine algorithm that produces seemingly better-than-human results. Unfortunately, in doing so they did not highlight whose curation led to content being shown, and so curation became less popular over time.
Unfortunately, that curation is what led to Pagerank being so valuable. Without it, spam and liars and malicious activities have infected all “search” and “ranking” systems. Without human curation distinguishing “valuable” from “unevaluated”, search does not scale either.
We did society great harm when we sidelined curation, and no amount of machine-learning algorithms will heal that wound.
Recommenders, like bureaucracies, are misanthropic (anti-human).
The rules are meant to remove human judgement. While denying the baked in bias and dysfunction of the imposed ruleset.
Per Goodhart's Law, they arbitrarily state some things are worthwhile & meaningful, and everything else are not.
Black boxes which thwart inspection, transparency, accountability, explanation.
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Forgive me for flogging this horse; I do have a point.
Also missing from online social networks are the concepts of fair and impartial adjudication.
Curation, adjudication, transparency, accountability... I'm sure we're omitting many other missing features. Because we're too close to the problem.
Going meta meta here: the common trait of all these "regulation arbitrage" unicorns is they profit by the destruction of our society's laws, checks & balances, social norms, and so forth.
I mean impartial in the sense that the adjudicators (judge, jury, arbiters, moderators, whomever) are not beholden to the publisher. So a third party. Like our court system is supposed to be.
IMHO, there's not enough daylight between ombudspersons and their paymasters.
I have no fixed opinion for standards of civility. I'm just trying to capture the notion that some dialog, rhetoric is out of bounds, as determined by the intended audience (context).
Nope, I've been scratching my head about those for a long time now, but haven't found anything better than adding a note wherever there might be a confusion... :/
Oh, I didn't think you were serious about that - this is probably not feasible because it would be insanely "expensive" ?
(I mean, Slashdot seems to have found the best middle ground here, haven't they ?)
I wouldn’t know, that question is apples and oranges different.
Twitter is creating a syndicated public one-to-all feed system; Email is a syndicated private one-to-many feed system. The public/private difference cannot be discarded and makes your question unrelated to my statement.
I encourage you to pursue a top-level thread about your concern instead, so that it’s not disregarded as a reply to mine.
Email lists are not private if you choose to sign up for one and post to it, the same way Twitter is not private if you choose to sign up and post to it. Email lists are very similar to Usenet which was the precursor to all these social media sites.
Apples can be orange in certain breeds or lighting conditions, but that doesn’t make them oranges.
Twitter is not equal to an email list. They share certain aspects but they are significantly dissimilar in UI, approach, social perception (by participants and by others), and publication.
M Twitter has not replaced mailing lists, and mailing lists continue to operate effectively.
Twitter is an electronic billboard that anyone with an app can post content to, and everyone can easily see it and do the same. Mailing lists are a town hall meeting inside a building: you can see them if you like, but participation from bystanders is quite rare and is often frowned upon or openly prohibited by the meeting’s coordinators.
You’re acting like there’s some extremely clear difference, but there isn’t. The only real difference is that email has kind of a bad UX. The comparison is not apples and oranges, it is grapefruit and oranges.
Human moderators.
Each grudgingly uses human moderators to squash the worst of the problems on their platform, and does a terrible job of it. Each underspends on human beings, using contractors without sufficient mental health care to ensure their well-being as they sift through our online sewer pipes.
Google outsources YouTube moderation to third-parties: the Content ID system is a labor shifting device designed to force the labor cost of enforcement outside of Google’s responsibility.
Twitter ended political advertisements rather than spend the human cost required to moderate them, and is now proposing a decentralized platform where Twitter is no longer responsible for content moderation for other platforms.
By doing so, they can continue to act as your “aggregator” of individual (RSS-like) Twitter accounts, so that they can continue showing you ads based on the data they harvest from you and your feeds — while outsourcing responsibility for moderation to others.
This is an effective strategy for increasing profits and if implemented correctly will permit mass layoffs of most of their content moderation workforce. This will also vastly increase the prevalence of abuse, racism, and other societal ills that infect Twitter with its underpowered moderation today.
Props to Twitter for identifying a way to externalize the cost of civility while continuing to profit from the resulting cesspool that will ensue.