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Comment by yabatopia | Hacker News Reader

So the solution for Twitter's problem is to find an idiot willing to pay $12 billion for a medium that many people consider the digital equivalent of an open sewer? An idiot who's willing to spend another few billion dollars to turn that sewer in a hallowed spring for journalism? And Larry Page is supposed to be that idiot? Good luck with that.

Twitter hasn't an old media problem, Twitter's problem is that it has a goal, but no vision. That goal right now is profitability, no matter what. Twitter started out as a micro-blogging platform, but the company seems to be at a loss what it wants to be now or in the future. They have something, but they they don't know what to do with it, causing them to keep treading on the spot. And treading water, especially sewage water, is not a healthy long-term strategy.

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"Open sewer"... pretty much. Then again, at some point most people are going to figure out that it's true of most big social media platforms. Anything which connects to you to the teeming mass of humanity is thrilling, then tiresome, then downright corrosive; there are just too many trolls, nuts, and dim bulbs to be borne.

that's just not true. slashdot taught us you can intake data, have humans tag it with metadata, and then let the viewer sort the data based on their own preferences and parameters. and that it works really really well. reddit/hackernews are a simplification of that idea brewed down to just upvote/downvote/flag.

twitter is unnavigatable by itself in any sort of abstract high level way. that doesnt mean you cant use software to parse, sort, and display the content in a more organized manner. the first step is to get people to tag and describe the data that exists.

> reddit/hackernews are a simplification of that idea brewed down to just upvote/downvote/flag.

HN has the unique advantage that it's a niche board. This means that the userbase is small, which makes moderation infinitely easier, because the pool of potential trolls just is extremely small.

Reddit has solved this problem by shifting the moderation load to volunteers for each subreddit. Of course, that can go south too (as witnessed with /r/fatpeoplehate, /r/thefappening, ...) but most of the time Reddit seems to be OK.

4chan just lets everything stay except childporn, because it doesn't have to take care of a public image (everyone knows 4chan is the vilest place on the net, except for the CP sites in the .onion tor net).

Twitter has probably more users than HN, Reddit and 4chan combined and has to rely mostly on automation for anti-spam (which rarely works, because there's a LOT of legit bots) and user reports, which, like FB, don't work at all or lead to brigading, mass-reports etc.

reddit and hackernews both use human moderation, as did slashdot, as and I mentioned it in my comment. Human metadata generation (this comment is good, funny, wrong, sad, incomplete etc) is a great first step in turning a sewer into a watertower.

I'm pretty sure reddit is operating at a loss, as is hackernews. You need better examples :)

so what? sometimes public services cost money. the comment i was replying to mentioned connecting humanity without creating a sewer, not profit.

These aren't public services, they're private endeavors.

arent sewers usually municipal? if twitter is a virtual telephony infrastructure, maybe we should treat its successor more like a municipal telecom. that said, it would also be federated systems compared to monolithic, so the analogy doesnt hold perfectly.

You may or may not be right, but certainly at this point they are not public services. The tragedy is that people treat them like they are, hence cries of "censorship".

the other tragedy being them run by shareholders that dont care about the platform health over short term profit

That's bad news for sure, but then, it's a self-correcting issue; the platform fails, another takes it place and tries again. It's not as though Twitter does something that anyone else couldn't do just as well, or better.

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