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Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

The telephone analogy is terrible. Phone calls are usually between two people, or a small number of people. At the very least, they're bounded to some relatively small number.

When you post something on Twitter, unless your account is private, you've broadcasted your speech to anyone in the world who cares to see it.

Not moderating any speech at all is a quick way to allow a community to turn into a cesspit of spam and trolling. Look at any web board or forum over the past several decades for inspiration. They either have moderation, or they get overrun.

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Twitter isn’t a phone call, but it also isn’t a message board. You only see the tweets of the people you personally choose to follow; it doesn’t matter if there are 100 billion spam accounts posting ads to nobody.

There are millions of Twitter accounts in Japanese, but if you don’t follow any of them, and nobody you follow retweets them, you’d never know they exist. You can also block or mute specific accounts, mute keywords, etc for even finer control.

> You only see the tweets of the people you personally choose to follow

That's not at all true by default; you also see tweets from people that have paid for involuntary reach for the tweet (promoted tweets), tweets that people you follow have interacted with, tweets that respond to or mention people you follow, and probably others that I'm forgetting.

So Twitter broke their platform, and they show ads. This is vastly different from a message board that shows all messages to all users.

> You only see the tweets of the people you personally choose to follow

If that was true, that would help a lot.

That is a vast oversimplification of how Twitter works. People absolutely see tweets from people they don't follow, all the time. Sometimes it's a promoted tweet, sometimes a retweet, sometimes just by browsing through trending topics. It's pretty much impossible to use the platform in such a way that you'll only see tweets from people you follow, and nothing else.

Agreed that Twitter isn't a message board, but that's a much closer analogy than calling it a phone call.

Imagine if those promoted tweets were delivered to you as automated phone calls from spoofed numbers.

>Twitter isn’t a phone call, but it also isn’t a message board.

Well, Twitter is Twitter. But Twitter is probably closer to a message board than it is to a phone call.

> They either have moderation, or they get overrun.

But those boards are moderated by people who are part of the community. Not by the software nor the software host.

Twitter, FB, Google are not part of those communities. If they want to be cesspit of spam and trolling they should be free to do so.

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