Jack: Our communication around our actions on the @nypost article was not great
twitter.com
twitter.com
“Our communication around our actions on the @nypost article was not great. And blocking URL sharing via tweet or DM with zero context as to why we’re blocking: unacceptable.”
Will the current knee-jerk reactions by the platforms work out well? I strongly doubt it. Yet all the the free-for-all, hands-completely-off approach has achieved is to hand vastly outsize influence to those who game it best, often without any transparency at all as to who they even are, and quiet assistance by the platforms themselves in some cases. The last bunch of elections in western societies have illustrated quite well that that's quite certainly not how we should want our democracies to work. So that's not the way to go, either. No idea what we'll end up with when the dust settles, but I expect it will have ended up being a lot harder and a lot more complex to get right than we currently expect it to be.
At any rate, the old internet some of us grew up in is no more, it's dead and gone, and it cannot be brought back, in the same way that the neighborhood I grew up in and that has been massively gentrified, modernized and rebuilt, the former neighbors all driven out, cannot be brought back to what it was. The early internet was a unique experiment that may not see its equal for a long time, and it was great to be a part of it, history being made by nerdy people in front of big CRTs and all, and it turned out pretty well, actually – for all the issues the current internet raises, it is doing enormously, mind-boggingly huge amounts of good. But it's now a whole other experiment, and I feel like it's time to move on.
There is no evidence that the stuff in question was "hacked," and Twitter itself is becoming a disseminator of disinformation by stating so. But even if it were - they gave no such affordance to, for example, Trump's tax returns, which could have only been hacked/leaked/stolen to be released. That's a straight-up double standard.
I think they're all shady. Why was there a media blackout on Andrew Yang again? https://vocal.media/theSwamp/a-visual-history-of-the-yang-me...
Andrew Yang on Eric Weinstein's podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sa2f0r9W2Mg
There isn’t anything objective about their moderation - they just want to help Biden win.
I’m not sure what it means. It seems like perspectives can be correlated with account longevity, but I have no data on this. Perhaps newer accounts are more likely to comment on politics-related articles?
Has this been studied in general or on HN specifically?
And it's an opportunity to say what I really think, without being judged by HN's faux-politeness criteria.
There's such a large intersection between tech and politics these days, in terms of their effects on each other, that the HN aversion to discussing politics just seems anachronistic and ill-judged.
However it doesn’t seem that humans have figured out how to effectively navigate our differences in the more ideological aspects of governance on a forum like this. Just think of how many times in a personal conversation you are happy to respond with nothing more than a ‘yes, but why?’ vs the same topic being discussed on HN or reddit? Or how much more information is exchanged in the ambience of that moment vs words on a page (and it’s still difficult). Online it’s nearly impossible and what you’re left with are echo chambers and vollies of insults.
For my part I appreciate the wet blanket thrown on those types of conversations on HN. I just haven’t seen them yield fruit elsewhere and i appreciate the harbor.
(1) there’s more new accounts than old, typically
(2) the lifespan of an account arguing politics on the internet is short - it’s too futile and frustrating
(3) good-faith sock puppet accounts (don’t want a non-anonymous record of political beliefs)
(4) bad faith sock puppet accounts (trolls, meanie-heads)
(5) confirmation bias - once you see it, you notice all the new accounts, even if the effect is smaller than you perceive
(6) new accounts are likely to be less HN-technical folks, as the site grows past its original audience, and they’re more likely to comment on non-tech posts in general
(7) the Russians?
There's something so sad about all of this to me. I "grew up" on the internet where most of my peers would have been furious at twitter for this, and yet here, now, it seems like the pro-fee-speech perspective is the one that is going to get me in trouble for having.
The culture has really shifted drastically in the last 10-15 years.
Twitter could have been this incredible place where you had democratization of information. Tons of politicians and important public figures are there, and you, a normal person, can interact with them. I have my gripes with twitter, I hate the way they "tweak" the feed to optimize for rage and hatred (but I think as long as you know its there, you can ignore it), but the core idea is so cool. Unfortunately I think we're way past dead now.
The world is a worse place because of twitter. There is more hatred, more confusion, more disinformation, and more normalization of the suppression of "wrong" ideas. This is not the world that we all though we were making.
I mean that there was a time when you might dream about a place on the internet where the communication mode I'm describing here (aside from the rage-creating "tweaks" like enforced shortness), where people were freely capable of communicating and interacting with people well outside of their social strata would be normal.
Twitter, with it's flaws, is that place. I routinely interact with politicians in my state on twitter. I have no idea where to do that outside of that space.
But the problem is that they're going to destroy it because of this stupid, short-sighted idea that they should be in control of what people on the platform are saying.
If they have proof, why haven't they provided it?
The majority of sources for the Washington Post and New York Times are leaking classified or privileged information without authorization, most of the time illegally. If they were caught, they'd be in jail.
How is this different?
The number of people who have completely bought the right-wing talking points around this story hook, line, and sinker - without bothering to exercise an ounce of critical thought or independently seek out any of the facts - is absolutely astonishing.
I didn't notice any SSNs in the article, is there a different article or am I just oblivious? Not redacting the email addresses is rude, but FWIW some of them appear to be defunct now. I only noticed one phone number, and it's not unlisted so its owner was public knowledge before it was published
[1]: https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden...
>In 1976, Rupert Murdoch bought the Post for US$30.5 million. [...] The Post has been criticized since the beginning of Murdoch's ownership for sensationalism, blatant advocacy, and conservative bias.
I think you will find that there are many of us that are quite dismayed at the state of things here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower%27s_farewell_addres...
because in the case of the new york post, the only thing that remained after 230 years is the branding. The writers, editors, and general "culture" at the newspaper has completely changed. On the other hand, the constitution has remained static. Nothing has changed. We can argue whether this is a bad thing or a good thing, but it's fundamentally incomparable to what happened to the new york post.
The citizens and institutions and general "culture" of the United States of America has also completely changed since 1789.
Also no New Yorker thinks the Post is a serious newspaper. Its most well known features are bad and tasteless puns cover headlines and a gossip page called "Page Six" which itself is not even on the 6th page of the paper.
I believe the Bill of Rights and the rest of the amendments would disagree with you. That's supposed to be the beauty of the US Constitution is that it was designed to be able to be updated.