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Comment by rrsmtz | Hacker News Reader

Twitter's owners seem to believe that their platform is an oligarchy of opinion leaders (celebrities, etc.), who influence the malleable minds of their aptly-named followers. And they're probably right that this is the overwhelming use case!

I spend a few months in a corner of Twitter with lots of open-minded and free discussion of politics between non-celebrity nobodies. Many accounts in said corner were brigaded, and then shadowbanned or banned outright, etc.

I'm still sore about the platform's intolerance, but it was a powerful lesson about the intolerance in modern society. Birdwatch seems to be yet another mechanism which enables and furthers the shutdown of free expression.

I'm very happy that HN is still capable of having thoughts that stray outside the Overton window, and that zealots are usually ignored =)

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yup, I have had the same experience, so much so that I stopped commenting and posting entirely. Waste of time. There are so many people on there that just seem to be outright trolling, posting outright non-sense, and doing other stuff that is just an outright nuisance. It significantly reduces the user experience.

Since HN mainly has startup-minded people on here, I think this actually opens up opportunities for new startups to enter the social media space. There is definitely a large audience who is looking for a more "professional" version of twitter so to speak. Start by blocking anonymous accounts/aliases since this is what every troll hides behind.

I think it comes down to group size and subject matter which drives meaningful debate.

When group size is large, conversation is shallow.

HN is a relatively small group with a relatively confined subject matter.

Same concept applies on reddit, with small niche subreddits.

There's more conversation depth with smaller groups of people.

I mostly agree with you, but I think HN is definitely a special case. It's not huge, sure, but it's certainly not small - I think there's a very active moderation effort and community spirit that keeps discussion much more productive than your average internet forum.

A more professional version of twitter is linkedin. I'm not being sarcastic. I'm entirely serious.

LinkedIn is slowly being destroyed by "personal branding consultants" who train people to be "person branding consultants". Once you get a couple of those in your connections the platform becomes unusable.

Good place to post the "Build a real-time Twitter clone in 15 minutes with LiveView and Phoenix 1.5" ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZvmYaFkNJI

Wow. I was under the impression that Twitter had a fairly high bar for banning accounts. Do you have any examples of the tweets that got members of your community banned?

The Unity 2020 group was basically an idea to put a center-left and center-right person on the ticket for POTUS and they had some stuff like they'd split areas of concern and trade Pres & Vice pres for their 2nd term. Super basic, non-threatening stuff. Nuked from orbit as soon as they got any traction.

https://articlesofunity.org/2020/09/press-release-for-our-tw...

If @articlesofunity was banned based on its content (to suppress a point of view), why hasn’t Weinstein, who talks about the same stuff, not been banned? Why is @aounityhistory still up?

Are we supposed to believe that Twitter hates bipartisanship or unity or something? It doesn’t pass the laugh test. Biden’s entire inauguration content package leaned into those themes and we can all note that their accounts are still online.

All the signs point to @articlesofunity account being banned for technical violations of Twitter’s terms of service, specifically the use of automation to falsely pump up its follower count. Thats why the banned account had 25.5k followers but the history account, which purports to carry its flame, has about 100 followers.

That doesn’t pass the sniff test either. Articles of Unity was silenced during the entire period where it had any relevance and momentum. That the election has come and gone, and Weinstein has long stopped pumping it, explains 100 followers of a downstream account that I haven’t even heard of by the way as an avid Weinstein listener (both of them).

Weinstein says that Twitter never gave them a reason for the ban, and even after getting a line to Dorsey, the most Twitter would do is allow people to link to Articles of Unity on the app. It’s still banned. And when you link it PM, it still gives you a “suspicious content” warning[1]. That doesn’t just seem like a follower inflation punishment to me. It’s also not the precedent.

That defeats your theory on my eyes. As for a reasonable reason that AoU was banned, the most likely one to me is that someone at Twitter didn’t like that AoU was getting hashtags to trend that put people against both Trump and Biden during a critical moment in the race. Their movement would likely hurt Biden the most as it would splinter the “anyone but Trump” voter. Btw asking if Twitter banned AoU because Twitter hates unity is a very weak attempt at brainstorming the truth, is that really where your analysis ended?

Twitter has super selective inexplicable inconsistent bans all the time. Like “men aren’t women” getting you suspended while “kill all men” does not. Twitter has obvious heavy handed biases, so don’t overthink it.

[1] https://twitter.com/bootylactin/status/1351278941751926788

Twitter recently clamped down on Qanon accounts, suspending some 70K accounts. Conversely, they also suspended several accounts that supported Antifa which had thousands of followers. I'm not sure the better approach. Suspending the user or an account that has thousands of users attached to it.

I honestly couldn't tell you what got them banned; but I'm sure having politically charged tweets probably didn't help either group. It would seem anything political right now is on the radar of Twitter. Aside from that subject matter, I'm not sure what warrants a suspension these days.

I was suspended for 7 days for saying a comedian was "retarded".

Then over a year later I was permanently suspended for saying that a bunch of rich scientists that someone was talking about were "a bunch of insufferable cunts".

If only I'd said those things about Trump, I'd still be on there....

HN works pretty well for the types of discussion it hosts but I'm not sure if it would be as good if it were a general-purpose politics forum. I suspect techno-politics tend to be less emotional compared to other areas of politics.

Although many people in HN have gripes over political discussion in here, I still think this place is (relatively) the best forum to talk about politics. Subreddits are usually in their own bubbles (which has its benefits, but may be boring in the long run), and Twitter doesn’t allow for any long-form discussion. HN is for the most part centrist, but the standard deviation is big enough that everyone would have some people to agree and some people to argue with.

Hn is a pretty poor place for unusual opinions, with downvoting comments actually making them physically harder to read and all. It's pretty obnoxious when you have to start manually highlighting text to follow a discussion

You can click on the timestamp to go to the comment's page, where the text will be readable. It's an annoying extra step, but not as annoying as downgrading the immune system would be, assuming you find fatal illness annoying. Most (<-- notice I said "most") downvoted comments have been downvoted for good reason. Letting the median downvoted comment have the run of this place would kill it.

I don't disagree, and I'm here because I enjoy the culture and comments. But if you are specifically looking for unusual opinions I don't think this is the place with that system in place.

"Unusual opinions" can mean a lot of things. It's not hard to express unusual opinions without breaking the site guidelines, but often people can't resist ranting, lashing out at the mainstream and so on, at the same time. That approach is guaranteed to get downvoted, and typically the commenter does not think "perhaps I could have expressed myself more thoughtfully". Instead they think, "I am being downvoted for my unpopular opinions". It always feels like the fault lies with others. (Edit: of course that applies to what I'm saying here, too...fair's fair.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> I spend a few months in a corner of Twitter with lots of open-minded and free discussion of politics between non-celebrity nobodies. Many accounts in said corner were brigaded, and then shadowbanned or banned outright, etc.

> I'm still sore about the platform's intolerance, but it was a powerful lesson about the intolerance in modern society. Birdwatch seems to be yet another mechanism which enables and furthers the shutdown of free expression.

I posted a proposal (basically, government mandated, non-partisan, constant auditing of software and processes of all major public communication platforms) in another thread on this story - do you think this might be a plausible approach to addressing this censorship issue, at least in part?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25908432

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