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Comment by nickelpro | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand HN's problem with this. It's a freemarket of ideas, no one is being forced to follow Americans on Twitter or subscribe to American content producers on Youtube. What even is the alternative being proposed here? Segmenting the internet so people from different countries _can't_ interact with one another? Is that preferable?

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You sure it's a free market of ideas ? What do you make of intellectual property ? Content zoning ? Media consolidation ?

On social media : what do you make of algorithmically selected content ? Thought bubbles ?

People who engage with social media do so freely. If the content wasn't what they wanted or sought out, it wouldn't be popular and successful. Would you rather have it policed? A grand council that determines which algorithms you may enjoy and which are verboten?

> People who engage with social media do so freely. If the content wasn't what they wanted or sought out, it wouldn't be popular and successful.

My local tennis club only publishes to Twitter. They do not operate a mailing list anymore.

I want to play tennis, be notified of same day court cancellations, be notified when new classes are available to book.

I don’t want to use social media.

What do I do? Give up tennis? Move to a different district where they don’t use Twitter? Set up a gofundme to depend on strangers to stump up for private lessons? Or suck it up and be an unwilling user of social media?

So I suck it up and use Twitter.

If they only published the information via newsletter you'd need to subscribe to that. If they only advertised via newspaper spots you'd need to subscribe to the paper. These are natural social pressures that you're succumbing to and that's fine, that's how society works. None of us is an island.

In any case, you're not being forced to engage with Twitter's algorithm _beyond_ what you've bought into via your engagement with the tennis club. And the tennis club wasn't forced to engage with Twitter in the first place, they chose to.

> you're not being forced to engage with Twitter's algorithm

Maybe not forced, but strongly encouraged. On mobile, a quarter of my screen is taken up with prompts for me to join Twitter.

Before it was made illegal in the USA and the UK in the 1930s, nobody "forced" children to work, they chose to (with the alternative of starvation). Regardless of their right to choose, child labour was seen as a harmful practice and subsequently outlawed.

That being said, I'm not equating Twitter to child labour. My point is that the fact we are not "forced" to do something doesn't mean it's right, or should be allowed.

And my point is that your personal annoyance with the nature and content of information in public forums isn't a valid basis for legal censorship.

I have a couple 'twitter to rss' things saved in my recent bookmarks - anyone know if / how these work?

I've seen that fbook recently made it 'possible' to export your posts to wordpress..

We need to have data export options - and any 'public' page / group - should have export auto-enabled so that regular people can easily pull in via rss or rss-to-email - or similar type of accessibility imho.

Not sure if this sort of thing is in the 'kitchen sink against tech valley' that the house is putting together, but it should be.

>People who engage with social media do so freely. If the content wasn't what they wanted or sought out, it wouldn't be popular and successful.

That's quite an assumption, one that is frequently called into question on this very site. The very largest social media sites have growth strategies unavailable to smaller competitors - "the rich get richer". People who want to participate in any social media are forced to join the largest ones purely to follow the crowd. When I'm out and about in the real world and I see small handfuls of social media icons plastered on things, it doesn't feel like a "free marketplace of idea" - it feels like society intentionally facilitates and encourages the use of a select few services.

And yes, when they get large enough to be de-facto infrastructure - like Facebook did - absolutely there should be a council of acceptable algorithms. We can't let for-profit companies decide the terms of discourse of society at large.

How is it an assumption? Are you saying that people are using Facebook under threat of violence? Or are you saying that peer pressure wouldn't exist if it weren't for TikTok and Twitter forcing us all to become followers?

These are natural human social structures being extended by technology. Celebrities existed long before they were posting their butts on Insta. And just like you could choose to not engage with celebrity culture before the internet, you can choose to not engage now. That's the definition of free association and the free market of ideas.

> absolutely there should be a council of acceptable algorithms

Ya we're on completely different wavelengths about how governance works then. That's insanity to me. If I don't like facebooks content I just log off facebook, I wouldn't never think it appropriate to dictate in law what speech can or cannot be produced.

>Are you saying that people are using Facebook under threat of violence

Please. Nowhere in my comment did I even remotely hint at that. It's disappointing to spend time on a nuanced comment and be met with such a ridiculous strawman. People are nudged towards Facebook and other social networks in all sorts of ways, but not generally violently, no.

I could spend more time replying to the rest of your comment, but honestly I'm not inclined to after that.

> Would you rather have it policed

It is being policed? What do think algorithmic feeds are?

They're content referrers that people are free to engage or disengage with at their leisure. If you don't like Twitter's content you can go use Youtube, or TikTok, or Facebook, or HN.

What I wouldn't want is some government agency telling me I'm not allowed to use Twitter for my own good. Or that the content I enjoy on [insert social media network] must change because HN finds it objectionable.

I think what you’re saying is true - We have the choice to pick another platform. But, I fear they’ll shut it down just like they did with Parlor.

Besides the choice of what platform to choose, people’s lives destroyed by Twitter mob whether they have a Twitter account or not. This is just not right. Activism by cancelling people. If you’ve got issue with someone, go through the proper channels and not publicly. There are cases when that’s needed and that’s why we have whistleblower laws. But, destroying someone’s career because they don’t share progressive views!?

Ya man, that's social structures and public life. That's humanity. Twitter's got nothing to do with it, it's just the latest platform. Before Jack Dorsey and Twitter it was Cronkite on CBS, before Cronkite it was Pulitzer, Hearst, and their newpapers, and before them it was the Church.

At least now you've got your choice of platforms, just because some movements on some of the popular ones don't align with your personal views doesn't make the platform the problem.

I don’t know. I used to think social media has connected people but last 5 years of it - these platforms are creating a new compliance culture that deeply bothers me. I don’t even care about people wasting their time and adtech, fundamentally it’s creating divisiveness and eroding freedom of expression (of course not strictly, but implicitly the chilling effect is real).

Uhh… try speaking against progressivism as a professor. You’ll get cancelled on Twitter followed by a letter from the Dean you’re fired. This is the fear and reality of all this freedom of expression we have. All free speech unless ofcourse you disagree.

I’m only slightly exaggerating.

That's always been true? If you say something your boss hates, your boss has always been free to fire you. If you're a cashier and all the customers hate you, you're also getting fired.

I don’t think this is a matter of liking someone. Replace political views with religion and we provide protections against discrimination of someone based on their religion.

Let me spell out the problem more clearly, it’s not as simple as your boss not liking you.

1) Coworker gets to find out someone doesn’t share their political beliefs.

2) They try to get moral superiority over the person … because disagreeing with their wokeness is immoral and it’s escalated from a minor disagreement to full blown moral superiority campaign.

3) Publicly denounce them. Unleash the Twitter mob.

4) Eventually it gets to the top management chain and they’re gonna fire this person who just a few years ago would have just been involved in a minor disagreement about politics in the coffee room.

If hope you can agree this is a problem, IMO has profound implications for the society.

I don't see how what your upset about is new or connected to social networks. McCarthyism existed two decades before the first networked computers and was the exact same thing as what you're describing.

I agree, people are shitty, but trying to legally limit the speech of people you don't like is exactly opposite the values of free ideas that we usually try to support. Or at least the ones that I support.

Yeah, I agree. Let's rescind all protected classes ASAP.

Protected classes were supposed to be about things that are innate, like skin color or ancestry, not about your ideas or speech. Obviously religion is sort of borderline here.

Religion is not any more borderline than gender. Neither is strictly innate, but we're not OK with people being forced to change their gender for the sake of some abstract social equality. And gender, like religious values, is something that's deeply felt as one's personal expression. But this is also true wrt. many political stances.

The first three points seem like normal human behavior, we used to call it “the marketplace of ideas”. The problem comes in with the weak willed company management who decides to fire the person. Let’s put the blame where it belongs, here, not with the Twitter mob.

The weak willed company management is weakened because of the mob. It's a full circle. Company management would be on the chopping block of they try to disagree with the mob. It would destroy the company into absolute dust. So, they comply.

> It would destroy the company into absolute dust.

I honestly don’t think it would. The Twitter mob is a bunch of loud voices, that’s all. A bunch of people using online. I doubt they could arrange an actual effective boycott.

I believe this mostly as well - I'm sure there could be a few exceptions - but generally I don't see major impact on real world sales from twitter mobs of the week being a thing -

I do wonder if anyone has put together stats on this to show that once [any-twitter-outrage]-reaches X number of tweets/retweets - then some companies act, with y number os tweets/retweets Y number of companies react..

To discern, how many people you need to become a twitter mob for thing Z - to get a public statement/apology.. firing.. whatever cancelling.

I started to research this a bit some time ago and have not found a memorable chart or anything - surely someone has done this (?)

I've been seeing some trends of vocal minority cause change - even when majority don't even know there is a discussion of said changes - and it's often more powerful than it should be imho.

Just brainstorming here:

What if social media algorithms were biased heavily towards local content?

I don't subscribe to any channels at all on YouTube, and yet when I watch a video the sidebar recommendations are often filled with only marginally related videos on US politics and other specially American content.

On Facebook, I don't follow any American news outlets, and again, my newsfeed gets a disproportionate amount of US news stories.

Despite not actively attempting to consume Americentric content (but not actively avoiding it), it's pushed in my face.

After the US election, my newsfeed was flooded with posts about it. Meanwhile, I saw practically zero posts about the election in Myanmar and subsequent events. I haven't seen anything at all about the election in Peru.

Arguably US politics has more of an effect on me than Peruvian politics. But so much of the "news" was inane tabloid stories covering events like Rudy Giuliani's hair dye running.

> Segmenting the internet so people from different countries _can't_ interact with one another? Is that preferable?

Oh no, we enjoy interacting with each other. Just segment us off from the Americans and we'll be happy. /s

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