[HN Gopher] Birdwatch Overview
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Birdwatch Overview
Author : anigbrowl
Score : 41 points
Date : 2021-01-25 20:36 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.github.io)
| rrsmtz wrote:
| 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 =)
| HNfriend234 wrote:
| 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.
| um_ya wrote:
| 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.
| cauthon wrote:
| 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?
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| 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...
| njanirudh wrote:
| Twitter is so one sided and biased it almost makes me barf.
|
| So many conservative voices in india have been banned my them
| without reason.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| 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
| dang wrote:
| 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.
| draw_down wrote:
| No kidding!
| a_diplomat wrote:
| In other words, they want people to do fact checking for free for
| them.
| munificent wrote:
| Yes, just like HN wants you to write content in the form of
| comments for free. I get your point, but this is an overly
| simplistic economic reduction of the incentives and value
| propositions.
|
| Yes, Twitter wants you fact check for free. They also want you
| to write Tweets for free. In return, the hypothetical value
| proposition is that the tweets you and others read are more
| likely to be factual. If this is successful at scale, it means
| that the voters in the hopefully democratic place you live will
| be more informed and more likely to vote for reality based
| policies.
|
| So, sure, they don't give you a nickel when you fact check. But
| that doesn't mean it doesn't (possibly) provide sufficient
| value to you to be worth doing.
| gknoy wrote:
| This seems like it would be very vulnerable to people
| supporting a viewpoint (whether true or not) brigading the
| heck out of posts about the other viewpoint.
| agentdrtran wrote:
| I'm cautiously optimistic about this, as long as they can prevent
| brigading, which allegedly they're working on.
| bigpumpkin wrote:
| Only people in the US can become a birdwatcher, yet they can
| influence the whole of Twitter. Sounds like more recipe for
| centralization of discourse.
|
| If they open it up to foreign countries, then Congress will
| complain about foreign influence in American politics.
|
| Catch 22?
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I don't understand why that's a catch 22 as it seems to me that
| the outcomes are different depending on the choice they make.
|
| I agree that the way big American tech companies mostly care
| about the US and suffer from ethnocentrism when stepping
| outside the US is a problem but I'm not sure what a solution
| would even look like.
| jamestimmins wrote:
| It's notable that when it comes to content moderation, most
| people are positive that the execs at Twitter are morons for not
| addressing issues sufficiently, but few people can articulate a
| clear solution to the problem.
|
| I too have concerns about how this will play out, but we should
| be open minded about different solutions to an important
| challenge.
| samename wrote:
| How long until Twitter revokes their API access?
| seanyesmunt wrote:
| This is an official Twitter product.
| dang wrote:
| There's another active thread here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25906672. Not sure if we
| should merge them or what.
| lhnz wrote:
| Back in March 2020, this would have meant getting factchecked or
| shadowbanned for stating that masks should be protective against
| coronavirus.
| offby37years wrote:
| Or in January 2020 if it was contagious at all:
| https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152
| ceejayoz wrote:
| People keep mixing up "absence of evidence" and "evidence of
| absence" with this tweet.
|
| There is no reason to believe the WHO was in possession of
| secret evidence of human-to-human transmission on that date,
| and they noted that it was entirely possible said evidence
| would emerge soon. It did shortly afterwards.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Despite the common saying, absence of evidence _is_
| evidence of absence a lot of the time.
|
| To put it in boring mathematical terms. If you have a bag
| filled with a million playing cards, and you inspect 1000
| of them and they're all red, that's pretty good evidence
| that there aren't any black cards in the bag! But blind
| followers of the "absence of evidence" dogma would say "No
| it isn't! Just because you haven't found a black card yet
| doesn't say anything about whether there are any black
| cards at all." which is clearly nonsense.
|
| The differentiating factor is _have you looked?_
|
| I think it's reasonable for people to assume the WHO had
| actually investigated how people contracted covid
| (otherwise why bother tweeting?), in which case them saying
| "[we looked but] we couldn't find any evidence of human to
| human transmission" is clearly misleading.
| paganel wrote:
| As late as early February 2020 being concerned about the
| coronavirus meant you risked being labeled as a right-wing,
| Trump-lover, conspiracy theorist.
|
| One of the first Twitter accounts that was getting the
| straight facts out of Wuhan starting with late January was
| this lady [1], and because she had written for Epoch Times
| (among other things) of course meant that everything she was
| saying was potentially a big, fat lie meant to denigrate the
| Chinese. I was told as such by at least one user on this very
| website back then.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/jenniferatntd
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| Don't worry, every time consensus changes it will be revealed
| that we were always at war with Eastasia to begin with, I'm
| sure.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > we were always at war with Eastasia to begin with
|
| I mean, you clearly meant to write Eurasia, but that's a
| really unfortunate typo.
| hirundo wrote:
| While they're not using this data to moderate by consensus at
| this point that's clearly the direction they're heading.
| Consensus certainly has its place, particularly in democratic
| institutions. But IMHO it's an anti-feature for a forum. It's
| exactly the counter-consensus opinions that I find most valuable.
| To the extent that they are suppressed the forum simply loses my
| interest. Yes, it's useful to see where the consensus is heading.
| But mostly it's a snooze, and the compelling content is the stuff
| that challenges it.
|
| A better use of this data would be to highlight the counter-
| consensus speakers so that I can have a listen.
| runarberg wrote:
| Correct me if I'm wrong but hasn't Stack Overflow used
| consensus to moderate with great success? What is the reason
| that consensus driven moderation works well on Stack Overflow
| but not other forums like Twitter?
| GrumpyNl wrote:
| I have to disagree, there are to many down votes on legit
| questions but they did not rephrase it properly or didn't
| show the proper code. It should be more help full, specially
| when you down vote, give a reason and solution or advice.
| tylersmith wrote:
| It's been a very long time since I've seen anyone use SO as
| an example of good community moderation. Everyone I know and
| the general sentiment I get online agree that their
| moderation is far too heavy handed and leads to an unpleasant
| experience for most participants.
| shijie wrote:
| I would say that with SO, amortized consensus is fine due to
| there being a "right" answer to a technical problem or
| question (more or less). Twitter deals mainly in the market
| of human opinion, which is necessarily far more nuanced with
| n sides to a story. This makes Twitter the arbiter of truth
| for their platform. Perfectly legal, as it's their platform,
| but I wouldn't expect a free exchange of ideas on such a
| platform.
| [deleted]
| CDSlice wrote:
| On StackOverflow there is a simple, objective measure for
| judging answers and posts by. Namely "Does this answer
| actually solve my specific problem?" If there are syntax
| errors or if the answer plain just doesn't solve the problem
| it won't get upvoted or selected as the correct answer.
|
| On Twitter what objective measure are you going to use to
| evaluate "The election was stolen by widespread voter fraud"?
| The news? Half of the country believes that "liberal" news is
| full of lies and the other half thinks the same of
| "conservative" news.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Don't they suggest that they don't want to simply take the
| majority vote? I'm not really sure whether by consensus you
| mean the majority opinion or a smaller more shared opinion so
| maybe I'm misunderstanding.
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(page generated 2021-01-25 23:00 UTC)