[picks_at_nits]

What you describe in the first paragraph is not censorship.

There's a whole thing around censorship not applying to private platforms, but even if you argue that the word "censorship" applies to a private entity moderating the content it publishes with its own money (like Hacker News: It definitely moderates content), the thing you describe is still not that kind of "censorship."

Showing or not showing your tweets based on Twitter optimizing for engagement and advertising is not like a government deciding that nobody is allowed to criticize the Dear Leader.

It's actually like a grocery store that promises to stock your product for free, but you aren't Coca-Cola, so you get shitty shelf space and positioning, until you either pay up for shelf space, or build enough demand for your product that the store decides it can make more money giving you better positioning.

Twitter also moderates content in a way that has nothing to do with engagement and making them money. But if you give someone free content, you have to accept them deciding how they feel like monetizing that content.

If you don't like it, write a blog.

[Nextgrid]

Censorship is maybe the wrong word, but we all understood what he meant and agree that this behavior wrong.

Twitter misleads you into believing following someone will deliver you 100% of their content (and similarly, that someone who follows you will see 100% of your content) while that's not actually the case.

It might not be censorship, but it's still a terrible move, and frankly a sign of a defective product. The whole point of Twitter is to "follow" accounts you're interested in - if the tool can't do this with 100% reliability it should be considered as broken.

[picks_at_nits]

We don't get to declare what Twitter is or isn't. It has evolved over time from a kind of microblogging platform into an algorithmic-timeline social network.

As a user, I don't care for it much, but in no way is it "defective." It does what it does, and if we don't like it, it's our obligation to make sure the door doesn't hit us in the ass on our way out.

The thing we have to understand is that we who want a microblogging platform aren't their market. They're not interested in people with 500-5,000 followers using Twitter to publish things that every one of their followers will see.

Likewise, they're not interested in people who want to just follow certain people and see 100% of their tweets. That's not their business model. Do I like that? No. But I'm not their customer, I'm the product they sell to their customers.

———

One thing I find very interesting about discussions like this is how closely they resemble discussions from the 1970s and 1980s about what computers were for. It seems quaint now, but people once said computers were for business, not games.

Then a younger generation came along and when all the old fogies died off or retired, gaming became a gajillion-dollar industry.

Now we get pronouncements like "That's not what Twitter's for." Obviously it is what Twitter's for, because millions of people are using it that way and are "Happy as Larry," oblivious to the fact that it used to be a microblogging platform, and if we ask 100 randomly chosen Twitter employees, exactly zero of them will say Twitter is defective and they're working hard to restore its value as a way to subscribe to everything people tweet.

I kind of feel like those of us who miss its microblogging origin are metaphorically members of an older generation than those who are happily Tweeting, TikToking, SnapChatting, &c.

[Nextgrid]

The concept of following still (at least to me) implies seeing all the content said person is posting. Twitter liberally uses the word "follow" but then doesn't deliver.

They are not being transparent about your experience being manipulated for the purposes of generating engagement either. Most non-technical people don't immediately associate "contains ads" with "will use all kinds of nasty tricks to make you spend more time looking at said ads".

---

> are "Happy as Larry,"

Are they? The amounts of arguments and toxicity on that despicable website (enough to prompt highly-upvoted posts about quitting the website every so often) suggests they aren't?

> exactly zero of them will say Twitter is defective

They profit from the fact that it's defective, so of course to them it is not a defect, just like a printer manufacturer will tell you that ink cartridge DRM is not a defect, or some smart juice press manufacturer will tell you that its online-only requirement and juice pack DRM is also not a defect.

[picks_at_nits]

They are not being transparent about your experience being manipulated for the purposes of generating engagement either. Most non-technical people don't immediately associate "contains ads" with "will use all kinds of nasty tricks to make you spend more time looking at said ads".

You have something there that applies to all of social media (and just because others do it doesn't make it ok). Algorithms are black boxes. Even if you make 100% sure I read a disclaimer explaining that the timeline is curated and algorithmic, I still will never know what I'm getting and what I'm missing.

The lack of control and transparency is abhorrent to a certain type of person, and you and I are probably those kind of people. But there's a vast world out there that simply. doesn't. care. Even after we explain why they ought to care.

Compare and contrast to walled gardens like iOS. There's a certain type of HNer who talks about iOS the way we're talking about Twitter. And yet... Many, many people are happy with an opaque system deciding which apps they can install, which apps appear on the front page of the app store, &c.

It can be very frustrating, but there it is. People like Twitter, and no amount of explaining why they shouldn't like it will change their minds.

[Nextgrid]

The fact that some people are blind to these issues doesn't mean we shouldn't be calling out unethical, malicious, misleading or defective behavior and/or software.

[picks_at_nits]

100% agree. It may be futile with the vast majority of their users, but every person who actually cares about it and becomes more informed though advocacy is a modest win of some kind.

[picks_at_nits]

a printer manufacturer will tell you that ink cartridge DRM is not a defect, or some smart juice press manufacturer will tell you that its online-only requirement and juice pack DRM is also not a defect.

There's a phrase for this: "Defective by design." Meaning, what we the observer consider to be a harmful quality of the product is not an accident or oversight, but a deliberate choice.

I say similar things about Slack's iPad client. It's defective by design.

Likewise, web sites that choose not to be accessible are defective-by-design. If you ask their product manager, the response will be, "Accessibility is not a priority, and we can live with people who need accessible web sites doing business with someone else."

Of course, it's implicit in the phrase "defective by design" that this kind of defective is not exactly the same kind of "defective" as the product not doing the thing its creators designed it to do, or not doing the thing that their target market expect it to do.

[picks_at_nits]

Are they? The amounts of arguments and toxicity on that despicable website (enough to prompt highly-upvoted posts about quitting the website every so often) suggests they aren't?

This is a very interesting point, to which I will say that people who complain or praise any product are always the vocal minority.

As I alluded to in another reply, we regularly get impassioned posts and comments about what's wrong with iOS on HN, and yet we know for a fact that many, many, MANY people are happy with their iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches.

[sneak]

Most people are happy with censorship and a lack of freedom of speech, because most people have nothing to say, and a lack of such never affects them.

Most people are fine not having any privacy, because they believe that they have nothing to hide.

The danger comes from making it impossible to publish unpopular things or publish anonymously, or making privacy impossible. There is a percentage of people for whom these things are not only important but essential, and when we close off those options then we lose the important aspects of society facilitated by those people. Those aspects benefit everyone.

We should pay very close attention to the complaints of those people, even if (or perhaps especially because) they are a minority of users.

[sneak]

> If you don't like it, write a blog.

And when my blog host starts hiding my posts? What then? Will you tell me the same thing?

I did write a blog. On Twitter.

[sneak]

You can't promote some things to the top without simultaneously demoting other things down the page. Such is the tyranny of spacetime.