[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".

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> 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.