Comment by ilikehurdles
1 year ago
Free speech includes things that are offensive to your sensibilities. There's a lot of this unhinged stuff on X - no question - but IMO I've seen so much more good, critical discussion come out of the Elon takeover that I'm firmly in the camp that says it was a net good.
> Free speech includes things that are offensive to your sensibilities.
Obviously, and that's okay, but if you want to have a discussion platform then you need to deal with the worst of it one way or the other. Otherwise it's just going to regress to the nastiest. No normal person wants to casually engage with people like this, so when you let them free they will turn any thread into a toxic flamefest.
When push comes to shove, very few people are 100% free speech absolutions. That would include people just replying "fuck off you moron", "kill yourself n--er", "gas the Jews", etc. etc. on every post. The internet makes it very easy for slightly unhinged people to spend a lot of time posting these types of things hundreds or thousands of times per day. So stuff like "free speech includes things that are offensive to your sensibilities" is just a discussion stopper truism.
My post from a few years ago applies here: https://www.arp242.net/censorship.html
X has already mentioned what they do in this regard. Posts that are excessively vulgar/crude/etc get shadowbanned. But it's the post, not the account. So if the guy wants to run around saying dumb stuff, it'll be seen by basically nobody besides those that follow him or otherwise actively seek it out. But if he decides to start acting like a normal person again, then his posts would work similarly to anybody else's.
You curate your own feed. Mute people that you think post low quality/toxic stuff, and follow people you think post high quality stuff. It's simple.
I don't buy that this works. Platform-level feedback loops can overwhelm personal feedback loops. When the global system is overwhelmed by noise, the quality of your feed decreases. Not to mention that a lot of people don't curate their feed and they get ques on how social interaction is from horrible places on the internet. I think asking for things to sort themselves is wishful thinking.