Comment by jandrese
5 days ago
> From the article: "Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness, was bought by Elon Musk in order to neutralize it, and he seems to have succeeded — and not, incidentally, by censoring left-wing users the way Twitter used to censor right-wing ones, but without censoring either. [14]"
As has been demonstrated time and time again, especially on the Internet, unmoderated discussion boards do not scale. Trolls can naturally push out the reasonable people by increasing the noise level. Once the number of users exceeds some small threshold it is basically a guarantee that trolls will move in. Shitposting is cheap, easy, and the people who do it have all the time in the world. If you don't moderate the board will become useless for substantive discussion.
I mean this was amply demonstrated back in the Usenet era. Nothing has fundamentally change with human psyche since then, so the rule still holds true. Twitter/X is just the lastest example.
You've hit the nail on the head here. If you let the trolls in they will suck all of the air out of the room.
Twitter is not unmoderated.
I don't know how many people I muted, banned, or how many times I clicked that I don't want to see something. Over time, Twitter gets better.
This being said, I prefer doing my moderation myself instead of having somebody I extremely disagree with (former Twitter employees) to do this for me.
But you have to mute each account when trolls probably create new accounts daily just to troll people and make fake engagement between their accounts to get boosted by the algorithms.
And really bad actors are taking advantage of the removal of the block feature, which was useful to block people from easily seeing your tweets, so that it leaves one open to nonstop harassment. Or in the case of Elon, forcing people to still get surfaced his tweets even if they blocked Elon on the platform.