Slashdot Mirror
Twitter CEO: "We Suck" At Dealing With Trolls, Vows To Kick Them Out
AmiMoJo writes "We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform, and we've sucked at it for years," wrote Twitter CEO Dick Costolo in a leaked internal post. "We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day." Gamergate is only the latest and loudest example of harassment. Robin Williams' daughter, Zelda Williams, left the service last August because of the disturbing images and attacks she received after her father's suicide. Advocates have offered numerous suggestions for fixing the problem, including improving responsiveness to reports and better blocking tools.
After they get rid of all those Christian, Muslim, Athiest, Gay, whatever trolls and all you hear is crickets. Yeah I'm being extreme but I'd rather a few trolls slip through rather than a lot of good posts getting pulled.
The web doesn't need more heavily censored platforms. One persons troll is another persons dissident.
You suck worse at dealing with bots. And worse still about dealing with follow-bait advert accounts managed by media agencies.
If you removed all of these two types of accounts, I have no doubt twitter's "user base" would drop by 80%. It's functionally useless IMHO.
Slashdot moderation isn't web scale ;)
It's a damn sight better than the nothing that exists today.
John
Every time I think of Gamergate, I'm reminded of that scene in PCU where the protestors break out the blank placards and start writing the latest liberal cause-of-the-moment slogans on them. Some people are just always looking for an oppressor to blame for all their problems, and some cause to give their pathetic lives some meaning. And being the drama queens they are, they feed on any criticism as further evidence that they're being oppressed.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
When you're posting pictures of you in front of someone you don't like's work place because they said something you don't like counts as something. Maybe not trolling. But it's abusive and shitty and stalking like that happens fairly regularly on the internet.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
tbh i enjoyed the tropes vs women video series. I found them to be +1 interesting and +1 insightful. I didn't agree with everything, but I found them reasoned and well documented. I suspect that the people with the most hate never actually watched the videos.
Seriously, the slashdot moderation system works well for what it moderates: a bunch of threads which each get a couple of hundred replies that you see mostly at the same time.
Those who actually read articles accumulate points that let them moderate up to 5 or 15 posts in a 3-day period every month or so, and (something I would implement if I set up a blog, because of all the "thanks for your post!" spammers) all threads are closed after two weeks. It's not trivial to get mod points on multiple accounts, and you also don't know exactly when you'll get points.
Meta-moderation is a good idea too, but it's been fucked since they changed it from Agree/Disagree to +/- about five or so years ago without ever updating the FAQ to say whether +/- means Agree/Disagree or Good post/Bad post. Actually it was fucked much, much earlier than that when there was a bug that prevented the "Have you meta-moderated today?" from ever showing up on certain accounts (like mine) and the only way to meta-moderate was to go to metamod.pl manually.
Twitter is basically just a bunch of random posts (like "Hey, I just pooped!") that are loosely linked with # and @ characters in free-form text. It's like in the old BBS days when you would post a message to "All", with nothing like a "thread" with a root post. You just poop out your "hashtag BowelMovement" into the Twitter-space, where you might get as few as zero readers. Try to crowd-moderate that. Frankly, I'm surprised Twitter ended up as popular as it is for having basically no structure other than "fits in an SMS message" and "# and @ mean something". Really, the only significant thing added beyond that original idea is attaching an image.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Watched quite a few because I find them amusing. The documentation is very cherry-picked. As for reasoned, that only works if you accept their rather agenda driven premises.
I'm totally serious on this. Do what I do. I've never been on Twitter. I never will be on Twitter. End of story.
The problem with Twitter is that people think it's valuable. It's not valuable at all. The press is forced to pretend its valuable because their jobs require them to have Twitter accounts. So this had led to the situation where people in the press quote random users on controversial subjects as if their opinions are really important just because they were said on Twitter.
All Twitter is is a way to behave like an ass and say stupid things, sometimes with consequences, sometimes with no consequences. The greatest trick Twitter pulled is convincing people that it's actually important and worth caring about and paying attention to. I still firmly believe that in a not too distant future it will be about as meaningful as My Space is today and future generations will be absolutely baffled that anybody actually thought Twitter was important or useful in the past.
Dear Twitter CEO:
If you don't understand the difference between trolling and cyberbullying, you already fail.
Trolling: "Global warming is bullshit"
Cyberbullying: "I'm going to chain you to the radiator and grape you in the mouth for decades and decades.*
*I recognize that I'm out of the norm by having a pretty high standard here limited to libel or actual threats, which ARE illegal already; I have very mixed feelings about the whole American societal thing about bullying in general today (of which "cyber" bullying is just an element). But that's tangential to my point here.
-Styopa
You realize the SJW side of Gamergate has an equal, if not worse, record of doxxing people, right?
So where's their equal, if not worse, condemnation?
You're a perfect example of a SJW.
Sure thing. I don't, nor do I want to live in a world where social justice is considered a bad thing, notwithstanding the efforts of a loud minority to redefine social justice as a rando collection of things they hate on the internet.
So, SJW and proud of it.
You wrap everything up in emotion and oppression to make yourself look like a martyr. ("I've got karma to burn.") And then when people stop taking you seriously because of your outbursts, you complain people are just indoctrinated slaves of the system. ("I'll take a sweepstake on whether I get troll or flamebait.")
Oh gosh, no on ever used the meme "mod me down, I've got Karma to burn!" on slashdot before gamer gate broke. Nope, it's an SJW marytrdom conspiracy!
It took all of 30 seconds to find that Slade Villena of RogueStar Games leaked sensitive financial records from Polytron and IFG as retaliation for some form of SJW infighting.
That's mostly dead links and links to unsourced blogs and twitter feeds. And it says RogueStar is on the 'gater side too. So I'm not sure I follow your point.
The rest of your post sounds like a bomb went off in a hyperbole factory. Domestic terrorism? Seriously?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I agree except opinions often get moded up/down. I've been an offender and the offended. I've recently moded up a number of posts moded down due to disagreeing opinions even if the opinion was worth a read (positive comments towards MS or Apple often get moded down). There's a difference between disagreeing and actually having an invalid, inaccurate or flaming comment.
The cover-up didn't work.
The week-long gaming press news blackout and user comment/forum censorship didn't work.
The coordinated, ongoing smear campaign that began with the "Gamers are Over" articles hasn't worked.
The doxxing and harassment of pro-GG folks hasn't worked.
The endless train of embarrassingly desperate counter-hashtags hasn't worked.
The Wikipedia and Nightline hit pieces only damage those outlets' credibility for short-term effect.
PC Gamer is the latest games journalism site to update its ethics policy in the wake of Gamergate, joining IGN, the Escapist, and of course Kotaku/Gawker (though in Gawker's case, they put up more of a fight and the Gamergate pressure to be ethical had to be routed through the FTC). And there are probably more I'm forgetting.
Gamergate also got Brad Wardell (CEO of Stardock) some long-overdue apologies for hit pieces run against him:
https://twitter.com/iamDavidWi...
http://www.gamepolitics.com/20...
http://www.zenofdesign.com/in-...
Ask yourself how much of this you've seen reported in the corrupt media (which at this point, sadly, clearly includes Slashdot). Of course none of it ever had a chance of appearing in the Wikipedia article. Nothing enrages anti-Gamergaters more than someone covering both sides of the story, and that should tell you something.
Their side thrives only in an environment of propaganda and censorship, and evaporates when faced with integrity and transparency. They prove the need for Gamergate every time they write an article based on the assumption that terrorism and child porn^W^W^W^W misogyny and harassment have become the root passwords to the Constitution^W^W journalistic ethics.