Draft: The Website That All of Us Now Need The Most is Gone

[Arnox]

https://intosanctuary.com/index.php?resources/sanctuary-transcript-first-draft.10/

 

[Houseman]

On the subject of Reddit, you can also talk about powermods, a small group of people that moderate the most popular subs, ban-bots, where you can get banned from, say, r/cats for posting in r/dogs, and that whole "protest" they did regarding r/NoNewNormal.


I haven't read the whole thing yet, but you can also touch on the aspect of "what if [bad person] were to control this platform? Do you think they would try and use it to manipulate public opinion? How do you know this isn't already happening, and that you aren't already being manipulated?"

That's my big issue whenever I contemplate social media sites.

 

[Arnox]

On the subject of Reddit, you can also talk about powermods, a small group of people that moderate the most popular subs, ban-bots, where you can get banned from, say, r/cats for posting in r/dogs, and that whole "protest" they did regarding r/NoNewNormal.

Yeah, I definitely had that in mind, but I feel like that's already been talked about to death and I wanted to raise attention to a much larger issue. As bad as these sub-reddit mods are, you can always just make another sub-reddit, even if it gets banned. But you can't escape the voting system. It is ever present and cannot be turned off. And hell, even if you could, the site still sorts threads by date of the original post, not the date of the last post made in it, so it's entirely unoptimized to be a real internet forum, among the other issues it has. I would MUCH rather run SMF (again) or phpBB rather than this shite.

what if [bad person] were to control this platform? Do you think they would try and use it to manipulate public opinion? How do you know this isn't already happening, and that you aren't already being manipulated?

Could you be a little more specific?

 

[Houseman]

Could you be a little more specific?

No, that's about it. It's just a thought experiment that should make people aware of how social media and public opinion can be manipulated, and how valuable it would be for some people, for instance, politicians.

 

[Houseman]

Twitter section:

2nd paragraph 3rd sentence "This was the first and probably most integral reason why Twitter failed and has failed as much as it has" I would strike this sentence. You already say "first and foremost" in the first sentence, and twitter is still ubiquitous, so to say that it's a failure lacks meaning.

3rd paragraph, 2nd sentence: "If it wasn't enough that all individual posts had to be only 140/280 chars. in length..." strike this. You just finished with this point, no need to bring it up again. Also, the less numbers you have to pronounce, the better.

You can add some stuff about "blue checkmarks" to your final paragraph, as this ties in with using real names.
If you want, you can also talk about the concept of blocking, and block bots.

 

[Arnox]

Twitter section:

2nd paragraph 3rd sentence "This was the first and probably most integral reason why Twitter failed and has failed as much as it has" I would strike this sentence. You already say "first and foremost" in the first sentence, and twitter is still ubiquitous, so to say that it's a failure lacks meaning.

3rd paragraph, 2nd sentence: "If it wasn't enough that all individual posts had to be only 140/280 chars. in length..." strike this. You just finished with this point, no need to bring it up again. Also, the less numbers you have to pronounce, the better.

You can add some stuff about "blue checkmarks" to your final paragraph, as this ties in with using real names.
If you want, you can also talk about the concept of blocking, and block bots.

2nd paragraph 3rd sentence: Good call. I rewrote it as, "This is probably the most integral reason why Twitter has failed from a communications perspective as much as it has."

3rd paragraph, 2nd sentence: Stricken.

Rewrote final Twitter paragraph as, "And finally, although this one isn't entirely Twitter's fault, it is a factor nonetheless. Facebook was the one who first started the push to make everyone use their real names (more on them later), and then Twitter followed that up later with the blue checkmark system to further reduce anonymity. Since everyone became comfortable with giving out their real names via Facebook, it seemed a natural progression to give all the followers you've earned and may earn in the future your real face and name. And if one de-anonymizes themselves, anything they say now is linked directly to their identity, which means that such people can be easily targeted in real life by hate mobs."

I've never heard of block bots. What nonsense is going on this time?

 

[Houseman]

I've never heard of block bots. What nonsense is going on this time?

They're bots that crawl twitter and look to see if you follow "bad" people. If you follow those people, or if you follow someone who follows those people, the bot will block you. The list of blocked users can also be exported and imported, so that other users can block who you're blocking. It was a big thing during gamergate.