Another benefit is that it would make it easier to leave a site like Twitter if you don't like something about it, e.g. if you want stricter or looser content restrictions, if some other site has a better interface or a new useful feature, &c. The main feature that prevents this now is network effects: the main reason to use Twitter, as opposed to Tumblr or a Mastodon instance or some other competitor, is that lots of other people are on Twitter, so you can be confident that most people you might want to contact will be there, so any particular person moving to a new network will be substantially worse off even if the software is better, because they will not be able to use the software to communicate with their friends. (Something analogous is, IIRC, true of Amazon: everyone who wants to buy things online uses it because they can expect to find what they want there, which causes & is caused by everyone who produces goods & wants to sell them online selling them via Amazon because they can expect to find the most customers there.) Interoperability — different sites being able to send messages between each other so that people using different cooperating sites can communicate as easily as if they were on the same site — is supposed to solve this problem. (Mastodon does this already, but it hasn't spread because they haven't convinced enough people to move there for network effects to work to their advantage; older & more basic parts of the internet, like HTTP or email, still work like this.) Without this, changing to better software would only be practical if the whole community decided to move at once, which requires either an enormously significant change (Scott Alexander at https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centralized-web/ gives the example of Digg, a Reddit-like site that was abandoned by many of its users in favor of Reddit after badly screwing up its redesign) or a coordination mechanism like an assurance contract (which requires that everyone agree to it & trust each other to follow it), since otherwise the lack of common knowledge of desire to move means that each person fears that by moving they would be leaving their friends behind.
I expect it might also be better for freedom of speech — a walled garden run by a single company thereby has a single point of failure that anyone who wants a product banned or an idea censored can threaten or exert social pressure on (often successfully if they're influential enough: compare Twitter's publicly expressed principles in 2012, when they called themselves "the free speech wing of the free speech party" (https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/mar/22/twitter-tony-wang-free-speech), to their present actions), while in a federation of interoperable sites this wouldn't work unless someone can convince all the sites to cooperate to exclude something & somehow prevent those excluded from forming their own. The interoperability of websites in general seems to work like this in that even criminal (e.g. piracy) or offensive (e.g. pornography or Nazism) content is still accessible online, & decentralized cryptocurrencies are similarly harder to block the use of than corporate payment processing services (the aforementioned SSC post also discusses Paypal banning people from donating to Wikileaks or buying pornography), but I don't know how well this sort of effect would generalize to social networks.
Loved the interview and the podcast in general, but the audio quality of some episodes can make it hard to enjoy/follow at times. Some low-hanging fruit that could make a big difference:
1) Some voices come in very loud and others very quiet, which can require listeners to constantly adjust the volume and lead to occasional ear-splitting interjections when a louder host cuts in. Try to normalize/compress audio levels for all speakers; most audio software will let you do this for an entire file when you're done editing (if you're only recording from a single source), but ideally you would just boost the entire track for whoever is quiet.
2) Audio quality in general could be better. I'm not sure if everyone usually uses a headset or dedicated mic (not built in to their laptop), but that goes a long way toward reducing echoes, etc. Low bitrate audio/dropouts/digital noise can be solved by having each speaker record their own audio locally, then share their files with whoever is editing. That way you'll have 3 separate high-quality tracks to work with, instead of 1 high quality and 2 that have been heavily compressed and generally bastardized by video conferencing software.
3) Latency seems to be a real problem, both for the hosts struggling to have a free-flowing conversation as they accidentally cut each other off, and listeners occasionally experiencing awkward/disjointed/delayed moments. This may be due to the software you're using; if that's not able to be fixed, consider implementing a process (eg. raised hand, either in software or a literal hand-wave on camera) so speakers can more seamlessly pass the baton without stepping on each others' toes.
Again, huge fan and I don't mean to be critical. Audio is hard, especially when everyone is remote and you're trying to keep production overhead to a minimum. Hope this helps.
>Is it ideas, or is it actions? If you harass someone you're not expressing an idea, you're stopping them from expressing theirs.
>Cory: Absolutely. So, so the issue is: that there are Nazis talking to other Nazis is okay. It's just that when Nazis talked to other Nazis and figured out how to go harass someone.
There is a correlation between weird offensive ideas & harrassment, partly because trolls are more likely to pretend to be (to take your example) Nazis, partly because strange offensive ideas can be used by disagreeable people to signal their disagreeableness & attract compatible friends (David Chapman in https://vividness.live/buddhist-ethics-is-advertising makes this point about neoreactionaries & radical feminists, but I expect it would also apply to neo-Nazis). (&, of course, in the case of literal Nazism (though not for all of the far-right ideas that get criticized as fascist), the ideology itself tends to encourage harrassment & violence.) However, your point that bad actions & the ideas held by bad actors should not be ethically conflated is still important & probably more important in the present moment (especially given some people's strategy of claiming that the mere presence of opposing ideas or counterarguments constitutes harrassment).
> We would be saying that if you are abetting unlawful conduct, when we see a remedy for preventing this unlawful conduct, and you refusing to implement that remedy, we might defenestrate you. We might do something worse.
A likely failure mode of this strategy is creating a chilling effect. A company like Twitter or Facebook can't moderate all its content directly, so it has to adopt some organized system for moderation, like using algorithms or hiring special employees to do this, which will inevitably take time & miss things. A company that faces harsh sanctions for anything that it misses or leaves up too long will be incentivized to delete anything that looks like it might be illegal, which means that lots of legal content that's mislabeled or looks like something illegal will also be banned in practice. (Compare this to the chilling effect of workplace harrassment laws, as described by Eugene Volokh at https://web.archive.org/web/20210311051429/https://fileleaks.com/file/9d4e1574e83024cb56e80d0a61ed51afe256f747/volokh1992freedomOfSpeechworkplaceHarassment.pdf .) IIUC avoiding this is much of the reason why Section 230 exists.
I found it really hard to understand what that federated twitter would solve.
From the description it looks like a very cumbersome way to create what amounts to a shared block list.
Agreed.
Another benefit is that it would make it easier to leave a site like Twitter if you don't like something about it, e.g. if you want stricter or looser content restrictions, if some other site has a better interface or a new useful feature, &c. The main feature that prevents this now is network effects: the main reason to use Twitter, as opposed to Tumblr or a Mastodon instance or some other competitor, is that lots of other people are on Twitter, so you can be confident that most people you might want to contact will be there, so any particular person moving to a new network will be substantially worse off even if the software is better, because they will not be able to use the software to communicate with their friends. (Something analogous is, IIRC, true of Amazon: everyone who wants to buy things online uses it because they can expect to find what they want there, which causes & is caused by everyone who produces goods & wants to sell them online selling them via Amazon because they can expect to find the most customers there.) Interoperability — different sites being able to send messages between each other so that people using different cooperating sites can communicate as easily as if they were on the same site — is supposed to solve this problem. (Mastodon does this already, but it hasn't spread because they haven't convinced enough people to move there for network effects to work to their advantage; older & more basic parts of the internet, like HTTP or email, still work like this.) Without this, changing to better software would only be practical if the whole community decided to move at once, which requires either an enormously significant change (Scott Alexander at https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centralized-web/ gives the example of Digg, a Reddit-like site that was abandoned by many of its users in favor of Reddit after badly screwing up its redesign) or a coordination mechanism like an assurance contract (which requires that everyone agree to it & trust each other to follow it), since otherwise the lack of common knowledge of desire to move means that each person fears that by moving they would be leaving their friends behind.
I expect it might also be better for freedom of speech — a walled garden run by a single company thereby has a single point of failure that anyone who wants a product banned or an idea censored can threaten or exert social pressure on (often successfully if they're influential enough: compare Twitter's publicly expressed principles in 2012, when they called themselves "the free speech wing of the free speech party" (https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/mar/22/twitter-tony-wang-free-speech), to their present actions), while in a federation of interoperable sites this wouldn't work unless someone can convince all the sites to cooperate to exclude something & somehow prevent those excluded from forming their own. The interoperability of websites in general seems to work like this in that even criminal (e.g. piracy) or offensive (e.g. pornography or Nazism) content is still accessible online, & decentralized cryptocurrencies are similarly harder to block the use of than corporate payment processing services (the aforementioned SSC post also discusses Paypal banning people from donating to Wikileaks or buying pornography), but I don't know how well this sort of effect would generalize to social networks.
Loved the interview and the podcast in general, but the audio quality of some episodes can make it hard to enjoy/follow at times. Some low-hanging fruit that could make a big difference:
1) Some voices come in very loud and others very quiet, which can require listeners to constantly adjust the volume and lead to occasional ear-splitting interjections when a louder host cuts in. Try to normalize/compress audio levels for all speakers; most audio software will let you do this for an entire file when you're done editing (if you're only recording from a single source), but ideally you would just boost the entire track for whoever is quiet.
2) Audio quality in general could be better. I'm not sure if everyone usually uses a headset or dedicated mic (not built in to their laptop), but that goes a long way toward reducing echoes, etc. Low bitrate audio/dropouts/digital noise can be solved by having each speaker record their own audio locally, then share their files with whoever is editing. That way you'll have 3 separate high-quality tracks to work with, instead of 1 high quality and 2 that have been heavily compressed and generally bastardized by video conferencing software.
3) Latency seems to be a real problem, both for the hosts struggling to have a free-flowing conversation as they accidentally cut each other off, and listeners occasionally experiencing awkward/disjointed/delayed moments. This may be due to the software you're using; if that's not able to be fixed, consider implementing a process (eg. raised hand, either in software or a literal hand-wave on camera) so speakers can more seamlessly pass the baton without stepping on each others' toes.
Again, huge fan and I don't mean to be critical. Audio is hard, especially when everyone is remote and you're trying to keep production overhead to a minimum. Hope this helps.
>Is it ideas, or is it actions? If you harass someone you're not expressing an idea, you're stopping them from expressing theirs.
>Cory: Absolutely. So, so the issue is: that there are Nazis talking to other Nazis is okay. It's just that when Nazis talked to other Nazis and figured out how to go harass someone.
There is a correlation between weird offensive ideas & harrassment, partly because trolls are more likely to pretend to be (to take your example) Nazis, partly because strange offensive ideas can be used by disagreeable people to signal their disagreeableness & attract compatible friends (David Chapman in https://vividness.live/buddhist-ethics-is-advertising makes this point about neoreactionaries & radical feminists, but I expect it would also apply to neo-Nazis). (&, of course, in the case of literal Nazism (though not for all of the far-right ideas that get criticized as fascist), the ideology itself tends to encourage harrassment & violence.) However, your point that bad actions & the ideas held by bad actors should not be ethically conflated is still important & probably more important in the present moment (especially given some people's strategy of claiming that the mere presence of opposing ideas or counterarguments constitutes harrassment).
> We would be saying that if you are abetting unlawful conduct, when we see a remedy for preventing this unlawful conduct, and you refusing to implement that remedy, we might defenestrate you. We might do something worse.
A likely failure mode of this strategy is creating a chilling effect. A company like Twitter or Facebook can't moderate all its content directly, so it has to adopt some organized system for moderation, like using algorithms or hiring special employees to do this, which will inevitably take time & miss things. A company that faces harsh sanctions for anything that it misses or leaves up too long will be incentivized to delete anything that looks like it might be illegal, which means that lots of legal content that's mislabeled or looks like something illegal will also be banned in practice. (Compare this to the chilling effect of workplace harrassment laws, as described by Eugene Volokh at https://web.archive.org/web/20210311051429/https://fileleaks.com/file/9d4e1574e83024cb56e80d0a61ed51afe256f747/volokh1992freedomOfSpeechworkplaceHarassment.pdf .) IIUC avoiding this is much of the reason why Section 230 exists.
I'm disappointed you didn't ask him about MMT. After a few months of study, he's become an "expert". Think of all you could have learned.