Prokofy's dashboard

I'd like to ascertain whether this is a rule about not being able to follow 2,000 at once, or a cap on a certain day, or cumulatively, only 2,000 period.

If so that is HUGELY unfair, as @biz and company let @scobleizer have gadzillion followers and all the rest of the A-listers from Silicon Valley who just seized it as broadcasting pulpits and to show off their collections of fanboyz to each other. This is really wrong if true. There should be numerous people protesting -- why aren't they?

Go to edit/preferences/networks/clear cache and relog and be sure to allow the system to log you on without exiting, and then open your inventory and let it load without exiting. Then sort by date and see if it is in the aggregated lost and found. Also try searching by name.

This is the best comment I've read on this thread, or anywhere, in a long time, on the threat to our freedoms. It gives me hope. – Prokofy, on May 27, 2008 07:19

Um, where is that place where the !@#holes can go? And who's to say you can define *the other* people who are in that category, and that you are not in it yourself? We are not "guests in a house". We are using a public utility in a public space -- a public commons -- on the Internet. We're not over at Ev's for a barbeque. We're on his mall, and as such, we have the right to some reasonable protection of the right to freedom of expression if it does not incite imminent violence or libel a private person. As Ev has already explained, he could not prove that an actual tweet was put out that actually specifically called Ariel Waldman directly by this term. And even if he had found such a tweet, by itself, while offensive, it is not actionable under real law; it's doubtful it's actionable even under a good-faith reading of the admittedly overbroad TOS.

Smart service providers had better NOT move quickly to dispense justice according to thin-skinned prima donnas and their incited mobs. – Prokofy, on May 27, 2008 05:14

concerned tweeter, your analysis is merely the narrow analysis offered repeatedly in different forums by a tiny segment of tekkies who create and rule social media and Internet sites and think that their notion of what is just and proper should prevail. That doesn't mean it serves the public interest; it doesn't mean that it will remain this way forever.

There's nothing to say this "way things are" should last -- it won't.

Here's what it's about for you, Waldman, and other people like you -- power.
"Speaking as someone who consistently bans people on a weekly basis in communities I moderate - being afraid of a banning of a user who has broken your terms is a wee, well... disingenous sounding to me. Sorry."

And here's the message you need to hear: a) your TOS is unconscionable; b) your power is not legitimate, c) your behaviour is unjust, and more and more, people will be challenging your rule.

I'm quite sure a knowledgeable lawyer could take a look at all this and just as easily find that Twitter *is* a common carrier -- indeed, this topic is widely and heatedly debatedly all over, and your conviction that you can pronounce "the truth" on it is misplaced. It will be changing, and adapting to the needs of the public -- not to the needs of Silicon Valley.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_c...

If harassment rises to the test where you'd actually have a case in real life in person with a lawyer and court -- then go for it, and ask Twitter to cooperate. If it doesn't, then don't follow your vanity feed if you don't want to see criticism or nasty stalking of yourself. It's just that simple. Threatening the service with boycotts and smearing it all over town just don't work to persuade or impress.

I guess you aren't comprehending what the Twitter devs have written now repeatedly: it isn't that they didn't enforce their TOS, which I'd argue is arbitrary and overbroad anyway. They did in fact take a look at the material, *made a determination that it was not abusive* and moved on, responding to the customer. In this case Waldman tried to leverage her position to keep banging on Twitter and keep hollering on her blog and incite people like you to high dudgeon and self-righteous indignation. But again -- it's all vapour. It doesn't matter. They didn't find abuse. She needs to stop reading her vanity feed.You need to stop spouting outrage on behalf of your illegitimate and unconscionable occupation.

So again, what happened here is that Waldman made a false charge. It's not true that "Twitter refuses to uphold its TOS"; it's that Twitter refuses to interpret the TOS *the way that thin-skinned and petulant Internet prima donas think they should uphold it*. Let's be clear on the distinction.

Um, not everybody follows every link, champ. She did not state it explicitly in her post *here*. We don't know her from Eve, frankly. And as I made clear in my post, it doesn't *matter* that she made this information in theory available to the link-happy and Google witch-hunter, and even that this stalking thing happened long before Twitter. Because that's my point -- if she isn't engaging in a crass dissing of a competitor, which doesn't seem to be the case, she's trying to *dictate to the industry* the way she thinks the devs and their minions should control the public. And the hell with all that, I say.

Politicans are elected. I'm all for representative democracy. Warts and all. Community managers aren't elected. They aren't even acclaimed in some sort of medieval fashion. They are just hired, or the game-gods dub their most loyal fanboyz to be the mods because they suck up the most. It's a horrible culture, and you know full well that this isn't tolerable in most areas of life -- like science, to use your analogy.

Who says we even need community managers?! It's an inherently corrupt and abusive system. – Prokofy, on May 25, 2008 03:09

Er, when were we going to learn that Ariel Waldman is *Community Manager at Pownce* which is a competitive service to Twitter -- where people go when Twitter is down?! Good Lord, the OP might have said "As manager of another community where I think we do it better and where I'd like to see the whole industry go -- or else we'll steal your customers" etc.

That conflict of interest in itself should raise eyebrows here, but there's a lot more to it, if you buy Ariel's claim that her job position and commercial interests aren't at play here.

She's clearly a passionate believer in the odious role of the community manager -- a role that has been badly performed in too many contexts to count across the Metaverse and blogosphere -- on MMORPG forums. on forums and company blogs for virtual worlds like Second Life, on social media sites, on individual A-list bloggers' sites and their ustream shows -- you name it. Community managers are not elected or accountable and only serve their own interests and those of the company they work for. They feign an advocacy for the community, but it's a very flawed model and they are not honest brokers.

Nobody feels the need for such an explicit and intrusive role on Twitter, and thank God for it. To be sure, we have the Get Satisfaction people attempting to play that role, but so far their smarmy little entreaties have a Higher Power to curb them -- the enlightened devs themselves.

I don't want to live in a world not only where people who really are the nasty things that people call them can't be called that, but where people who are not those things can't be called those names either. I believe in the right to mount even a false hypothesis in the search for truth. It has to be the hallmark of an open society. Along the way, there will be people like the plaintiff in Times v. Sulivan who will be offended. If they are public figures -- so be it. If they are private figures, let them be very cautious and restrained so as to prove *actual malice* and loss of livlihood. These are matters better determined by real courts, not mobs of fainting e-mommies and fussy and controlling IT widgeteers.

Um, Adam, are you in a "community" with all other, say, Verizon DSL customers or whomever you have as an ISP? Are you in a "community" with all users of Con Edison, or whoever supplies your electricity? Do you hobnob with your fellow "community members" using the U.S. Postal Service? Do you have "likes and dislikes" about the people travelling next to you on Amtrak or your local train company?

I am not in a community with 69 million other Facebook users. I'm not even in a community with the 75 odd people I might follow just to get their news. I don't even know some of them. Please. Get a grip. Don't villagize the global in the name of globalizing the village. – Prokofy, on May 24, 2008 20:39

I'm suffered many foul comments on Twitter and elsewhere. I don't care. Freedom of speech and the media and calling to account those who are in power in government and in the private sector are more important values for me. – Prokofy, on May 24, 2008 20:37

Eric, that was a terribly smarmy response. You simultaneously insult the users here by implying they are like your seven-year-old and then fawn all over them in unconvincing ways saying there are "some spart people here".

Biz didn't lay down policy -- nothing new, anyway. He stuck to his guns, which is that mods like yourself, driven by fake "communities" who bang on you to "do something" cannot determine the level of free discourse. And thank God for it.

You've also in truly underhanded fashion held out the idea that "guidelines might evolve and change" -- in the direction YOU apparently want them to go, egged on by various fans here -- and implying that they will change to accommodate these concerns about "abuse". But let's hope they DO NOT "evolve" as that would not be evolution, but regression. – Prokofy, on May 24, 2008 20:30

A phone service is different. A stalker could reach you directly in your home by voice on a service you need for many critical communications. Phone services are public utilities.

An Internet chat site is not the same thing. You can chose to participate or not and don't need *this particular service* to communicate with. Again, anyone even seeing comments from someone they don't like, in a manner they don't like *is using track or search to watch their vanity feed and ensure they don't miss @ communications even from friends*

Obviously, people don't follow stalkers or spammers, and discourage them from sending @ by blocking them. *If they still see them, that means they are choosing to watch their vanity feed*. So that means...they can stop doing that and be more selective.

And a reminder here that none of us have seen this offending speech. We have no way of impartially judging whether in fact these communications even rose to the test of harassment or stalking. Given that people like Steve Gillmor of Newsgang can accuse someone like me of "trolling" and needing to be blocked merely by *a single tweet* addressed to them on a single controversial topic like Rev. Wright, we can see that the system will always sink to the lowest threshold for tolerance if left to vain A-listers and easily insulted users.

Good Lord, listen to the vigilantes, here! Threatening to "bring a company down" because...they are taking what one person says subjectively about their alleged abuse? There are basic principles of justice, due process, the right to face one's accuser, the right to be informed of the charges, and so on. None of this has been made public.

No one should be tried by "negative buzz on blogs". The terms of the TOS are overbroad, and as such the TOS is abusive itself.

Anyone who believes the service is used to stalk/harass them can avail themselves of real-life lawyers and courts and ask for Twitter's cooperation in locating and serving the users.

To make a private company the arbiter of speech is eventually to undermine the Constitutional protection of free speech. Where will the First Amendment take place if everywhere you turn there is a private company and a neuralgic and fussy user imagining they are abused by trolls, with mobs of "justice" swarming everywhere with angry "buzz"?

Biz,

I'm glad you are sticking to your guns here and keeping Twitter free as a medium, and not a message.

I'm concerned when you write things like "We're upset that Ariel is having such a bad experience with Twitter. She's been a long term user of ours and a great advocate of our service."

This is so typically Valley/beta/MMORPG/geek culture -- someone is a fan of the devs, therefore they get special atttention, special treatment, special dispensation. Except looks like they didn't here -- but only because apparently the problem resolved itself with the person's removal of the offending content.

So what happens next time, when the person either isn't a "long-time user" and "great advocate" and the content isn't removed? I am less concerned about that side of the question -- but you will find many who will be. And what about someone who is accused, possibly falsely, by one of your fangirlz who are a "long-time user" and "a great advocate" of "being a troll"? Will you automatically rule in their favour?

Any policy you develop has to be very simple and openly accessible to all, impartial, and fair, and not rely on things like fan status to get attention.

Twitter isn't a new medium. It's an old medium -- the message board -- with some new aspects or technologically speedier features to it.

I can only urge you to look at the system-wide ramifications of policies that stream/filter/block content that will make news production biased and unfair.

1. I'm not here to play chef, and I don't care if people don't like my comments. I'm not available to be rounded up and put in the tribe. I'm here to defend a space that needs to be kept open. This is really a serious issue.

2. Uh, dearie pie, nice try assuming you can play psy-war and influence people and bind them into your little posses, but I'm not playing. If I've already labelled your activities and sussed out your motives, no need to keep repeating it -- unless you need a reminder again of just how fussing and controlling you are. Stop it.

3. I don't advocate the use of Block. I only have a few blocks on personally of people who were actually inciting violence and stalking of me in real life, and threatening to come into my home, beat me up, etc. or making horribly violent and vulgar sexually harassing sorts of statements. That would only be in a few and very extreme cases, like @jesatiu. People who express all kinds of hatred and such I don't bother blocking -- who knows, perhaps they might say something interesting, that is, if I bothered to follow them in the first place. If they talk about me and it shows up in my vanity track feed, great! Always good to get feedback, pro and con.

My point about Block is that I really can't object, even in the interests of both freedom of expression AND the importance of not drowning out critical voices in the public commons, if someone simply doesn't want someone else reacting to them in real time. That's different than trying to mount a vanity feed then shushing what you pick up from being curious and vain (which is ok to be on social media).

And it's pointless to bitch too much about Block because Block is the silliest feature of Twitter -- you can use it, but anyone can easily and legally, so to speak, go around it just by searching a person's name from within Twitter and seeing their whole page. I find it very infantile when people block me, because of course, periodically, I can go read up on their page or look them up in Tweetscan, and if I have some burning need, just for the record, I can write them anyway. And will go on doing so, even if track-block starts working.

I don't advocate Block because it means that people can try to prevent you from seeing content. I don't think any public space like Twitter or the Internet at large should be blocking people from seeing content. That defeats the entire purpose of the Internet. If you want a private conversation, go in an IM, an email, a DM. But to be talking to everybody, but trying to keep just certain people you don't like in the dark seems really stupid to me. It comes from fussy, controlling, irritable little tekkies and their culture, which we really need to work overtime to dissipate.

4. In Second Life, there is a "mute" function for both people and objects (because the objects can talk too). So you can pull up an interface and see the whole list of mutes. And no doubt Linden Lab can get the master top view of who is most muted, if they care to gather that information. If you come in a group situation, and that muted person is there, you can't hear them talk, although anyone else talking to them will be heard, of course. They will show up to you with a label over them "MUTED".

I find this horrible, and nasty, and really, a sordid little totalitarian culture in the making. I'm forced to mute people who spam, i.e. shouting horrible messages over and over on "shout" -- if you don't mute them, you can't see your screen after awhile, it floods. There are also people who are creepy stalkers, and it is not always possible to deal with them through the abuse report system. But other than that, I wouldn't bother muting people -- why not listen?

Having these mute lists in SL is good only in the sense that you can visually see if you've made a mistake -- in a crowd, or in a busy area, you might mute someone shouting a Bingo game or just being a spammer, and you might click on the wrong person by accident.

Really, anything that anyone thought up in Twitter or FriendFeed or Pownce in fact has been going on live, streaming, 3-D and interactive in Second Life for 5 years now. It has been a very usual accelerating prototyper.

5. "judgement [sic]" -- this sort of anal-retentive, fussy and *wrongful* kind of social grooming is what gives tekkies and forums-dwellers a bad name. Don't do it. This spelling *is* correct in Canadian and British English, although "judgment" is common in American spelling. My God, don't try to control other people, especially on something you're wrong about. And as for statements like this, "Please, please consider adopting a less combative stance in your replies if your intent is to persuade "-- grow a thicker skin and take some Tylenol for your neuralgia. I'm not available for Miss Manners classes and I'm not going to listen to church ladies outside my actual church. I don't care about persuading, especially not persuading by following some "terms of reference" in your church.

I don't expect there's a lot more to say on this topic unless you decide there's some new angle or you feel motivated to keep banging on my style of delivery. Do that, and I'll push back, but I'll have less and less time for it.

Mdy,

Just briefly for now:

1) Vinegar is a good disinfectant; I don't fall for flattering and cajoling and switching from insult to praise. No sale.

2) I will not be changing anything about what I think or the way I express it. I will not be conforming to any tribalist geek-inspired norms that suppress independence of thought and expression, I will not be submitting to any grooming and culling of my speech by your or your posse, and I will not be conceding any norms of politeness or proprietary dictated by you or those like you -- and you are indeed a type and a lobby of your own, and your "solutions" are indeed obstacles to a free Internet.

3) You wish to block people you don't like because you don't like their views or their manner of expression. "Unfollow" exists for that, but it's never enough -- you wish to scrub further. That's wrong. Sure, that's your right. But you need to hear in the strongest, most strenuous terms how that harms the public debate, and I'm here to do that. And your blocking behaviour can be imitated, spread virally, and used to completely cripple democracy and put social media into the hands of only powerful and biased influencers, so it needs to be vigorously and robustly opposed now, while it still can be.

4) Spam isn't anywhere near the problem you claim, and you know that your blocks aren't only about spam, anyway, and proof of that is in your desire to have a block list that you can "review' now and then to see if you now can "clear" people that you might be "willing to tolerate again". That's sick, and you need to be told that; it's a culture and a mindset common to tekkie early adapters and Web 1.0 and 2.0 engineers -- and it needs to go, and the sooner it goes, the better. I'm here to help that happen.

Gosh, I love that tech-speak, Marjolein with the ! and the = -- does that make you feel in control?

Do you realize that what you are writing there has been repeated over and over, like a machine, by people just like you, on forums everywhere? that merely repeating it with the kind of hectoring tone that you bring doesn't make it somehow more "right"? It's just a view of yours and your class -- but it isn't *nessarily* the narrative of the future and it's merely *how you wish it to be* but not how it *may* be.

You're still failing to grasp the larger point. Gosh, no, duh, nobody can force other people to listen just because they speak. Do you think you have imparted the wisdom of the ages by constating that obvious one? Is your assumption always and everywhere that the target of your homilies is stupid and unwilling to grasp the obvious something you are subjected to a lot in your field?

It's a truism, but one that only goes so far in a normal, democratic society where in fact listening to people, especially dissenters, especially groups in the society with grievances, is in fact an activity that the society values. And scientists in fact, if they are true to their values, don't create systems without feedback. They don't say "Let's all close our ears to everything that is said because after all, we're not required to listen just because something speaks." Most people of conscience and intelligence don't want a society that would create isolated, deliberately deafened individuals or worse, isolated, deliberately deafened circles of people in power.

Your persistence in seeing this as some kind of little blog management problem is hobbling you from seeing the ramifications of your recipes.

In fact, contrary to your brutal formula that imagines a privileged elite filtering out people they hate and always getting away with it with malicious glee, *listening* is what good journalists and editors do *in the public interest*, to serve *the public's right to know*. It's what good representative politicians do in a democracy.

Increasingly, it's people like you who are undermining those concepts but not implementing anything that is a valid replacement, and they are eroded by the changes in the old mainstream media as well. So more and more stress *is* indeed placed on new media to provide some of these functions.

This concept of "Server = law" -- geez lol. No, that's old-fashioned thinking, Marjolein, and increasingly, you will be finding these TOS declared unconscionable by courts of law.

As for the old tekkie "forced migration policy" -- i.e. if you don't like it leave, go run your own server, blah blah blah, the answer is: no. When you create services on servers that are as large and unique as Twitter, you don't just tell people you don't like to leave. And the owners/coders aren't doing that. Looks to me that rather than make the socialist little exclusive club, they are creating something far more open that I think even they themselves don't understand the consequences of.