Prokofy's dashboard

Mdy,

Um, why do you think that somehow my objection to Block in Track doesn't have "anything" to do with my own desire to be heard -- duh? Your surly suspicions and curled lip of distaste are obvious, but you're at the wrong address with all of this. Of course I desire to be heard, just like anyone, and I don't play any silly geeky game of fake altruism like you all do. It's a totally legitimate desire to be heard. What, you would like being muffled and suppressed?!

I *do* have a larger interest than just my own little voice on Twitter, however: I think that any system needs feedback, and any country needs criticism and the ability both to criticize and petition leaders. And this matters, and it matters getting it right at the early stages of social media that will aspire to supplant what we have in the form of institutions and old media now.

Re: "Only a fool or a liar will claim to be unconcerned if they *truly* believe their voice can be silenced so completely by the very people they want to reach and influence."

So, you're assuming I'm a liar and fool. Well, whatever. I don't pretend to be altruistic and unconcerned about being heard, that's silly. I've never said any such thing. I'm also concerned about other people being heard, too, which is more than I can say for you and others in these threads, who want only one, selfish thing: tools to block the hell out of people you hate and ideas you dislike -- forever.

As for my "confidence," oh, I think we can give this a really big fight. But in fact it's a slender reed. For example, I could always criticize somebody on my blog, which is owned by Six Apart. But what if one of these A-listers whose knickers are in a twist because I talked back to them on Twitter goes and parties or lunches it up with the Six Apart people, and says, "Get rid of Prokofy. Just find a pretext." What protection would I have from that happening? I would have none. Because they have the same silly and overbroad TOS as anybody, allowing for hugely discretionary and arbitrary interpretation of what might be "abuse". Basically, any of these services can expel you "for any reason or no reason" and there really isn't a place for the First Amendment to play out, unless you plan to type samizdat.

One minute, it could seem like legions of people critical of a Scoble or an Arrington could be blabbing away on their Live Journals or Word Presses and then WHOOPS those track-blocking types could be putting them on master shit lists shared around the tech gangs in Silicon Valley and likeminded circuits and then they're toast. And we know they do this already when they need to. THey are very vulnerable to peer pressure. For example, Scoble explained on FriendFeed that he blocked me because "his readers pointed out to him" that he should. I've seen such sycophantic activity on Twitter/FF that you wouldn't believe. If Scoble nods and says something positive to me, suddenly a wave of his little fanboyz come to pat me on the head and follow me. If he disses me and decides to throw a fit over something I've criticized him about, his little grouplets also unfollow me or tsk-tsk on FF. It's hilarious to watch. Don't any of these *men* have minds of their own?!

Uh, I'm not going to "admit" something that isn't true, dearie. I'm definitely crusading for the common good. People who crusade for the common good don't exempt themselves from this common good, duh. It's good for all of us -- and you, too -- if Twitter is kept as an open and free platform that doesn't acquire the horrid, nasty, vicious and hateful climate rejecting newcomers, non-techs, dissenters, etc. that one finds in so many settings whether Terra Nova or Tech Crunch.

It might be that as more and more people get blocked by this bunch, they in turn will network and become their own center of power, too. The Internet seems to have always functioned that way. But lately, it has become possible to blanket more and more applications and services with bans and filters, and that's very much of concern. It's like making people un-persons.

mdy:

naaah, it does very much threaten public discourse -- but nice try, attempting to use reverse psychology in your doomed forums battle. For every point I've made about how one can do temporary workarounds to get around the obstacle course put on the Internet by neuralgic geeks, here's an extension of the same points:

a) vain A-listers who block people now both from following them so that they won't see them and talk back to them and/or vain A-listers who lobby for block-in-track to keep vanity feed firehouse without "negativity" are eventually going to make sure that people they don't like can't see them at all, anywhere, and make sure eventually that they don't talk, anywhere, as they gain more and more control over blog sites that more and more will be owned by a few companies. This "block even from reading" is already possible to do with Drupal web pages and is already practiced, included by at least one fussy busybody named Nobody in Second Life.

b) Once the A-listers and their neuralgic friends catch the hysterical wave to blackball certain people, they do. They circulate hit-lists. They tell each other with great malicious glee that they are "not feeding trolls" which is of course a ridiculous concept.

c) As for blimps, I guess you have zero sense of humour, but why-are-we-not-surprised.

d) the other "whatevers" are all destined to be unnoticed and amount to "talking on a plastic telephone not linked up to anything". While some narrow segment of controlling nits might find this "just the thing," we ought not to put power in their hands, given the dismantling of other, more free and liberal institutions which they are now undermining.

And what needs to happen is that the insensitive but think-skinned louts that make and run social media and a lot of the other tech stuff out of Silicon Valley need a vast and very loud and long wake-up call from the Rest of the Country and the World. Just think of what happened to Trenton, New Jersey ("Trenton Makes The World Takes").

So your argumentation is shown as the specious thing it is.

The fact is, news aggregators and influencers and political wannabees like Arrington want to control the Internet. They think "somewhere out there" are places "for people like that" who are entitled to their "free speech" "somewhere". That's not a public discourse, however. It's not the public commons. It is not the place where the First Amendment will live and move and have its being. I don't expect you to understand this.

Nice try there mdoeff, but I don't need to be "heard through Track". I don't spam people. If there's some A-lister I really need to read me, I can still write "@" to them, or write comments on their vanity TV shows, and chances are they will NOT have turned me off *even if they can* precisely because most vanity-feedsters are insanely curious about what is said about them.

I can also use my blog, comment on their blog, or hey, rent a blimp to fly across San Francisco Bay, or whatever.

My point is larger, and while I realize you project on to other people your own thinking patterns, and assume others merely operate thinking of their own self-interest as you do, I am trying to call attention to the larger ramifications of everybody using track-block -- and using it hatefully, aggressively, even fearfully as many in these threads have been advocating. That's all.

Uh, I hardly call a "rat hole" merely responding to the opinions here. It's a forum where you can do it. You're welcome to exchange private emails if you don't want to speak in public and never want to hear people disagree with you, which seems to be the case.

I won't be settling down after a week or two : ) – Prokofy, on May 08, 2008 22:17

All media becomes something different than what the framers imagined and is subject to a rising tide of emergent behavior. The first thing that happened is that 99 percent of the people using it do NOT state merely what they are doing at that moment (to do so would be to write boringly "I'm sitting on my computer or telephone doing nothing") but write *a thought* they have, or articulate *an opinion* or *provide a link to some other written piece on the Internet*.

It is not a massive lifelogging system: as Scoble said about FriendFeed, it's a World Wide Talk Show where everyone is a producer and as opionated as they wish to be. (I'd call FF "The World Wide Show and Tell")

Thus what has happened is that far from being some little lifelogger for your little posse at work or your little closeknit family circle, it has been a means by which all those more isolated circles in fact talk to larger circles of both likeminded and non-likeminded. It's a national and international conversation, or in some cases, a sectoral conversation, i.e. "all geeky lovers of apis" or "all camera lovers" or "all 20-somethings looking for a date" or "all educators using Second Life" or whatever. So it's very, very different than the original real-time IMing Facebook sort of system that the framers envisioned. – Prokofy, on May 08, 2008 16:43

You don't agree with my premise at all, so don't be misleading and tendentiously say you "agree 100 percent of part of it" (geez, what a ruse!) when I said very clearly:

I'd rather have a system of 1) modes' manual banning of accounts for botting and spamming on an individual basis INSTEAD OF 2) arbitrary and massive track-blocking by individuals driven by vanity and hysteria.

Number one is more rational and informed about the whole system; number 2 is irrational and uninformed about system-wide affects on the public commons.

That's because I'd rather have the human judgement exercised by the creators of Twitter looking at the whole system, and in possession of server facts about usages of automatic botters, and in possession all the block lists to see what's up, and in possession of the most accurate and thorough top-down look at all of Twitter's usages, than have the multitudes using their subjective limited human judgement to block people on whims, low thresholds of irritabilty, hearsay, hysteria, etc.

Big difference.

Uh, you're pretty predictable yourself, using an age-old technique. Keep going with your intuition about "unforgiving," because in fact the entire feature you are clamouring about is "unforgiving" and needlessly draconian.

In fact, I think the method whereby those people who create multiple accounts and use bots on them to constantly respam each account are suspended for misuse of resources makes more sense, as human judgement can go into the ban on a case-by-case basis instead of inciting massive hysterical behaviour with numerous thin-skinned controlling net nannies gleefully playing gotcha with blocks and spreading the word to block other people.

System-wide, it makes for a terrible place.

Um, I love how you pre-cook debates lol. Why are you like this? You can't decide what "the only debate is" because there are system wide ramifications of the multiplicity of user choices.

Hey, why not also keep a list of all the people blocked and see if you can hound those people and get them blocked more! Maybe if you try to drown them, they will float.

It's precisely because Block is a brutal and blunt axe that I don't think its use should be encouraged, nor should it also be melded into track.

Some people like the A-list bloggers in the Valley block people from following them so they won't talk back to them or criticize them, but you can just look their page up and read it any way, so it's all pretty silly. It's a mild hindrance and is merely about flagging the power of those people to obstruct you and lobby to do more to obstruct dissenters.

Your high need to eradicate other people makes me wonder why you come on the Internet.

Sam,

I'm constantly amazed at your fake claim that I am somehow "imposing" my views on someone or "telling them how to use Twitter". I'm articulating my view firmly and I stand by it. I will continue to make the arguments for my view. You are apparently used to being rounded up and tribalized in your corporate or IT or geeky setting. I'm not : )

I don't "control" the conversation, that's ludicruous -- that sort of comment comes from inside a horridly intolerant culture that hears a whisper as a shout because it is so used to conformity.

I'm merely posting what I think like anybody else here. Some people have spammed enormous lists of the spam itself, and put up the most hateful and idiotic stuff here. Uh, where's your over-sensitive concern about them "tryinging to take over" and "bullying"? I'm not required to stop speaking just because you find anyone speaking that disagrees with you firmly as "controlling". You're trying to control yourself lol

Let me suggest that you can't tell what I'm rallying against because you are deeply imbued in it yourself: an insular culture that brooks no dissent and is as thin-skinned as a Mac Air, imagining bullies everywhere when people outside their magic circle turn up. Again, try to zoom out and think of the system as a whole rather than wresting a public space into your private email box.

sorenj, you are imagining things. And any coder of any social media or even Web 1.0 website understands what spam and self-replication is and this story is as old as the hills and always planned for in these systems.

You're mistakenly saying I advocated not deleleting the panopticons accounts.

To me, deleting those accounts or any others that begin to aggregate, make multiple bots, etc. are resource hog issues, and spamming issues quite properly dealt with by deletion as the obvious course.

What I oppose is dealing with with this problem in the system by enabling track-block. That has ramifications as I've been explaining. – Prokofy, on May 07, 2008 21:55

Goldtoe/Jason,

Your point about 1) -- that it is useful -- begins to diminish when people began to massively and hysterically block.

3) You may consider it a "bug" but it isn't, because it keeps the system open and transparent and accessible and viewable at many levels. Adding this "feature" is not something supported by all customers; it is not a showing of "all customers" just because a tiny percentage of forums-dwellers showed up here to clamour for it. Most people aren't even aware of the ramifications.

Your "willing it to be so" is valid only in that you are a private company doing what you want. However, you'll increasingly have to realize your responsibility and status as a common carrier and as a provider of a public commons. And to the extent that you continue to privilege some kinds of communications over others (your friends, your geographical cohorts, your loudest customers on forums agitating you, etc.) you will find that this has ramifications for the whole society.

4) That's great that you as product manager get "a lot of say" in this feature. But it sounds like you haven't thought of all the consequences, and the actuality you haven't thought about most of all is this: you didn't make it that way to start with, because you a) didn't think it was necessary and b) didn't realize you'd be dealing with so many vanity feeds c) wanted to encourage people's access to each other's streams to help it spread virally.

The "folks" deciding not to have content delivered to them are more properly located with that wish in their own private email box, or in their own private corporate network, or in whatever other private club they are in with its doors and rules.

Is Twitter a private club?

If it becomes massively adapted (it may not scale to that, but let's dream) do you think it's right that a bunch of coders and their close personal friends in SF get to decide where and how the First Amendment plays out (parts one, two, and three of it), culturally and politically, in a context where old media is dying?

A nation of track blockers with aggregating Valley A-listers blocking out criticism of them is a nation cut off from feedback, and that's not scientific. Surely that argument should have some merit with you as a purported computer science expert.

Yes I do?

And again, glad to see you're oh-so-plugged-in, mdoeff, likely living within jogging distance of the devs in SF, but hey, social media is *for everyone* not just you in the Valley. You'll have to accept that.

Because they haven't weighed in. This is not a trivial issue. At stake is the nature of their whole concept of viral user-made social media.

I see no evidence that they are "all on the same page". You know why? Because...this feature hasn't been put in yet. You still can't put blocks into track. Perhaps they are reviewing or coding or testing this but...there it is. It is not done yet.

They solved the problem short-term by removing these panopticons accounts, but the issue of how/whether to put in this feature isn't done.

I don't accept anything whatsoever and I don't plan to "move on" because I'm not required to move on by solving *your problem* with an opinion you don't like with a *forced migration policy* where I'm supposed to "get lost."

I really don't care if they put this block in -- there will emerge other griefer-types who will get around it; there will also continue to be commentary like mine about the problem of wrongful blocks, and the long-term problem of insularity and distortion will remain.

I haven't "dissed" Goldtoe -- this isn't a hierarchical mafia and we're not in a MMORPG. I don't even pay for this service. Perhaps he -- and you -- feel entitled to do whatever you want, for whatever arbitrary reasons, "just because," but members of the public are also free to fight back.

Please, spare me the homilies, the tribalistic grooming behaviours -- it's a user-generated type of media, that means you'll have to accept you're on the platform with *other people* not just your posse.

As you can see below, I've done further research, guided by my skepticism, lack of being persuaded by you, and innate curiosity and unwillingess to get into prostrate mode just because a dev speaks some start-up corporate-speak making it seem to some customers that their lobbying to nerf a feature is complete. This is an age-old story.

And as you can see below, my persistence in reading up, studying, thinking has in fact proved my point: he is not any absolute authority. He is put off to customer management on here, which already lets us know he is not a prima dona in the code cave exclusively -- he's been sent out of the code cave to talk to the masses. He seems to be an amalgam of both within Getting Satisfaction and within Twitter, not sure how that diagram ties up. Again, let me repeat my question...and you are...???

His role in this company is subordinate to the co-founders, who have not ruled yet. Now, they may have distributed decision-making or some other hippie kind of "future of work" crap going on in their company, we'll soon see, eh?

Fact is: feature not implemented. I'll be willing to bet real money that they are really still arguing about this upstairs.

End of story. – Prokofy, on May 07, 2008 07:06

I don't care if Goldtoe is Lord and Master of the Universe. There are those above his head. If they aren't in Twitter, even, perhaps they can be found in the legislators and courts of the state of California.

Honestly, you kids are far too supine, and far too craven to these SF devs. They are just devs in a start-up, just geeks who hire people to manage you.

Here's what his profile says:

"Jason Goldman
31 year old male Libra
Location: San Francisco : California : United States
Interests: flaming swords +2, underwater cartoon photography, pixels (e.g. green), toast, slime, warcraft"

Um, gosh, I realize I don't count because I'm not at level 70 in WoW and I don't live in California, but I refuse to bow down to a 31-year-old male Librar named Jason and I don't care WHAT his job title is here, he is not implementing this feature and is not the final say on it.

and if he would like me and others to take him more seriously, he needs to have a less goofy picture and description.

More to the point, just Google Twitter and find out the top honchos:

Jack Dorsey
Biz Stone
Evan Williams

http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2007/05...

These are the co-founders. Read more here:
http://blog.obvious.com/

Here's what they say about him, showing his subordination to him, even though he's teh awesomeness:

"Jason Goldman starting working for Pyra in 2002, shortly before we got acquired by Google, and went on to become product manager of Blogger. As I wrote about when he left Google six months ago, he kicked ass (even though it was sort of fluke that I hired him in the first place).

This time I'm prepared. So after taking a few months off, I'm proud to say that Jason is once again working with Biz and I and (for the first time) the rest of the fabulous Obvious crew."

Also there are investors, like Susan Wu.

So, again, regardless of the kick-ass qualifications of whatever geek coder dude that puts his hand to "customer management," customers need not remain supine, subserviant fools staring up in awe at their mouths because we count just as much -- if not more! -- than they do in *user-generated social media*.

That's why it's called SOCIAL MEDIA because it's NOT just about "freedom of the press belongs to him who owns one."

Mdy...and you are...?

I'm not persuaded that he represents Twitter per se, but isn't merely the Twitter account manager in this third-party site hired by Twitter, speaking on its behalf to "manage the customers" that devs don't like managing. That's all. His "official rep" does NOT mean that he represents the *actual thinking of the devs*.

You are suffering from Tigger syndrome -- a belief that interface agents sent out to manage you are people you have to accept as "the final say". They don't.

Even if he "the real essential original Twitter representative" -- he's not the chief. There are those above his head. One needs to appeal to them.

I do have grounds to say it's narrow based on your abundantly clear posts here.

Um, I read Goldtoe's post. He is not some absolute authority. He represents this third-party service, Get Satisfaction, hired by the Twitter developers to handle customer relations, so he is "interfacing" and rendering his understanding of the company policy -- but it's not the final word. The feature isn't operative precisely because obviously this is reviewed above his pay-grade.

Re: ""Our goal is to provide tools that allow people to enjoy the Twitter service in the way that makes sense to them."

This statement is, at one level, merely feel-good corporate speak, and at another level, an admonition to you to use the tools available to avoid seeing unwanted content -- and that means *don't use track on keywords that will turn up bunches of spam for you"

I realize user self-restraint is an alien concept when you feel like doing something, yet, it's really more about "preventing a user rising tide of expectations".

"Tracking "accessibility" makes sense to ME, it WORKS for me, and it doesn't impact anyone else using Twitter."

But it's not working. You are getting too much unwanted content that you aren't willing to chill out about it. So it is *not* working, and all you are doing is then getting into entitlement mode demanding the system be changed to suit you.

Tracking DOES impact the entire system. The entire reason that there are bots resorting to this now is precisely because of blocking behaviour. They wouldn't be trying to rise to people's attention again around blocks if it weren't for blocking behaviour which makes them adapt more and more crappy spam methods.

They're also playing on people's vanity.

Having millions of people in a system who assidously block others creates a system-wide, top-level problem of coherency and raises the spectre of suppression of the visibility of dissent. I realize you don't care about that. I do, as do others.

"Blocking bots also makes sense to ME, it would not impact anyone else using Twitter. The problem here is DOESN'T work."

Again, the problem is that you have decided that doesn't is "broken" when the answer is that "it is not there". So use a service like Profilactic which allows you to friend yet block elements of friends' feeds, etc.

Your ability to block ANYTHING (and your subjective judgement of what a bot is) impacts the system when replicated as a typical behaviour.

Um, "trolls" is a completely outdated and silly concept that is a hangover of The Well culture in Silicon Valley; and a leftover of MMORPG culture. You, even in the Netherlands, have imbibed it with your Internet mother's milk. But...it's not valid, and people with persistent criticism or who stick to their guns aren't necessarily bad, or even exhibiting the actual characteristics of "trollness" that people like you whine about. Stop feeding this *outdated concept* of troll, and grow up along with the rest of the Internet that is moving away from those geeky early adapter nerdy artifacts of culture and becoming more mainstream.

You can take the geek out of New Jersey? You can't take the New Jersey out of the geek.

Tindle, a vanity feed is when you track your own name, either compulsively looking it up on tweetscan.com to see others talking you about it, or sending a track yourname command into Twitter. The settings page tells you about it.

If you are NOT using track, you are using something else on the settings (check them): see all @ replies to me regardless of whether I'm following that person.

So if you don't want people talking to you whom you don't like, and only want friends/people you follow to write to you, then move that slider to "receive only @ from those I follow" and get over your agida.

NOT doing this, and getting upset that people talk about you, that they write you whether you want to hear from them or not, IS a vanity feed. CHANGE IT if you do not want a vanity feed.

Oh, you want the ability still to see everybody interesting writing you who you might want to hear from? Then realize that is a firehose that may contain spam, retweets, creeps. Scroll past them -- you who are reading on the web have no excuse not to scroll past.

If you engaged somebody making multiple accounts, and notifying the world that he is doing a huge social hack and prank on them, and twitted them that they should "get a good night's sleep," surprise, surprise. I'm shocked, shocked. Your winnings, sir.

"On a second occasion, I simply suggested he might be more effective and persuasive in his arguments with others if he tried being a little less vitriolic, and used less foul language. I haven't engaged, as you put it, since his resultant response to that suggestion.

Good lord, who is the Little Miss Hall Monitor? I really suggest you grow a much larger tolerance and thicker skin and stop telling strangers -- especially strangers that appear to be deliberate creepy stalkers, that they could somehow modify their behaviour like Mr. Roger's Neighbourhood and be more successful at what they are doing. Um, a kinder, gentler stalker?! You are insane.

"I'm a man who has spent forty six years of his working life in industry, working in abbatoirs, oil refineries, and various other heavy duty industrial environments, so I'm no stranger to bad language, rough and ready company, and bad behaviour. I've heard and seen things that would blister the leather on many a psychiatrist's couch, and, no doubt, send you running for your mother's smelling salts."

Uh, well, that's definitely in the Too Much Information department, but it sounds to me like your main issue here is *the desire to control other people's behaviour*. Don't do that. They won't submit, and you will only get angry.

"There's an old fashioned word that has returned to common use in the United Kingdom. Many erroneously understand it to be an oath, a swear word. It isn't. It's a word that simply meant, to the Victorians, rubbish. That word is 'Bollocks'. It's an appropriate word to use to describe what you have to say, most of the time. You seem, to me, to talk a load of bollocks, and, dare I suggest it? I think that's simply because you are taking a pounding on this issue, but you can't let go, and your vanity has gotten the better of you."

You're strengthening my perception that it is largely neuralgic Brits driving this discussion along with provincial Americans -- loudmouthman is British and naturally would like to impose his national sense of what free speech is acceptable on an international space; others are entitled, of course, to disagree. As is known, the UK has a very, very different notion about free speech and public rhetoric than the U.S. There is a curious inverse relationship. Brits of course don't have the First Amendment, and encourage libel suits more easily in their court system than Americans. They also have a rich tradition of elaborate and literary insult that Americans, who are more innocent in this regard and less cynical in the public space generally avoid. You're exemplifying both features.

No, I just fight back. I push back. I know I'm right about the wider ramifications of a nation of insular track-blockers and I will continue to assert this opinion. This is going to be seen by thin-skin controlling geeks as "imposing my opinion"; it's going to be seen by Brits with less tolerance for free speech as "bollocks"; it's going to be seen by all kinds of Victorian ladies as frightening the horses. I don't care. Sticking to a position you believe to be right isn't vanity; it's conscience.

Mike, there are males grousing even more about @panopticons than females! In fact, this entire thread was begun by a male -- loudmouthman. So that analysis isn't relevant. I think this guy is an equal-opportunity stalker.

Again, my arguments aren't about "free speech," because it's not some notion of inserting absolutist free speech into someone's stream. It's a call to consider the LARGER IMPLICATIONS (which perhaps you are intelligent enough to see) of LOTS OF PEOPLE doing this -- shutting out others, making snap judgements about people who innocently retweet stuff of theirs they like, etc. Indeed, I've spoken to the *second part* of the First Amendment about petitioning to redress grievances of those in power (as other non-state forces increasingly govern people's lives).

I think if the Twitter devs are going to cave to a tiny claque of users here with big mouths on the forums (most people never post on forums, never read them, and have no idea this is an issuse), they will be doing a disservice to the public weal.

One workaround is to enable third-party applications that wish to do so to provide unblocked streams where block within track doesn't work, so that people can still go to a window somewhere if they like and subscribe to a feed somewhere where they can see the top view as an alternative to the kind of filtration that both News Gang and other aggregators will make and also individual power users. – Prokofy, on May 07, 2008 02:53

And i sure as hell DO get what the issue is, and I've outlined it repeatedly; you simply disagree. Don't impugn ignorance to someone who merely strenuously disagrees with you. I've made a completely adequate case as to why your insistence on this particularist usage has wider implications. – Prokofy, on May 07, 2008 02:47