For five years, I ran a network of Twitter accounts promoting local tech events. They were (uncreatively) called the "Tech Events Network" and included ATXTechEvents, DENTechEvents, NYC_TechEvents, and 50+ others that would broadcast local meetups, even supporting basically unknown tech communities like Albuquerque with ABQTechEvents. All received massive traffic, engagement (RTs & likes specifically), and became an active megaphone for their respective communities.. gaining almost 300k followers.
More importantly, the meetups and events they tweeted saw attendance rise and more people know about them in general. It was great for everyone and I had hundreds of thank you tweets, emails, and DMs.
But Twitter's repeated, bizarre, and unexplained API limitations hobbled the system more times than I can count. They'd suddenly suspend one for "API abuse", I'd get it manually reviewed and they'd release it.. only to have 10 suspended the next day. I even started asking followers to tag @TwitterSupport on our behalf and zero progress.
After dozens of suspensions, I finally shut it all down. I haven't come up with a theory beyond Twitter hates tech communities but that feels off..
In all honesty, the Shadowban was the worst thing they ever did...
I've had 3 accounts, 1 of which has been stuck at sub 130 users for over 10 years of posting, no matter what I've tried. That would be f*ing impossible on any platform that truly fosters creativity and even a scrap of post equality/fairness. There is also absolutely no indication nor procedure for contesting a limited status placed on social accounts on platforms like Twitter, it's all done in secret, which adds insult to injury.
Truth is, the minute you mention anything now that is remotely perceived as critical of a platform on the platform, a switch is flipped that prevents you from building anything positive within that community.
Tech sufferers greatly from a "God Complex" syndrome, and it's exactly what will prevent it from getting better. Even the largest social platforms are not insulated from bad leadership being accountable, and frankly, that's the reason why things really die a slow death these days.
Since I decided to just bolster my own site, I get reliable growth, and metrics... Focusing on my own site is a lot less stressful than relying on the gaslighting and unexplained "growth-hobbling" that is now far too typical on social sites...
> Tech sufferers greatly from a "God Complex" syndrome, and it's exactly what will prevent it from getting better. Even the largest social platforms are not insulated from bad leadership being accountable, and frankly, that's the reason why things really die a slow death these days.
I think I know what you mean, though I typically frame it almost like they have an Anti-god problem. Big tech leaders are often explicitly trying to avoid passing moral or ethical judgment, so instead rely on "data" or "numbers." What a lot of the "I-follow-data" cultists seem not to realize is that "data" is basically inherently meaningless per se, thus decision-making based on data alone builds interpretive value judgments into the decision rule being used. It also invites fanatics to start producing manipulated/biased/tendentious "data" that appears to be some impartial metric, but is in fact just veiled motivated reasoning exploited to drive an agenda.
Facebook and Google appear to have followed this to its logical extent, allowing literal algorithms to make decisions "based on data." So has Twitter, though Twitter's system is probably even more dysfunctional.
At least when God damns you, you can argue your case and be presented with the evidence and know who to complain to. Tech damnation involves receiving a vaguely-worded message about polices or "community guidelines" being violated (per some unknown interpretation), or no reason at all. You have no recourse or chance to argue your case, even though many times the damnation was an error.
Why does "justice" as a concept exist? How did it evolve? Where is the advantage in it? After all, in non-human species, the runt of the litter tends to die.
I have ample evidence that all humans are deeply concerned with this concept, however different their conceptions may be; yet I have seen or heard no evidence that could plausibly explain why it helped sustain us as a species.
In my experience, big tech leaders are cowards and hide behind “data” to justify whatever actions they’re looking to take. I’ve watched as teams of “tech leaders” wait and massage “the data” until the data fits the narrative they’re trying to push.
I’ll say it again: these are the actions of cowards. I’m ashamed these people are by default charting humanity’s course.
> Tech sufferers greatly from a "God Complex" syndrome, and it's exactly what will prevent it from getting better.
I saw an excellent critique of Roblox the other day, which covered many aspects of their business and different kinds of abuse which are happening in and around their game.
The most bizarre part was that they sent some questions to the company - and the company responded by saying they “clearly weren’t being objective” and essentially gaslighting the people making the video.
I think the people in charge of Roblox seriously don’t see themselves as holding any sort of responsibility to the broader society that pays their bills. It’s like someone watched The Corporation and thought - “oh companies can get away with sociopathic behaviour? I want in!”. Doing harm to the world in the name of your bottom line doesn’t make you clever. It makes you the villain.
What's weird is no one really notices/cares about this type of behavior. I sometimes wonder if this is seen as a feature: institutional sociopathy shields powerful sociopathic people from their consequences.
A few possibilities:
* people generally cannot discern moral realities within complex systems, instead preferring simpler narratives ("he made a lot of money, he must be a decent chap")
* people can see it on occasion, but insist that the problem is the single bad actor rather than the system enabling them
* people realize they can't do much about it, as they're implicitly bound up in this system run amok
Yeah I’m puzzled why people don’t seem to care too. I think it’s mostly the third - complaining about companies acting malevolently is boring like climate change. Most people would rather not think about it.
At the companies themselves, I blame the C suite entirely. It’s a leadership problem. What is the vision for your company? Why do we all get out of bed in the morning? If the goal is to make the world better, then concerns about how your business is impacting the world would matter. But having a goal to simply to enrich the founders (which seems to be the case with most tech companies), is like making an entire car just so you can drive to the gas station.
Companies like Twitter and Roblox change the world by their very presence. It’s shameful to waste that capacity by not making the world better in the process.
That’s simply not true. CEOs can and do argue for value based decision making in plenty of companies. Plenty of boards support them in this. Values alignment, “knowing your why”, acting with integrity - these are the qualities that help your company still be around in 100 years time.
Even if you want to make the most money possible, you usually won’t get there by screwing over your employees and customers.
I don't think a broader society pays their bills; their customers do.
"Broader society" is not a real entity; it's just a term to denote, presumably, the entire planet's population, given Roblox is not limited to a single country.
I saw part of that video the other day and what you and the guy in the video are saying is absurd. This guy is all butthurt that Roblox can't monitor and ban people for what goes on in Discord chats. How and why would anyone expect Roblox to enforce it or even care what happens off of their platform?
I’d have no problem if that was their stance. “Hey, we know about the abuse happening in the broader game development communities and we want to help, but we can’t control what happens on discord”. But that’s not their stance. They seem to be pretending nothing bad ever happens, and also (for some reason) running a stock market for children over Roblox items with extortionate profit taking on their end.
I don’t expect them to fix everything overnight. But there’s plenty they could do, if they weren’t too busy gaslighting and ignoring any criticism of their platform.
I still have those old social media accounts, now they serve to drive content to my site (the primary focal point of content I create) though... I make full music videos for my site, and then cut smaller snippets of it to post as I can on social sites, which makes my life a lot easier.
I question whether reddit has shadow banned one of my accounts. I post regularly to both and one has about 10k karma and the other seems stuck at 2k. I do get the occasional like but never anything substantial and it makes me wonder if they are severely limiting how many people see my posts. I could just be imagining it but with the thought of shadow band it had me wondering. I couldn’t remember my password so on a separate computer I made a new account and hope to stay logged in on the first one so I don’t lose it is why I am using 2 accounts.
Everybody is doing that. Even here on the HN you'll get shadow banned - couple of weeks ago whole thread that someone else started just disappeared. I become aware of that only when searching for my own message from that thread. It was semi-controversial issue but nothing in that thread (at least at the time I saw its content for the last time) warranted that. Basically what I'm seeing as a HN is just a view that someone else curates.
>But Twitter's repeated, bizarre, and unexplained API limitations hobbled the system more times than I can count. They'd suddenly suspend one for "API abuse", I'd get it manually reviewed and they'd release it.. only to have 10 suspended the next day. I even started asking followers to tag @TwitterSupport on our behalf and zero progress.
Fundamentally that's the result of a toxic, lazy engineering culture that thinks the solution to heavy load is to punish users rather than improving the system. Whoever was in tech leadership positions there at the time should be ashamed of themselves.
I haven't come up with a theory beyond Twitter hates tech communities but that feels off..
Might simply be "money". The "Web 2.0" business model, which actually sometimes makes money, is Revenue = Transactions per second X Revenue per Transaction - (Capital Expense + Operating Expense). It really is that simple.
Capital expense is both the cost of servers and what not which records quarterly as depreciation expense, operating expense is everything you pay per month, whether it is developer salaries, licensing fees, or network bandwidth charges. And transaction revenue is typically in units of $ (or local currency) per 1,000 transactions.
Twitter, is an information business. That is to say the value it provides to people who use it are the consumption of, or distribution of, information.
In previous technologies, one could inject "forced information distribution" (aka advertising) into the "good information" that people valued. And for MBA types without any vision that became their "go to" mantra. We can force ads on the users which people will pay us to do.
It is an adversarial relationship to be sure, there isn't much incentive for Twitter to be "compelling" like there is for audience metric based information services like television shows or movies. And there are plenty of technological mechanisms to utilize for injecting information and for collecting demographic data and reselling it.
The failure in that model, and the one that probably shut down the event tweet network, is that Twitter was not getting enough money from NYC_TechEvents and others for their use of the system in these ways. The "easy"[1] coin was personal data and forced impressions. As a result anything that interfered with those revenue streams was to be shut down. The road not taken was to exploit the time value of information and the imbalance between readers and writers.
There are a number of ways that information gains value, one is its timeliness. The canonical reference for this is stock market quotations. Getting a stream quotes that are 15 minutes delayed is "free", getting those same quotes within a few seconds costs money, and getting them within milliseconds costs exponentially more money. Notice that the "information" here is all the same, it is just "when" (or the time) you see it that is valuable. So let's apply a business model that collects the value in "timeliness" of Twitter.
Twitter keeps me up to date
To extract this value, create two tiers of service, one which is free and the Tweet stream is 15 minutes delayed, one which costs $4.99 / month and the tweet stream is instantaneous.
Twitter lets me reach my group
To extract this value, create two tiers of service. One is free and reaches 10 people per minute. Which is to say your tweet goes out and 10 random followers see it right away, and then in the next minute another 10 see it, and in the next minute another 10, until all of your followers see it. A paid account can increase this diffusion rate from 10 to 100 @$4.99/month, to a million $49.99/month.
These are just a couple of examples of creating a model where the more you value timeliness of the information, the more you have to pay for that. What this does is provide a system that captures the intrinsic value of timely information and allows you to create a value proposition around it. No advertising, just people talking to people, and some wanting to talk to bigger crowds or stay more informed etc, and a whole lot of people who are fine with things being delayed a bit because its free.
Its fun to model these things too. You can analyze what sort of return you would need to have a margin that sustains a business and it becomes just like modelling making widgets in a factory, all of the classic business mechanics work like you would expect. Pricing the value add is just as hard as it is in a goods economy, and pricing mistakes are just as costly. But it equalizes out exactly like it does for goods.
[1] The term easy here is a way of expressing a technique that has worked, for the definition "generated revenue" for worked, in other situations.
More importantly, the meetups and events they tweeted saw attendance rise and more people know about them in general. It was great for everyone and I had hundreds of thank you tweets, emails, and DMs.
But Twitter's repeated, bizarre, and unexplained API limitations hobbled the system more times than I can count. They'd suddenly suspend one for "API abuse", I'd get it manually reviewed and they'd release it.. only to have 10 suspended the next day. I even started asking followers to tag @TwitterSupport on our behalf and zero progress.
After dozens of suspensions, I finally shut it all down. I haven't come up with a theory beyond Twitter hates tech communities but that feels off..