If the people go to twitter then twitter needs to consider their circumstances and accommodate.

It's a for profit private company, not an NGO.

It's not a water company, it doesn't have legally a duty to its clients.

It will do what is good for twitter.

I guess the lesson will be learned by paying a heavy price again and again until it sticks.

I guess the lesson that I've learnt is that there's always a gormless oddball on HN that attempts to instigate an irrelevant argument. Unfortunately, it's a heavy price I continue to pay. Hasn't stuck yet :(

The argument is only irrelevant if you consider the matter solved. But it's not.

You still think "Twitter should do something", like if 30 years of big IT corporation behavior history hasn't proven it's wishful thinking.

What we need is keeping educating people to not use those platforms for anything that requires privacy, to not give all their data to GAFAM and make safe systems more user friendly and ubiquitous. So that it doesn't stay in the HN bubble.

This is not wishful thinking, as people around me are asking me more and more about privacy. Last month, my little bro told me to switch to encrypted channels to talk to him, for something I though was overkill. He is not in IT. It's a slow process, but so is teaching everyone to read.

In that regards, having such argument is a good thing, since that, even in HN, it's a healthy way to discussing between people tech saavy what we could prioritize as a community.

I assume, that, since we are discussing it, some of us are interested in the problem and our role in it.

I don't work at Twitter which is why I'm doing what I can by bringing it up here so someone at Twitter can do something about it. One way to make sure this problem doesn't get solved is to say things like "Twitter is a private company they don't owe anyone anything". Maybe if we as a community stood together to demand these features of big companies then they would consider it a must-do. Cynicism, no matter how valid (very, extremely, enormously valid) is not a reason to let these big Co's relax for even one moment in the pursuit to protect its users.

But anyone worth their salt (imo) would consider these matters.

But the problem is that Twitter has no incentive to do anything at all other than optimize for ad revenue. Which is not a judgement -- it's just physics.

We cannot expect large, private, for-profit enterprises to act compassionately out of moral obligation. The answer is going to lie elsewhere.

a) It's not just Physics as it's not Physics at all.

b) If society is simply behaving in a way that maximizes short-term profits, we're doomed (or doomeder?). The good news is that there is a ton of evidence that this behavior is tempered by at least a little bit of thought for the future.

c) Companies still recognize that "customer goodwill" is a valuable asset even though it's neither quantifiable or convertible.

For thousands of years, we've relied on various forms of public and private postal service. The public ones were funded and run by whatever government, and the private ones provided a service for their customers in exchange for payment. Phone companies have mostly been technically private but heavily regulated, and funded directly by their customers.

That all worked well enough. In contrast, what we have here with Twitter is a system where the customers are the advertisers. The communications on the platform are a byproduct. In this scenario how could we expect Twitter to act any differently?

We need something way different and we tech folk can be part of the solution. Distributed open platforms with public funding and which welcome regulation -- this seems like a direction with some hope.

But I will not be betting on a few do-gooders at Twitter having a little bit of thought for the future acting as our savior.

Agreed! And we desperately need a savior.

I just wanted to point out that it isn't as simple as assuming companies are simply aiming to algorithmically maximize profits.