On the contrary, Twitter has repeatedly failed to enforce their own rules/TOS, primarily to benefit a single extremist political faction.

So good thing they're trying for a change?

That doesn't mean I agree with their moderation as a whole but they seem to have tried to do the right thing here

But it would effectively kill the various cat-and-mouse gaming of the entire system by spammers, scammers, and sub-nation-state adversaries.

That's Twitter's problem, not the user's problem. Your comment is akin to the old open source saying, "It's open source, go fix the bug yourself."

Heh,I had a terrible experience with the twitter api too but that's why you develop on one account and deploy with a different account. If the api limit is 100 requeste per hour make sure to limit to a paranoid limit like 40-60. Use multiple accounts if you can and need to.

Twitter uses automated spam bot detection and you'll never talk to a human for an unban. This is one of those things where you walk around the mountain instead of climb over it. Their api isn't fun but you can do useful stuff with it if you accept the limits.

Hope the author tries again :)

I don't want to be too glib, because your technical concerns are legitimate and well-argued. But... have you actually tried using it?

It works fine! It doesn't work as well as Twitter and has rough edges, but at this point it's well past the "will it work?" stage. There are real people there posting real content and engaging in real ways. If Twitter were to disappear tomorrow, people could all just move over and... it would be fine.

So it's OK to criticize, but the idea that it's somehow fatally flawed seems weird to me. It works fine.

The difference being that on Parler the 'cesspool' as you call it is all there is, or at least it is the main attraction.

On Twitter it is easy enough to find, but an average user mostly does have to go looking for it, or at least be following someone who goes looking for it. Twitter also does make efforts to drain the cesspool, although it can certainly be debated whether those efforts are sufficient or even being made in good faith.

The latter wouldn't be such a problem if they had an established, WORKING process for appeals. Or to get in contact with a human at all.

As for the spambots: ignore them, they don't do much besides luring morons to porn sites. The Nazis and other similar trolls are vastly more dangerous for Twitter and for societies.

Giving people the choice of whether they want to accept moderation or not, seems reasonable.

For example, if twitter allowed everything that is allowed by law, but also gave people control over content that they see, then that seems fine.

There is a fundamantal difference between disallowing something, and giving a user the option of not seeing certain content.

IE, I do not believe that the block feature is censorship, for example.

> Is that really what you want?

I'd want to have the option to control the content that I see, as opposed to twitter forcing its own decision. I don't see a problem with someone choosing to allow spam to themselves, if they are OK with that.

LOL, I couldn't disagree more. Twitter is profoundly broken. Scams to UX, pretty much every aspect of it is subpar.

This is THE ONE THING they've done right. I'm come on Twitter to read what people wrote about stuff. Last thing we need is an emotionless machine generated feed.

Alternative take, particularly pertinent to this situation:

The person handling twitter is not a technical person, but a customer support person who handles hundreds of dumb questions, day in, day out, from customers who have no clue what they're doing but will often throw technical terms around.

Expecting solid technical answers from a general twitter account for a business is beyond absurd.

I strongly agree with this. It's a far better solution than censorship.

I will not talk about the ethics and privacy issues of Twitter but about user experience and quality of content on feed.

The quality of content on your feed is as good as the people you choose to follow. Choose selectively, block and mute liberally. Keep doing this, and your feed will be fantastic.

I use Twitter only for work. I set my Trending country to some country I have never heard the name of outside of trivia books containing nation capitals.

And my Twitter experience is fantastic. Have meaningful discussions, learn new things, gain new perspectives.

I keep away from politics and such.

What if they're not idiots? What if that system is working exactly as intended?

I have not said this, and I do not think it. What I actually said is that I wish twitter would do a better job, you've managed to somehow invert that.

The medium (in this case Twitter) is in fact a part of the problem and there are very specific features that contribute to it. The quote tweet feature is a good example. It fundamentally amplifies and encourages combative exchanges and negativity through its design.

In fact looking at how a platform can prevent or encourage certain kinds of behavior/interactions is super interesting when you dive deep - I don't find it lazy or tired at all.

This website is full of employees (and ex employees) of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Twitter, and any other company that has done stuff at global scale.

Scaling provides constraints, we all understand that. The interface being completely miserable to use is not because of that constraint.

Which problem? Seriously: the only legitimate problem I know of is that Twitter gives artificial reach to things via algorithmic engagement. They literally send me push notifications for tweets their algorithm thinks is interesting.

If you retweet something some asshole says and I don't like it, I should probably just unfollow you because you could have just screenshotted the original tweet and included the image... that was you actively sending that content, and wasn't the original anymore.

(FWIW, the reason I don't trust this is because I actually further disagree with your assertion that the algorithms aren't causing reach, because Twitter no longer does linear timelines: everything you see, including from your followers, has been curated by the engagement-driving algorithm, and so if he starts down-modding stuff then it actually will work and actually will reduce reach as you will be less likely to see it even if the people you follow retweet it.)