zlacker

>>feross+(OP)
> And it would make the avoid-harassment side happier, since they could set their filters to stronger than the default setting, and see even less harassment than they do now.

I highly doubt it.

I’m pretty sure typical harassment comes in the form of many similar messages by many different users joining a bandwagon. Moderation wouldn’t really be fast enough to stop that; indeed, Twitter’s current moderation scheme isn’t fast enough to stop it. But the current scheme is capable of penalizing people after the fact, particularly the organizer(s) of the bandwagon, and that creates some level of deterrence. An opt-out moderation scheme would be less effective as a deterrent, since the type of political influencers that tend to be involved in these things could likely easily convince their followers to opt out.

That may be a cost worth paying for the sake of free speech. But don’t expect it to make the anti-harassment side happy.

That said, it’s not like that side can only tolerate (what this post terms as) censorship. On the contrary, they seem to like Mastodon and its federated model. I do suspect that approach would not work as well at higher scale - not in a technical sense, but in terms of the ability to set and enforce norms across servers. But that’s total speculation, and I haven’t even used Mastodon myself…

>>comex+7y
Yep. I've got a small number of friends who are regularly harassed on Twitter (and elsewhere). One for their professional work on climate change. One for their professional work on racial history. And one for their transgender status while being professionally associated with a field that attracts an unusual number of alt-right people.

There are occasional repeat harassers. But the usual situation is "somebody posts about one of my friends to their circle and suddenly a gazillion hate messages arrive from a gazillion different people." The only option to prevent this would be "see zero dms or comments on your posts by people you haven't explicitly allowlisted," which works badly if communicating with an ever-shifting professional network is a part of your job.