[Dudelander]

This article is profoundly unhelpful for people who's job is to determine what speech is promoted and what speech isn't.

[dmbche]

"I see a lot of bad speech scrolling through twitter, speech that would not be worth engaging with in any context and speech that is not worth engaging in a context where engagement is a metric the platform optimizes for.

What is my solution to this? To ban this speech? To ban twitter, as a platform that is optimized for anger and hatred? My solution is to close the tab and to read a book.

The most basic decision is not what to say, but what to listen to, since what we say is in some sense a response to that, and we will always respond in kind."

This is advice for the layperson.

[mitthrowaway2]

For me, the times when I compulsively engage with something is more akin to a threat-response. The scary things I react to are things like a twitter-mob forming to take someone down, or some policy proposal to enrich billionaires, or a politician offering a feel-good one-liner built on broken math.

I could go read a book, but blissful ignorance only lasts until the torches are burning down my own door. Perhaps it's better to try to engage in hopes of putting out the fires early? The foundation of democracy's is civic engagement.

[_chu1]

Why the fuck is that a job? Shouldn't what speech someone follows be up to their own discretion?

[shadowgovt]

a) because services like Twitter and Facebook have to show something in the timeline. What they show is this job

b) because in practice, an approach too laissez-faire here has negative impact both on customer adoption (most people don't actually enjoy cesspools, and they leave when they decide a service is one) and regulation (even in countries with broad free-speech protections, some communication is de facto illegal and there are consequences for a service taking no responsibility for keeping their house in order).

[Dudelander]

It's called a search engineer, and this isn't left to people's own discretion because they don't have the time or inclination to make their own search engines / recommendation engines.

[archarios]

if only we could trust people to make informed decisions..

[azinman2]

I don’t think that was the intended audience.

[Dudelander]

So the whole point of the article was "read a book dummies"?

[tom_]

Their employer should be providing them guidance on the matter. This article is for the rest of us.