Twitter has increasingly slid into user-hostile territory. I moderate /r/Twitter on reddit and we have a pinned thread just showing nothing but complaint after complaint, because content moderation is a failure when you attempt to scale it.
We'd like to get Twitter Comms to address it at some point, but the company is opaque. It's just nuts.
Just a small anecdote: I created a company account, then set the birthday to ~1 year ago, when the company was registered. Everything was fine for 5 minutes, then my account has been blocked with a notification telling me that I need to be at least 13 years old to use Twitter. I can still login but cannot access the settings to change the birthday (or just remove it) as a screen “fix your age or prove your identity” is blocking me from doing anything. I used their support form to send a proof of ID a few times but the account gets blocked again every time.
Somehow twitter believes that 1 years old are trying to join their platform. That was more than 6 months ago, and still no solution ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Most hilarious one related to the 13yo boobytrap was that they lock you out if your date of registration predates your 13th birthday, regardless of how long ago it was.
Like, if you were younger than 13 at some point, and you didn’t prove yourself that you’re no longer 13, it can’t be ruled out that you potentially haven’t aged since, by Twitter logic.
Seen through survivorship bias it’s obvious that you may never set DoB for any of your accounts, but ... I guess Twitter is kind of weird one from what SNS is generally understood to be.
> Like, if you were younger than 13 at some point, and you didn’t prove yourself that you’re no longer 13, it can’t be ruled out that you potentially haven’t aged since, by Twitter logic.
No, that’s due to the fact that they don’t want to store any data about yourself from when you were under 13 years old. I had this happen to me when I changed my account age and it said it had to delete all tweets (amongst other info) from when I was <13 and my profile was wiped (bio, profile pic, website link), likely because they don’t timestamp profile changes in their DB (some audit log probably has it though).
>7. I have a “mixed audience” app and would like to age screen my users. Are there specific requirements for the age screen?
>An example of a neutral age screen would be a system that allows a user freely to enter the month and year of birth. Avoid encouraging children to falsify age information by, for example, stating that certain features will not be available to users under age 13.
I lost my Discord account for daring to use the "change your e-mail address" feature. Nothing warned me that this was a potentially-destructive action. It happens.
A year or two ago I went through every online account I have to change the email address.
I should have kept a record of results. Some were good and easy. Some had no option other than an account closure. Some involved a single contact of support without any real verification that I was actually the account holder. Some involved a protracted string of contact with support that tried to claim I was asking for an impossibility. Some services kept my old email on file and I periodically receive something to my old address.
I had way too many successful email changes that did not send an email to my old email account informing me of the action. If a hacker had stolen those accounts, I might not know for a long time!
Similar story: I finally created an account last week and after a few minutes of looking around, I tried to follow 1 person and got locked out. It requires a phone number to the unlock the account now. Just feels like gratuitous extortion of personal data. Also, seriously asking: Why does it even let you create an account with email if it will force you to give a phone number anyway?
Yeah, this phone number lock is really annoying. Depending on the state of the account you may have a link on the desktop version to bypass adding a phone number.
I created a regular account. I followed a handful of people. Not long after (same day I think) it said they thought I was a bot and could I scan my ID and email it to them to verify I was a human.
I couldn't even log into the account to delete it without providing them a photo of my ID, so I said fuck that and never thought about it ever again.
Unpopular opinion: I am not sure if I come to the the same conclusion (that Twitter is user-hostile). Even if you see "complaint after complaint". It could be actually true that the complaint ratio is going down, because the # of users or engagement is actually growing. I am not saying I know the rate, but I don't think we can rule that possibility out.
As a thought exercise, if you assume there is 1% chance of someone complaining about something that went wrong with their account. And there is a billion users using that service. You will have to have a super high accuracy to not end up in a world where there isn't a dozen+ people being affected each month. I believe that Twitter (and other services) actually do try very hard to avoid this, but it is a very hard problem.
To this, some HN users believe that they just should have say 100k+ humans moderating everything, but it is very hard to have 100K humans consistently moderate and not introduce biases.
I come to the conclusion that Twitter is user-hostile based not on complaints but rather by details mentioned in this post (user suspensions in response to posting 'memphis' in a tweet.) It doesn't take much else to make this determination.
I will note that your thought exercise is a statment, least in part, of Masnick's Impossibility Theorem (Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible To Do Well):
Content moderation is trivially easy when your users pay for it or have skin in the game. Making accounts paid would immediately fix the problem as few people would want to risk losing real money.
Content moderation only becomes a problem where your business model is "growth and engagement" and your revenue depends on your users generating as much content as possible.
If users are paying, you run into lawsuit territory when you try to censor them for their views. Not necessarily because you can't stop doing business with the person who you decide is an enemy of the people, but because you are still taking all the money of their followers and others who signed up to read their tweets. So accepting money would require a moderation policy that didn't change every other week but was clear and upfront in terms of what business services were being sold.
If skin in the game was a guarantee we would have no crime. Spammers, astroturfers, and scammers already spend real money to get their message out for their purposes.
Real name polices already failed at their stated purpose even after people losing their job over tweets and Facebook posts was a well known things. Whatever fee people would be willing to pay wouldn't cut it. Hell it didn't work even on the infamous SomethingAwful!
It's not a guarantee but it's much better than what we have now.
All the issues you mention were successfully dealt with on the forums of the good old days with much less resources (moderation done by volunteers and very little technical expertise - definitely no machine learning).
We'd like to get Twitter Comms to address it at some point, but the company is opaque. It's just nuts.