Thread by @AlexandraErin

Imagine thinking that any tool that makes harassment on twitter less visible or gives more control over how people interact with your tweets isn't worth having if you can't afford to pay someone to do it for you.

I am 100% here for reply hiding and I hope it leads to more.

If being able to move individual replies to a hidden page is the first baby step to letting us moderate replies to our tweets... I don't care that it will allow a brand or celeb to hide criticism of a bad tweet. We'll all just quote and screen shot instead.

If anything, making dunk ratios non-viable will just make the Streisand effect kick in, as instead of being contained to one spot the reactions will be everywhere.

But meanwhile we'll be able to moderate our own replies.

And yeah, moderation can be soul-destroying. I've had to moderate a large blog reply community before.

I'd still give up the right half of my soul to be able to moderate replies to my tweets on twitter.

Bring on the mod tools. Yes, the rich and powerful will be able to extract more use from them.

Same is true of twitter itself as a whole, even before any special checkmark-only tools or considerations are factored in.

Making the platform *more* useful means the people with the resources to wring more use out of every aspect of it will get still even more out of it. Sure. Capitalism.

But that's no reason to withhold features we need.

Sure.

Counterpoint: I don't actually care if this happens, and I am increasingly confident that this kind of discourse in the replies of a tweet rounds down to zero in its effect on anything.

https://twitter.com/kylejhutton/status/1175379390433304577

It's not "abusing" anything for anti-vaxers to moderate replies to their posts on a platform. I mean, they're wrong. What they do is harmful and they should stop doing it, and they deserve the criticism... but, I mean, actually. Wait.

Who cares if they deserve criticism?

Why is that the concern? Desert and criticism? Anti-vaxers do material harm to the human race. Focusing our discussion in terms of who deserves criticism sort of elevates the concept of criticism to punishment and makes it about moral desert... I mean, criticism is important...

...but at the point where we're discussing if moderating critical comments is abuse or is a thing that can be abused, it feels like we've focused too much on "are we criticizing the right people enough?" and not enough on "what outcome are we going for, and how?"

And this is where I reluctantly concede that twitterjack et al might be on the cusp of slightly overlapping with a good idea in their quest to "improve the conversation".

Not by making sure we're all exposed to Nazis and anti-vaxers, I mean.

But any step in letting us curate/moderate our replies. Yes, it will make the echo chambers more echo-y. But they'll all still exist, in conversation with each other, which is where I think the productive discourse happens.

I mean, just think about the difference between a circle of people that brigades replies of whomever they hate at the moment, and another group that when they see a problem with a person or issue or group, they make informational tweets about the problems.

One of those practices will be more effected by mod tools for users and one of them won't.

Mod tools = talking @ people is less viable, talking about issues instead becomes more normalized.

I don't know... I just look at sentiments like "these people deserve criticism and the system must let us tell them to their face" vs. the threads that people make documenting in detail Proud Boy chats, white supremacist identities, celebrity crimes, etc.

I care about the latter

I think the ratio is a useful tool of social rebuke. But social sanction is like pornography: it doesn't matter what the platform is, we'll find a way to put it there. I mean, the ratio wasn't by design in the first place. It's an emergent user innovation.

Anyway, lots of words to say: bring on the mod tools. Yes, the rich will get more out of them... just like they'll get richer if we implement a universal basic income.

...and that's it, isn't it?

"Mod tools are bad because they will let the rich silence criticism" is the "UBI is bad because millionaires don't need it." of twitter.

Last thought on reply hiding/moderation: I get anxiety even looking at my replies ever since I hit a certain threshold of visibility on here, but if I knew I could *do something* about them when I see one, it would help a lot.

And final, final thought on moderation:

Nazis spend more time in their targets' replies than the other way around, terfs spend more times in trans women's replies than the other way around, etc.

A 100% open platform enables them. User-level moderation hurt them.

And yes it sucks to try to moderate your own posts when you're being brigaded, I know firsthand... but having the option beats not having it.

So twitter moving from "We're going to improve the conversation by making sure you see people who disagree with your existence!" to "We're going to improve the conversation by giving you control over it!" is a huge step in the right direction.

And I'm not going to give it up because it means that Mike Huckabee, terfs, brands, and problematic celebrities get to do it, too.