Mike Monteiro:

Jack, and to an extent Twitter’s pet porg Biz Stone, have always believed that absolute free speech is the answer. They’re blind to the voices silenced by hate and intimidation. The voices that need to be protected.

There’s this photo, in a children’s doctors office I saw once, where it said “equal”. The image for equal was three kids of very different heights looking at a baseball game from the back of the stands. All of them standing on, say, a one foot tall step. Only the tallest kid could see perfectly, the middle somewhat, and the shortest not at all. And yet, this is equality, one foot for all.

Next to this image is another frame titled “fair”. In this frame the tallest kid still has the one foot step, the middle a two foot step, and the shortest a three foot step. This is inequality, as the shortest gets more help, but we all agree this is fair, because the one who needs less help, gets less help, and the one who needs more help gets more help.

What’s equal is not often what’s fair. These words are not the same, and too often companies hide behind the guise of “equal” and pretend that this means fair. That’s bullshit.

Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks believe in equality above all else because it’s the easiest way to cop out. You can’t be wrong if you treat everyone the same, right? This is ideal, but not reality. The reality is that there are some who need more help at times than others.

How users are treated in social networks generally gives the taller set of steps to the biggest users, the very users who do not need the help. While at the same time digging a hole for those who do need steps. This is the problem with a business needing “attention” and “engagement”, above all else, because they are not motivated to make the system a good system for users and the world. They are motivated to do what they need to do to make money, they would argue to stay in business, to later change the world.

Bullshit.

Don’t trust any of them, they have every intention to do something world changing later, without realizing they’ve already fucked the world now. And all the while, no idea what or how they will change the world later. Sounds cool, bro, but maybe fix what you’ve already done?