[HN Gopher] New Anti-Toxicity Features on Bluesky
___________________________________________________________________
New Anti-Toxicity Features on Bluesky
Author : runarberg
Score : 95 points
Date : 2024-08-28 18:24 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bsky.social)
(TXT) w3m dump (bsky.social)
| richbell wrote:
| > This helps you maintain control over a thread you started,
| ideally limiting dog-piling and other forms of harassment. On the
| other hand, quote posts are often used to correct misinformation
| too. To address this, we're leaning into labeling services and
| hoping to integrate a Community Notes-like feature in the future.
|
| I'm confused. It seems like they're acknowledging why this is a
| bad idea yet are proceeding with it?
|
| If you don't want people to be able to reply critically to a
| post, why not have a private profile or not post it in the first
| place?
| josefresco wrote:
| It is confusing language but basically they're saying "we're
| giving you this ability, but will be adding a new feature to
| fix this unfortunate side effect".
|
| I think it will cause a shift to "screenshots of posts" as is
| done on Twitter/X when the retweeter does not want to @ /
| mention the original author.
| Jare wrote:
| That's perfectly fine. Screenshots as posts deter 90% (my
| guess) of people from going through the trouble of finding
| the original post/author, but still allow dedicated people to
| do that. It reduces the ability to trivially post mindless
| shit to someone on a whim. I totally believe that this
| approach can significantly increase the signal/noise ratio,
| without allowing anyone to silence anyone else arbitrarily.
| GrinningFool wrote:
| It's also completely untrustworthy. It's not complex to
| make a fake tweet screenshot. It doesn't even always have
| to pass close scrutiny.
| roblabla wrote:
| They're acknowledging that it has some downsides, that they
| think they can resolve through other features that they'll
| develop later.
|
| > If you don't want people to be able to reply critically to a
| post, why not have a private profile or not post it in the
| first place?
|
| The problem isn't people replying critically, it's people being
| assholes on the internet, leveraging their follower base to
| harass someone. This feature gives tool to the bluesky posters
| to protect themselves against this form of harassment.
|
| Hence why they're going with it despite the downsides: it's a
| necessary feature for people to protect themselves against
| harassment.
| richbell wrote:
| > The problem isn't people replying critically, it's people
| being assholes on the internet... it's a necessary feature
| for people to protect themselves against harassment.
|
| The problem is that "harassmemt" is a nebulous term. Many
| people inappropriately (in my opinion) claim any sort of
| dissenting voices are "harassment".
| roblabla wrote:
| Of course. But there are also very real cases of people
| quote-posting someone with an opinion they don't agree
| with, leveraging their follower-base to start dogpiling.
| Even without the harassment problems, this is already not a
| very good way to have a conversation, as you'll end up with
| a ton of people with the same viewpoint replying. But then
| things can go even further with people starting to send
| death-threats and other niceties of this kind to the OP -
| which is definitely harassment territory.
|
| Currently, there just isn't many good tools to protect
| yourself against this kind of dogpiling.
|
| ---
|
| Personally, I think both are necessary: A tool to protect
| against using quote-posts for dogpiling, and another to
| correct misinformation.
| o11c wrote:
| I'd dare say: social media _promotes_ the idea that any
| sort of dissenting voices is harassment. It 's not a
| spontaneous belief on the part of the people who claim
| that.
| xg15 wrote:
| Are you claiming there are no such things as shitstorms,
| dogpiling or cyberbullying?
| richbell wrote:
| > Are you claiming there are no such things as
| shitstorms, dogpiling or cyberbullying?
|
| Please quote where you believe I made this claim.
| xg15 wrote:
| Well, how would you protect against cyberbullying then?
| richbell wrote:
| > 1. We must do something.
|
| > 2. This is something.
|
| > 3. Therefore, we must do this.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism
| bee_rider wrote:
| Dissenting voices from a ton of anonymous people looks a
| lot like harassment, especially when their expectations for
| what normal debate and politeness look like don't match
| yours.
| malwrar wrote:
| I think they're intending to address something like THE X GROUP
| DID Y THING TO THE Z GROUP (which we will assume to be false)
| by allowing for factual corrections via "community notes" and
| "labels" that I assume the T&S team plans to control. Depending
| on how the specifics of this future plan manifest, I think this
| could be useful for quelling legitimate adversarial or
| genuinely uninformed and harmful misinformation. I still worry
| about the bias and transparency of whoever controls these
| labels, and the general potential of these features to enable
| the creation of echo chambers, but least this will all be
| transparent and observable via the developer API so factual
| investigation and reporting can be done on how this actually
| plays out in practice. I hate censorship and the general
| cowardice of people who would abuse these features to stifle
| legitimate dissent, but I think these features are a good
| compromise between that and the opposite real problem of
| malicious/harmful legitimate misinformation.
| newsclues wrote:
| Sounds like they are making a tradeoff of creating community
| bubbles or silos in order to limit unwanted interactions.
|
| Seems like safe spaces online, where people can be happy but
| perhaps they will be sharing opinions and information that are
| incorrect, but they won't be unhappy from people they disagree
| with providing the facts.
| anonfordays wrote:
| >If you don't want people to be able to reply critically to a
| post, why not have a private profile or not post it in the
| first place?
|
| Exactly. Someone will post something abhorrent, critical
| replies will be removed, supportive replies will stay. It will
| make echo chambers worse than they ever have been. Then again,
| that may be exactly what the users want.
| skrbjc wrote:
| This is a key criticism of reddit, and everyone knows how
| much of an echo chamber reddit is
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I don't. Enlighten me, please.
| ineedaj0b wrote:
| it's sorta like reading the breitbart comment section but
| it's all left wing. there's some good stuff, but there's
| also good stuff on mass email chains if you read enough
| of them.
|
| reddit ain't what it used to be.
| Levitz wrote:
| Reddit enforces echo chambers mainly on two levels, the
| user level and the mod level.
|
| Nobody respects etiquette anymore, and rather than
| upvoting valuable content they upvote whatever they like.
| As an extreme example, you can make the best, most
| honest, rational argumentation of a political issue, if
| the users don't agree with your stance it's going to be
| downvotted and hidden. Similarly, they will tolerate
| content that might be against the rules or the spirit of
| the subreddit if it's something they agree with.
|
| On top of that, the vast majority of the time moderators
| enforce echo chambers themselves through bias, with a few
| of them going as far as banning every single user that
| posts in communities they disagree with, even if they
| have never engaged with the community they themselves
| moderate.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| The corners of Reddit I inhabit do not suffer from these
| issues.
|
| I spent a lot of time on usenet in the 1990s discussing
| politics there (mostly talk.politics.theory which was
| riven with libertarians). Given that I've lived another
| 40 years since then, I would simply not bother to do this
| anymore. Mass discussion of political issues is, in my
| eyes, mostly a dead end.
|
| By contrast, locale-based subreddits, equipment-based
| subreddits, how-to-based subreddits remain, in my
| experience, relative gold mines.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| See my comment at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41383744
| viccis wrote:
| Reddit is a good example of how insane that can make
| discourse look in some subreddits, with one large one in
| particular showing how you truly can just engineer a faux
| consensus by deleting and banning every single comment and
| commenter that differs even slightly.
| richbell wrote:
| Reddit also overhauled user blocking, which means that both
| mods and normal users are able to create a narrative.
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/sdcsx3/tes
| t...
| viccis wrote:
| If we're going all in on how they've ruined their site,
| their change of the default sort to use a variety of
| engagement metrics rather than upvotes is why the
| frontpage is mostly ragebait and gossip posts, as those
| drive engagement metrics like comments, replies, and time
| spent reading comments.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/o5tjcn/evolving_th
| e_b...
|
| There's also the fact that nearly 100% of frontpage posts
| are pruned by moderators within 12 hours now. Tracked by
| a subreddit (RedditMinusMods) that reddit banned without
| reason, but you can still find a link to a graph of that
| happening on HN of all places:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36040282
| JohnMakin wrote:
| > Exactly. Someone will post something abhorrent, critical
| replies will be removed, supportive replies will stay.
|
| Precisely and this is the misguided approach to moderation I
| see everywhere - it basically turbo charges cry-bullies,
| trolls, and people devoted to spreading misinformation.
| bangaroo wrote:
| bluesky currently doesn't support private profiles, so that's a
| no-go.
|
| while i fundamentally agree with what you're saying, the cases
| where a quote-skeet contains a polite or well-intentioned
| correction vs. is explicitly designed to enrage the quoter's
| follower-base and dunk on that person are way out of balance.
|
| there are many people who will, rather than attempt to correct
| a misunderstanding (or simply ignore an opinion they don't
| agree with,) immediately jump to quote-tweeting and dunking on
| someone, trying to drag their followers into a dogpile. it's
| often just blatantly unnecessary and it is frequently a
| miserable experience to be on the receiving end of that.
|
| i worry i'm coming across as lamenting cancel culture or
| something - i'm not - but i've absolutely had cases where
| someone with a different flavor of an opinion _i agree with_
| will see something i said, take my slightly different view on
| it, and quote skeet it with some nasty comment tearing into me.
| their friends, with no context of the discussion i was
| initially having, will just dive in and tear into me because
| they are clearly having fun doing it, not because it 's
| actually correcting a problem or resolving a misunderstanding.
| i frequently have this happen from completely random passers-by
| to whom i wasn't speaking and who really would have no reason
| to see my post in the first place. i'm really not a
| controversial poster on bluesky, either. i really don't think
| i'm saying anything particularly offensive or earth-shattering.
| it's just a dumping ground for shower thoughts, mostly.
|
| great example of this is some guy who randomly found a post i
| made about the fact that i was disappointed in joe biden's
| debate performance, which i'd say is a pretty uncontroversial
| opinion. he said some nasty stuff, i made the mistake of
| responding trying to explain myself, and then he just started
| replying to me exclusively in quote-skeets, berating me and
| mocking me, and the gaggle of idiots following him just dove on
| in and also decided to tear in to me for reasons that still
| don't make a whole lot of sense.
|
| all this to say, if you've had any meaningful interaction with
| folks on these platforms, i feel like you understand the
| idealized version of a quote post and how far it is from how
| it's most frequently used.
| Kye wrote:
| Another real world example: A famous comedian once grossly
| misunderstood something I said, quote tweeted it with a
| framing based on that, and sent tens of thousands of views,
| hundreds of replies, and thousands of notifications my way
| over the course of a few minutes. All extremely hostile.
|
| It can go well: SwiftOnSecurity once QTd me and their comment
| led to lots of good conversation on the quote and in my own
| notifications. But they cultivate a good community of
| followers and understand the responsibility they hold with a
| 6 digit follower count.
|
| The thing about quote posting is that the very act completely
| collapses context, and puts all the power and responsibility
| on the quoter. An innocent mistake can be as harmful here as
| malice because, as I experienced, no amount of trying to
| address the mis-representation to people coming at me helped
| because I was just some nobody and someone they trusted told
| them what's what.
| bangaroo wrote:
| You put it a lot more succinctly than I did:
|
| > The thing about quote posting is that the very act
| completely collapses context, and puts all the power and
| responsibility on the quoter.
|
| There have been plenty of circumstances online where I was,
| in fact, the fool. I've had many interactions where I
| benefitted from being corrected. Almost universally, these
| corrections came in the form of a reply or private
| discussion designed to engage me specifically and not in a
| performative manner, and I found them very helpful.
|
| I see less value to someone having the right (or perceived
| duty) to amplify my meager reach _while_ correcting me in
| front of people who don 't know me and who lack any empathy
| for me. I don't see the difference between this and
| someone, during a conversation in a bar, standing up on the
| bartop and yelling HEY EVERYONE, CHECK OUT WHAT THIS GUY
| JUST SAID! and then loudly correcting me while egging
| everyone else on.
|
| I have questions about the impact of this feature on more
| famous figures - for example, I'm not sure I'd want a
| politician to employ this functionality against me. There
| is some balance that likely needs to be struck that takes
| into account the reach and impact of the original message
| and thus the potential for damage. They seem to be touching
| on that with the future community notes feature. I can see
| why that's a more appealing approach. That allows the
| opportunity for correction/response while not actively
| promoting the thing that's being responded to - just
| providing context when people come across the post
| organically.
| Kye wrote:
| I've had two pull-aside moments exactly like this on
| social media! They changed me for the better. The pull
| out and up of a quote never had that effect even if
| that's the stated intent of its most ardent defenders.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| On Reddit I mostly see this feature used for political
| manipulation. Especially by people who to me are obviously
| propagandists.
|
| It's a very common pattern for me to encounter something,
| writing a reply I think is superb, seeing it highly upvoted,
| and then seeing the person I replied to delete that comment.
|
| It's incredibly effective-- you get your propaganda out, and
| when it gets questioned it just disappears-- the lies will have
| affected many and the rebuttal seen by few.
| BeetleB wrote:
| That's why you quote the relevant portions...
| impossiblefork wrote:
| Yes, but upon the deletion visibility is greatly reduced.
| perihelions wrote:
| I'm only minimally familiar with BlueSky. Is it a fair analogy,
| for understanding what this is, to say it's like:
|
| - If someone replies to this HN comment I just wrote, and I don't
| like it, I can delete their comment (because there is an thread
| ownership concept on BlueSky, and the earliest comment is the
| owner);
|
| - If someone links to this HN comment I just wrote, and I don't
| like it, I can make that hyperlink disappear, or invalidate in
| some way (because BlueSky is a locked API garden and hyperlinks
| are not plain text, but magic cloud API tokens)
|
| Is this much correct?
| skrbjc wrote:
| Pretty much, the first one being more like you can hide a
| comment that you don't like and if someone wants to see it they
| can click "see hidden replies"
| Jare wrote:
| My reading of "hiding replies" was that people who follow the
| replier would still see the reply as part of their normal
| feed. So you are not silencing them for _their_ audience.
| Which is fair.
|
| The removal of links to yourself is also very welcome.
|
| Both tools have cons, and there's methods to work around them
| / prevent them from taking effect. But they address the
| default easy/trivial ways in which people can pollute other
| users, so in practice the value for users should prove high.
| roblabla wrote:
| > - If someone replies to this HN comment I just wrote, and I
| don't like it, and I can delete their comment (because there is
| an thread ownership concept on BlueSky, and the earliest
| comment is the owner);
|
| You can hide it - which I agree is functionally equivalent to
| deleting it as people are very unlikely to go dig for hidden
| comments. FWIW this is kinda similar to "flagging" a comment on
| HN, which (as far as I understand) will cause it to be hidden
| for everyone - at least until someone vouches it back.
|
| > - If someone links to this HN comment I just wrote, and I
| don't like it, I can make that hyperlink disappear, or
| invalidate in some way (because BlueSky is a locked API garden
| and hyperlinks are not plain text, but magic cloud API tokens)
|
| You can just make the hyperlink disappear to anyone using the
| default BlueSky frontend. But from my understanding, the
| hyperlink will still be accessible through the API.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| The difference is that on actual HN, it takes more than one
| flag vote to hide a comment. (I suspect it's in the range
| 2-5, but I don't actually know.) So one person can't make a
| post they don't like disappear.
| thenewnewguy wrote:
| Also, anyone can flag a comment, not just the thread
| starter (I personally suspect flags from the thread starter
| are actually down-weighted).
|
| HN flagging is not meant to hide people you don't want to
| see reply to your comments, it is meant to identify rule-
| breaking comments.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| > The difference is that on actual HN, it takes more than
| one flag vote to hide a comment. (I suspect it's in the
| range 2-5, but I don't actually know.) So one person can't
| make a post they don't like disappear.
|
| I don't know, but I would suspect if the user who wrote the
| parent comment flags a reply, it would be less weight than
| if another random user flagged it.
| an_ko wrote:
| To clarify how flagging works on HN: Flagging only hides a
| comment once "enough" users flag it, and even then remains
| visible to users with the showdead option set in their
| profile.
|
| Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12173809
| throwup238 wrote:
| Where "enough" = two accounts.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I think. I know N>1 because I sometimes flag something
| and it is not suppressed right away. Often though I flag
| something and then it is suppressed a few minutes later
| so I believe N=2 or N=3 or something small like that.
|
| For that matter a lot of posts get suppressed right away,
| particularly from people who visit HN and immediately
| start posting stories from the same blog over and over
| again.
| perihelions wrote:
| I think you can estimate the threshold by just counting
| the ratio of times you flag something and it immediately
| dies. You would wait a while to see which items die or do
| not die, and discard the subset which never die, and
| consider only the subset of items that transitioned to
| [flagged][dead].
|
| If the [flagged] logic is simply "flags >= N", then of
| the subset of things that are flag-killed with your
| involvement, you will be final flag in 1 of N of those.
|
| The null hypothesis is "this experiment converges to a
| reciprocal integer".
| Terretta wrote:
| Which is fine, since plenty people don't flag, but will
| vouch.
| curtisblaine wrote:
| > which I agree is functionally equivalent to deleting it as
| people are very unlikely to go dig for hidden comments.
|
| I think you're being very optimistic here.
| layer8 wrote:
| > You can hide it - which I agree is functionally equivalent
| to deleting it as people are very unlikely to go dig for
| hidden comments.
|
| My understanding is that hidden replies are just one extra
| click away. From TFA: "All hidden replies will be placed
| behind a Hidden replies screen -- so they're still
| accessible, but much less visible." Probably not much
| different from a collapsed subthread on Reddit.
| skybrian wrote:
| Only at the app level. At the protocol level, each user has a
| repo with their own posts and you can't delete other people's
| posts.
| advisedwang wrote:
| Not really correct. You can
|
| A) Make it so YOUR NAME and YOUR POST doesn't appear attached
| to a post that somebody else makes. Their post will still be
| visible to their followers.
|
| B) Make it so that YOUR FOLLOWERS don't see somebody else's
| reply unless they click a "hidden replies" button. Their post
| will still be visible to their followers or someone looking at
| their timeline.
|
| In no case can you prevent somebody's posts being visible to
| their followers.
| saurik wrote:
| The former doesn't make much sense in a distributed system
| where we expect to have multiple clients--and, preferably, no
| dominant one!--as there is no reason for the people you are
| restricting to opt in to that restriction.
|
| > B) Make it so that YOUR FOLLOWERS don't see somebody else's
| reply unless they click a "hidden replies" button. Their post
| will still be visible to their followers or someone looking
| at their timeline.
|
| Like, for this latter use case, if I am following you, I am
| buying into your frame and am often am going to agree with
| your moderation choices on the people who reply to you, so it
| actually makes a lot of sense to me that I would accept your
| ability to hide replies _I_ "shouldn't" / "wouldn't want to"
| see.
|
| Meanwhile, the only recourse to be heard for the person whose
| reply was hidden is to do so to their own audience; this not
| only seems fair, but strips them of the power they were
| trying to "steal" from you when they replied to your post in
| the hope of gaining access to your audience.
|
| > A) Make it so YOUR NAME and YOUR POST doesn't appear
| attached to a post that somebody else makes. Their post will
| still be visible to their followers.
|
| However, this former use case does not have the same
| structure: if I am following someone else and they talk about
| something you said, but now I can't see what/who they are
| talking about, I'm just going to get annoyed, as the goals of
| this feature don't align with the direct user of the client
| anymore.
|
| At best, this just leads to people using workarounds, as the
| recourse is too powerful: anyone--not even merely the quoter
| --can add a reply with a screenshot of the post and a
| permalink through an external link shortener. At worst, it
| leads us down the dishonorable path of people demanding
| client DRM :/.
|
| It sucks, because I was kind of excited about BlueSky
| actually caring about distributed incentive issues in a world
| where they were not the only client; but, this is the kind of
| mistake that people get goaded into making when they build a
| distributed system and start to assume centralization.
|
| ...and like, by the way: this feature is also inherently
| _dishonest_ , as, even if it is documented how it works, a
| lot of users aren't going to understand it, and so they are
| going to assume they have a safety net in place that doesn't
| really exist in the protocol.
|
| This honesty issue is similar to the way Snapchat claims
| people won't be able to (at least secretly, though I remember
| the original claim to be stronger) save the photos they send.
| Of course, people often can secretly screenshot your photos--
| such as using jailbroken devices or even merely a second
| camera via the good ol' analog loophole--but people send
| riskier photos because they trust the feature to protect
| them.
|
| And yes, I totally understand that Snapchat's feature _sort
| of_ works and _maybe_ is better than nothing?... but, it
| _only_ works due to continual effort Snapchat invests--from
| both their engineers and lawyers--to enforce the feature by
| embracing DRM, implementing user behavior profiling /
| banning, and sending legal cease and desist notices to
| alternative clients.
|
| I hope (but no longer can assume) that BlueSky won't (or
| can't) ever go to such lengths; and so, in some sense, the
| feature is even less honest, right? :/ Even if the feature
| "sort of works", the power only comes from "pretty much there
| is only one client everyone has", and so the incentives are
| broken.
|
| If I were building this, I would have done the exact
| opposite: if someone "quotes" you, there should be a copy of
| that content stored on the quoter's end, so that it is still
| visible even if the original is deleted... but like, that
| copy would be trivially editable, so no one ever treats
| previews as truth.
|
| You have to implement it like that, as it has to be
| functionally equivalent to the analog loophole version of the
| feature -- the one where the quoter just attaches a
| potentially-forged screenshot of the post along with a link
| through an external shortener -- in order to align everyone's
| incentives.
| skybrian wrote:
| Since I'm someone who believes in consent, then if someone
| else doesn't want me to reshare their post with my
| audience, then I respect their wishes. Particularly since
| that's the default.
|
| It's possible to override this with a screenshot, but it's
| a clear escalation. The question is, how often do people do
| that? Does it become routine, or an exception? If you do a
| screenshot, maybe it would be a good idea to blur the
| username, if it doesn't really matter?
|
| When people stop caring about mutual consent, things get
| messy, but I think tools that assume it are a good default
| that avoids unintentional conflict. Maybe it's a default
| that most Bluesky clients will follow?
|
| Compare with robots.txt: if you don't want your website
| crawled, okay then, says the well-behaved crawler.
|
| (I might want a client that keeps a snaphot regardless,
| just in case, but doesn't show or publish it.)
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I like the robots.txt comparison, at the root it is about
| respecting someone else's wishes
|
| I'm trying to decide how I feel about this unlinking
| quote feature, something about it strikes me as
| undesirable, kind of insulting, like the way I'm treated
| at airport security, presumed to be a bad actor
|
| Of course, social media is rife with bad actors and
| harassment campaigns, so bsky is trying to create a world
| with tools to prevent that, but it just seems very
| reactive - here's one way harassment happens so we're
| building a button into every post that prevents that
| particular touch. Makes me think bsky is not forward
| thinking or creative, but just patching the old ship.
|
| Last time I used Twitter for a couple months I feel I
| became enculturated very quickly into the popularity
| contest of picking a gang on some divisive issue and then
| making arguments or insulting arguments for internet
| points (Twitter is a very metric-forward interface, it's
| hard to use it without adjusting your behavior to try and
| make the numbers go up, and you make the numbers go up by
| jumping into a contentious drama and shooting your shot,
| aiming for reshares, requoting an opponent to dunk on
| them / make an example out of them)
|
| I noticed this behavior change in myself looking forward
| to getting into internet arguments and deleted my
| account, it was a waste of time for me but the people
| inside the matrix seem to enjoy it.
|
| The point I'm attempting to arrive at is that the design
| of Twitter encouraged this kind of behavior where you're
| ganging up on each other and so I find it foolhardy to
| duplicate the general design of a tool and patching it up
| in places hoping that people use it differently than the
| original.
|
| They want to be a Twitter clone without the bits that
| made Twitter interesting and addictive.
|
| (I ran in anti-e/acc and x-risk circles and also argued
| with people about Israel a lot, your cultural bubble may
| vary)
| sigmar wrote:
| >The Bluesky app won't list all the quote post removals directly
| on your post, but developers with knowledge of the Bluesky API
| will be able to access this data.
|
| Seems like they have some good ideas for how to deal with quote
| posts/tweets. But I don't understand how decisions like this are
| compatible with their hopes to eventually make the network
| decentralized. Surely you can't trust individual servers to obey
| this anti harassment feature? Are they no longer planning to make
| it decentralized?
| rapht wrote:
| The fact that you can still access hidden quotes/replies/etc
| from the API makes me think it's a client-side (i.e. app-only)
| feature.
| saurik wrote:
| But would any other client bother to implement this feature?
| Helping me not see toxic bullshit helps me as a user and I
| might opt in to various content curation schemes; but, if I
| am already looking at something, removing the context for
| what they are talking about does not help me. It is like,
| imagine if I was permalinked on HN to a flagged comment,
| because someone wanted me to see it, but the "parent" button
| didn't work.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Most people will be using the official app or the web site
| and if you're _really_ dedicated one of the web archives
| will probably have the post and the quoted post archived.
|
| It's not about being perfect, it's about cutting off _wide
| masses_ from abusive behavior.
| saurik wrote:
| If BlueSky truly believes that there will even be an
| "official app (or the web site)" for their decentralized
| protocol--the one they claim they only even developed a
| client for at all in order to promote the usage of--then
| they have already fallen off mission.
| danabramov wrote:
| The AT protocol is agnostic of Bluesky or Bluesky-
| specific content.
|
| Different applications using the AT Protocol can publish
| records that have no relation to Bluesky posts, Bluesky
| follows, or other Bluesky concepts. For example,
| https://smokesignal.events/ is an AT protocol app that
| produces and aggregates its own record types ("events"
| and "RSVP"s).
|
| So yes, there can't be any meaningful "official protocol
| client" (because the protocol isn't tied to a specific
| app).
|
| However, realistically for each app (such as Bluesky or
| Smoke Signal) there'll usually be the most popular client
| (and the one we're developing is "official" in the sense
| that it's one we put on the app store under the Bluesky
| brand).
|
| People can build other clients for Bluesky, but more
| importantly, they can build _other apps on the protocol_
| which have no relation to Bluesky (but can still ingest
| Bluesky data if they want to).
| verdverm wrote:
| > People can build other clients for Bluesky, but more
| importantly, they can build other apps on the protocol
| which have no relation to Bluesky (but can still ingest
| Bluesky data if they want to).
|
| Additionally, these apps can benefit from the
| distribution, moderation, and data hosting portability.
| ATProto allows for shared infrastructure across apps.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > If BlueSky truly believes that there will even be an
| "official app (or the web site)" for their decentralized
| protocol
|
| The utter majority of people aren't nerds. They go on the
| App Store, type in "bluesky" and install the first hit,
| and that assumes they've heard of it in the first place.
|
| Reddit, even before the Great API Crackdown, was just the
| same. The utter majority used the official client/website
| no matter how horrible they are/were to use - I'm
| honestly surprised old.reddit.com (the one with barely
| any JS) is still alive and kicking, new.reddit.com (the
| inbetween) for me keeps alternating between "it works"
| and "it redirects or shows the new UI that fails all the
| time with graphql errors"...
| jacoblambda wrote:
| It is. Everything in bluesky that runs on the AT protocol
| (like 99% of it) is currently public.
|
| So if you as the OP detach your post from the QRT, all you
| are doing is posting a certificate (akin to a revocation
| cert) that declares the intent that you don't want their QRT
| to be connected to your post.
|
| An app can still show it. Or it can show it behind a warning
| prompt. Or it can hide it entirely.
|
| It's an intent and even if it was controlled entirely, a
| determined third party could still work around it so there's
| not much point in trying to stop them. Instead you operate on
| "Don't be a dick" principles.
| skybrian wrote:
| These release notes are about the official apps and website.
| Yes, other apps could do whatever they like, in theory. But
| they're concentrating on UI improvements to the official apps,
| and I don't know of any others.
| toyg wrote:
| Nobody builds a centralized app and then successfully
| decentralizes it. Nobody. If you want a decentralized network,
| you build a decentralized network - and then centralize it to
| the minimum degree necessary for it to actually work and scale.
|
| The rest is PR.
| eli wrote:
| Nobody builds a successful decentralized app, period.
| traverseda wrote:
| email
| layer8 wrote:
| The web is just that. Also Usenet (it was successful for at
| least a decade or two), and email as the sibling notes.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| That's exactly what they've done. Bluesky is a decentralised
| service. It was designed to be decentralised. It's currently
| centralised in a limited capacity because they didn't open up
| federation right away.
|
| First they allowed DID federation (i.e. you can host your own
| DID by tying it to your domain name). Then feed curation.
| Then data storage. Then moderation features. And so on.
| There's really only a few things left and those are systems
| that are designed in a decentralised manner but for the sake
| of a smooth transition have yet to be handed over fully to
| the community.
| danabramov wrote:
| The way decentralization works on Bluesky is similar to how the
| web itself works.
|
| The part that's decentralized is users' storage of data --
| anyone can host it themselves (we provide both a Docker image
| of a server that can do that, and the source code for the
| server, and a spec in case you want to write your own).
|
| However, _applications_ (such as Bluesky) are centralized in
| the sense that there 's just one instance of each application
| and it can make choices about how to _aggregate_ the
| decentralized data from the network. A useful analogy is how
| Google crawls the web into its index but can present stuff from
| its index according to its own rules.
|
| In this case, quote posts removals don't remove anything from
| the user repositories (you can't remove data from someone
| else's repository just like you can't remove data from someone
| else's website). Rather, when you detach someone's quote,
| you're putting a record into _your_ repository (declaring the
| intent to detach it). Our app (both server and client) respects
| that intent and displays it accordingly.
|
| Indeed, other clients could choose to not respect that, but the
| default behavior for most users matters a lot -- and in general
| good faith clients try to be well-behaved and align with users'
| expectations.
| verdverm wrote:
| Breaking out feeds and moderation are also interesting design
| decisions that allow an app like Bluesky to give users more
| control and select algorithms from outside the centralization
| echelon wrote:
| This is a "gotcha" mechanic, not a feed filtering mechanic.
|
| Platforms are not only turning people thin-skinned, they're
| actively amplifying the desire for us to control the behaviors of
| others.
|
| This is why we need true P2P social media instead of platforms or
| cabal-led federation.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| It's really nothing to do with "controlling the behavior of
| others".
|
| What I'm seeing on Mastodon is a desire by quite a few people
| to use these open, public messaging systems as something more
| akin to private mailing lists. They have no desire for anyone-
| can-read/anyone-can-reply, they just want a nice little circle
| of people who all agree to be a part of the circle and to have
| the others there too.
|
| I believe that many of the people who want this are too young
| to have ever been on old listserv-style mailing lists, and for
| them, this sort of messaging technology is obviously how you
| would do this sort of thing.
|
| I don't think they are right, but I also see how they would
| think this, and they're not clearly wrong.
| edflsafoiewq wrote:
| Twitterlikes seem to straddle the space between a public
| forum, with open discussion on particular topics, and a
| private blog, where the author moderates the comment section
| on their posts.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| That's a take, but I think its quite generational (I could
| be wrong).
|
| Twitterlikes to me seem utterly public, and I get really
| confused when I encounter people who think they are having
| a private group chat.
|
| But as I said, I do understand how and why these different
| views of the same technology could arise.
| BeetleB wrote:
| That's correct, but what are the alternatives? Most people
| aren't going to do it via email, so Listserv won't work. And
| they want convenient features like links and images.
|
| I'm not a social media guy so I truly don't know if
| alternatives exist. Google Plus is the only service I know
| that seriously tried to solve the problem. At the moment
| Mastodon seems like the simplest approach. If they could
| define "circles" (that applies across servers), then it would
| be ideal.
|
| I'm on server A and you are on server B. I define a circle
| (and own it), and I add you to it. The system ensures that
| only people within the circle can see the posts, and you
| cannot reshare outside the circle. If someone in the circle
| is misbehaving, I can kick them out. Perhaps add some
| moderation capability (within the circle).
|
| You can argue that this is just a "Mastodon network within a
| Mastodon network", and you'd be correct. It still acts mostly
| like a "private" list.
|
| Lots of other subtleties to figure out, but this alone would
| be a great start!
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| That's a way of adapting the fundamentally public design of
| the Twitterlikes to be like a listserv.
|
| I'm not convinced that this is where we should be starting
| if creating a 21st century listserv-alike is the goal.
| You're taking a technology that was fundamentally conceived
| of in a "push-to-public" mindset and trying to fit it into
| a "push-to-the-group" mindset.
| nwoli wrote:
| Love every program having a little police bundled in them these
| days
| neilv wrote:
| UI design comment: In their first example of detachment, two ways
| that "Removed by author" seems ambiguous:
|
| * which author is meant (the quoter, or the quotee)
|
| * whether the quoted post was removed, or merely the link to it
|
| This ambiguity not only requires learning by all users of that
| platform, but will also be confusing to non-users, such as when
| screenshotted on another venue.
| pfraze wrote:
| Yeah actually I agree about this, we should update it
| Kye wrote:
| Hi paul
|
| Anyway, consider
|
| "hidden by quoted user"
| layer8 wrote:
| I find "quoted user" more difficult to understand than
| "original author".
| taeric wrote:
| Anyone have a good analysis on the various strategies different
| sites have tried over the years? Feels like it would have to
| include threaded versus non-threaded conversations, as well. I
| don't typically think of that as a way to control toxic crowds,
| but it does help stay aware of conversations without having to
| follow down rabbit holes.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| The only strategy that works is a tight knit community that is
| hostile to bad actors and good moderation. Trying to automate
| away human negativity will never work.
| symlinkk wrote:
| Moderation just leads to censorship. Upvote / downvotes are
| good enough on their own, we don't need someone babysitting
| us.
| mark242 wrote:
| That is fundamentally wrong. Pushing content moderation
| onto every person who posts a message on social media is a
| chilling effect on people posting. Pushing content
| moderation onto every person who reads a message on social
| media is a chilling effect on people reading.
| symlinkk wrote:
| People are fine reading stuff they disagree with, it's
| fun that way. They just downvote if they disagree. It's
| not fun sitting around in a moderated hugbox where
| everyone is saying the same thing
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| "Stuff I disagree with" is fine. Outright hate is not.
| There are limits.
| pixl97 wrote:
| You're talking about a system of good actors that just
| disagree on what's being said, if you spend 10 minutes
| running your own site you'll quickly learn there is a
| metric shitton of bad actors.
|
| Run something unmoderated long enough and, depending
| where you are, you'll have law enforcement knocking on
| your door.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Moderation just leads to censorship
|
| I welcome censorship on my personal site because I control
| the censorship.
|
| Likewise I'd like the option of controlling the
| conversation for responses to my posts. You're welcome to
| say whatever you want about me - under your own threads.
|
| You're not going to get much sympathy if your stance is
| censorship = bad
|
| > Upvote / downvotes are good enough on their own
|
| Not sure I've seen this work. It's not good enough for
| Reddit or HN, both of which have heavy moderation.
| symlinkk wrote:
| There are minimally moderated Reddit subs where it works
| beautifully
| PaulHoule wrote:
| If I couldn't run my own site with social features and
| reserve the right to kick anybody out just because I
| probably wouldn't run a site with social features.
|
| For a small site the argument is that there are many
| other small sites you could go to if you got kicked out
| of one or the other.
|
| For a site like Facebook or YouTube, however, it starts
| looking more and more like an essential public utility. I
| think of a case in my town where there is a person who is
| being a real jerk to their neighbors who run a "BiPOC
| garden". They've filed a federal discrimination case
| which probably won't accomplish anything because
| discrimination law applies to landlords, employers and
| similar gatekeepers -- like the stork said in this book
|
| https://www.paperbackswap.com/Nuts-Nightingale-Sweet-
| Jacquel...
|
| "You can't make a law that makes people be nice"
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Hacker News only works because it is heavily censored.
| verdverm wrote:
| Censorship is a government activity
|
| Moderation is a private entity activity
| isk517 wrote:
| The Somethingawful forums is still one of the best places on
| the internet, the $10 price tag on accounts help reduce the
| bad actors (or at least puts a price tag on bad behavior) and
| thus make good moderation easier. Sadly the free internet
| suffers from the tragedy of the commons, of course an
| entirely pay to access internet will be it own nightmare.
| taeric wrote:
| I'm not necessarily asking about how to automate negativity
| away. I'm honestly not clear that you want to eliminate all
| negativity. Indeed, I am generally wary of policies that kick
| out members. It can help some things, sure; but not having a
| path to good is a problem for members, too. Similarly, not
| allowing any bad behavior is the "purity spiral" that has
| killed a fair number of communities, too. You don't want it
| to flare out in such a way that it causes trouble, though.
|
| I'm also curious on the tight knit community. I recognize
| some names here, sure. I think I would be stretching
| definitions to say I was part of this community, though?
| Specifically, I'm guessing there is, at most, a hand full
| that would ever recognize my username?
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Shadowban everyone, use ai to fake engagement.
| bangaladore wrote:
| This is a terrible idea. They even note it by saying "we're
| leaning into labeling services and hoping to integrate a
| Community Notes-like feature in the future".
|
| Why push an update that is undoubtedly a net negative when the
| company itself suggests that it's not the best solution?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Show me a perfect solution. I'll wait.
| bangaladore wrote:
| Having no solutions may be better than implementing flawed
| solutions.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| What makes you think this is a terrible feature. This is a
| federated service and the company is actively attempting to get
| the service to a state where it can exist independently of
| them, preferably without the service fracturing into a bunch of
| islands, mostly separate from each other (cough mastodon
| cough).
|
| What solution would you propose that's better than this one and
| how is this solution a net negative (personally I think
| labelling services are a great approach to the problem)?
| bangaladore wrote:
| Community notes have been very effective in retaining public
| trust while combating misinformation on Twitter/X.
|
| This is the polar opposite of that. Delete all opinions you
| disagree with, no matter the reasons.
|
| Echo chambers are not productive. Full stop. It will lead to
| worse outcomes.
|
| I would have a different opinion if they weren't advertising
| this as a general-purpose way to shut people up. This could
| work if it were just a method to remove "rule-breaking" posts
| where some authority would still evaluate the reason for
| removal.
| verdverm wrote:
| Community Notes, and their abuse, is one of the reasons I
| left Xitter. I was a CN editor and saw that it just became
| another battleground for ideology
|
| Bluesky, with ATProto, is putting more control into the
| author and user hands. You may not like this design change,
| but many people do. The nice thing about ATProto is that
| you can write a different UI that doesn't hide or allow for
| this, and still belong to the social network fabric at
| large. You don't have to rebuild a new, separate social
| network from scratch
| Zenzero wrote:
| Not going to lie, I think Bluesky's effort is good for reducing
| inflammatory and combative behavior on the internet. So this
| response:
|
| > This is a terrible idea
|
| Got a good chuckle from me.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Glad it made you laugh, but in my experience as a moderator,
| these types of efforts result in the complete opposite and
| only empower trolls.
|
| Like this is 10000% going to happen:
|
| someone makes an inflammatory tweet. Bunch of replies, back
| and forth. The original poster will get someone to say
| something absolutely horrible when taken out of context of
| the argument, hide all other replies except the horrible one
| and act like a victim (while continuing to post inflammatory
| rage bait).
|
| Trolls spreading misinformation will use this to hide any
| criticism. Serial scammers will do the exact same thing.
|
| Not one single thing about this will reduce inflammatory and
| combative behavior on the internet, let alone bluesky.
| orwin wrote:
| No, the comments aren't deleted, just hidden for you and
| your own followers. And it will hid you from the hidden
| comment owner's community too.
|
| Think about it though: how do harassment campaigns start on
| twitter : do you have someone actively pushing his
| followers like this: 'you should reply to all his comments
| and spam his DMs!', or is more like someone responding
| strongly to your tweets, then his followers starting, w/o
| coordination to spam you?
|
| Now, did I manage to change your opinion a bit?
| JohnMakin wrote:
| > No, the comments aren't deleted, just hidden for you
| and your own followers.
|
| I understood this and nowhere in my post did I say I
| thought they were deleted. "hiding" is barely better and
| the effect is essentially the same since people aren't
| often going to go trolling through hidden replies.
|
| Nothing about these changes prevent or mitigate the
| situations you are describing.
| orwin wrote:
| I do think the second situation is the most prevalent by
| far, and I think that hiding the origin tweet from
| bloodlusty followers would add enough friction to
| severely limit harassment, don't you think? Find the
| tweet your edgelord hero is responding to before writing
| an insulting DM?
|
| In the first situation, I agree you can't do anything,
| but isn't the second one we'll mitigated? And if you
| don't think so, why?
| bangaladore wrote:
| Hidden, by all accounts, is a deletion on a platform like
| this.
|
| US free speech allows someone to protest on public
| property (within reason, of course). If they could only
| protest in their home, would that be free speech? By
| forcing them to "hide" the protest from public view,
| you've essentially removed their capability of
| protesting.
| verdverm wrote:
| > US free speech allows someone to protest on public
| property
|
| Social media is not public property or a public square.
| Social media also spans all geographies and legal speech
| landscapes.
| bangaladore wrote:
| Nobody said it was. I'm not trying to assert that social
| media should guarantee free speech. That's for the
| platform to decide.
|
| All I was demonstrating is that hiding is equivalent to
| deletion. Claiming otherwise is disingenuous.
| ChocolateGod wrote:
| I think "microblogging" format, such as Bluesky, Twitter,
| Mastodon etc, just seems to bring out the worst in people, I
| don't think it's possible to combat it properly when the
| format itself encourages it.
| optimalquiet wrote:
| Microblogging is one of the many aspects of the internet
| where the only winning move is not to play.
| lilyball wrote:
| Because quoting is also used as a harassment vector.
| mlindner wrote:
| If your goal is to create a space where people can only say
| nice things and only agree with you, then yeah this a great
| method to do it. It's a great way to create a tiny bubble of
| like-minded people and allow you to spiral ever deeper into
| the bubble as outside debate and challenging of assumptions
| becomes disallowed.
| lilyball wrote:
| "Harassment" and "disagreement" are two separate things,
| and the fact that you're conflating them here tells me
| you're not a member of a marginalized group
| bangaladore wrote:
| This tool cannot prevent harassment and allow
| disagreement. The author can unilaterally choose what to
| remove, no matter the reason. When you give someone this
| capability, you will remove discourse and guarantee echo
| chambers.
| KittenInABox wrote:
| TBH I think part of this is for very large accounts,
| where there is literally just too much engagement to deal
| with. You kind of _need_ to be able to filter and create
| your echo chamber to preserve your sanity and use the
| application the way it is intended to be used (not some
| kind of updates-only account). Personally I highly doubt
| I will ever have a problem where I either _need_ to get
| engaged by with someone (seems unhinged) or _need_ to
| click extra buttons to disengage from someone unless I 'm
| being pushed to do so by e.g. an excessively rude person
| or someone who is behaving unhinged at me.
|
| Like these are low stakes. If someone wants to hide
| polite disagreement, that's cool, they're managing what
| it means to be their follower and if I don't like it I
| can stop following them. It has nothing to do with me
| personally and they're not obligated to receive
| disagreement because I want them to, that's a weird
| position to take.
| bangaladore wrote:
| I agree to disagree. I don't see a world where this
| creates a net positive on a platform.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| cultivate a better class of friends. Are people not free to
| exist in an echo chamber if they choose? Who are you to
| tell them no?
|
| I don't want a community where people all agree with me but
| I _do_ want a community free of chronic trolls who only
| poison the well.
| fortyseven wrote:
| I sure as hell wouldn't want to be forced to coexist with
| fascist assholes. Bubble me up, if that's the case.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Framing "harassment" as "disagreement" is bad faith at
| best, and actively toxic at worst.
|
| I don't think you have any idea the kind of harassment
| anybody in a marginalized group deals with on public social
| media.
| scudsworth wrote:
| just a few more years of work on the moderation features. then
| the site will get really good, probably
| skybrian wrote:
| The UI is quite pleasant already, provided you want
| "superficially like Twitter was, but better."
|
| I have trouble finding people or feeds worth following, but
| give it time. The same was true for Twitter when I started.
|
| My one recommendation: the Moss feed is agreeably chill.
| verdverm wrote:
| The recently introduced StarterPacks so people can collect
| groups of accounts on a topic for new users go quickly find
| and follow.
|
| They seem to be holding off on indexing these, as well as the
| block lists, to prevent abuse. I saw they wrote that
| somewhere, but cannot find it at the moment
| koolala wrote:
| People talking about people is taboo to me. It's a very easy
| habbit to get into. I like seperating Ideas from People.
| mlindner wrote:
| Well I was considering creating a Bluesky account, but now I
| definitely won't. I don't want my comments getting purged just
| because I argued with the author of a post.
|
| This isn't "Anti-Toxicity" in as much it as "affirmation bubble
| creating". Your followers become your yes men and anyone arguing
| with you gets their comments purged from anyone seeing them.
| anamexis wrote:
| Do you use Twitter (X)? Because you can hide specific replies
| to your post there, too.
| layer8 wrote:
| Your comments don't get purged, they just require an extra
| "show hidden comments" click to be viewed.
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