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User ban controversy reveals Bluesky’s decentralized aspiration isn’t reality

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Re: User ban controversy reveals Bluesky’s decentralized aspiration isn’t reality

#71

Post by chimeracoder »

whistlestop wrote: post #53
greekrich92 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Why do you believe that description applies to Singal? His work is well-researched, grounded and reasonable. Perhaps his journalistic output conflicts with your beliefs, but that's no reason to cast false aspersions on him.

> Why do you believe that description applies to Singal? His work is well-researched, grounded and reasonable. Perhaps his journalistic output conflicts with your beliefs, but that's no reason to cast false aspersions on him.

Singal's work is not well-researched or reasonable. There have been countless analyses documenting the factual inaccuracies in his work, not to mention the routine and egregious violations of journalistic ethics.

Nobody has cast false aspersions on him, least of all the person that you are responding to. On the contrary, your comments on this post suggest to me that your defense of Signal and your description of him as "grounded and reasonable" has more to do with your approval of his beliefs rather than an honest assessment of his work.

Re: User ban controversy reveals Bluesky’s decentralized aspiration isn’t reality

#72

Post by throwawayqqq11 »

jrsdav wrote: post #17

I hate to be the one to say it, but...this is why we can't have nice things. At a certain scale, social media tilts humanity in one direction. We can't seem to escape the trajectory of our very nature; it will outcompete any complex system we devise to outwit it.

Maybe its just a filtering problem. I wished musk would have thought about creating semi-permeable bubbles for every milieu, when he bought twitter, where you can switch between feel-good and controversy filters as you wish. Hard lock outs / bans only lead to more polarization.

Re: User ban controversy reveals Bluesky’s decentralized aspiration isn’t reality

#73

Post by LexiMax »

chimeracoder wrote: post #71
whistlestop wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you believe that description applies to Singal? His work is well-researched, grounded and reasonable. Perhaps his journalistic output conflicts with your beliefs, but that's no reason to cast false aspersions on him.

> Why do you believe that description applies to Singal? His work is well-researched, grounded and reasonable. Perhaps his journalistic output conflicts with your beliefs, but that's no reason to cast false aspersions on him. Singal's work is not well-researched or reasonable. There have been countless analyses documenting the factual inaccuracies in his work, not to mention the routine and egregious violations of jo…

Could you link to some of those analyses?

I'm sure that Hacker News would love to delve into the arguments instead of trying to downvote or flag your posts into non-visibility because they disagree with you.

Re: User ban controversy reveals Bluesky’s decentralized aspiration isn’t reality

#74

Post by like_any_other »

jrflowers wrote: post #40
chimeracoder wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doxxing people off-platform used to be against the ToS. When people began reporting him for that, Bluesky amended their ToS.

Yeah they changed the policy on off-site behavior to specifically allow his posts. For another example he routinely posted screenshots of posts from people that had blocked him. Block evasion is/was against the ToS as applied to most users other than Jesse Singal. People mix up “users wanting him banned for having abhorrent views” (which is the opinion of some people) with “users wanting him banned for the same stuff…

> he routinely posted screenshots of posts from people that had blocked him

I don't like platforms that try to keep me ignorant of what others are publicly saying, keeping me in a non-consensual information bubble. It is basically deception.

Re: User ban controversy reveals Bluesky’s decentralized aspiration isn’t reality

#75

Post by TimorousBestie »

whistlestop wrote: post #53
greekrich92 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Why do you believe that description applies to Singal? His work is well-researched, grounded and reasonable. Perhaps his journalistic output conflicts with your beliefs, but that's no reason to cast false aspersions on him.

> His work is well-researched, grounded and reasonable.

Do you intend this to include his almost entirely uncritical coverage of so-called “rapid onset gender dysphoria”? How well do you believe he researched and fact-checked the claims of Lisa Littman? Was he simply misled that her retracted study was real science?

> Perhaps his journalistic output conflicts with your beliefs, but that's no reason to cast false aspersions on him.

Perhaps his journalistic output reinforces your beliefs, but that’s no reason to overstate the quality of his journalism.

Re: User ban controversy reveals Bluesky’s decentralized aspiration isn’t reality

#76

Post by oxonia »

ogou wrote: post #50
packetlost wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When speech is violence, allowing someone a platform is akin to being party to and supporting .

Speech is not violence.

I think packetlost knows that. I think the argument being put forward was that "if you are the kind of person that thinks that speech is violence, then you would believe that allowing someone a platform..."

Re: User ban controversy reveals Bluesky’s decentralized aspiration isn’t reality

#77

Post by ogou »

wmf wrote: post #64
ogou wrote: post #28

This is not a general problem with moderation there, centralized or decentralized. This particular issue is specific to a large group of people that don't like Jesse Singal and have been trying to get him removed from Bluesky. It hasn't worked and that group is trying all kinds of way to reframe the narrative to get leverage. All the padding this post adds around that is neotechnical jargon slop.

The more interesting part of the article, completely unrelated to Jesse Singal, is that Bluesky bans also apply to Blacksky because Blacksky can't afford to run their own moderation.

According to the post, it's a usability issue of the open source app layer and not some failure of moderation principles. "Blacksky is dependent on Bluesky’s application server to give users a fast experience, which also means that it is dependent on Bluesky’s labeling system and its moderation choices." Also, Singal's name is mentioned multiple times throughout the the article in irrelevant contexts. I still see the agenda here and I've seen this tactic before.

Re: User ban controversy reveals Bluesky’s decentralized aspiration isn’t reality

#78

Post by nomel »

chasd00 wrote: post #65
AlexandrB wrote: post #12

> However, as time has gone by, Bluesky’s traffic has declined (X’s has as well) and some of its users have become increasingly upset at its moderation decisions, including allowing U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance and anti-trans writer Jesse Singal to remain as users of the platform. So the expectation is that the vice president of the United States should be banned because he says stuff people don't like? What's the…

I don’t use bluesky and was never really on Twitter that much if at all but does bluesky not have an ignore feature? If you don’t want to hear from Vance can you not just “ignore” / “unfollow” them? Seems like a pretty basic feature of a communication platform… I think even fark.com allows users to ignore other user’s comments.

Yes, blocking is fully supported. The goal isn't to ignore, it's to silence/de-platform.

Re: User ban controversy reveals Bluesky’s decentralized aspiration isn’t reality

#79

Post by mustache_kimono »

tptacek wrote: post #66
TinkersW wrote: post #60

From the article I got the impression Singal was some far right loon, but after looking it up.. nope, he is a liberal that said something mildly out of sync with trans activists opinions...

No good will come of a fulsome litigation of Singal but it's fair to say that he doesn't go out of his way to avoid these controversies. Sort of like Fredrik deBoer, he's one of journalism's answers to the concept of edgelordery. People who vocally wish he was less influential would do well to remember how much juice they've been giving him.

> he doesn't go out of his way to avoid these controversies.

Science journalist covering the science of perhaps the most salient social issue of our time?

Don't get me wrong -- there are other really important stories which aren't being covered as well as they should be, but Singal's beat would seem to be at least as important as... most anything linked from HN on a daily basis.

> People who vocally wish he was less influential would do well to remember how much juice they've been giving him.

I totally agree. By turning Singal into a boogeyman he almost certainly isn't, people are only feeding his social and journalistic capital. Singal is just someone who disagrees with you (in that classically liberal 90s American sense). Efforts to cancel or ban him have made some look like they don't have actual arguments to contribute.

That's how Singal makes those with opposing views look ridiculous.

Re: User ban controversy reveals Bluesky’s decentralized aspiration isn’t reality

#80

Post by TimorousBestie »

LexiMax wrote: post #73
chimeracoder wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do you believe that description applies to Singal? His work is well-researched, grounded and reasonable. Perhaps his journalistic output conflicts with your beliefs, but that's no reason to cast false aspersions on him. Singal's work is not well-researched or reasonable. There have been countless analyses documenting the factual inaccuracies in his work, not to mention the routine and egregious violations of jo…

Could you link to some of those analyses? I'm sure that Hacker News would love to delve into the arguments instead of trying to downvote or flag your posts into non-visibility because they disagree with you.

The most comprehensive “Singal does bad journalism” montages come from the left-wing media outlets and leftist bloggers that he’s targeted over the years. The typical HN commenter is going to immediately gloss those accounts as partisan hyperbole. And why not? It’s purely academic for some of them, and internally worldview-challenging for others.

But if you really are honestly curious and unbiased, M. K. Anderson wrote a well-researched article for Protean in 2022.

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