81–90 of 410 posts
"..systems that reward outrage only make the problem worse.” I think this is what a lot of social media has become, particularly as people isolate themselves to only those sources and feeds they agree with.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's worse than that, as the linked TC article links to an explanation of his ban-worthy views that, if applied to everyone, would lean to a ban of probably 85% of the US. (Purposefully not referencing them here. The question is not whether those views are right, it's whether those are mainstream.) Bluesky has a problem of its user base demanding purity, and it will 100% be the death of it.
You'll need to explain this a little bit more, because the TC article seems to indicate the issue is that he is accused of targeted harassment. I doubt you could design a poll to make people vote 85% in favor of targeted harassment.
yeah but that's an accusation without basis in reality.
> 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. The problem, if you can call it that, is Singal hasn't broken any of their TOS or guidelines. Right now, AFAICT this is a people with pi…
"he didn't technically break any rules so I won't ban him" has been the death of _many_ social spaces good moderation requires discretion and keeping the users happy, not slavish legalism
You know what they say, when you're explaining that you don't really wish death upon the CEO of the niche social network platform on which you depend, you're losing.
The format is the problem. The medium is the problem. Poorly moderated groups of anonymous people voidscreaming as some “this will be monetized once we hit critical mass” exercise is the problem.
I believe that eventually people will sort ourselves out into the masses who never really understand or accept that, and those of us who choose not to subject ourselves to something so obviously poisonous.
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.
I've been a member of this site for fifteen years. I know that nearly any material - not abstract - defense of transgender rights will get downvoted into invisibility, as will any attempt to name transphobia, no matter how civilly presented or exhaustively-cited.
For that same reason, I also know that it's not a worthwhile use of time to delve into substantive "debate" on these topics in this thread, or any place where transphobia is being trafficked openly, for that matter (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45508592).
> 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. The problem, if you can call it that, is Singal hasn't broken any of their TOS or guidelines. Right now, AFAICT this is a people with pi…
It's worse than that, as the linked TC article links to an explanation of his ban-worthy views that, if applied to everyone, would lean to a ban of probably 85% of the US. (Purposefully not referencing them here. The question is not whether those views are right, it's whether those are mainstream.) Bluesky has a problem of its user base demanding purity, and it will 100% be the death of it.
> 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. The problem, if you can call it that, is Singal hasn't broken any of their TOS or guidelines. Right now, AFAICT this is a people with pi…
"he didn't technically break any rules so I won't ban him" has been the death of _many_ social spaces good moderation requires discretion and keeping the users happy, not slavish legalism
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wro…
Wow. I've read that article and if you think that was unbiased or even-handed...
There is a tech blogger who I really don't like and this blogger happened upon a comment where I said I really didn't like anything they had written, and happened to ask, "Why?" And my answer was how deeply incurious they were, and how incurious they invited their readers to be. This blogger never acknowledge the potential they might be wrong. Even as a nodding feint to fallibility as something we simply expect of people writing about any complex topic.
That's what that article is like to me.
I don't understand how you can "ban" anyone from distributed social media. The idea seems... outdated? I mean, I get "ignoring" someone so they don't show up when you log into whatever instance you're in, whether it's the AT Protocol or ActivityPub, but like... if someone somehow decides to do work on top of one of these protocols and extend it to allow people to basically comment on things that a victim user doesn't…
Applications on atproto run moderation as a kind of filtering layer on top of the user data. A ban in that scenario is fully filtering their account out of the application.
While anybody can host their own PDS, the public bsky.app instance can and will “block” users by preventing their login and not pulling data from the PDS of the banned user or showing it in feeds.
Since, to date, the BlueSky “AppView” (the service backend itself that handles aggregating data, generating feeds, etc.) continues to be closed, being banned from the public instance is effectively being banned from the network. The data model (lexicon) is well documented and somebody else is free to write their own, but, for now, BlueSky is just as centralized as other platforms even if you can store your data elsewhere.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wro…
> But if you really are honestly curious and unbiased, M. K. Anderson wrote a well-researched article for Protean in 2022. Wow. I've read that article and if you think that was unbiased or even-handed... There is a tech blogger who I really don't like and this blogger happened upon a comment where I said I really didn't like anything they had written, and happened to ask, "Why?" And my answer was how deeply incurious…
I said it was well-researched, which is true.