This reminds me of when some NFTs were stolen and OpenSea delisted them. Like yeah, they still exist out there on the blockchain, but when a central authority can gatekeep peoples' ability to view them, how decentralized are they actually?
Moxie Marlinspike wrote a good essay [1] about "Web3" that highlighted a few of these kinds of issues, and I think it applies to anything like Bluesky claiming to be "decentralized" when it's prohibitively difficult to access it any way other than the biggest central service.
This is like grasping at a boogeyman web3 straw to make a point.
Concretely, Bluesky has an AppView that takes posts from relays and PDSes, subscribes to moderation labelers, filters posts that have labels which have certain labels, then displays them in the browser. Blacksky is the first independent implementation of relays and other large components of the system.
The default Bluesky AppView subscribes to the Bluesky Moderation labeler which cannot be disabled. No independent AppView has been made which can turn off the Bluesky Moderation labeler. That's all.
I have my concerns over the network, namely DAUs decreasing and community politics, but the tech is largely a matter of time I feel. It's true that the ActivityPub ecosystem has a lot more federation happening but ActivityPub is a much older system (which itself derives from OStatus which originated in 2012-ish.) Mastodon was released in 2016. It's bound to be more federated than Bluesky.
This just reads like not a response to the problem, but instead a description of technical implementations.
Concretely, nobody is going to subscribe to anything else in bsky but the default stack, anything else is unlikely to ever gain much adoption, and thus federation is basically meaningless and a technical implementation detail for how they wanted to manage their stuff.
You might be right simply that no one actual cares about any of this, and 99% of people don't care at all who gets banned or censored and who doesn't. And they'd all just stick around to the one place where everyone else is and that's that.
But this is an argument against the idea that people care or don't.
Assuming people do care, then Bluesky is the first protocol attempt that could actually work, because it lets you move your existing account freely to any alternatives easily, and because it also allows you to control your own recommendation algorithms.
If people don't care, than, people don't care, and that's that.
But if people do care, you need to achieve the above behavior, and that becomes a technical challenge that tech can solve.
Why wouldn't they? You join the platform, make friends with folks who say stuff like "Vance and Singal shouldn't be here but the people that give them death threats should", then they tell you to hop onto "Cleansky" which has its own Appview that filters out Vance, Singal, and platforms your buddies. You don't need to make a new account or anything.
The default experience just needs to be good enough. Beyond that folks with strong opinions will filter into moderation communities that offer them the curation they want. That's the technical side of this at least. There's larger problems around community culture but unrelated to tech.
Yeah which is why I added the "and platform your buddies" and the "but the people that give them death threats should" bits but they probably were too parenthetical to come across.
In fact, I'd argue that blue sky encouraged this by nerfing federation from the beginning. Rather than adopting ActivityPub, they made their own boutique protocol and put up barriers for third parties to use that protocol.
There are plenty of criticisms of Web3, but this doesn't seems like a particularly valid one. What could the people who designed the relevant blockchains and smart contracts have done differently to prevent one marketplace from becoming dominant?
It undermines the value of decentralization itself given intermediaries tend to pop up in all of these various platforms and become the dominant way to use them.
Any response that starts with "users could..." or "people could..." is pure wishful thinking and not worth wasting your time on. People don't work this way. En masse they will flow to the path of least resistance, and no amount of wishful thinking will ever change that.
OpenSea is very nearly "entirely on-chain" if I'm understanding your point correctly. It's powered by smart contracts. It's not custodial like Coinbase or Robinhood. Users custody their assets in their own wallets. They trade by submitting transactions directly from their wallet to a smart contract address on-chain which facilitates fulfillment of the trade. The code for these smart contracts is open source and verifiable.
It may not be obvious to more casual observers, but there is a lot of trading volume happening on on-chain exchanges these days (as in easily 10B+ in trading volume per day with most of this coming from futures).
I much prefer Bluesky to X but have had a hunch this was coming due to everything I've read about the practicality of running a Bluesky protocol service.
I still think there's room for something better technically. Mastodon seems more true to the decentralized ethos but I've never quite gotten used to the server dependency experience.
Nostr appeals to me technically but every time I'm on it seems swamped completely by discussion of cryptocurrency.
I guess to me it feels like one of these catch 22 (necessary but not sufficient?) problems where you have to have the right technical base for a platform, which seems doable, but even then you have to have the right userbase also.
It always comes back to the userbase. I don't know how many times technologists need to learn the lesson that normal people simply don't care about ideological technical principles like decentralization and often actually prefer the benefits of centralized systems like ease of use and typically stronger moderation. And when it comes to social media, businesses are naturally going to end up prioritizing the desires of the majority of their userbase.
> It always comes back to the userbase. I don't know how many times technologists need to learn the lesson that normal people simply don't care about ideological technical principles like decentralization and often actually prefer the benefits of centralized systems like ease of use and typically stronger moderation.
The choice need not be limited to the familiar corporate hellscape vs decentralized usability nightmare dichotomy. Middle grounds can exist if we want them to.
I've seen a lot of general support for the criticisms and concepts described in this article:
Businesses are naturally going to end up prioritizing the desires of the majority of their customers and for “free”, ad-supported[0] social media that isn’t their userbase.
I’d like to see Bluesky’s long-term business plan and what they will do when someone inevitably wants return on investment.
[0] Yes, this describes all of current social media, but it doesn’t have to be this way. This business model should not be legal: as long as there is one “free” social media platform, that is the platform that is going to be used, simply because even $1 is infinitely more than $0 and no one can compete with free.
That remains to be seen. Typically, the userbase is the product for a social media company, not their customers. Which means without a sizable enough userbase, there is nothing to actually sell to their customers. Bluesky has claimed to be different, but they are very much still in the early phase of trying to attract enough users so they need to cater to those users' priorities and decentralization simply isn't a priority that will attract many users.
It's why I found it so dismaying when we went through years of apparently serious newspapers reporting on every twitter-storm as if it was important. Yes, it was a good if unreliable source of breaking news, but the general noise of people fighting back and forwards about whatever it was that week ... was just noise, among a relatively small group of motivated crazies. Using it as a societal barometer just results in skewed coverage and an emphasis on American social issues that aren't necessarily as relevant everywhere else.
> Mastodon seems more true to the decentralized ethos
I'm not sure that's true. It's important to note that these bans are from the Bluesky App View (one component of the infra), and that these users can continue to post under their identity (if they own it, which they can), and users on App Views that haven't banned these users could continue to follow them.
None of that works with Mastodon. An admin bans you from the instance, and you can no longer post, use your identity, interact on the platform, etc. You have to start from scratch.
In short, Mastodon reduces the blast radius, but the "blast" is the same as on any private platform. Bluesky/AT Proto changes the impact to a different, strictly lesser type.
That is true, but due to the smaller size and larger number of instances, it's easier to find a place where you won't get randomly banned without an admin taking the time to talk to you about what's wrong. My instance has about 1K active people on it and I've always been able to have a dialogue with the moderators and sysop. When things have gone wrong I had the opportunity to correct them.
I think there's a great value to the "small community" ethos that the fediverse supports much better than bluesky.
Seems like the hard truth is all these alternate platforms that offer their technology as the reason to get on it ... it's just not a great selling point for someone who wants to post "woah watch out driving tonight, it's slippery out there" or cat pics. I think that's a lot of users.
The content of the posts and some level of moderation is the selling point.
Personally that's kinda a bummer, because IMO my biggest disappointment is that its just Twitter but little different. Same pithy posts and petty bickering:(
> I still think there's room for something better technically. Mastodon seems more true to the decentralized ethos but I've never quite gotten used to the server dependency experience.
There's more servers on Mastodon, yes, so in that way it is decentralized more. But as a user, I have a lot more sovereignty over my data on Bluesky than I get having my account on a Mastodon / fediverse. I can set up my own PDS quite easily, or move to another, or back to BlueSky hosting very easy. I appreciate this decentralization a lot.
And I have a much better chance of being able to analyze system behavior, understand propoganda networks on atproto/bluesky. Mastodon servers heavily discourage trying to view & understand the network, but Bluesky really lets everyday folks run and analyze the whole firehose, very very cheaply. Which is an incredible decentralization, a very powerful syndication that it's protocols enable, that's simply unmatched. Still, research is being done on both networks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45507566
I definitely have my concerns over the decreasing DAUs on the platform and the crabby, toxic community that has come to really define Bluesky these days but I don't think the tech is the problem. For folks who keep pointing at Mastodon, remember that ActivityPub's predecessor OStatus originates from 2012 and Mastodon itself was kicked off in 2016. Mastodon is 9 years old at this point. Bluesky is only a few years old.
In AP land, for better or for worse microblogging is dominated by the ad-hoc set of standards that Mastodon pioneered, and too much of the community just treats AP as "HTTP+REST JSON APIs for social" and ignores the semantic components that AP can use to interoperate.
Yeah. I’m not a big short form social media person, so a world with or without Bluesky (or Twitter) changes little. Bluesky has good people and communities within it, but a lot of the people on it are just a mirror reflection of the American Right. Devoid of critical thinking, they follow whatever the left cause of the day is.
While that’s much preferable to Twitter in 2025 (and the right)… it’s not encouraging as for the future of, frankly everything.
Aheming about "the right" aside... there exists people across the political spectrum that think the way they do because of a variety of reasons. Some because they read the literature and arrived at the conclusion, some because that is the economically or socially advantage position to be in, and some because that is just their political position tautologically.
I do wish there was a community that encouraged thoughtful positivity over negativity (granted I would not "ban" it) and some level of limited posting ... or something like that.
It's a pipe dream I know, but on the surface social media could be really cool.
There is, it's almost every successful advertisement-driven social media site. Youtube, reddit, facebook, etc. have all adapted to remove negative and controversial comments and leave positive/advertiser-friendly comments.
Since Youtube made that change I found its comments much, much more pleasant. Meta made an early decision with Threads to deprioritize political content which they only recently went back on (now it's an opt-out slider I think) which did do a decent job of keeping the network lighter than Twitter but also made the network a bit less intellectual than Twitter or Bluesky.
When you introduce such a high level of moderation and ranking what you get are a load of reddit style "funny guys" that are desperately trying to be noticed.
I prefer random comments without ranking, because it gives you a more truthful view of public sentiment. The force that aggressively filters comments is the same force that takes away the dislike button. It is all about controlling public opinion. Everything is good all of the time, and everyone is in a controlled demographic where they are insulated from new ideas that might make them difficult to advertise to.
> I do wish there was a community that encouraged thoughtful positivity over negativity
Yeah, it's called the real world. We have millions if not billions of years of experience in dealing with in-person differences, tentative contacts with members of neighbouring tribes and smoothing out conflicts. One will find the risk of getting smacked over the face for being an absolute idiot to be a very effective motivator to remain on our best behaviour with strangers.
On the internet these days, you can only choose between an echo chamber, or all-out culture war.
I think the core Bluesky team has been discussing ways to limit toxicity so I definitely think this is on their radar. Substack also leans into the idea that their platform manages social media toxicity better than other platforms, at least in their marketing copy. I think in 2025+ toxicity is a major dimension to evaluate social platforms on.
Substack is biased towards long form, and long form is inherently antifragile against toxicity. Although bad actors with LLMs could in theory change this.
I probably read more viewpoints I disagree with on Substack than anywhere else.
This is the culture we have tried to foster over at Discuit (small open source feed-style social media site).
Granted, we had a huge Imgur user migration, so that's the current flavor of the content, but the OG userbase was aiming for a culture that is perfectly defined by "thoughtful positivity."
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.
That’s a good observation about position. For those curious, the original (and arguably representative) Bluesky user said:
> “I want to be extremely clear I was not making a death threat or inciting violence,” he told me, saying that he had sent 12 separate examples of other people posting the same Kirk image as a reaction meme. “I don’t wish death on Jay, I wish for her and her team to grow a conscience. I disagree with the decision and how it was handled. My account was taken down without any explanation for almost a full day in what can only be viewed as a retroactive ban.”
I’m sure that it’s just some sort of mistake but it’s kind of funny that the alt text they cited in the email to him about the ban wasn’t what he wrote at all.
Still the whole premise of blue sky being decentralized was that when one server bans you you could pop over to another community that doesn't consider memes a death threat, so this is a good test of how centralized bluesky remains (very)
I’d argue that people lose the moment they sign up for an account, deluding themselves into believing that the problem with the last nth iteration of the same thing isn’t them.
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.
100% it doesn't make any sense to expect different behavior out of the same format just because you make slightly different promises about what the rules will be
Bluesky has been drama central since the beginning, consisting mostly of people who thought Twitter wasn't censoring enough (or censoring the wrong people), the free speech crowd came later and, well, tested the waters and found transphobic speech was in fact not free, and that despite distributed promises, the town wasn't big enough for the two parties to coexist
While I agree with you, I would hesitate to be throwing stones from the glass house that is Hacker News.
This place also suffers from some pretty severe systemic issues that are inherent to any site that delegates moderation responsibilities to ordinary users. Invariably, these tools get abused to silence people.
The amount of greyed out and dead posts in this very comments section is exhibit A, and it's a pattern I've seen repeated in pretty much all other sites like it.
Sure there's bad uses, but putting yourself out there, on the public record, and cherishing those others around us doing the same is, in my view, divine.
I can't imagine the mindset that wouldn't want to be capturing some of the amazing wonderful world about them & the thoughts in their head & sharing them with others. I find these views about walking away from putting yourself online, seeing only the harm, as being deeply nihilistic & running away from clear amazing basically spiritual human value.
You’re entitled to your experience and spirituality, but nothing about Twitter or Bluesky has ever struck me as ‘divine.’ Rather than being a nihilistic flight from value, I think there’s far more value to be found in cultivating friendships and companions in the real world. There’s more divinity in a single hug from my wife than in everything I’ve ever read on the internet. Words have to bend to flesh at some point; we are embodied creatures. I’ve found my mental health improving massively when I take a step back from the firehose of social media and focus instead projects where I can use my hands and spending time with people I can eat with and hug.
>I’d argue that people lose the moment they sign up for an account, deluding themselves into believing that the problem with the last nth iteration of the same thing isn’t them.
I see your example as a positive in favor of mastodon over other social networks.
When the one responsible for running the site can not run it anymore, it effects everyone on that website.
Examples:
- Digg (killed by owners removing their own product)
- Myspace (killed by new ownership leaving site to rot)
- Google+ (killed by Google)
- Facebook (killed by enshitification)
- Tumblr (killed by new ownership's rules)
- Twitter (killed by unhinged new ownership)
But mastodon is actually decentralised by design and implementation.
Mastodon as a whole isn't a single website, but instead is a whole collection of groups each running on their own server that can interact with each other as if they were one large site.
So with mastodon: when a site runner loses their ability to keep a site running (e.g. your example), only the single mastodon server/group is affected, the users move to a different group, and the rest of mastodon keeps running as if nothing has changed (because in the grand scheme of things, nothing has).
> While the ATProto system has been criticized as overly complicated compared to the ActivityPub system that powers the Fediverse, it has one key feature that ActivityPub lacks: the ability to transfer servers while keeping all of your followers and posts.
FWIW, it looks like Mastodon software has some features for moving servers, including bringing your followers, but not your posts:
My understanding is Mastodon requires the server to be complicit with the transfer (online and redirecting requests to the new destination). If your host server is offline or not willing to migrate your data, you can't move.
In the AT protocol, your identity isn't tied to a server. You don't need the older server's consent or support to have a new identity somewhere else.
I know, that's a terrible image, and I should be the last person suggesting such an image.
I was mentioning one use case that's a showstopper that much of HN would appreciate, and which forces a lot of the people who attract other people to be on the proprietary platforms.
Of course a risk of making Fediverse become more popular is ruining it for those people who want very small-neighborhood community. And who don't mind that, on any given topic, they're basically stuck with the handful of people who happened to be there, not those who would be most interested.
I'd still like to make Fediverse more welcoming to more people, to get more people on it.
I have an optimistic belief that a more popular Fediverse could be better than any of the commercial alternatives. Though it would become more like them in some ways, as it grows.
>But HN members who aren't mass-marketing could change that, by moving to the Fediverse -- giving it their endorsement, and network effects.
Why? Why should HN members, or anyone else, move to another network with the same kinds of fragmentation and mutual mass bannings (and/or demands for mass bannings) that we are talking about here with Bluesky? See, for example, <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195>
> On Friday, Graber turned more serious in her pushback: “Harassing the mods into banning someone has never worked. And harassing people in general has never changed their minds,” she wrote, adding later that: “Yet it’s a behavior that persists across social media anyway, with negative consequences for civil discourse and society. Human nature is a contributing factor, but systems that reward outrage only make the problem worse.”
I think the goal of pushing many of these harassment's forward, is to further have a reason to force these platforms to clamp down on its users to push the agenda of needing to control speech. The people who benefit directly are government insiders that want to wield power over the population.
Its very similar to what I suspect the RIAA did during the file sharing craze. They would post there own content to force these platforms into submission.
IMHO. Decentralization is just another way to centralize control at choke points. The only way to make these systems censor proof is to have them built on distributed networks[0].
Secondly any for profit entity that pushes a platform is going to want control over the platform and as such be diametrically opposed to freedom of expression.
Look at BitTorrent as an example. Its been working for years. yes they can poison nodes, but its clearly much more resistant to these kinds of attacks then our current iteration of social media platforms. Why do we keep buying into platforms that doing give us what we need?
Also I'd be very wary of any overly complicated system designed to make it very difficult to understand the process of connecting to peers. Complication is usually a way to obfuscate the technical process of a system to prevent people from making any meaningful changes to it.
The only major decentralized forms of social media that I'm aware of that have confronted philosophical questions of how handle moderation have been Mastodon, Bluesky, and arguably Lemmy.
I don't know of any sense in which Mastodon has increased centralization, I think its blocking tools have been distributed essentially since the beginning, not something that has iterated toward centralization over time in response to an unfolding debate. Although it does have a complicated history and as possible that new things have happened I'm not aware of.
BlueSky though, to your point, is a good example of centralization not being reliable in terms of not being accountable to users. Or for a different way of saying the same thing, the lack of accountability has served to reveal how centralized it truly is.
It does seem to be simple enough that people don't get confused about using it, but it doesn't seem to walk the actual walk of decentralization.
The big example that comes to my mind is Matrix, where most homeservers use Mjolnir to apply centralized public blocklists of other servers/people they don't like.
So if for example #archlinux disagrees with your opinion and they decide to ban you for it, you are now banned from many other unrelated channels.
I have also seen subreddits that auto-ban users that have ever posted in specific other (unrelated) subreddits.
Mjolnir is designed to apply decentralised public blocklists - i.e. you pick which banlists to apply; there are a bunch published by different people (matrix.org, the matrix 'community moderation effort', etc). Admittedly moderators do share lists (so that if #archlinux bans you, others might pick up the ban), but there's no intrinsic centralisation.
BlueSky also has this, but it works poorly because people use blocklists as a form of harassment, or else take over existing lists and add their enemies to it.
Eh, not really. It really is decentralized, you can find them on Google. They could stop respecting a certain list but I think you can host your own AppView and get it back?
Centralization eventually ends up with a single entity in charge of everything, which eventually does (or doesn't do) something that causes it's value to collapse.
The real solution here is federalization: A bunch of independent self-govening entities that co-operate with other entities to assist each other in moderation.
A good non-social network example here would be adblockers.
- Each adblocker uses at least one ad tracking list, with most adblockers allowing for multiple lists to be used and a sensible default for their own users to use.
- Each list has it's own moderators that add/update/remove entries on their list based on their own values.
- Adblockers (and their users) can collaborate on requesting changes to lists, resulting in faster reactions to advertising changes on the web, and in turn faster updates passed down to users of those adblockers who participate.
- If an adblocker can't do their job anymore (e.g. their owners/workers can't do their job anymore, the owner sells out, etc...) users can switch to (or create) a new adblocker.
- If a list fails, adblockers can switch to other lists (or create a new one).
No adblocker and no list holds all the power. Adblocking as a whole is strengthened by always having viable alternatives that can be switched to, and methods to quickly create new alternatives if the need arises.
That's the power of federation: the strengths of centralization without the weaknesses.
The social media version of a federated twitter is mastodon. A whole bunch of groups running their own mastodon servers that can interact with each-other as if they were a centralized mastodon website, with similarly aligned servers sharing co-operatively maintained bad-actor lists.
ML could potentially provide a decentralized mechanism for filtering unwanted content, or even hybrid approaches. IMO the worst of content filtering (gore or other psychologically disturbing content) will soon be an automated job.
It already is and has been for a long time. The kinds of content you have to moderate are not things anyone wants to look at. The worst ones are far worse than you can imagine and the average ones are nudes of people you don't want to look at all day.
This is actually today's controversy on Bluesky because the #1 attribute of its power users is they're terrified of "AI" and the idea that "companies will steal their posts to generate AI slop", which means they think the ML moderation is stealing their posts.
Oh, but the ML can't be decentralized because the training datasets are illegal.
Old internet was most decentralized but since the platforms weren't scaling up to ridiculous heights moderation wasn't that big of a deal. It was also "gatekept" in a self-selecting way; now, everyone is online. Conspiracy beliefs have drastically shot up in adoption, through social media exposure.
People always had irrational populist and conspiratorial beliefs, but that was mediated by popular media generally not platforming kooks. Now you have the top 10 podcasts allowing people to mainline validation for conspiracies.
I don't see how centralization helps. Allowing (or demanding) that a media provider to regulate more could lead to less platforming for conspiracy theorists and populists.
Reddit is forum as a service. discord is chat as a service, fandom is wiki as a service. They all share the common goal of centralizing something that should probably not be centralized.
Some US states have started trying to ban or require ID for Bluesky. Is it possible to self host on your own hardware that allows somebody to get around that. If not the decentralization doesn't seem real.
I just don’t see why Joe Public will ever care about decentralisation as a concept.
We tend to hand wring about principles within the tech sphere, when the bulk of people just want a place that won’t make them feel immediately (longer term doesn’t matter) crappy when they use it, whatever that means for them. That tends towards centralisation because decentralised services have awful moderation and tend to create an even stronger strain of groupthink.
I think Bluesky exists to demonstrate that people want the features that come with centralization without the oppressive platform lock-in. If Bluesky's moderation, TOS, UI, default feeds, etc. are intolerable to you, then you should be free to move your content and your network to an app with different moderation, TOS, feeds, etc.
Bluesky isn't marketing itself as a decentralized platform because it's not. It's an opinionated view of a decentralized network, and others are free to use differently opinionated views or make their own.
> I just don’t see why Joe Public will ever care about decentralisation as a concept.
IME they do care, but they have no patience to deal with the hurdles that decentralisation imposes upon your user experience. So ease-of-use and convenience always win.
I don't understand how the removing of right wing users is described as a necessary good to create a safe and inclusive space, while the removal of left wing users is decried as censorship. If you dismiss people who have genuine concerns about things as bigoted, you yourself are being bigoted! It is as though people don't understand the definition of the word.
Who defines intolerance though? What if you call me intolerant because I do not like your favourite programming language, and have dared criticize it - is that OK?
It's a recursive paradox: an intolerant person cannot define what intolerance is, but that's what often happens in reality.
There are quite a few solutions to the paradox of tolerance. One of which was even articulated by the guy that coined the term, which the wiki link covers.
The article mostly redefine the question about tolerance as being a strategy for peace, one which will be given up when war is unavoidable. It not so much a solution to the problem of tolerance and more of a description of the motivations behind the who deploy it.
As an effect it also reject the concept of an intolerant person, as there are only people with different views about what constitutes an acceptable state of peace and what represent real and present danger.
If the left view the right as jeopardizing safety, and the right view the left as jeopardizing safety, then existential conflict is inevitable and tolerance as a strategy is dropped by both.
Intolerance is the wrong framing. You should be understanding. People who throw the label "bigot" around are themselves bigots (convinced of the superiority of their own beliefs without engaging with others views). A lot of people can have genuine disagreements with certain ideologies (e.g., they might think that transitioning minors is net negative for society) but also be open to dialogue. Such people are not bigots. Those who disagree with the left on any given point may or may not be wrong, but disagreement is not bigotry. There is no paradox there.
There is also a difference between speach and action. As a society, we should allow all speach (e.g., people questioning authority), but supress certain actions (e.g., violence). Currently, the American left seems to believe that people voicing the wrong views justified violence. That belief is abhorrent and fundamentally completely at odds with liberalism and a just and well functioning society.
Specifically, re-tolerance of intolerance, I highly recommend a speach by Rowan Atkinson on exactly that topic. If you Google it you can probably find it. It is worth a watch. He is an incredibly intelligent and eloquent man.
The technology powering Bluesky is “inspired by” but never interoperable with existing standards or similar reference architectures. This is one’s first queue that the direction is not being open.
And beyond the technical details, how can a corporation commit to transparency and non-bias when their very funding depends on it? Google already provided us with the most popular example of how this is not possible (“don’t be evil” by an ad company).
Bluesky is a PBC, which isn't a corporation exactly. Or rather it's one designed to respond to the fears of people who think corporations are required to maximize profits.
I'm disappointed in what has happened, but I think Bluesky/AT Proto presents a better direction and I hope that this is just a period of adjustment.
There are essentially two tiers of moderation on Bluesky – that provided by Bluesky themselves, and community moderation. The community moderation is powerful and I use it fairly extensively already, and my hope is that in the long term it's the community moderation that represents the bulk of moderation on the network.
The problem is that Bluesky are legally required, and required by app publishing platforms, to implement some moderation themselves. It seems like their approach there has been to focus on strict legalities, leaving the rest to community moderation. This is a good idea for the decentralized nature, but unfortunately some high profile individuals know how to fly under the legal limit while still being a pain. Then there's outrage at them not being banned even though community moderation thoroughly silences them for anyone who wants it. This results in hate being targeted at the Bluesky team... and eventually that hate turns into threats (perceived or real) and that results in bans. Now it looks like Bluesky are banning their critics while allowing dangerous people on the platform.
Bluesky are not without fault here. They've not communicated about this well, they've not pushed community moderation well enough, and they've posted some questionable rage bait. But I do understand where they're going and think the future is ultimately bright for AT Proto and the Bluesky network.
This is the reason I left the "main" social media and what keeps me from engaging too much with Reddit/HN or any of the other new hotness like Mast, nostr, BlueSky, etc: it's just rage baiting or karma farming
Mastodon is pretty much anti-that. No algorithm. If you don't like something, you just don't follow it. Nothing defaults to the instance/global timeline either and you're free to mute anything.
This hasn't been my observation. Yeah you can mute whatever you want (you can on Twitter and Bluesky also) but the HOA tendencies of Mastodon servers are alive and well. If you're a very online type of person and "live and die" by online social currents then no problem, but for others I'm not sure.
The problem with a lot of social media is that a lot of it allows you to either directly or indirectly monetise engagement. That creates an strong incentive to create outrage.
This has also been discussed in the context of FB's feed where optimising for engagement has inadvertently led to a situation where users are constantly being bombarded with ragebait.
You really don’t. You discover sites (like this one) and interesting people by word-of-mouth. Within a site (forum or blog), recency, topical categories, sorting and (full-text) searching are sufficient. That’s how the web mostly worked 20+ years ago.
You can have personal rankings, for example people reporting on the most interesting things they’ve recently seen. But these will be individual lists, not aggregated by an algorithm over all user behavior.
You certainly don’t need likes and other reactions, and you also don’t need up- and downvoting of contributions. Those set the wrong incentives and do more harm than good overall, IMO. You do need reporting of problematic content, but only site moderation will see those.
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.
He kind of did this by making it so you can see the posts of people who block you. Of course, he did this because he's so annoying everyone blocked him.
You seem to have missed that Musk nurturing a cult of mentally ill edgelords is a feature, not a bug. Why would he ever want to shield his users from the made-up ragebait that so successfully radicalized so many of them into joining MAGA?
> 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 benefit of ignoring reality like this? He's not going to magically disappear if Bluesky bans him - indeed he'll remain VP with all the power that entails.
This is worse than performative activism, it's like some kind of political denialism. You can't change reality by pretending it doesn't exist.
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.
What is this for kind of logic. So if you have a store, and you happen to have a client that smashes someone else's head in your shop, then that means in your logic that you as a shop owner are guilty of violence.
But I guess you say you should know the reputation of every person coming into your shop, and if their reputation is deemed inappriopriate by a certain group, they should not be allowed into the shop to prevent them from harassing any other customers.
But how are you gonna regulate that? Who is gonna decide who is inappropriate and who isn't?
I think we already have a fairly well organized system for that: law & order. If someone breaks laws, they are punished for it. So if someone is violent, whether it's inside or outside a shop, they can be punished for it.
And you as a shop owner don't have to also individually take the effort to investigate and punish the individual. Although if you want to you have the freedom to; it's your shop in the end.
True. People define the speech of others as violence because they think it makes a violent response into self defense. It isn't true and never has been. If you're responding to speech with violence... you're the baddie.
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..."
Speech is not violence, guilt by association is undemocratic, and this hypothesis of de-platforming as a tactic to limit uncouth ideas was thoroughly tested over the last ~15 years and demonstrably shown to be false: Trump, Alex Jones, and many others were banned across platforms. One of these people now sits in the White House, in part because of backlash to the deplatforming of him and others with similar politics.
It cost $44B to get him unbanned so I think that's actually pretty good evidence it worked.
> One of these people now sits in the White House, in part because of backlash to the deplatforming of him and others with similar politics.
It's not because of anything. Cause and effect doesn't apply to the brain of the median American voter - they live in a world of pure imagination. You could say they thought prices would go back down to 2016 levels, but that makes too much sense. If you look up what they actually think it's like "I voted for Trump because I want to protect abortion".
> It cost $44B to get him unbanned so I think that's actually pretty good evidence it worked.
Good evidence that it worked to do what? Limit his influence and popularity? This is false. His unbanning had little effect besides the right wing giving Musk brownie points, but the initial ban fueled grievance politics and became a huge rallying cry for the right. It was an extraordinary backfire.
> It's not because of anything. Cause and effect doesn't apply to the brain of the median American voter - they live in a world of pure imagination.
I flatly disagree with this. Human beings are endlessly deep and complex. The extremes of the internet cause us to group people together and create 1-dimensional strawmen of them, but if you talk to any American voter -- offline and 1-on-1 -- you will find complexity, nuance, and surprise in their opinions. At least, that has been my experience, with a pretty decent sample size.
Edit: I've been loosely watching the score on these comments, and it's interesting to see how rapidly it fluctuates up and down. For those that disagree, please leave a comment. IMO what I wrote is pretty common sense and moderate, so I'm interested in hearing disagreements.
All social media moderation is "banning people for saying stuff people don't like". Most people don't like e.g. spam, or death threats, or racism, so social media offer communication platforms where those kinds of speech are restricted, with varying degrees of effort and success. The goal of banning Vance would be to have a social media site that moderates against the kinds of things Vance says.
This makes some sense if Vance was a minor, fringe figure. But he was on a ticket voted for by ~50% of US voters. This is effectively saying that the goal is to have a social media site where half the country is not welcome.
The problem with that is two-fold. One, it neuters any political impact - you're effectively driving away the very voters you need to convince. And two, it creates an echo chamber that distorts reality because everywhere you look people are agreeing with you. Then 2028 rolls around and you're shocked that "the bad guys" won again.
> This is effectively saying that the goal is to have a social media site where half the country is not welcome.
That seems like a good goal. I want to chat with friends about formula one or whatever, not have to have everything messed up by some weirdo who always wants to debate whether minorities have rights.
I don't like Vance at all, but him being on the same social media platform as you isn't the same thing as him showing up uninvited to your formula one conversation.
Exactly the GP's point though, that's essentially sending an indicator to 50% of the population that they're not welcome on the platform. Do you really think a platform that performs actions like that will be successful? In practice, it obviously just creates echo chambers where fringe beliefs are painted as the common majority, because all dissenting views are silenced.
Why wouldn't it be successful? Truth Social seems to be doing pretty well, and no one on the left pretends that they should be allowed post there, the left is happy for those people to fuck off and leave them alone.
Not everyone wants to debate politics all the time. Sometimes they just want to exist as trans people, share posts with their other queer friends and enjoy their day.
> Why wouldn't it be successful? Truth Social seems to be doing pretty well,
Is it? No one I know uses it at all, the only time I even remember it exists is when seeing screenshots of Trump's posts reposted on mainstream media and twitter from his account there. It's essentially the "trump-branded-twitter" and I never even hear of anyone else actually using it.
Compared to twitter, where most people I know still have an account in one way or another, including most notable mainstream figures.
> Not everyone wants to debate politics all the time. Sometimes they just want to exist as trans people, share posts with their other queer friends and enjoy their day.
Well they'd be poorly served by Bluesky, seeing as how someone merely existing on the platform without even breaking any rules has become a hot-button issue.
The whole platform is filled with politics, and people complaining about politics(/political figures). Perhaps politics they agree with are more tolerable than having to see opposing politics on their feed, but I find it hard to believe they truly are attracted to Bluesky for the total lack of politics.
Well, unless they go there for furry porn. There's so much of it for those that seek out such content, perhaps it really goes drown out any semblance of political discussion.
Mastodon is the right model. I keep saying this and I keep being surprised that it isn't more obvious to most. It's the right model because it's essentially the same model as email. Yes, there is TONS of "human" work to be done to change people's minds on this, but STRUCTURALLY it's the only one that can handle things correctly.
I always found what Bluesky was "optimizing" for to be a stupid goal, and inherently a bad idea -- namely "the ability to keep your everything permanent."
That's EXACTLY what brings MORE danger to centralization. I get that losing an identity on a thing sucks BUT WE'VE ALREADY DEALT WITH THIS WITH EMAIL, and more over the ability to lose/destroy/start over -- like with email -- is a FEATURE as much as it is a bug.
Right, but email is really not all that great, neither on a practical nor technical level. 99.99% of all users doesn't run their own mail server so in practice it is not decentralized. I would guesstimate that 50% or more of all mail traffic is handled by Google, MS, Apple, and a few outer mega corps. And for most people Facebook, Slack, and WhatsApp are way more convenient communication methods than email.
Your criticisms have some validity, but email is in a sense objectively great in that it's the thing that "won."
I believe there's a universe of difference between ONE provider and a few megacorps plus weirdos like me who pay for my own domain; I actually think that would ALSO be a good model for twitter-esque microblogging the way it pretty much works for email.
> I keep saying this and I keep being surprised that it isn't more obvious to most.
Well I read your explanation, and it's still not obvious. Nor do I appreciate the implication that anyone who disagrees with you is missing something obvious. Not the best choice, rhetorically.
>Mastodon is the right model. I keep saying this and I keep being surprised that it isn't more obvious to most. It's the right model because it's essentially the same model as email. Yes, there is TONS of "human" work to be done to change people's minds on this, but STRUCTURALLY it's the only one that can handle things correctly.
>I’d argue that people lose the moment they sign up for an account, deluding themselves into believing that the problem with the last nth iteration of the same thing isn’t them.
They cover the possibility of people potentially migrating to Mastodon with this gem:
> But not everyone is looking forward to the idea: “I’d go back to Usenet before I went back to Mastodon,” wrote Bluesky user Count Von Horse Knuckler. “I do not need people yelling at me for not putting cat pictures behind trigger warnings or unwanted Linux advice.”
But I'm suspicious because:
1. That doesn't appear to be a valid Bluesky handle and,
2. Even if it's a pseudonym-- which is understandable-- how could there possibly be a former usenet graybeard who didn't love trafficking in unwanted Linux advice?
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 want to allow an antagonist to take part in, I mean, aren't you just like effectively putting fingers in your ears while someone in another room talks about you?
I don't see how, without centralization, you can say to the world, "Hey, here's my content, interact with it," and then also say, "Oh you, over there, you can't participate in this thing that I am doing."
Like, depending on the shape of the graph, that doesn't make any sense. You effectively cannot do that without just creating a bunch of silos that are non-cooperative.
Bam, you've reinvented centralization with extra steps.
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.
I think there’s a lot of misconceptions about atproto; unlike ActivityPub where your home server runs both the application as well as stores your data, atproto is build in the concept that “applications” like BlueSky store your data inside your PDS (Personal Data Store), which may or may not be hosted somewhere else.
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.
What are you talking about? Yes, it is closed - their PDS implementation and clients are open, but the actual service that runs on bsky.app is, at present, not open source.
Without the backend that handles all of the XRPC endpoints [1] being available, BlueSky still effectively maintains centralized control over their part of the 'atmosphere'. Somebody could, of course, make an open source implementation of the app.bsky lexicon and users would only need to update their DID to point at their preferred instance, but AFAIK none exists right now.
Would projects like this one, which pulls only a subset of Bluesky data straight from the firehose, and can be processed as the end user pleases, help mitigate this limitation?
Bluesky is still the arbiter of what their firehouse emits
Theoretically they could maintain that filtering only occurs on the client level but they've made the choice to exclude banned users from the firehouse so their moderation choices effect everyone
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.
> But not everyone is looking forward to the idea: “I’d go back to Usenet before I went back to Mastodon,” wrote Bluesky user Count Von Horse Knuckler. “I do not need people yelling at me for not putting cat pictures behind trigger warnings or unwanted Linux advice.”
Cat pictures need a trigger warning? Wonder what the triggering effect is there?
It seems a bit random though. Are mastodon people big on trigger warnings? I never signed up for it. Heck, I never signed up for twitter or bluesky either. For mastodon I considered it, but telling people "ha, ha, I am writing toots" was a little too silly, even for me.
Not on trigger warnings, but on content warnings on general. It folds the post by default, but shows the warning description so it's useful for lots of reason.
For example "USpol" is often used as common CW but not specifically TW. But it could be "boob", or "giant spider", or "furry", or "food photo", or "super long post" whatever else you think people may react to with "I wish I didn't have to see that while scrolling the timeline". It's really just about making it a nicer place to others. It's common, but it's not like people expect you to put USpol warning on posts from account which deals only with politics.
You can't have decentralized but connected and system level moderation at the same time.
It's either centralized and moderated system wide or decentralized and moderated locally.
The problem with being connected and moderated locally is your creating global moderation problems for a local system, typically that means massive amounts of work for said moderators.
The founder has been posting through it, Elon-style and with as much cringe.
It's disappointing because I've mostly been able to replicate my Twitter experience there. It's better actually, because more funny people moved and fewer journalists so it's less of a doomscroll.
"Posting through it" is a fairly nonsensical concept. It implies you're required to agree with people yelling at you, which you aren't.
Bluesky in particular has this problem because it inherited a kind of leftist crustpunk poster from 2016 Twitter. They had a weird affect where they hated "nerds" for some reason and pretended to be those jock bully characters from 80s high school movies.
The modern Bluesky form has evolved into being terrified of "AI" and screaming at anyone who uses it or has ever heard of it that it doesn't work and will never work but is also using up all the water and steals everyone's art and is going to make everyone unemployed and also you're a STEMlord who needs to take humanities classes to learn to be ethical.
They're currently working on inventing new slurs for AI chatbots which are mostly remarkably offensive.
By remarkably offensive I mean they're clearly just trying to get away with saying the N-word. The full version too. You should try living your life better.
Saying that making jokes about inanimate probability models is comparable to saying the N word is anti-Black racism. Completely inappropriate and divorced from reality.
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.
> he's one of journalism's answers to the concept of edgelordery
either the term "edgelord" means something very different from what it did 10ish years ago or you have a very misinformed understanding about how timid Jesse approaches online conflict. I haven't seen him initiate any form of edgy engagement in forever .. maybe ever.
I followed him long after he was declared persona non grata, sort of uncomfortably agreeing that he was getting dogpiled unfairly (I don't think I agree with him about much, but at the time, it didn't seem like he was saying anything more than a stddev from the media consensus). I don't follow him anymore, after it became very clear that he's steering right into personal conflicts with people, and reciprocating all the weird grudges. I've also had reason to listen to his podcast within the past year (they did an episode covering our local library system), and feel comfortable with the decision to yuck out of paying attention to him.
(Not over the library coverage itself, just over ancillary stuff I heard on the podcast).
I'll put it this way: I had reason to tip our local politics Facebook off to the episode he did, and when I did that, I wrote a paragraph long disclaimer about what he's like. Not because I have any animus towards Singal, but because I didn't want anybody to associate me with some of what he's said.
So yeah, I'd push back on this.
Singal is a lot less interesting a subject (aren't we all exhausted of debating Singal at this point) than whether Bluesky is going to be a viable mainstream competitor to Twitter, and he's interesting to me only in what this drama says about that question.
> Singal is a lot less interesting a subject (aren't we all exhausted of debating Singal at this point) than whether Bluesky is going to be a viable mainstream competitor to Twitter
I 100% agree with you on that part. As for the rest, it seems you and I have a vastly different experience with him and his views. Cheers!
edit: oh yea, I don't know whether you'd be comfortable sharing it here but I'd be fairly curious about that Jesse 101 you wrote for your facebook group. Not to criticize it or anything just to get a better idea of your POV.
The guy's whole bit is arguing from some sort of vague sociological perspective against gender affirming care. And pretending that (in the United States of America of all places) teens can just walk up to their doctors super easily and get surgery done somehow.
He presents this issue as a sort of parental-rights-ignoring epidemic, but if you dig into the reality of it all there's a hell of a lot of parental consent, a hell of a lot of checks within the medical establishment about whether to do these things, and of course the person themselves being involved.
Singal is a fellow traveler to people who defend conversion therapy, which is a thing where _kids are sent to a camp to be trained into a different sexuality_. This is shit that's basically banned in many places in Europe, because many believe that those camps are basically child abuse.
So you're looking at a person who has a lot of distrust for the medical establishment, falsely presents the reality of the thing to make it sound like people are walking in for free top surgery the moment they get into middle school[0], and this is stuff that is being cited to add restrictions on other things.
There's this deeply personal thing that a very small segment of the population is trying to deal with. There are medical professionals that have some help (including just of the "talking" variety), some degree of acceptance in pockets of society. And this sort of thing means that people can have a little bit of dignity. And the medical establishment is trying to treat people!
Meanwhile this guy is using his voice to just spread fear around all of this, misrepresenting even really basic things. And to what goal? Again, parental rights are part of the equation in reality! And we're not talking about a sports thing here. So who is Singal out there fighting for?
I kind of don't care what this guy's opinion is on, like, taxes and the role of government in the rest of life. He's going out there writing this kind of stuff so consistently that he's known for it. And I have a very hard time understanding who he is the voice for, except for people who are just against trans people existing in public society.
I don't care about him being banned off of bluesky or whatever. I just want people here to have at least some access to medical care (in various forms) if doctors and parents agree. And his stuff is helping to provide ammo to roll this access back at a legislative level. Serious people should know that what he says doesn't hold up on examination. In the same way that people "know" that Trump just says things that sound emotionally right to him in the moment to prove a point.
[0]: I'm exagerating here but again, in the USA access to medical treatment is not easy!
What is Singal misrepresenting? His writings on the subject mostly serve to highlight just how poor the evidence around gender affirming pediatric care is. And he's hardly alone in this conclusion. The UK, Sweden, Italy, Denmark, Norway, and Finland have all stopped routine prescription of hormone blockers to children. Most countries never allowed it in the first place.
> And pretending that (in the United States of America of all places) teens can just walk up to their doctors super easily and get surgery done somehow.
It was about how the so called Dutch Protocol re: gender affirming care first came to the US, and how long-ish psychological evaluation times were often truncated because of how far patients had to travel in the US. Then the lid flew off when such care moved to California.
> Singal is a fellow traveler to people who defend conversion therapy
Yikes. One doesn't usually expect people to use the actual language of McCarthy-ites.
> So who is Singal out there fighting for?
The kids? It's really not crazy to believe that the children, perhaps not given adequate care, could simply be wrong, or even socially influenced (like everything else in a teenager's life).
> He's going out there writing this kind of stuff so consistently that he's known for it. And I have a very hard time understanding who he is the voice for, except for people who are just against trans people existing in public society.
It's a new treatment and how it is practiced here in the US is the very Q he is examining. I'm not saying he's right, but I do feel better if there is someone with a critical eye looking at new treatment methods.
I am going to re-insist on the idea that parental consent is going to play a big role in practice in US healthcare practices, if only for financial reasons. I have very little patience for the idea that access is easy.
Perhaps there is a debate to be had on treatment protocols, but I generally feel like, for something that covers such a small segment of the population, the default is to err towards letting that debate happen in professional circles.
> I am going to re-insist on the idea that parental consent is going to play a big role in practice in US healthcare practices, if only for financial reasons.
Oh agreed. If, for no other reason, that is how the politics, even on the American Left, are now. A few years ago, people were talking about gender affirming care as a matter of right for the children. Singal, among others, changed that conversation.
> I have very little patience for the idea that access is easy.
Agreed, but I think you may have misconstrued Singal's point. He's not saying it's too easy, he's saying there is not enough preliminary psychiatric care like the treatment protocol dictated in the Netherlands.
> Perhaps there is a debate to be had on treatment protocols, but I generally feel like, for something that covers such a small segment of the population, the default is to err towards letting that debate happen in professional circles.
Um. Those professional circles like HN's professional circles need to be open to the air every now and then. Like -- what if we allowed Peter Thiel and his circle of founders, raised on Heinlein novels and sugary soda, to dictate tech policy in the US? Some people are just too weirdly close to a thing. We actually do need the wisdom that normies can offer.
Specifically, re: this topic, four European countries, who have a much more experience than Americans do with this care, have recently implemented more restrictive approaches to care. See: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/06/us-europe-transgend...
It should be a matter of right. My parents mutilated me as a child because they denied me healthcare. We should not allow parents to deny their children healthcare which leads to their permanent disfiguration. That's disgusting.
If you think it'd be wrong to force a cis kid to be trans, then it's also wrong to force a trans kid to be cis.
I think that's a fine point to make, but I also think it's unlikely to be politically feasible, any time soon, in the US. You may have been perfectly capable of making this decision, but, in the most common case, most parents know that teenage brains driving almost adult bodies sometimes make really terrible decisions. And lots of us imagine we were much smarter than we actually were in adolescence. Moreover -- parents can be just as profoundly stupid.
I'd imagine a teenage Melanie Griffith would say she was perfectly capable of consenting to the very adult relationship she had with Don Johnson, and to which, I believe, her parents consented, as well. In retrospect, I'm not sure adult Melanie Griffith would feel the same. Or at the very least she may not allow her daughter to do the same.
Perhaps that's why we should willing to accept some guidance from things that at least can pretend to be objective -- science and journalism. Especially views critical of our priors and intuitions. And we definitely shouldn't seek to silence or de-platform anyone simply because they disagree.
Please -- vote the bastards out of office who don't take your problems seriously, but also please don't silence journalists for suggesting that there is more to this question than two simple American Left and Right narratives. Some of us need that kind of help to understand the world.
> We should not allow parents to deny their children healthcare which leads to their permanent disfiguration. That's disgusting.
So instead we need to enable parents to allow healthcare to disfigure their young kids when they predictably get influenced from social media and their peers?
How is it 'disgusting' to try to let someone live as they were born?
It's a medical matter. If medical officials broadly agree that having a prosthetic limb gives someone better quality of life than having no limb, then yes, we should disfigure the human body by attaching a prosthetic.
Medical officials fairly broadly agree that gender-affirming care improves the quality of life of patients, and so of course it should be allowed.
It's disgusting to try and use the law to force medical professionals to give sub-par care for no good reason.
> How is it 'disgusting' to try to let someone live as they were born?
I assume you're opposed to cosmetic dental braces for children? Even though just like gender-affirming care, they can lead to better self-perception and better outcomes (but 'disfigure' the child by making their teeth more aligned with stereotypical norms)
> Medical officials fairly broadly agree that gender-affirming care improves the quality of life of patients, and so of course it should be allowed.
This is not really true any more at this point in history. European countries have either backed away from pediatric gender affirming care, or they never allowed it in the first place. It's increasingly the case that the US and Canada are the outliers in the broader consensus that the evidence for the benefits of endocrine interventions in children is too weak to justify routine prescription.
> I assume you're opposed to cosmetic dental braces for children? Even though just like gender-affirming care, they can lead to better self-perception and better outcomes (but 'disfigure' the child by making their teeth more aligned with stereotypical norms)
Are we really going to try and draw an equivalence between cosmetic dental braces and permanently-altering hormones? A wire pulling a kid's teeth into places is not comparable to chemically castrating the kid for a few years and giving them opposite-sex hormones in their mid-teens. The measured benefits to the latter have to be way higher to justify that level of invasiveness and permanent change.
These kinds of blithe comparisons to the seriousness of gender-affirming care no small part of why trust on this issue has waned so fast.
I read a study that said a majority of trans kids grow up to be gay if they don't take puberty blockers. I think it's wrong to force a gay kid to be trans.
> 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 pitchforks problem, who are asking for something which they don't have any business asking.
Sure, if you want to stick your fingers in your ears, block Singal. There are widely used block lists for people who even merely follow Singal. Asking for his ban from a public use platform is too much without more than "He wrote some articles for the NY Times, The Atlantic, and NY Magazine, I didn't personally enjoy."
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.
> Bluesky has a problem of its user base demanding purity, and it will 100% be the death of it.
Yup.
As someone who describes themselves as Leftist, I wanted to enjoy Blue Sky, but the purity tests are insane.
To give a concrete example, I was called a Nazi for owning a Tesla Model 3. The fact that I bought the car 6 years ago, long before Elon Musk made his hard-right turn, was irrelevant. They literally expected me to sell the car and take a huge financial loss (Since I need a car and would then need to buy a new one, and the trade-in value of my M3P is shit) just to virtue signal.
The _actual_ trouble with Bluesky is that it's just a retread of Twitter with only a few minor tweaks, right down to the inevitable moderation and governance problems from shoving every user into a single shared social space and having a single centralized point of failure.
It's not 2012 anymore, and the modern mainstream social media ecosystem has turned into an utter disaster area. If you're going to do social media in the 2020's, you need something better, not the same tired ideas and empty promises about "We'll do it _right_ this time around, honest."
Mastodon, for all its faults, at the very least was truly and demonstrably decentralized.
A decentralized system would allow for that to happen tbh. That 85% can exist in their bubble but other actors who see them as dangerous and unsafe should have the means to mute/disconnect.
Even better: the only “evidence” of Singal’s “anti-trans” views are that his work has been quoted by anti-trans politicians and activists. This is an absolute ridiculous bar to have. Anyone who follows him would be hard-pressed to describe him as “anti-trans” unless you think anything less than a full throated endorsement of self ID and medical transition interventions for minors is “anti-trans”.
Indeed, Singal is a journalist you go to when you want to read a thoughtful, data-driven analysis of a controversial issue.
He's exceptionally skilled at taking complex and highly polarized topics and picking them apart in a way that invites readers to consider different perspectives.
Unfortunately, that in itself is a polarizing approach, as many people just want their pre-existing beliefs reinforced.
Speaking of confirmation bias, do you disagree with Singal about anything in particular?
What about agreement?
Who else have you read on this 'controversial issue'? Why did you consider them less persuasive than a journalist with no particular expertise?
Why have you not named what the 'issue' is?
Are 'people' an 'issue' to be solved in general, or just in this case?
If we changed topics to 'what should be done about the "autism issue"', does your opinion change? If so, why? There are perfectly valid questions being brought up by heterodox thinkers all the time. We're not even certain that those people experience emotions, there's literally no way to tell, and we shouldn't shy away from hard questions and even harder truths, don't you think?
Do you believe that the executive branch of the federal government is best-suited to dealing with undesirable minorities generally? If so, what national-level 'solutions' currently being discussed in the halls of power are your favorites?
In the spirit of cooperation, I'll go first. Openly trial-ballooning the revocation of the second amendment for trans people is my favorite in terms of pure audacity.
I wanted to give you (and the website you linked) the benefit of the doubt since with all the accusations they make there is a link in there. I thought it was sources of Jesse actually doing any of this stuff (which he didn't but I am willing to be proven wrong) .. but no. Those links are all just internal info dumps and almost nothing of the accusations on the page is sourced .. at all.
Right, the website lists the accusations with links, but the links seem unrelated to the accusations.
For example, I'd expect "criticizing expert medical and scientific consensus on healthcare for our minors" to link to some kind of article describing what Jesse Singal said about this topic and why it's incorrect, but instead it links to a general page about "healthcare providers serving gender diverse youth" that doesn't even mention anything about the accused person or their writings.
Facebook and Twitter no longer bother with moderation, do you think the experience on those platforms is better or worse than 5 years ago?
It used to be common sense to immediately ban creeps of all stripes, especially the obvious ones. Singal certainly qualifies. Putting aside the super annoying 'just asking questions' vitriol that he publishes to national papers, his pdf-file chat log stuff alone would warrant an instant perma from me without a second thought.
Speaking to your broader point about the 'death' of a platform. The people that made bsky what it is now (good and ill) are precisely the people you are blaming for its downfall, which is weird. Normally when you run a business you want your users to remain so that you might profit.
Relatedly, I'm very very tired of the 4chan/crypto/ai gas-leak that has enshittified everything, aren't you?
I've seen bsky users chat casually about their rpe and death-threat ratio before and after leaving twitter, and for that alone, I would choose the 'threat lite' platform for as long as it remained so.
> "The question is not whether those views are right, it's whether those are mainstream."
I don't agree that this is the question, nor do I agree with the your unsupported number. This isn't an election, and popularism is a coward's appeal. Was the Gaza genocide not a genocide until the polls caught up with what we could all see was happening?
I don't even think you believe what your wrote. If the 'views' in question are truly shared by 85%!* of a population that never agrees on anything, then surely there's no problem with sharing them on this forum? A guarantee of 85% positive karma is awaiting you if you just speak your truth. It's the Trump era, and you can say the 'r-word' and the 't-slur' now. What was actually holding you back?
> This isn't an election, and popularism is a coward's appeal.
These platforms were supposed to be the "digital town square". Implicit in that is the idea that anyone and everyone can discuss and share their ideas. When would you remove someone from an actual town square? Only when they are being extremely disruptive or violent.
Further, it cannot be a "town square" if half the town isn't allowed to be there.
These are privately owned for-profit hundred-billion+ dollar publicly traded advertising companies. These are, almost definitionally, not honest actors! Are you serious, you still believe their marketing copy from 8 years ago verbatim?
> Facebook and Twitter no longer bother with moderation, do you think the experience on those platforms is better or worse than 5 years ago?
I haven't used FB in years but Twitter is very (stupidly and incoherently, but very actively) moderated. Unless you are being technical and saying that Twitter doesn't exist and so isn't moderated, and the moderated thing is X, but...
X then. By unmoderated I mean it's a cess-pool of pay-boosted groypers, crypto ad accounts, ai accounts, sex accounts, pure scams, ai generated underage girlfriends, and actual CSAM, that go mostly ignored if they shell out 8 USD.
I'm sure some actual humans manage to still get banned from time to time, but you can't be telling me that things haven't changed for the worse right? Do they even have a 'trust and safety' team anymore?
Do you have a source for any of this? I've never seen any of those.
Well, except the groypers, but that's a feature, not a bug, as they otherwise are not breaking the law or platfom rules and therefore deserve to be on the platform just as anyone else does.
> Facebook and Twitter no longer bother with moderation, do you think the experience on those platforms is better or worse than 5 years ago?
> It used to be common sense to immediately ban creeps of all stripes, especially the obvious ones. Singal certainly qualifies.
The experience on these platforms is somewhat better than it was five years ago, because the people making moderation decisions for these platforms have been largely replaced by people who are less prone to banning people because someone who dislikes their political speech labels them a creep. There are still serious moderation issues on these platforms, but yeah compared to five years ago there is somewhat more freedom to speak without risking getting arbitrarily banned, and a wider range of topics being talked about.
> Putting aside the super annoying 'just asking questions' vitriol that he publishes to national papers, his pdf-file chat log stuff alone would warrant an instant perma from me without a second thought.
You should be able to perma-ban anyone you want from your own feed for any reason. If it is possible for you to make the platform ban Singal (or anyone else) in a way that affects anyone other than ypu, then that platform is not meaningfully decentralized. I've occasionally read articles by Singal but I don't follow his output closely and don't have a strong opinion about him one way or the other. I should still be able to read what he posts even if you think it is not worth reading.
> Relatedly, I'm very very tired of the 4chan/crypto/ai gas-leak that has enshittified everything, aren't you?
I don't think 4chan, cryptocurrency, or AI have much to do with each other, nor that online discussion related to to these phenomena in some way universally constitutes enshittification or not.
4chan has changed the way that discourse happens online, and it has definitely leaked to X at the very least. Incel lingo especially, you might even use it yourself being completely unaware. I'd call it as a style of reactionary discourse, where the most 'controversial/engaging' thing is elevated and 'ironic' nihilism is the default viewpoint. This is now fully automated, but it needn't be forever so. These companies would do well to learn how to enter the post-exponential phase of their life-cycle.
crypto (and gambling I suppose these days) is a barometer of the advertising/fake user space. There's a fundamentally different vibe to a site trying to trick the gullible into getting 'free' crypto from musk and a site trying to sell you 75% off crocs at Target. You are free to disagree.
AI is the source of a huge wave deeply inauthentic and frankly boring/weird content. This reduces the signal/noise ratio, and thus the perceived value of any website. Again, your are free to disagree, but to me this is all symptomatic of cyclical autophagy.
There was an article about this issue on techcrunch yesterday, and it linked to a long discussion on Bluesky about whether "clanker" was a slur that should be banned. JC. What a waste of time by some people.
There seem to be a lot of people on Bluesky who don’t think it’s wrong to post reply-spam about their favorite grievances even when it’s entirely off topic. Complaining about Singal is an example. It’s the sort of thing that would be downvoted to oblivion on Hacker News.
For the most part they’re fairly easy to avoid, but reading the replies for popular accounts is a minefield.
This is sort of like email in the old days before the spam filters got good. Bluesky needs better reply-spam filters. Or maybe they already exist somewhere, but it needs better ways to find the good filters?
If that gets fixed then maybe it has a chance to become a more welcoming place.
If you're talking about moot and kiwifarms that wasn't merely "user pressure" like large customers threatening to walk - it was a harassment campaign hitting up the legal department and cloudflare decided they didn't want to bother dying on that hill
I have been halfway following the Farm's status for the past couple years from null's telegram/forum posts, I didn't know he spoke about the situation at length anywhere.
But I guess users also expect that there's freedom of opinions on the platform within the set rules. If users are merely being banned based on their opinion, that doesn't sound like a healthy environment.
Being someone who is obsessed with denigrating an oppressed minority should get people banned from more private places than it does currently. I'd like to hear counterarguments if there are any. If you don't think that characterization applies to Singal and Vance, why?
> Why do you believe that description applies to Singal? His work is well-researched, grounded and reasonable.
To answer your question: because truth is no defense. How many times have you seen some statement accused of being something-ist, instead of simply false? How often did in further arguing the factuality of the original statement not even come up?
> 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.
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.
> For example his claim that Singal's writing "endangers trans lives" is hyperbolic and unsupported.
Partially due to Singal’s sensationalist journalism, trans people in the United States are about to lose access to some forms of healthcare—treatments that will remain accessible to cis people, like hormone replacement therapy.
So I think history has vindicated this particular claim. I don’t expect you to agree, however.
I am honored that you made an account just to respond to this! Welcome to HN.
Couldn't it be possible that chemically altering minors isn't be best course of treatment? The UK, Finland, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway have all stopped routine prescription of puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria on the grounds that their efficacy is not clear but the negative side effects are. It's extremely hard to claim the science is settled at this point.
The allegations of harm seem to come from an a priori conclusion that these treatments are beneficial.
I welcome any novel, high-quality scientific research on better treatments for gender dysphoric children.
But, in the States at least, there is no longer any funding for that. They cut all of it by grepping the NIH and NSF databases for “gender”, more or less.
What there soon will be in the States, assuming SCOTUS overturns the Colorado ban this term, is a renaissance of conversion therapy. If you abuse the child hard enough and long enough, they’ll have bigger problems than gender dysphoria or—coming up in the next wave of manufactured outrage—same-sex attraction.
Hard to say that the “just asking questions” club has the child’s best interests at heart.
Somewhat unique among studies on pediatric gender affirming hormone therapy, this study had a control group that wasn't prescribed blockers. The group on blockers fared no better than the control group. This is the study that primarily motivated Finland to stop routine prescription of puberty blockers to children, with half a dozen or so other European countries following suit after their reviews of the evidence.
Researchers in the US have typically balked at the idea of including a control group in their studies on blockers, arguing that it's unethical to withhold live-saving medicine from patients. This, conveniently, lets authors frame null results as positive, by claiming that gender dysphoria patient would have fared even worse without blockers. This is what Johanna Olson-Kennedy did in her latest study: she observed no change in the patients' outcomes, and claimed that this indicates that blockers are beneficial because they prevented the patients from getting even worse. But without a control group in her study, this is statement is just speculation.
The retreat from gender affirming care is motivated by the absence of good evidence in favor of their usage. And it's hardly a US-specific phenomenon. It's uniquely politicized in the US, I'll grant that, but this shift in stance on altering children's endocrine systems is happening in plenty of other countries too, so I'm not so convinced this is solely borne out by this latest President.
And again, I find the attempts to equate anti-gay conversion therapy aimed at suppressing homosexual desire with exploring ways to become more comfortable in one's natural body. It's fundamentally different to[ tell a boy attracted to other boys that his feelings are wrong than it is to tell a boy identifying as a girl on account of his same sex attractions, "boys can like other boys, not only girls can like boys". The former is telling someone to reject a part of themselves, the latter is expanding's one's concept of gender to include one's natural state of being.
> 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 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.
I explicitly said it and every other example of the genre was biased, so I don’t know why you’re claiming otherwise. Thanks for confirming my priors on HN users.
> 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).
> 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.
> The problem, if you can call it that, is Singal hasn't broken any of their TOS.
Well, no, he did unambiguously break the TOS back when he originally joined. Then Bluesky amended their TOS, which gave them an avenue to avoid banning him.
My understanding is their TOS was unclear and they clarified it after the outrage, but their moderation policy didn't actually change. They're not going ban people that break the TOS outside the S, because that's practically unenforceable.
> They're not going ban people that break the TOS outside the S, because that's practically unenforceable.
Before they amended the ToS, they did do that. It's completely possible to enforce, especially when the person in question is the one sharing the evidence of the offending behavior. There's no dispute of facts at play.
> Doxxing people off-platform used to be against the ToS. When people began reporting him for that, Bluesky amended their ToS.
Even by the loosest definition what Singal did was not doxxing?
For instance, Alejandra Caraballo, like it or not, is a public figure. A role, I would add, that she has chosen for herself. She testifies before Congress FFS. When she says something in public, including on Bluesky, I'm not sure she deserves some radical right to not have it heard anywhere else. No matter what vague term you can point to in the Bluesky guidelines or 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 they see other people get banned for”. It serves as a kind of cover because even when you point to a concrete example of him violating the rules the moderation team will dismiss your report as being personally motivated. It’s a funny defense, “This guy couldn’t possibly be breaking the rules and be near-universally considered an asshole by the users on this site! It has to be one or the other!”
> 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.
This is an insane thing to ban in the terms of service, and it is in and of itself a good reason to avoid using BlueSky. I would not want to rely on any service to communicate that made it against the rules to post a screenshot of a public message from someone who blocked my account on their end.
> This is an insane thing to ban in the terms of service, and it is in and of itself a good reason to avoid using BlueSky.
That’s a perfectly reasonable opinion to have. The post you were responding to was not about the merits of the rule, it is about uneven enforcement of it.
That rule would be a reason to avoid BlueSky if you are not Jesse Singal, because you could get banned for breaking it. If you are Jesse Singal it is not a reason to avoid BlueSky, because that rule does not exist for you.
The strange thing about this is that Jay and the moderation team are sympathetic to your point. They don’t think that evading blocks (or doxxing) should always be grounds for taking action against an account. For at least one user they ignore all instances of it
> 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.
> I don't like platforms that try to keep me ignorant of what others are publicly saying
That’s neither here nor there. The nuclear block is a big part of how Bluesky works, and abiding by it/was part of the rules for users other than Jesse Singal.
The point I made is that other users that share your disagreement with the nuclear block would get suspended or banned for evading it, whereas Jesse Singal would not/does not. The message to other users was “if you don’t like it, tough”
I say is/was because I don’t read his posts. I stopped paying close attention to all that some time after it became clear that retroactive changes to the ToS to justify (lack of) actions is the baseline for how Jay and Aaron run the site.
How can people laugh and make meme at someone else murder ? Like the guy, hate him, but there is something that used to be shared amongst humans, it's that you respect the dead.
That's just empathy. Seems like it's gone to the toilet in some part of the usa or maybe it's just weirdos on internet. Either case it's despicable.
> How can people laugh and make meme at someone else murder ? Like the guy, hate him, but there is something that used to be shared amongst humans, it's that you respect the dead.
This is extremely wrong. Humans do have an impulse to show respect to the dead, even in some cases dead members of some kind of enemy community. But it is also extremely common and extremely widespread for people to celebrate the deaths of their enemies, from leftists making jokes about the death of Margaret Thatcher, to British people continuing to burn Guy Fawkes in effigy for his centuries-old act of unsuccessful terrorism, to Jews continuing to disparage Haman, some 2500 years after the events that formed the basis for the Purim festival.
Just because something is common and widespread doesn't mean it should continue to be common and widespread, though it will continue to happen due to human nature. And yet, people striving to be constructive and positive won't celebrate the death of a stranger. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is a cultural lodestar found globally for a very good reason: cheering the death of others may lead to others hoping to cheer your death, and that potential is enough to significantly curtail offers of constructive and positive assistance from the victims to the perpetrators, leading to a gradual social degradation within the perpetrators. Certainly remember and even memorialize a person's death, but the exaltation of a person's death is a sure path to cultural collapse.
Now, that's assuming people are one unified group. In reality, most people are forced into an "in" group or an "out" group. The "in" group exalts the death of the "out" group member, so the "out" group members must respond in kind. That eventually leads to the degradation of both groups, leaving the "above" and "beyond" groups with the remnants. In turn, the destructive and negative conflict continues.
Left and right both gawk at each other . Bluesky was refreshing for lefties to have their echo chamber back for a time , then it got dull. Fact is pointing out others flaws is more engaging than grandstanding alone
This reminds me of when some NFTs were stolen and OpenSea delisted them. Like yeah, they still exist out there on the blockchain, but when a central authority can gatekeep peoples' ability to view them, how decentralized are they actually?
Moxie Marlinspike wrote a good essay [1] about "Web3" that highlighted a few of these kinds of issues, and I think it applies to anything like Bluesky claiming to be "decentralized" when it's prohibitively difficult to access it any way other than the biggest central service.
1: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
This is like grasping at a boogeyman web3 straw to make a point.
Concretely, Bluesky has an AppView that takes posts from relays and PDSes, subscribes to moderation labelers, filters posts that have labels which have certain labels, then displays them in the browser. Blacksky is the first independent implementation of relays and other large components of the system.
The default Bluesky AppView subscribes to the Bluesky Moderation labeler which cannot be disabled. No independent AppView has been made which can turn off the Bluesky Moderation labeler. That's all.
I have my concerns over the network, namely DAUs decreasing and community politics, but the tech is largely a matter of time I feel. It's true that the ActivityPub ecosystem has a lot more federation happening but ActivityPub is a much older system (which itself derives from OStatus which originated in 2012-ish.) Mastodon was released in 2016. It's bound to be more federated than Bluesky.
This just reads like not a response to the problem, but instead a description of technical implementations.
Concretely, nobody is going to subscribe to anything else in bsky but the default stack, anything else is unlikely to ever gain much adoption, and thus federation is basically meaningless and a technical implementation detail for how they wanted to manage their stuff.
I have to disagree a little.
You might be right simply that no one actual cares about any of this, and 99% of people don't care at all who gets banned or censored and who doesn't. And they'd all just stick around to the one place where everyone else is and that's that.
But this is an argument against the idea that people care or don't.
Assuming people do care, then Bluesky is the first protocol attempt that could actually work, because it lets you move your existing account freely to any alternatives easily, and because it also allows you to control your own recommendation algorithms.
If people don't care, than, people don't care, and that's that.
But if people do care, you need to achieve the above behavior, and that becomes a technical challenge that tech can solve.
Why wouldn't they? You join the platform, make friends with folks who say stuff like "Vance and Singal shouldn't be here but the people that give them death threats should", then they tell you to hop onto "Cleansky" which has its own Appview that filters out Vance, Singal, and platforms your buddies. You don't need to make a new account or anything.
The default experience just needs to be good enough. Beyond that folks with strong opinions will filter into moderation communities that offer them the curation they want. That's the technical side of this at least. There's larger problems around community culture but unrelated to tech.
The decentralization problem in BlueSky is not filtering out users, but rather hearing from users that BlueSky has decided to filter out.
Yeah which is why I added the "and platform your buddies" and the "but the people that give them death threats should" bits but they probably were too parenthetical to come across.
In fact, I'd argue that blue sky encouraged this by nerfing federation from the beginning. Rather than adopting ActivityPub, they made their own boutique protocol and put up barriers for third parties to use that protocol.
ActivityPub is a bad protocol.
There are plenty of criticisms of Web3, but this doesn't seems like a particularly valid one. What could the people who designed the relevant blockchains and smart contracts have done differently to prevent one marketplace from becoming dominant?
It undermines the value of decentralization itself given intermediaries tend to pop up in all of these various platforms and become the dominant way to use them.
The users could reject exchanges and trade entirely on-chain, but that's expensive/complicated/risky.
It is a serious concern for cryptocurrency that most users don't even get the touted benefits because of reliance on exchanges.
> The users could...
Any response that starts with "users could..." or "people could..." is pure wishful thinking and not worth wasting your time on. People don't work this way. En masse they will flow to the path of least resistance, and no amount of wishful thinking will ever change that.
OpenSea is very nearly "entirely on-chain" if I'm understanding your point correctly. It's powered by smart contracts. It's not custodial like Coinbase or Robinhood. Users custody their assets in their own wallets. They trade by submitting transactions directly from their wallet to a smart contract address on-chain which facilitates fulfillment of the trade. The code for these smart contracts is open source and verifiable.
It may not be obvious to more casual observers, but there is a lot of trading volume happening on on-chain exchanges these days (as in easily 10B+ in trading volume per day with most of this coming from futures).
I much prefer Bluesky to X but have had a hunch this was coming due to everything I've read about the practicality of running a Bluesky protocol service.
I still think there's room for something better technically. Mastodon seems more true to the decentralized ethos but I've never quite gotten used to the server dependency experience.
Nostr appeals to me technically but every time I'm on it seems swamped completely by discussion of cryptocurrency.
I guess to me it feels like one of these catch 22 (necessary but not sufficient?) problems where you have to have the right technical base for a platform, which seems doable, but even then you have to have the right userbase also.
It always comes back to the userbase. I don't know how many times technologists need to learn the lesson that normal people simply don't care about ideological technical principles like decentralization and often actually prefer the benefits of centralized systems like ease of use and typically stronger moderation. And when it comes to social media, businesses are naturally going to end up prioritizing the desires of the majority of their userbase.
> It always comes back to the userbase. I don't know how many times technologists need to learn the lesson that normal people simply don't care about ideological technical principles like decentralization and often actually prefer the benefits of centralized systems like ease of use and typically stronger moderation.
The choice need not be limited to the familiar corporate hellscape vs decentralized usability nightmare dichotomy. Middle grounds can exist if we want them to.
I've seen a lot of general support for the criticisms and concepts described in this article:
https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/
Anyone who builds what they describe there can expect it to take off faster than ever.
Oh hah, I guess my blog post came a month after this one. Near-identical subject matter.
[0] https://abner.page/post/exit-the-feed/
Correction: businesses are naturally going to end up prioritizing the desires of the majority of their customers
And for social media that isn't their userbase.
Businesses are naturally going to end up prioritizing the desires of the majority of their customers and for “free”, ad-supported[0] social media that isn’t their userbase.
I’d like to see Bluesky’s long-term business plan and what they will do when someone inevitably wants return on investment.
[0] Yes, this describes all of current social media, but it doesn’t have to be this way. This business model should not be legal: as long as there is one “free” social media platform, that is the platform that is going to be used, simply because even $1 is infinitely more than $0 and no one can compete with free.
That remains to be seen. Typically, the userbase is the product for a social media company, not their customers. Which means without a sizable enough userbase, there is nothing to actually sell to their customers. Bluesky has claimed to be different, but they are very much still in the early phase of trying to attract enough users so they need to cater to those users' priorities and decentralization simply isn't a priority that will attract many users.
common people arent really using twitter or bluesky that much anyways. its just the crazies that are on there.
Always was.
It's why I found it so dismaying when we went through years of apparently serious newspapers reporting on every twitter-storm as if it was important. Yes, it was a good if unreliable source of breaking news, but the general noise of people fighting back and forwards about whatever it was that week ... was just noise, among a relatively small group of motivated crazies. Using it as a societal barometer just results in skewed coverage and an emphasis on American social issues that aren't necessarily as relevant everywhere else.
> Mastodon seems more true to the decentralized ethos
I'm not sure that's true. It's important to note that these bans are from the Bluesky App View (one component of the infra), and that these users can continue to post under their identity (if they own it, which they can), and users on App Views that haven't banned these users could continue to follow them.
None of that works with Mastodon. An admin bans you from the instance, and you can no longer post, use your identity, interact on the platform, etc. You have to start from scratch.
In short, Mastodon reduces the blast radius, but the "blast" is the same as on any private platform. Bluesky/AT Proto changes the impact to a different, strictly lesser type.
That is true, but due to the smaller size and larger number of instances, it's easier to find a place where you won't get randomly banned without an admin taking the time to talk to you about what's wrong. My instance has about 1K active people on it and I've always been able to have a dialogue with the moderators and sysop. When things have gone wrong I had the opportunity to correct them.
I think there's a great value to the "small community" ethos that the fediverse supports much better than bluesky.
Seems like the hard truth is all these alternate platforms that offer their technology as the reason to get on it ... it's just not a great selling point for someone who wants to post "woah watch out driving tonight, it's slippery out there" or cat pics. I think that's a lot of users.
The content of the posts and some level of moderation is the selling point.
Personally that's kinda a bummer, because IMO my biggest disappointment is that its just Twitter but little different. Same pithy posts and petty bickering:(
> I still think there's room for something better technically. Mastodon seems more true to the decentralized ethos but I've never quite gotten used to the server dependency experience.
There's more servers on Mastodon, yes, so in that way it is decentralized more. But as a user, I have a lot more sovereignty over my data on Bluesky than I get having my account on a Mastodon / fediverse. I can set up my own PDS quite easily, or move to another, or back to BlueSky hosting very easy. I appreciate this decentralization a lot.
And I have a much better chance of being able to analyze system behavior, understand propoganda networks on atproto/bluesky. Mastodon servers heavily discourage trying to view & understand the network, but Bluesky really lets everyday folks run and analyze the whole firehose, very very cheaply. Which is an incredible decentralization, a very powerful syndication that it's protocols enable, that's simply unmatched. Still, research is being done on both networks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45507566
I definitely have my concerns over the decreasing DAUs on the platform and the crabby, toxic community that has come to really define Bluesky these days but I don't think the tech is the problem. For folks who keep pointing at Mastodon, remember that ActivityPub's predecessor OStatus originates from 2012 and Mastodon itself was kicked off in 2016. Mastodon is 9 years old at this point. Bluesky is only a few years old.
In AP land, for better or for worse microblogging is dominated by the ad-hoc set of standards that Mastodon pioneered, and too much of the community just treats AP as "HTTP+REST JSON APIs for social" and ignores the semantic components that AP can use to interoperate.
Yeah. I’m not a big short form social media person, so a world with or without Bluesky (or Twitter) changes little. Bluesky has good people and communities within it, but a lot of the people on it are just a mirror reflection of the American Right. Devoid of critical thinking, they follow whatever the left cause of the day is.
While that’s much preferable to Twitter in 2025 (and the right)… it’s not encouraging as for the future of, frankly everything.
Aheming about "the right" aside... there exists people across the political spectrum that think the way they do because of a variety of reasons. Some because they read the literature and arrived at the conclusion, some because that is the economically or socially advantage position to be in, and some because that is just their political position tautologically.
I do wish there was a community that encouraged thoughtful positivity over negativity (granted I would not "ban" it) and some level of limited posting ... or something like that.
It's a pipe dream I know, but on the surface social media could be really cool.
There is, it's almost every successful advertisement-driven social media site. Youtube, reddit, facebook, etc. have all adapted to remove negative and controversial comments and leave positive/advertiser-friendly comments.
Since Youtube made that change I found its comments much, much more pleasant. Meta made an early decision with Threads to deprioritize political content which they only recently went back on (now it's an opt-out slider I think) which did do a decent job of keeping the network lighter than Twitter but also made the network a bit less intellectual than Twitter or Bluesky.
When you introduce such a high level of moderation and ranking what you get are a load of reddit style "funny guys" that are desperately trying to be noticed.
I prefer random comments without ranking, because it gives you a more truthful view of public sentiment. The force that aggressively filters comments is the same force that takes away the dislike button. It is all about controlling public opinion. Everything is good all of the time, and everyone is in a controlled demographic where they are insulated from new ideas that might make them difficult to advertise to.
> I do wish there was a community that encouraged thoughtful positivity over negativity
Yeah, it's called the real world. We have millions if not billions of years of experience in dealing with in-person differences, tentative contacts with members of neighbouring tribes and smoothing out conflicts. One will find the risk of getting smacked over the face for being an absolute idiot to be a very effective motivator to remain on our best behaviour with strangers.
On the internet these days, you can only choose between an echo chamber, or all-out culture war.
Spot on. I've long said that internet discourse will not improve until the implementation of a protocol to slap someone remotely.
If that were implemented, it would be used before any reply is even read.
Doubtful that it would be an improvement.
I think the core Bluesky team has been discussing ways to limit toxicity so I definitely think this is on their radar. Substack also leans into the idea that their platform manages social media toxicity better than other platforms, at least in their marketing copy. I think in 2025+ toxicity is a major dimension to evaluate social platforms on.
Substack is biased towards long form, and long form is inherently antifragile against toxicity. Although bad actors with LLMs could in theory change this.
I probably read more viewpoints I disagree with on Substack than anywhere else.
This is the culture we have tried to foster over at Discuit (small open source feed-style social media site).
Granted, we had a huge Imgur user migration, so that's the current flavor of the content, but the OG userbase was aiming for a culture that is perfectly defined by "thoughtful positivity."
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.
That’s a good observation about position. For those curious, the original (and arguably representative) Bluesky user said:
> “I want to be extremely clear I was not making a death threat or inciting violence,” he told me, saying that he had sent 12 separate examples of other people posting the same Kirk image as a reaction meme. “I don’t wish death on Jay, I wish for her and her team to grow a conscience. I disagree with the decision and how it was handled. My account was taken down without any explanation for almost a full day in what can only be viewed as a retroactive ban.”
which is leaving out the full context, they specificly cited the alt-text of the image, not the image itself.
The email, verbatim read:
> A reply with an image; alt text reads:
> 'Charlie Kirk sitting in a white T-shirt that says "Freedom." A negative consequence follows!
[0]: https://bsky.app/profile/aliafonzy.blacksky.app/post/3m2jm7u...
Thank you for confirming it was in no way a death threat
I’m sure that it’s just some sort of mistake but it’s kind of funny that the alt text they cited in the email to him about the ban wasn’t what he wrote at all.
https://bsky.app/profile/aliafonzy.blacksky.app/post/3m2k7c7...
Still the whole premise of blue sky being decentralized was that when one server bans you you could pop over to another community that doesn't consider memes a death threat, so this is a good test of how centralized bluesky remains (very)
I’d argue that people lose the moment they sign up for an account, deluding themselves into believing that the problem with the last nth iteration of the same thing isn’t them.
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.
100% it doesn't make any sense to expect different behavior out of the same format just because you make slightly different promises about what the rules will be
Bluesky has been drama central since the beginning, consisting mostly of people who thought Twitter wasn't censoring enough (or censoring the wrong people), the free speech crowd came later and, well, tested the waters and found transphobic speech was in fact not free, and that despite distributed promises, the town wasn't big enough for the two parties to coexist
While I agree with you, I would hesitate to be throwing stones from the glass house that is Hacker News.
This place also suffers from some pretty severe systemic issues that are inherent to any site that delegates moderation responsibilities to ordinary users. Invariably, these tools get abused to silence people.
The amount of greyed out and dead posts in this very comments section is exhibit A, and it's a pattern I've seen repeated in pretty much all other sites like it.
Sure there's bad uses, but putting yourself out there, on the public record, and cherishing those others around us doing the same is, in my view, divine.
I can't imagine the mindset that wouldn't want to be capturing some of the amazing wonderful world about them & the thoughts in their head & sharing them with others. I find these views about walking away from putting yourself online, seeing only the harm, as being deeply nihilistic & running away from clear amazing basically spiritual human value.
You’re entitled to your experience and spirituality, but nothing about Twitter or Bluesky has ever struck me as ‘divine.’ Rather than being a nihilistic flight from value, I think there’s far more value to be found in cultivating friendships and companions in the real world. There’s more divinity in a single hug from my wife than in everything I’ve ever read on the internet. Words have to bend to flesh at some point; we are embodied creatures. I’ve found my mental health improving massively when I take a step back from the firehose of social media and focus instead projects where I can use my hands and spending time with people I can eat with and hug.
>I’d argue that people lose the moment they sign up for an account, deluding themselves into believing that the problem with the last nth iteration of the same thing isn’t them.
Indeed. As you said, it's the people, not the technical details of the "protocol" or "platform". My "favorite" Mastadon example: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195>
I see your example as a positive in favor of mastodon over other social networks.
When the one responsible for running the site can not run it anymore, it effects everyone on that website.
Examples:
- Digg (killed by owners removing their own product)
- Myspace (killed by new ownership leaving site to rot)
- Google+ (killed by Google)
- Facebook (killed by enshitification)
- Tumblr (killed by new ownership's rules)
- Twitter (killed by unhinged new ownership)
But mastodon is actually decentralised by design and implementation.
Mastodon as a whole isn't a single website, but instead is a whole collection of groups each running on their own server that can interact with each other as if they were one large site.
So with mastodon: when a site runner loses their ability to keep a site running (e.g. your example), only the single mastodon server/group is affected, the users move to a different group, and the rest of mastodon keeps running as if nothing has changed (because in the grand scheme of things, nothing has).
> While the ATProto system has been criticized as overly complicated compared to the ActivityPub system that powers the Fediverse, it has one key feature that ActivityPub lacks: the ability to transfer servers while keeping all of your followers and posts.
FWIW, it looks like Mastodon software has some features for moving servers, including bringing your followers, but not your posts:
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/
My understanding is Mastodon requires the server to be complicit with the transfer (online and redirecting requests to the new destination). If your host server is offline or not willing to migrate your data, you can't move.
In the AT protocol, your identity isn't tied to a server. You don't need the older server's consent or support to have a new identity somewhere else.
This leaves the biggest question, why they're broken on Blacksky, too, unanswered. My general understanding was that this should _not_ happen.
One thing about the Fediverse (Mastodon) is that most people aren't on it.
As I found with one marketing experiment, this makes it terrible if your goal is to reach as many consumers as possible in a niche.
But HN members who aren't mass-marketing could change that, by moving to the Fediverse -- giving it their endorsement, and network effects.
https://joinmastodon.org/
> this makes it terrible if your goal is to reach as many consumers as possible in a niche.
Amazing. Another great reason to be there as a person trying to interact with other people.
I know, that's a terrible image, and I should be the last person suggesting such an image.
I was mentioning one use case that's a showstopper that much of HN would appreciate, and which forces a lot of the people who attract other people to be on the proprietary platforms.
Of course a risk of making Fediverse become more popular is ruining it for those people who want very small-neighborhood community. And who don't mind that, on any given topic, they're basically stuck with the handful of people who happened to be there, not those who would be most interested.
I'd still like to make Fediverse more welcoming to more people, to get more people on it.
I have an optimistic belief that a more popular Fediverse could be better than any of the commercial alternatives. Though it would become more like them in some ways, as it grows.
>But HN members who aren't mass-marketing could change that, by moving to the Fediverse -- giving it their endorsement, and network effects.
Why? Why should HN members, or anyone else, move to another network with the same kinds of fragmentation and mutual mass bannings (and/or demands for mass bannings) that we are talking about here with Bluesky? See, for example, <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195>
Because with mastodon, you can just run your own server, and continue using the network.
Between my single-user-instance and Facebook's billion-user Threads, ActivityPub is genuinely decentralised.
> On Friday, Graber turned more serious in her pushback: “Harassing the mods into banning someone has never worked. And harassing people in general has never changed their minds,” she wrote, adding later that: “Yet it’s a behavior that persists across social media anyway, with negative consequences for civil discourse and society. Human nature is a contributing factor, but systems that reward outrage only make the problem worse.”
I think the goal of pushing many of these harassment's forward, is to further have a reason to force these platforms to clamp down on its users to push the agenda of needing to control speech. The people who benefit directly are government insiders that want to wield power over the population.
Its very similar to what I suspect the RIAA did during the file sharing craze. They would post there own content to force these platforms into submission.
IMHO. Decentralization is just another way to centralize control at choke points. The only way to make these systems censor proof is to have them built on distributed networks[0].
Secondly any for profit entity that pushes a platform is going to want control over the platform and as such be diametrically opposed to freedom of expression.
Look at BitTorrent as an example. Its been working for years. yes they can poison nodes, but its clearly much more resistant to these kinds of attacks then our current iteration of social media platforms. Why do we keep buying into platforms that doing give us what we need?
Also I'd be very wary of any overly complicated system designed to make it very difficult to understand the process of connecting to peers. Complication is usually a way to obfuscate the technical process of a system to prevent people from making any meaningful changes to it.
[0]: https://medium.com/distributed-economy/what-is-the-differenc...
From what I have seen, the "solution" to moderation troubles in decentralized solutions has mostly always been... more centralization.
The only major decentralized forms of social media that I'm aware of that have confronted philosophical questions of how handle moderation have been Mastodon, Bluesky, and arguably Lemmy.
I don't know of any sense in which Mastodon has increased centralization, I think its blocking tools have been distributed essentially since the beginning, not something that has iterated toward centralization over time in response to an unfolding debate. Although it does have a complicated history and as possible that new things have happened I'm not aware of.
BlueSky though, to your point, is a good example of centralization not being reliable in terms of not being accountable to users. Or for a different way of saying the same thing, the lack of accountability has served to reveal how centralized it truly is.
It does seem to be simple enough that people don't get confused about using it, but it doesn't seem to walk the actual walk of decentralization.
The big example that comes to my mind is Matrix, where most homeservers use Mjolnir to apply centralized public blocklists of other servers/people they don't like.
So if for example #archlinux disagrees with your opinion and they decide to ban you for it, you are now banned from many other unrelated channels.
I have also seen subreddits that auto-ban users that have ever posted in specific other (unrelated) subreddits.
Mjolnir is designed to apply decentralised public blocklists - i.e. you pick which banlists to apply; there are a bunch published by different people (matrix.org, the matrix 'community moderation effort', etc). Admittedly moderators do share lists (so that if #archlinux bans you, others might pick up the ban), but there's no intrinsic centralisation.
https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/msc2313/propos... is how it works fwiw.
BlueSky also has this, but it works poorly because people use blocklists as a form of harassment, or else take over existing lists and add their enemies to it.
And bluesky has the ultimate power of choosing which blocklists to show you
Eh, not really. It really is decentralized, you can find them on Google. They could stop respecting a certain list but I think you can host your own AppView and get it back?
Not really, because there's only one AppView and you can't unsubscribe from the lists they dislike.
Wheras with Matrix, you can run your own server, with your own rules, and federate with the rest of the network.
Not necessarily.
Centralization eventually ends up with a single entity in charge of everything, which eventually does (or doesn't do) something that causes it's value to collapse.
The real solution here is federalization: A bunch of independent self-govening entities that co-operate with other entities to assist each other in moderation.
A good non-social network example here would be adblockers.
- Each adblocker uses at least one ad tracking list, with most adblockers allowing for multiple lists to be used and a sensible default for their own users to use.
- Each list has it's own moderators that add/update/remove entries on their list based on their own values.
- Adblockers (and their users) can collaborate on requesting changes to lists, resulting in faster reactions to advertising changes on the web, and in turn faster updates passed down to users of those adblockers who participate.
- If an adblocker can't do their job anymore (e.g. their owners/workers can't do their job anymore, the owner sells out, etc...) users can switch to (or create) a new adblocker.
- If a list fails, adblockers can switch to other lists (or create a new one).
No adblocker and no list holds all the power. Adblocking as a whole is strengthened by always having viable alternatives that can be switched to, and methods to quickly create new alternatives if the need arises.
That's the power of federation: the strengths of centralization without the weaknesses.
The social media version of a federated twitter is mastodon. A whole bunch of groups running their own mastodon servers that can interact with each-other as if they were a centralized mastodon website, with similarly aligned servers sharing co-operatively maintained bad-actor lists.
ML could potentially provide a decentralized mechanism for filtering unwanted content, or even hybrid approaches. IMO the worst of content filtering (gore or other psychologically disturbing content) will soon be an automated job.
It already is and has been for a long time. The kinds of content you have to moderate are not things anyone wants to look at. The worst ones are far worse than you can imagine and the average ones are nudes of people you don't want to look at all day.
This is actually today's controversy on Bluesky because the #1 attribute of its power users is they're terrified of "AI" and the idea that "companies will steal their posts to generate AI slop", which means they think the ML moderation is stealing their posts.
Oh, but the ML can't be decentralized because the training datasets are illegal.
Old internet was most decentralized but since the platforms weren't scaling up to ridiculous heights moderation wasn't that big of a deal. It was also "gatekept" in a self-selecting way; now, everyone is online. Conspiracy beliefs have drastically shot up in adoption, through social media exposure.
People always had irrational populist and conspiratorial beliefs, but that was mediated by popular media generally not platforming kooks. Now you have the top 10 podcasts allowing people to mainline validation for conspiracies.
I don't see how centralization helps. Allowing (or demanding) that a media provider to regulate more could lead to less platforming for conspiracy theorists and populists.
I just browse hashtags of art and pixelart, and I encounter a lot of furry penis porn
The internet is weird sometimes
Interesting. Reddit by contrast is moderation decentralized system centralized.
Reddit is forum as a service. discord is chat as a service, fandom is wiki as a service. They all share the common goal of centralizing something that should probably not be centralized.
Reddit hasn't been "moderation decentralised" for a few years now.
Nothing about reddit is decentralized in the ways that matter.
Not really.
Reddit Inc controls far more of the moderation inside subs than they let on.
Their insane PE higher than nVidiaa isn’t from an AI data deal. It’s a narrative/propaganda control device.
Some US states have started trying to ban or require ID for Bluesky. Is it possible to self host on your own hardware that allows somebody to get around that. If not the decentralization doesn't seem real.
I would phrase that differently, it sounds like you're suggesting that some states have actually banned Bluesky by name.
I just don’t see why Joe Public will ever care about decentralisation as a concept.
We tend to hand wring about principles within the tech sphere, when the bulk of people just want a place that won’t make them feel immediately (longer term doesn’t matter) crappy when they use it, whatever that means for them. That tends towards centralisation because decentralised services have awful moderation and tend to create an even stronger strain of groupthink.
I think Bluesky exists to demonstrate that people want the features that come with centralization without the oppressive platform lock-in. If Bluesky's moderation, TOS, UI, default feeds, etc. are intolerable to you, then you should be free to move your content and your network to an app with different moderation, TOS, feeds, etc.
Bluesky isn't marketing itself as a decentralized platform because it's not. It's an opinionated view of a decentralized network, and others are free to use differently opinionated views or make their own.
> I just don’t see why Joe Public will ever care about decentralisation as a concept.
IME they do care, but they have no patience to deal with the hurdles that decentralisation imposes upon your user experience. So ease-of-use and convenience always win.
I don't understand how the removing of right wing users is described as a necessary good to create a safe and inclusive space, while the removal of left wing users is decried as censorship. If you dismiss people who have genuine concerns about things as bigoted, you yourself are being bigoted! It is as though people don't understand the definition of the word.
Removing intolerant people is not intolerance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...
So you can frame anyone you disagree with as "intolerant", and then you are free to be intolerant to them.
Also I can be intolerant to you, because you are intolerant (to people you think are intolerant).
This is neither smart nor moral. This is logically inconsistent and breeds conflict almost by definition.
Who defines intolerance though? What if you call me intolerant because I do not like your favourite programming language, and have dared criticize it - is that OK?
It's a recursive paradox: an intolerant person cannot define what intolerance is, but that's what often happens in reality.
There are quite a few solutions to the paradox of tolerance. One of which was even articulated by the guy that coined the term, which the wiki link covers.
I also recommend
https://medium.com/extra-extra/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-prec...
The article mostly redefine the question about tolerance as being a strategy for peace, one which will be given up when war is unavoidable. It not so much a solution to the problem of tolerance and more of a description of the motivations behind the who deploy it.
As an effect it also reject the concept of an intolerant person, as there are only people with different views about what constitutes an acceptable state of peace and what represent real and present danger.
If the left view the right as jeopardizing safety, and the right view the left as jeopardizing safety, then existential conflict is inevitable and tolerance as a strategy is dropped by both.
Intolerance is the wrong framing. You should be understanding. People who throw the label "bigot" around are themselves bigots (convinced of the superiority of their own beliefs without engaging with others views). A lot of people can have genuine disagreements with certain ideologies (e.g., they might think that transitioning minors is net negative for society) but also be open to dialogue. Such people are not bigots. Those who disagree with the left on any given point may or may not be wrong, but disagreement is not bigotry. There is no paradox there.
There is also a difference between speach and action. As a society, we should allow all speach (e.g., people questioning authority), but supress certain actions (e.g., violence). Currently, the American left seems to believe that people voicing the wrong views justified violence. That belief is abhorrent and fundamentally completely at odds with liberalism and a just and well functioning society.
Specifically, re-tolerance of intolerance, I highly recommend a speach by Rowan Atkinson on exactly that topic. If you Google it you can probably find it. It is worth a watch. He is an incredibly intelligent and eloquent man.
Agree, comrade Dzhugashvili.
The technology powering Bluesky is “inspired by” but never interoperable with existing standards or similar reference architectures. This is one’s first queue that the direction is not being open.
And beyond the technical details, how can a corporation commit to transparency and non-bias when their very funding depends on it? Google already provided us with the most popular example of how this is not possible (“don’t be evil” by an ad company).
Bluesky is a PBC, which isn't a corporation exactly. Or rather it's one designed to respond to the fears of people who think corporations are required to maximize profits.
PBCs are absolutely corporations. They incorporate and that makes them corporations. It's in the name for Pete's sake.
I believe a PBC designation is somewhat meaningless; OpenAI was a PBC until a few months ago.
I'm disappointed in what has happened, but I think Bluesky/AT Proto presents a better direction and I hope that this is just a period of adjustment.
There are essentially two tiers of moderation on Bluesky – that provided by Bluesky themselves, and community moderation. The community moderation is powerful and I use it fairly extensively already, and my hope is that in the long term it's the community moderation that represents the bulk of moderation on the network.
The problem is that Bluesky are legally required, and required by app publishing platforms, to implement some moderation themselves. It seems like their approach there has been to focus on strict legalities, leaving the rest to community moderation. This is a good idea for the decentralized nature, but unfortunately some high profile individuals know how to fly under the legal limit while still being a pain. Then there's outrage at them not being banned even though community moderation thoroughly silences them for anyone who wants it. This results in hate being targeted at the Bluesky team... and eventually that hate turns into threats (perceived or real) and that results in bans. Now it looks like Bluesky are banning their critics while allowing dangerous people on the platform.
Bluesky are not without fault here. They've not communicated about this well, they've not pushed community moderation well enough, and they've posted some questionable rage bait. But I do understand where they're going and think the future is ultimately bright for AT Proto and the Bluesky network.
"..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.
This is the reason I left the "main" social media and what keeps me from engaging too much with Reddit/HN or any of the other new hotness like Mast, nostr, BlueSky, etc: it's just rage baiting or karma farming
Mastodon is pretty much anti-that. No algorithm. If you don't like something, you just don't follow it. Nothing defaults to the instance/global timeline either and you're free to mute anything.
This hasn't been my observation. Yeah you can mute whatever you want (you can on Twitter and Bluesky also) but the HOA tendencies of Mastodon servers are alive and well. If you're a very online type of person and "live and die" by online social currents then no problem, but for others I'm not sure.
The problem with a lot of social media is that a lot of it allows you to either directly or indirectly monetise engagement. That creates an strong incentive to create outrage.
This has also been discussed in the context of FB's feed where optimising for engagement has inadvertently led to a situation where users are constantly being bombarded with ragebait.
I upvoted you, and at the time I believe that the core of the problem is having ranking and reaction mechanisms.
But don't you have to have some sort of ranking system for discoverability?
That's a self-inflicted wound caused by the need for massive scale. Focused user communities don't need to rely on crowds to assist in moderation.
You really don’t. You discover sites (like this one) and interesting people by word-of-mouth. Within a site (forum or blog), recency, topical categories, sorting and (full-text) searching are sufficient. That’s how the web mostly worked 20+ years ago.
You can have personal rankings, for example people reporting on the most interesting things they’ve recently seen. But these will be individual lists, not aggregated by an algorithm over all user behavior.
You certainly don’t need likes and other reactions, and you also don’t need up- and downvoting of contributions. Those set the wrong incentives and do more harm than good overall, IMO. You do need reporting of problematic content, but only site moderation will see those.
Our children and grandchildren can and should judge us for what we devolved into in our pursuit of Internet Points.
I think outrage is good. I like conflict and debate. It is the systems that supress outrage that are annoying. Really, you just need to supress spam.
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.
He kind of did this by making it so you can see the posts of people who block you. Of course, he did this because he's so annoying everyone blocked him.
You seem to have missed that Musk nurturing a cult of mentally ill edgelords is a feature, not a bug. Why would he ever want to shield his users from the made-up ragebait that so successfully radicalized so many of them into joining MAGA?
> 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 benefit of ignoring reality like this? He's not going to magically disappear if Bluesky bans him - indeed he'll remain VP with all the power that entails.
This is worse than performative activism, it's like some kind of political denialism. You can't change reality by pretending it doesn't exist.
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.
> What's the benefit of ignoring reality like this?
Decreasing the reach of his propaganda. And reality isn't ignored since posts about him and his words/actions aren't removed
Twitter banned the president of the United States in 2020.
When speech is violence, allowing someone a platform is akin to being party to and supporting <insert -ism>.
What is this for kind of logic. So if you have a store, and you happen to have a client that smashes someone else's head in your shop, then that means in your logic that you as a shop owner are guilty of violence.
But I guess you say you should know the reputation of every person coming into your shop, and if their reputation is deemed inappriopriate by a certain group, they should not be allowed into the shop to prevent them from harassing any other customers.
But how are you gonna regulate that? Who is gonna decide who is inappropriate and who isn't?
I think we already have a fairly well organized system for that: law & order. If someone breaks laws, they are punished for it. So if someone is violent, whether it's inside or outside a shop, they can be punished for it.
And you as a shop owner don't have to also individually take the effort to investigate and punish the individual. Although if you want to you have the freedom to; it's your shop in the end.
Speech is not violence.
True. People define the speech of others as violence because they think it makes a violent response into self defense. It isn't true and never has been. If you're responding to speech with violence... you're the baddie.
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..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_terrorism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiction
Don't be naive.
Speech is not violence, guilt by association is undemocratic, and this hypothesis of de-platforming as a tactic to limit uncouth ideas was thoroughly tested over the last ~15 years and demonstrably shown to be false: Trump, Alex Jones, and many others were banned across platforms. One of these people now sits in the White House, in part because of backlash to the deplatforming of him and others with similar politics.
It cost $44B to get him unbanned so I think that's actually pretty good evidence it worked.
> One of these people now sits in the White House, in part because of backlash to the deplatforming of him and others with similar politics.
It's not because of anything. Cause and effect doesn't apply to the brain of the median American voter - they live in a world of pure imagination. You could say they thought prices would go back down to 2016 levels, but that makes too much sense. If you look up what they actually think it's like "I voted for Trump because I want to protect abortion".
> It cost $44B to get him unbanned so I think that's actually pretty good evidence it worked.
Good evidence that it worked to do what? Limit his influence and popularity? This is false. His unbanning had little effect besides the right wing giving Musk brownie points, but the initial ban fueled grievance politics and became a huge rallying cry for the right. It was an extraordinary backfire.
> It's not because of anything. Cause and effect doesn't apply to the brain of the median American voter - they live in a world of pure imagination.
I flatly disagree with this. Human beings are endlessly deep and complex. The extremes of the internet cause us to group people together and create 1-dimensional strawmen of them, but if you talk to any American voter -- offline and 1-on-1 -- you will find complexity, nuance, and surprise in their opinions. At least, that has been my experience, with a pretty decent sample size.
Edit: I've been loosely watching the score on these comments, and it's interesting to see how rapidly it fluctuates up and down. For those that disagree, please leave a comment. IMO what I wrote is pretty common sense and moderate, so I'm interested in hearing disagreements.
All social media moderation is "banning people for saying stuff people don't like". Most people don't like e.g. spam, or death threats, or racism, so social media offer communication platforms where those kinds of speech are restricted, with varying degrees of effort and success. The goal of banning Vance would be to have a social media site that moderates against the kinds of things Vance says.
This makes some sense if Vance was a minor, fringe figure. But he was on a ticket voted for by ~50% of US voters. This is effectively saying that the goal is to have a social media site where half the country is not welcome.
The problem with that is two-fold. One, it neuters any political impact - you're effectively driving away the very voters you need to convince. And two, it creates an echo chamber that distorts reality because everywhere you look people are agreeing with you. Then 2028 rolls around and you're shocked that "the bad guys" won again.
> This is effectively saying that the goal is to have a social media site where half the country is not welcome.
That seems like a good goal. I want to chat with friends about formula one or whatever, not have to have everything messed up by some weirdo who always wants to debate whether minorities have rights.
I don't like Vance at all, but him being on the same social media platform as you isn't the same thing as him showing up uninvited to your formula one conversation.
Sure, but banning him sends a signal to people who do like them that they also aren't welcome.
Exactly the GP's point though, that's essentially sending an indicator to 50% of the population that they're not welcome on the platform. Do you really think a platform that performs actions like that will be successful? In practice, it obviously just creates echo chambers where fringe beliefs are painted as the common majority, because all dissenting views are silenced.
Why wouldn't it be successful? Truth Social seems to be doing pretty well, and no one on the left pretends that they should be allowed post there, the left is happy for those people to fuck off and leave them alone.
Not everyone wants to debate politics all the time. Sometimes they just want to exist as trans people, share posts with their other queer friends and enjoy their day.
> Why wouldn't it be successful? Truth Social seems to be doing pretty well,
Is it? No one I know uses it at all, the only time I even remember it exists is when seeing screenshots of Trump's posts reposted on mainstream media and twitter from his account there. It's essentially the "trump-branded-twitter" and I never even hear of anyone else actually using it.
Compared to twitter, where most people I know still have an account in one way or another, including most notable mainstream figures.
> Not everyone wants to debate politics all the time. Sometimes they just want to exist as trans people, share posts with their other queer friends and enjoy their day.
Well they'd be poorly served by Bluesky, seeing as how someone merely existing on the platform without even breaking any rules has become a hot-button issue.
The whole platform is filled with politics, and people complaining about politics(/political figures). Perhaps politics they agree with are more tolerable than having to see opposing politics on their feed, but I find it hard to believe they truly are attracted to Bluesky for the total lack of politics.
Well, unless they go there for furry porn. There's so much of it for those that seek out such content, perhaps it really goes drown out any semblance of political discussion.
"Someone" in this case being Jesse Singal.
Mastodon is the right model. I keep saying this and I keep being surprised that it isn't more obvious to most. It's the right model because it's essentially the same model as email. Yes, there is TONS of "human" work to be done to change people's minds on this, but STRUCTURALLY it's the only one that can handle things correctly.
I always found what Bluesky was "optimizing" for to be a stupid goal, and inherently a bad idea -- namely "the ability to keep your everything permanent."
That's EXACTLY what brings MORE danger to centralization. I get that losing an identity on a thing sucks BUT WE'VE ALREADY DEALT WITH THIS WITH EMAIL, and more over the ability to lose/destroy/start over -- like with email -- is a FEATURE as much as it is a bug.
Right, but email is really not all that great, neither on a practical nor technical level. 99.99% of all users doesn't run their own mail server so in practice it is not decentralized. I would guesstimate that 50% or more of all mail traffic is handled by Google, MS, Apple, and a few outer mega corps. And for most people Facebook, Slack, and WhatsApp are way more convenient communication methods than email.
Your criticisms have some validity, but email is in a sense objectively great in that it's the thing that "won."
I believe there's a universe of difference between ONE provider and a few megacorps plus weirdos like me who pay for my own domain; I actually think that would ALSO be a good model for twitter-esque microblogging the way it pretty much works for email.
Is there stuff in bluesky that prevents starting over?
> I keep saying this and I keep being surprised that it isn't more obvious to most.
Well I read your explanation, and it's still not obvious. Nor do I appreciate the implication that anyone who disagrees with you is missing something obvious. Not the best choice, rhetorically.
Meh. Handle a little spiciness and participate in the actual topic of discussion, or don't.
>Mastodon is the right model. I keep saying this and I keep being surprised that it isn't more obvious to most. It's the right model because it's essentially the same model as email. Yes, there is TONS of "human" work to be done to change people's minds on this, but STRUCTURALLY it's the only one that can handle things correctly.
How is this meltdown at Mastadon not the exact same thing as what we're discussing here regarding Bluesky? <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195> As another said here,
>I’d argue that people lose the moment they sign up for an account, deluding themselves into believing that the problem with the last nth iteration of the same thing isn’t them.
Because Bluesky actively sells itself on the whole "take your stuff with you thing?"
At least with Masto, you know the possibility of being shutdown if you don't trust your provider, which is the same as email?
nostr protocol seems a better alternative
They cover the possibility of people potentially migrating to Mastodon with this gem:
> But not everyone is looking forward to the idea: “I’d go back to Usenet before I went back to Mastodon,” wrote Bluesky user Count Von Horse Knuckler. “I do not need people yelling at me for not putting cat pictures behind trigger warnings or unwanted Linux advice.”
But I'm suspicious because:
1. That doesn't appear to be a valid Bluesky handle and,
2. Even if it's a pseudonym-- which is understandable-- how could there possibly be a former usenet graybeard who didn't love trafficking in unwanted Linux advice?
Edit: clarifications
User and content bans are a great way to make money right now as partisans are super gullible
If a platform doesn't ban someone: short it as people say they are cancelling
If a platform does ban someone: also short it as people say they are cancelling
requires a publicly traded platform like Netflix or Disney+ as significant pieces of the parent company's revenue
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 want to allow an antagonist to take part in, I mean, aren't you just like effectively putting fingers in your ears while someone in another room talks about you?
I don't see how, without centralization, you can say to the world, "Hey, here's my content, interact with it," and then also say, "Oh you, over there, you can't participate in this thing that I am doing."
Like, depending on the shape of the graph, that doesn't make any sense. You effectively cannot do that without just creating a bunch of silos that are non-cooperative.
Bam, you've reinvented centralization with extra steps.
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.
I think there’s a lot of misconceptions about atproto; unlike ActivityPub where your home server runs both the application as well as stores your data, atproto is build in the concept that “applications” like BlueSky store your data inside your PDS (Personal Data Store), which may or may not be hosted somewhere else.
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.
It's not closed. There just isn't the needed ecosystem of other providers.
What are you talking about? Yes, it is closed - their PDS implementation and clients are open, but the actual service that runs on bsky.app is, at present, not open source.
Without the backend that handles all of the XRPC endpoints [1] being available, BlueSky still effectively maintains centralized control over their part of the 'atmosphere'. Somebody could, of course, make an open source implementation of the app.bsky lexicon and users would only need to update their DID to point at their preferred instance, but AFAIK none exists right now.
[1]: https://docs.bsky.app/docs/api/at-protocol-xrpc-api
https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team/post/3m2fjnh5hpc2f
Would projects like this one, which pulls only a subset of Bluesky data straight from the firehose, and can be processed as the end user pleases, help mitigate this limitation?
Bluesky is still the arbiter of what their firehouse emits
Theoretically they could maintain that filtering only occurs on the client level but they've made the choice to exclude banned users from the firehouse so their moderation choices effect everyone
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.
> But not everyone is looking forward to the idea: “I’d go back to Usenet before I went back to Mastodon,” wrote Bluesky user Count Von Horse Knuckler. “I do not need people yelling at me for not putting cat pictures behind trigger warnings or unwanted Linux advice.”
Cat pictures need a trigger warning? Wonder what the triggering effect is there?
I can see Linux advice though: kill, mount, etc.
> I can see Linux advice though: kill, mount, etc.
And cat. Some people are triggered by useless use of cat.
I can see that. I am even guilty of using cat a bit too much.
> Cat pictures need a trigger warning?
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/hyperbol...
It seems a bit random though. Are mastodon people big on trigger warnings? I never signed up for it. Heck, I never signed up for twitter or bluesky either. For mastodon I considered it, but telling people "ha, ha, I am writing toots" was a little too silly, even for me.
Not on trigger warnings, but on content warnings on general. It folds the post by default, but shows the warning description so it's useful for lots of reason.
For example "USpol" is often used as common CW but not specifically TW. But it could be "boob", or "giant spider", or "furry", or "food photo", or "super long post" whatever else you think people may react to with "I wish I didn't have to see that while scrolling the timeline". It's really just about making it a nicer place to others. It's common, but it's not like people expect you to put USpol warning on posts from account which deals only with politics.
That makes sense, thank you for explaining
They seem to be saying that they don't know how to use Mastodon.
I guess? They just seemed to reference some story or situation I am not familiar with
See also:
Are we decentralized yet? (arewedecentralizedyet.online)
492 points by Bogdanp 38 days ago | 283 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45077291
All roads lead back to centralization lol.
You can't have decentralized but connected and system level moderation at the same time.
It's either centralized and moderated system wide or decentralized and moderated locally.
The problem with being connected and moderated locally is your creating global moderation problems for a local system, typically that means massive amounts of work for said moderators.
The founder has been posting through it, Elon-style and with as much cringe.
It's disappointing because I've mostly been able to replicate my Twitter experience there. It's better actually, because more funny people moved and fewer journalists so it's less of a doomscroll.
"Posting through it" is a fairly nonsensical concept. It implies you're required to agree with people yelling at you, which you aren't.
Bluesky in particular has this problem because it inherited a kind of leftist crustpunk poster from 2016 Twitter. They had a weird affect where they hated "nerds" for some reason and pretended to be those jock bully characters from 80s high school movies.
The modern Bluesky form has evolved into being terrified of "AI" and screaming at anyone who uses it or has ever heard of it that it doesn't work and will never work but is also using up all the water and steals everyone's art and is going to make everyone unemployed and also you're a STEMlord who needs to take humanities classes to learn to be ethical.
They're currently working on inventing new slurs for AI chatbots which are mostly remarkably offensive.
>They're currently working on inventing new slurs for AI chatbots which are mostly remarkably offensive.
That sounds awesome. Thanks for the tip. I'm gonna join this effort immediately.
By remarkably offensive I mean they're clearly just trying to get away with saying the N-word. The full version too. You should try living your life better.
Saying that making jokes about inanimate probability models is comparable to saying the N word is anti-Black racism. Completely inappropriate and divorced from reality.
Which of these are acceptable/unacceptable to you?
- posting about saying it "with a hard R"
- posting TikToks of yourself yelling "dirty clanker" at delivery robots on the street
- posting TikToks of yourself saying it in a sketch where you're a waitress in the South in the 1950s
- replying to people with prosthetic robot arms calling them "half clankas"
Cause those are all real. It's the internet, you should assume anything bad you can imagine is real.
https://www.tiktok.com/@supervilliansprax/video/754524076599...
Neckbeards, neckbeards whatcha gonna do?
Whatcha gonna do when we come for you?
Slurs for AI? Maybe take to heart the idea that the Humanities are useful in that you don't end up having thoughts like this if you've studied them.
See, here's an example.
I think I have backup: https://www.accesstoinsight.org/ptf/dhamma/sacca/sacca4/samm...
Note Peter Thiel (the source of literally everything this sort of person is upset about) is a philosophy major.
What is the purpose of calling someone a clanker?
Note this word is actually a one-off joke from Star Wars, but the reason they're saying it is that you can say it with a hard R.
The other words are worse.
I don’t believe this is true. The sort of people to use this slur are the ones supporting DEI and BLM.
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.
> That's how Singal makes those with opposing views look ridiculous.
Quite frankly, he didn't have to do anything. They did that allll on their own.
> he's one of journalism's answers to the concept of edgelordery
either the term "edgelord" means something very different from what it did 10ish years ago or you have a very misinformed understanding about how timid Jesse approaches online conflict. I haven't seen him initiate any form of edgy engagement in forever .. maybe ever.
I followed him long after he was declared persona non grata, sort of uncomfortably agreeing that he was getting dogpiled unfairly (I don't think I agree with him about much, but at the time, it didn't seem like he was saying anything more than a stddev from the media consensus). I don't follow him anymore, after it became very clear that he's steering right into personal conflicts with people, and reciprocating all the weird grudges. I've also had reason to listen to his podcast within the past year (they did an episode covering our local library system), and feel comfortable with the decision to yuck out of paying attention to him.
(Not over the library coverage itself, just over ancillary stuff I heard on the podcast).
I'll put it this way: I had reason to tip our local politics Facebook off to the episode he did, and when I did that, I wrote a paragraph long disclaimer about what he's like. Not because I have any animus towards Singal, but because I didn't want anybody to associate me with some of what he's said.
So yeah, I'd push back on this.
Singal is a lot less interesting a subject (aren't we all exhausted of debating Singal at this point) than whether Bluesky is going to be a viable mainstream competitor to Twitter, and he's interesting to me only in what this drama says about that question.
> Singal is a lot less interesting a subject (aren't we all exhausted of debating Singal at this point) than whether Bluesky is going to be a viable mainstream competitor to Twitter
I 100% agree with you on that part. As for the rest, it seems you and I have a vastly different experience with him and his views. Cheers!
edit: oh yea, I don't know whether you'd be comfortable sharing it here but I'd be fairly curious about that Jesse 101 you wrote for your facebook group. Not to criticize it or anything just to get a better idea of your POV.
I think the article's sole purpose is to pressure Bluesky into enforcing an ideology.
The guy's whole bit is arguing from some sort of vague sociological perspective against gender affirming care. And pretending that (in the United States of America of all places) teens can just walk up to their doctors super easily and get surgery done somehow.
He presents this issue as a sort of parental-rights-ignoring epidemic, but if you dig into the reality of it all there's a hell of a lot of parental consent, a hell of a lot of checks within the medical establishment about whether to do these things, and of course the person themselves being involved.
Singal is a fellow traveler to people who defend conversion therapy, which is a thing where _kids are sent to a camp to be trained into a different sexuality_. This is shit that's basically banned in many places in Europe, because many believe that those camps are basically child abuse.
So you're looking at a person who has a lot of distrust for the medical establishment, falsely presents the reality of the thing to make it sound like people are walking in for free top surgery the moment they get into middle school[0], and this is stuff that is being cited to add restrictions on other things.
There's this deeply personal thing that a very small segment of the population is trying to deal with. There are medical professionals that have some help (including just of the "talking" variety), some degree of acceptance in pockets of society. And this sort of thing means that people can have a little bit of dignity. And the medical establishment is trying to treat people!
Meanwhile this guy is using his voice to just spread fear around all of this, misrepresenting even really basic things. And to what goal? Again, parental rights are part of the equation in reality! And we're not talking about a sports thing here. So who is Singal out there fighting for?
I kind of don't care what this guy's opinion is on, like, taxes and the role of government in the rest of life. He's going out there writing this kind of stuff so consistently that he's known for it. And I have a very hard time understanding who he is the voice for, except for people who are just against trans people existing in public society.
I don't care about him being banned off of bluesky or whatever. I just want people here to have at least some access to medical care (in various forms) if doctors and parents agree. And his stuff is helping to provide ammo to roll this access back at a legislative level. Serious people should know that what he says doesn't hold up on examination. In the same way that people "know" that Trump just says things that sound emotionally right to him in the moment to prove a point.
[0]: I'm exagerating here but again, in the USA access to medical treatment is not easy!
What is Singal misrepresenting? His writings on the subject mostly serve to highlight just how poor the evidence around gender affirming pediatric care is. And he's hardly alone in this conclusion. The UK, Sweden, Italy, Denmark, Norway, and Finland have all stopped routine prescription of hormone blockers to children. Most countries never allowed it in the first place.
> And pretending that (in the United States of America of all places) teens can just walk up to their doctors super easily and get surgery done somehow.
You should see some of the background evidence on this. NY Times did a podcast series not long ago, which covered the controversy, called The Protocol: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-protocol/id1817731...
It was about how the so called Dutch Protocol re: gender affirming care first came to the US, and how long-ish psychological evaluation times were often truncated because of how far patients had to travel in the US. Then the lid flew off when such care moved to California.
> Singal is a fellow traveler to people who defend conversion therapy
Yikes. One doesn't usually expect people to use the actual language of McCarthy-ites.
> So who is Singal out there fighting for?
The kids? It's really not crazy to believe that the children, perhaps not given adequate care, could simply be wrong, or even socially influenced (like everything else in a teenager's life).
> He's going out there writing this kind of stuff so consistently that he's known for it. And I have a very hard time understanding who he is the voice for, except for people who are just against trans people existing in public society.
It's a new treatment and how it is practiced here in the US is the very Q he is examining. I'm not saying he's right, but I do feel better if there is someone with a critical eye looking at new treatment methods.
I am going to re-insist on the idea that parental consent is going to play a big role in practice in US healthcare practices, if only for financial reasons. I have very little patience for the idea that access is easy.
Perhaps there is a debate to be had on treatment protocols, but I generally feel like, for something that covers such a small segment of the population, the default is to err towards letting that debate happen in professional circles.
> I am going to re-insist on the idea that parental consent is going to play a big role in practice in US healthcare practices, if only for financial reasons.
Oh agreed. If, for no other reason, that is how the politics, even on the American Left, are now. A few years ago, people were talking about gender affirming care as a matter of right for the children. Singal, among others, changed that conversation.
> I have very little patience for the idea that access is easy.
Agreed, but I think you may have misconstrued Singal's point. He's not saying it's too easy, he's saying there is not enough preliminary psychiatric care like the treatment protocol dictated in the Netherlands.
> Perhaps there is a debate to be had on treatment protocols, but I generally feel like, for something that covers such a small segment of the population, the default is to err towards letting that debate happen in professional circles.
Um. Those professional circles like HN's professional circles need to be open to the air every now and then. Like -- what if we allowed Peter Thiel and his circle of founders, raised on Heinlein novels and sugary soda, to dictate tech policy in the US? Some people are just too weirdly close to a thing. We actually do need the wisdom that normies can offer.
Specifically, re: this topic, four European countries, who have a much more experience than Americans do with this care, have recently implemented more restrictive approaches to care. See: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/06/us-europe-transgend...
It should be a matter of right. My parents mutilated me as a child because they denied me healthcare. We should not allow parents to deny their children healthcare which leads to their permanent disfiguration. That's disgusting.
If you think it'd be wrong to force a cis kid to be trans, then it's also wrong to force a trans kid to be cis.
> It should be a matter of right.
I think that's a fine point to make, but I also think it's unlikely to be politically feasible, any time soon, in the US. You may have been perfectly capable of making this decision, but, in the most common case, most parents know that teenage brains driving almost adult bodies sometimes make really terrible decisions. And lots of us imagine we were much smarter than we actually were in adolescence. Moreover -- parents can be just as profoundly stupid.
I'd imagine a teenage Melanie Griffith would say she was perfectly capable of consenting to the very adult relationship she had with Don Johnson, and to which, I believe, her parents consented, as well. In retrospect, I'm not sure adult Melanie Griffith would feel the same. Or at the very least she may not allow her daughter to do the same.
Perhaps that's why we should willing to accept some guidance from things that at least can pretend to be objective -- science and journalism. Especially views critical of our priors and intuitions. And we definitely shouldn't seek to silence or de-platform anyone simply because they disagree.
Please -- vote the bastards out of office who don't take your problems seriously, but also please don't silence journalists for suggesting that there is more to this question than two simple American Left and Right narratives. Some of us need that kind of help to understand the world.
> We should not allow parents to deny their children healthcare which leads to their permanent disfiguration. That's disgusting.
So instead we need to enable parents to allow healthcare to disfigure their young kids when they predictably get influenced from social media and their peers?
How is it 'disgusting' to try to let someone live as they were born?
It's a medical matter. If medical officials broadly agree that having a prosthetic limb gives someone better quality of life than having no limb, then yes, we should disfigure the human body by attaching a prosthetic.
Medical officials fairly broadly agree that gender-affirming care improves the quality of life of patients, and so of course it should be allowed.
It's disgusting to try and use the law to force medical professionals to give sub-par care for no good reason.
> How is it 'disgusting' to try to let someone live as they were born?
I assume you're opposed to cosmetic dental braces for children? Even though just like gender-affirming care, they can lead to better self-perception and better outcomes (but 'disfigure' the child by making their teeth more aligned with stereotypical norms)
> Medical officials fairly broadly agree that gender-affirming care improves the quality of life of patients, and so of course it should be allowed.
This is not really true any more at this point in history. European countries have either backed away from pediatric gender affirming care, or they never allowed it in the first place. It's increasingly the case that the US and Canada are the outliers in the broader consensus that the evidence for the benefits of endocrine interventions in children is too weak to justify routine prescription.
> I assume you're opposed to cosmetic dental braces for children? Even though just like gender-affirming care, they can lead to better self-perception and better outcomes (but 'disfigure' the child by making their teeth more aligned with stereotypical norms)
Are we really going to try and draw an equivalence between cosmetic dental braces and permanently-altering hormones? A wire pulling a kid's teeth into places is not comparable to chemically castrating the kid for a few years and giving them opposite-sex hormones in their mid-teens. The measured benefits to the latter have to be way higher to justify that level of invasiveness and permanent change.
These kinds of blithe comparisons to the seriousness of gender-affirming care no small part of why trust on this issue has waned so fast.
> How is it 'disgusting' to try to let someone live as they were born?
Welcome to the cleft palate surgical repair denialism club!
I read a study that said a majority of trans kids grow up to be gay if they don't take puberty blockers. I think it's wrong to force a gay kid to be trans.
> 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 pitchforks problem, who are asking for something which they don't have any business asking.
Sure, if you want to stick your fingers in your ears, block Singal. There are widely used block lists for people who even merely follow Singal. Asking for his ban from a public use platform is too much without more than "He wrote some articles for the NY Times, The Atlantic, and NY Magazine, I didn't personally enjoy."
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.
> he is accused of targeted harassment
yeah but that's an accusation without basis in reality.
oh, there's tons of basis in reality. How could you even say that? Just a cursory google:
https://www.professorwatchlist.org/
https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-makes...
https://www.azregents.edu/news-releases/abor-chair-statement
That's for Charlie Kirk et al, not Jesse Singal.
> Bluesky has a problem of its user base demanding purity, and it will 100% be the death of it.
Yup.
As someone who describes themselves as Leftist, I wanted to enjoy Blue Sky, but the purity tests are insane.
To give a concrete example, I was called a Nazi for owning a Tesla Model 3. The fact that I bought the car 6 years ago, long before Elon Musk made his hard-right turn, was irrelevant. They literally expected me to sell the car and take a huge financial loss (Since I need a car and would then need to buy a new one, and the trade-in value of my M3P is shit) just to virtue signal.
The _actual_ trouble with Bluesky is that it's just a retread of Twitter with only a few minor tweaks, right down to the inevitable moderation and governance problems from shoving every user into a single shared social space and having a single centralized point of failure.
It's not 2012 anymore, and the modern mainstream social media ecosystem has turned into an utter disaster area. If you're going to do social media in the 2020's, you need something better, not the same tired ideas and empty promises about "We'll do it _right_ this time around, honest."
Mastodon, for all its faults, at the very least was truly and demonstrably decentralized.
> would lean to a ban of probably 85% of the US
A decentralized system would allow for that to happen tbh. That 85% can exist in their bubble but other actors who see them as dangerous and unsafe should have the means to mute/disconnect.
Wouldn't the remaining 15% be the section in a bubble?
Could you rephrase that please, I’m not sure what you mean
Even better: the only “evidence” of Singal’s “anti-trans” views are that his work has been quoted by anti-trans politicians and activists. This is an absolute ridiculous bar to have. Anyone who follows him would be hard-pressed to describe him as “anti-trans” unless you think anything less than a full throated endorsement of self ID and medical transition interventions for minors is “anti-trans”.
Indeed, Singal is a journalist you go to when you want to read a thoughtful, data-driven analysis of a controversial issue.
He's exceptionally skilled at taking complex and highly polarized topics and picking them apart in a way that invites readers to consider different perspectives.
Unfortunately, that in itself is a polarizing approach, as many people just want their pre-existing beliefs reinforced.
Speaking of confirmation bias, do you disagree with Singal about anything in particular? What about agreement?
Who else have you read on this 'controversial issue'? Why did you consider them less persuasive than a journalist with no particular expertise?
Why have you not named what the 'issue' is?
Are 'people' an 'issue' to be solved in general, or just in this case?
If we changed topics to 'what should be done about the "autism issue"', does your opinion change? If so, why? There are perfectly valid questions being brought up by heterodox thinkers all the time. We're not even certain that those people experience emotions, there's literally no way to tell, and we shouldn't shy away from hard questions and even harder truths, don't you think?
Do you believe that the executive branch of the federal government is best-suited to dealing with undesirable minorities generally? If so, what national-level 'solutions' currently being discussed in the halls of power are your favorites?
In the spirit of cooperation, I'll go first. Openly trial-ballooning the revocation of the second amendment for trans people is my favorite in terms of pure audacity.
What's with this barrage of questions? Pick one or two if you want a conversation. I'm not interested in an interrogation.
I don't know, a cursory 'singal anti trans" google search had this as first result : https://www.transgendermap.com/issues/topics/media/jesse-sin...
I'm fine with labelling this person "anti trans"
I wanted to give you (and the website you linked) the benefit of the doubt since with all the accusations they make there is a link in there. I thought it was sources of Jesse actually doing any of this stuff (which he didn't but I am willing to be proven wrong) .. but no. Those links are all just internal info dumps and almost nothing of the accusations on the page is sourced .. at all.
Right, the website lists the accusations with links, but the links seem unrelated to the accusations.
For example, I'd expect "criticizing expert medical and scientific consensus on healthcare for our minors" to link to some kind of article describing what Jesse Singal said about this topic and why it's incorrect, but instead it links to a general page about "healthcare providers serving gender diverse youth" that doesn't even mention anything about the accused person or their writings.
> I'm fine with labelling this person "anti trans"
You should probably at least give Jesse the right of reply here: https://unherd.com/2023/11/the-rage-behind-transgender-map/
Why
How dare they write for... The Atlantic!
Why are some people like this?
That's the one thing you pick up?
I had never heard of Singal but I went ahead and started following him. Thanks!
How exciting
> unless you think anything less than a full throated endorsement
That is absolutely how some of the more "passionate" activist types have been for the past 5+ years on a number of social topics, not just trans.
Which ones? Everyone in this thread is afraid to stand on their beliefs and I find that annoying. Just say what you mean!
First though, a clarifying question, do you think the civil-rights movement, as it existed in history, was 'too passionate'?
If not, in what specific way is the current 'activist' movement worse than those movements of our recent past?
Which civil rights organization has gone too far recently and what is the preferred middle ground that you do accept?
QED
>if applied to everyone, would lean to a ban of probably 85%
I'm not American but looking in from the outside i can't figure out anything 85% of you would agree on there right now.
"People who disagree with me should not be allowed to speak" is definitely up there.
Even that only applies to one side of the political aisle
It really really doesn't. If you pay attention, $yourside does it just as much as - possibly even more than - $otherside.
As evidence, consider the fact that from your comment, I literally have absolutely no idea which political side you are on.
Dolly Parton!
Facebook and Twitter no longer bother with moderation, do you think the experience on those platforms is better or worse than 5 years ago?
It used to be common sense to immediately ban creeps of all stripes, especially the obvious ones. Singal certainly qualifies. Putting aside the super annoying 'just asking questions' vitriol that he publishes to national papers, his pdf-file chat log stuff alone would warrant an instant perma from me without a second thought.
Speaking to your broader point about the 'death' of a platform. The people that made bsky what it is now (good and ill) are precisely the people you are blaming for its downfall, which is weird. Normally when you run a business you want your users to remain so that you might profit.
Relatedly, I'm very very tired of the 4chan/crypto/ai gas-leak that has enshittified everything, aren't you?
I've seen bsky users chat casually about their rpe and death-threat ratio before and after leaving twitter, and for that alone, I would choose the 'threat lite' platform for as long as it remained so.
> "The question is not whether those views are right, it's whether those are mainstream."
I don't agree that this is the question, nor do I agree with the your unsupported number. This isn't an election, and popularism is a coward's appeal. Was the Gaza genocide not a genocide until the polls caught up with what we could all see was happening?
I don't even think you believe what your wrote. If the 'views' in question are truly shared by 85%!* of a population that never agrees on anything, then surely there's no problem with sharing them on this forum? A guarantee of 85% positive karma is awaiting you if you just speak your truth. It's the Trump era, and you can say the 'r-word' and the 't-slur' now. What was actually holding you back?
> This isn't an election, and popularism is a coward's appeal.
These platforms were supposed to be the "digital town square". Implicit in that is the idea that anyone and everyone can discuss and share their ideas. When would you remove someone from an actual town square? Only when they are being extremely disruptive or violent.
Further, it cannot be a "town square" if half the town isn't allowed to be there.
"digital town square"
These are privately owned for-profit hundred-billion+ dollar publicly traded advertising companies. These are, almost definitionally, not honest actors! Are you serious, you still believe their marketing copy from 8 years ago verbatim?
What am I witnessing here?
> Facebook and Twitter no longer bother with moderation, do you think the experience on those platforms is better or worse than 5 years ago?
I haven't used FB in years but Twitter is very (stupidly and incoherently, but very actively) moderated. Unless you are being technical and saying that Twitter doesn't exist and so isn't moderated, and the moderated thing is X, but...
X then. By unmoderated I mean it's a cess-pool of pay-boosted groypers, crypto ad accounts, ai accounts, sex accounts, pure scams, ai generated underage girlfriends, and actual CSAM, that go mostly ignored if they shell out 8 USD.
I'm sure some actual humans manage to still get banned from time to time, but you can't be telling me that things haven't changed for the worse right? Do they even have a 'trust and safety' team anymore?
Do you have a source for any of this? I've never seen any of those.
Well, except the groypers, but that's a feature, not a bug, as they otherwise are not breaking the law or platfom rules and therefore deserve to be on the platform just as anyone else does.
> Facebook and Twitter no longer bother with moderation, do you think the experience on those platforms is better or worse than 5 years ago? > It used to be common sense to immediately ban creeps of all stripes, especially the obvious ones. Singal certainly qualifies.
The experience on these platforms is somewhat better than it was five years ago, because the people making moderation decisions for these platforms have been largely replaced by people who are less prone to banning people because someone who dislikes their political speech labels them a creep. There are still serious moderation issues on these platforms, but yeah compared to five years ago there is somewhat more freedom to speak without risking getting arbitrarily banned, and a wider range of topics being talked about.
> Putting aside the super annoying 'just asking questions' vitriol that he publishes to national papers, his pdf-file chat log stuff alone would warrant an instant perma from me without a second thought.
You should be able to perma-ban anyone you want from your own feed for any reason. If it is possible for you to make the platform ban Singal (or anyone else) in a way that affects anyone other than ypu, then that platform is not meaningfully decentralized. I've occasionally read articles by Singal but I don't follow his output closely and don't have a strong opinion about him one way or the other. I should still be able to read what he posts even if you think it is not worth reading.
> Relatedly, I'm very very tired of the 4chan/crypto/ai gas-leak that has enshittified everything, aren't you?
I don't think 4chan, cryptocurrency, or AI have much to do with each other, nor that online discussion related to to these phenomena in some way universally constitutes enshittification or not.
4chan has changed the way that discourse happens online, and it has definitely leaked to X at the very least. Incel lingo especially, you might even use it yourself being completely unaware. I'd call it as a style of reactionary discourse, where the most 'controversial/engaging' thing is elevated and 'ironic' nihilism is the default viewpoint. This is now fully automated, but it needn't be forever so. These companies would do well to learn how to enter the post-exponential phase of their life-cycle.
crypto (and gambling I suppose these days) is a barometer of the advertising/fake user space. There's a fundamentally different vibe to a site trying to trick the gullible into getting 'free' crypto from musk and a site trying to sell you 75% off crocs at Target. You are free to disagree.
AI is the source of a huge wave deeply inauthentic and frankly boring/weird content. This reduces the signal/noise ratio, and thus the perceived value of any website. Again, your are free to disagree, but to me this is all symptomatic of cyclical autophagy.
There was an article about this issue on techcrunch yesterday, and it linked to a long discussion on Bluesky about whether "clanker" was a slur that should be banned. JC. What a waste of time by some people.
There seem to be a lot of people on Bluesky who don’t think it’s wrong to post reply-spam about their favorite grievances even when it’s entirely off topic. Complaining about Singal is an example. It’s the sort of thing that would be downvoted to oblivion on Hacker News.
For the most part they’re fairly easy to avoid, but reading the replies for popular accounts is a minefield.
This is sort of like email in the old days before the spam filters got good. Bluesky needs better reply-spam filters. Or maybe they already exist somewhere, but it needs better ways to find the good filters?
If that gets fixed then maybe it has a chance to become a more welcoming place.
"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
That's an argument that proves a lot, given that it kind of implies that a quorum of customers can simply vote other customers off the island.
well... yes? does that not happen regularly on many platforms?
even on a free service, users have some tiny leverage; they can vote with their feet
Not on any viable investor-funded ones, nope.
even billion dollar corporations like cloudflare (with a "free speech absolutist" CEO) absolutely do drop unpopular customers due to user pressure
If you're talking about moot and kiwifarms that wasn't merely "user pressure" like large customers threatening to walk - it was a harassment campaign hitting up the legal department and cloudflare decided they didn't want to bother dying on that hill
> moot
Do you mean null? Ironically, 4chan actually still uses Cloudflare to this day, and did through that whole controversy too.
I assure you there is way, way worse things posted to /pol/ than there ever was, or will be, to Kiwi Farms.
Right, sorry, Moon not moot.
I enjoyed his interview with Nina Paley and Chris Cohn on life after cloudflare: https://heterodorx.com/podcast/episode-107-how-the-internet-...
Interesting, thanks for sharing.
I have been halfway following the Farm's status for the past couple years from null's telegram/forum posts, I didn't know he spoke about the situation at length anywhere.
This can backfire. eg Twitch moderators.
Discretion should be rarely used. For everything else, create a set of rules and stick to them.
But I guess users also expect that there's freedom of opinions on the platform within the set rules. If users are merely being banned based on their opinion, that doesn't sound like a healthy environment.
He /doesn't use the service at all/. I agree that is a way of not breaking its rules.
Good on Jay Graber that she's sticking to a reasoned set of principles instead of bowing down to the braying mob.
if you call your userbase a braying mob, you're not going to have a userbase for long
It's a small fraction of the userbase that is up in arms about this, who want special exceptions made for their demands.
Let me rephrase my flagged comment:
Being someone who is obsessed with denigrating an oppressed minority should get people banned from more private places than it does currently. I'd like to hear counterarguments if there are any. If you don't think that characterization applies to Singal and Vance, why?
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.
To answer your question: because truth is no defense. How many times have you seen some statement accused of being something-ist, instead of simply false? How often did in further arguing the factuality of the original statement not even come up?
> 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.
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.
> But if you really are honestly curious and unbiased, M. K. Anderson wrote a well-researched article for Protean in 2022.
He misrepresents Singal's writing, uses guilt-by-association smears, and focuses more on personal vilification of Singal than substantive critique.
For example his claim that Singal's writing "endangers trans lives" is hyperbolic and unsupported.
This is nothing more than a hit piece penned to destroy the heretic.
> For example his claim that Singal's writing "endangers trans lives" is hyperbolic and unsupported.
Partially due to Singal’s sensationalist journalism, trans people in the United States are about to lose access to some forms of healthcare—treatments that will remain accessible to cis people, like hormone replacement therapy.
So I think history has vindicated this particular claim. I don’t expect you to agree, however.
I am honored that you made an account just to respond to this! Welcome to HN.
Couldn't it be possible that chemically altering minors isn't be best course of treatment? The UK, Finland, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway have all stopped routine prescription of puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria on the grounds that their efficacy is not clear but the negative side effects are. It's extremely hard to claim the science is settled at this point.
The allegations of harm seem to come from an a priori conclusion that these treatments are beneficial.
I welcome any novel, high-quality scientific research on better treatments for gender dysphoric children.
But, in the States at least, there is no longer any funding for that. They cut all of it by grepping the NIH and NSF databases for “gender”, more or less.
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/nih-terminating-active-researc...
What there soon will be in the States, assuming SCOTUS overturns the Colorado ban this term, is a renaissance of conversion therapy. If you abuse the child hard enough and long enough, they’ll have bigger problems than gender dysphoria or—coming up in the next wave of manufactured outrage—same-sex attraction.
Hard to say that the “just asking questions” club has the child’s best interests at heart.
There has been quality research published recently on treating gender dysphoria. For instance, A 2020 study on treating GD with hormone therapy: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08039488.2019.1...
Somewhat unique among studies on pediatric gender affirming hormone therapy, this study had a control group that wasn't prescribed blockers. The group on blockers fared no better than the control group. This is the study that primarily motivated Finland to stop routine prescription of puberty blockers to children, with half a dozen or so other European countries following suit after their reviews of the evidence.
Researchers in the US have typically balked at the idea of including a control group in their studies on blockers, arguing that it's unethical to withhold live-saving medicine from patients. This, conveniently, lets authors frame null results as positive, by claiming that gender dysphoria patient would have fared even worse without blockers. This is what Johanna Olson-Kennedy did in her latest study: she observed no change in the patients' outcomes, and claimed that this indicates that blockers are beneficial because they prevented the patients from getting even worse. But without a control group in her study, this is statement is just speculation.
The retreat from gender affirming care is motivated by the absence of good evidence in favor of their usage. And it's hardly a US-specific phenomenon. It's uniquely politicized in the US, I'll grant that, but this shift in stance on altering children's endocrine systems is happening in plenty of other countries too, so I'm not so convinced this is solely borne out by this latest President.
And again, I find the attempts to equate anti-gay conversion therapy aimed at suppressing homosexual desire with exploring ways to become more comfortable in one's natural body. It's fundamentally different to[ tell a boy attracted to other boys that his feelings are wrong than it is to tell a boy identifying as a girl on account of his same sex attractions, "boys can like other boys, not only girls can like boys". The former is telling someone to reject a part of themselves, the latter is expanding's one's concept of gender to include one's natural state of being.
That's quite the leap of causation
https://commonslibrary.org/the-anti-trans-movement/
Singal is part of the “Disinformation and Conversion” faction, as a promoter of so-called “rapid onset gender dysphoria.”
> 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 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 explicitly said it and every other example of the genre was biased, so I don’t know why you’re claiming otherwise. Thanks for confirming my priors on HN users.
I said it was well-researched, which is true.
Thanks. I'm well acquainted with Hacker News' proclivities for mob censorship, but I didn't know a ton about this specific incident.
> 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).
> 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.
Why is the idea that children are impressionable so controversial?
> The problem, if you can call it that, is Singal hasn't broken any of their TOS.
Well, no, he did unambiguously break the TOS back when he originally joined. Then Bluesky amended their TOS, which gave them an avenue to avoid banning him.
My understanding is their TOS was unclear and they clarified it after the outrage, but their moderation policy didn't actually change. They're not going ban people that break the TOS outside the S, because that's practically unenforceable.
> They're not going ban people that break the TOS outside the S, because that's practically unenforceable.
Before they amended the ToS, they did do that. It's completely possible to enforce, especially when the person in question is the one sharing the evidence of the offending behavior. There's no dispute of facts at play.
> Well, no, he did clearly break the TOS back when he originally joined.
Care to explain? The links in the article re: potential violations are mostly BS.
Doxxing people off-platform used to be against the ToS. When people began reporting him for that, Bluesky amended their ToS.
> Doxxing people off-platform used to be against the ToS. When people began reporting him for that, Bluesky amended their ToS.
Even by the loosest definition what Singal did was not doxxing?
For instance, Alejandra Caraballo, like it or not, is a public figure. A role, I would add, that she has chosen for herself. She testifies before Congress FFS. When she says something in public, including on Bluesky, I'm not sure she deserves some radical right to not have it heard anywhere else. No matter what vague term you can point to in the Bluesky guidelines or TOS.
Also Caraballo was the one who was actually harassing and doxxing. Singal was just reporting on it, as any journalist might do.
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 they see other people get banned for”. It serves as a kind of cover because even when you point to a concrete example of him violating the rules the moderation team will dismiss your report as being personally motivated. It’s a funny defense, “This guy couldn’t possibly be breaking the rules and be near-universally considered an asshole by the users on this site! It has to be one or the other!”
> 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.
This is an insane thing to ban in the terms of service, and it is in and of itself a good reason to avoid using BlueSky. I would not want to rely on any service to communicate that made it against the rules to post a screenshot of a public message from someone who blocked my account on their end.
> This is an insane thing to ban in the terms of service, and it is in and of itself a good reason to avoid using BlueSky.
That’s a perfectly reasonable opinion to have. The post you were responding to was not about the merits of the rule, it is about uneven enforcement of it.
That rule would be a reason to avoid BlueSky if you are not Jesse Singal, because you could get banned for breaking it. If you are Jesse Singal it is not a reason to avoid BlueSky, because that rule does not exist for you.
The strange thing about this is that Jay and the moderation team are sympathetic to your point. They don’t think that evading blocks (or doxxing) should always be grounds for taking action against an account. For at least one user they ignore all instances of it
Block evasion is creating an alt account to interact with someone who has blocked you.
Screenshotting someone's public post is not block evasion.
> 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.
> I don't like platforms that try to keep me ignorant of what others are publicly saying
That’s neither here nor there. The nuclear block is a big part of how Bluesky works, and abiding by it/was part of the rules for users other than Jesse Singal.
The point I made is that other users that share your disagreement with the nuclear block would get suspended or banned for evading it, whereas Jesse Singal would not/does not. The message to other users was “if you don’t like it, tough”
I say is/was because I don’t read his posts. I stopped paying close attention to all that some time after it became clear that retroactive changes to the ToS to justify (lack of) actions is the baseline for how Jay and Aaron run the site.
How can people laugh and make meme at someone else murder ? Like the guy, hate him, but there is something that used to be shared amongst humans, it's that you respect the dead.
That's just empathy. Seems like it's gone to the toilet in some part of the usa or maybe it's just weirdos on internet. Either case it's despicable.
> How can people laugh and make meme at someone else murder ? Like the guy, hate him, but there is something that used to be shared amongst humans, it's that you respect the dead.
This is extremely wrong. Humans do have an impulse to show respect to the dead, even in some cases dead members of some kind of enemy community. But it is also extremely common and extremely widespread for people to celebrate the deaths of their enemies, from leftists making jokes about the death of Margaret Thatcher, to British people continuing to burn Guy Fawkes in effigy for his centuries-old act of unsuccessful terrorism, to Jews continuing to disparage Haman, some 2500 years after the events that formed the basis for the Purim festival.
Just because something is common and widespread doesn't mean it should continue to be common and widespread, though it will continue to happen due to human nature. And yet, people striving to be constructive and positive won't celebrate the death of a stranger. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is a cultural lodestar found globally for a very good reason: cheering the death of others may lead to others hoping to cheer your death, and that potential is enough to significantly curtail offers of constructive and positive assistance from the victims to the perpetrators, leading to a gradual social degradation within the perpetrators. Certainly remember and even memorialize a person's death, but the exaltation of a person's death is a sure path to cultural collapse.
Now, that's assuming people are one unified group. In reality, most people are forced into an "in" group or an "out" group. The "in" group exalts the death of the "out" group member, so the "out" group members must respond in kind. That eventually leads to the degradation of both groups, leaving the "above" and "beyond" groups with the remnants. In turn, the destructive and negative conflict continues.
Left and right both gawk at each other . Bluesky was refreshing for lefties to have their echo chamber back for a time , then it got dull. Fact is pointing out others flaws is more engaging than grandstanding alone