Comment by cornholio
2 years ago
Moderation does not sound like an additive function, i.e multiple moderation *filters" that add up to the final experience. That seems an almost usenet like interaction, where each user has its own skizoid killfile and the default experience is bad.
Rather, moderation is a cohesive whole that defines the direction of the community, the same rules and actions apply to everybody.
This was a very active topic of debate within the team. We ended up establishing the idea of "jurisdictions" to talk about it. If a moderation decision is universal to all viewers, we'd say that it's under a specific jurisdiction of a moderator. This is how a subreddit functions, with Reddit being the toplevel jurisdiction and the subreddits acting as child jurisdictions.
The model of labelers as we're releasing in this first iteration is, as you say, an additive filtration system. They are "jurisdictionless." We chose this model because Bluesky isn't (presently) segmented into communities like Reddit is, and so we felt this was the right way to introduce things.
That said, along the way we settled on a notion of the "user's personal jurisdiction," meaning essentially that you have certain rights to universally control your own interactions. Blocking is essentially under this umbrella, as are thread gates (who can reply). What's then interesting is that you can enlist others to help run your personal jurisdiction. Blocklists are an example of that which we have now: you can subscribe to blocks created by other people.
This is why I'm interested in integrating labels into threadgates, and also exploring account-wide gates that can get driven by labels. Because then it does enable these labelers to apply uniform rules and actions to those who request it. In a way, it's a kind of dynamic subreddit that fits the social model.
> That said, along the way we settled on a notion of the "user's personal jurisdiction," meaning essentially that you have certain rights to universally control your own interactions. Blocking is essentially under this umbrella, as are thread gates (who can reply).
As as user, "personal jurisdiction" is a critical feature to me. If I start a thread, I want to maintain some minimal level of agreeable behavior in the responses associated with my original post.
It's sort of like online newspaper comments sections. Many unmoderated comment sections were once full of 20 disagreeable trolls who drove everyone else away. The bad drives out the good, and trolls accumulate over time. This doesn't even need to be ideological—I knew a semi-famous tech personality that had a handful of personal stalkers who infested every open comment section. Many newspapers fixed this by disabling comments or actually hiring moderators.
I won't post to a service if the average reader of my posts will see a pile of nasty, unpleasant comments immediately following each of my posts.
This is why I mostly prefer blogs, and moderated community forums. Smaller, well-moderated subreddits are great, as are private Discords.
This sounds very much like a federal system of government like the US, with each level of jurisdiction applying their own rules.
For Bluesky, by default does power lie with the highest authority by or the lowest authority (i.e. the user)?
The US model was originally designed bottom up, with power having to be granted to the higher authority. Admittedly we've effectively abandoned this today.
I’m a huge nerd about this so I enjoy this question. The logic of the system is that the protocol offers users rights by architecture. They include rights to an identity, to speak, and to choose your providers. The right to control reach is controlled by the applications, and they apply business logic to construct the threads and feeds. So: users are independently publishing structured data (a reply to a post) and applications are interpreting that data into app experiences.
As a consequence, the personal jurisdiction model as I described is a construct of the application. It can ultimately choose the logic of what gets shown. Therefore it’s top down in this case. What an application can’t do is remove a user’s identity or posts from the internet. And consequently other applications can make other decisions.
All decentralized networks are an expression of a political philosophy.
Once you support delegating your killfile to other people it no longer functions the same as each user having their own. And FWIW, as an example, here on Hacker News, many of us have showdead turned on all the time and so while I am aware of the moderation put in place by the site, I actually see everything.
Also: frankly, if there were someone willing to put a lot of effort into moderating stuff Hacker News doesn't--stuff like people asking questions you can answer in the article or via Google--I would opt into that as I find it wastes my time to see that stuff.
And with delegation of moderation, I think it will start to feel like people voting for rulesets more than a bunch of eclectic chaos; if a lot of people agree about some rule that should exist, you will have to decide when you make a post how many people you are willing to lose in your potential audience.