Comment by apollo_mojave
2 years ago
Seems like a really, really good way to create a really, really boring website.
ETA: Rereading this, that is probably not a very helpful HNy comment, so let me elaborate.
Maybe I am old-fashioned, but one of the things that the internet is most useful for is exploring places and ideas you would otherwise never encounter or consider. And just like taking a wooden ship to reach the North Pole, browsing around the internet comes with significant risk. But given the opportunity for personal growth and development, for change, and so on, those risks might well be worth it.
That model of the internet, as I said, is somewhat old-fashioned. Now, the internet is mostly about entertainment. Bluesky exists to keep eyeballs on phones, just like Tiktok or Instagram or whatever. Sure, Bluesky is slightly more cerebral -- but only slightly.
People are generally not entertained by things that frustrate them (generally -- notable exceptions exist), so I can understand an entertainment company like Bluesky focusing on eliminating frustrations via obsessive focus on content moderation to ensure only entertaining content reaches the user. In that sense, this labeling thing seems really useful, just like movie ratings give consumers a general idea of whether the movie is something appropriate for them.
So in that sense, wonderful for Bluesky! But I think I'll politely decline joining and stick with other platforms with different aims.
What I want is a filter for angry posts. Social media exposes me to a wider cross section than I get in person and there is really a limit to the amount of distress I can absorb.
Right, and I think you've zeroed in on what I feel is the most important point here. Somehow, for a lot of people, "diversity of opinions" and "angry posts subject to moderation" are more or less the same thing. For me, those are distinct things, and don't think diversity of opinions, at least not on things of interest to me (philosophy, astronomy etc) are under the crosshairs. Of course I feel that way because I feel like I'm right about something, and that something is the idea that diversity of opinion has a lot more to it than whether something is or isn't moderated.
The internet isn't one size fits all, all the time. Most people don't want to be challenged all the time and everywhere. Sometimes you want to watch a challenging documentary about socioeconomics in 17th century Poland and other times you want to watch Friends. I see a good use case here for BlueSky allowing users to vary moderation & use curated lists to separate interests & moods.
This is true! I'm not sure I 100% agree with your analogy, but your basic point is of course correct.
I think I can have lively, intellectually stimulating exposure without say, someone advocating for the mass killing of gay people. Or engaging in an interesting political discussion without bad-faith conspiracy theorists shitting up the place. For example, the “chiller” which as far as I know is just designed to cool down a hot button discussion actually sounds super amazing for this purpose.
One of the things that frustrated me about browsing twitter now is the constant bad faith discussions about everything, one-off potshots that waste pixels and lead nowhere. A moderation tool that sifts that and just gets me to the people that actually know wtf they’re talking about and are engaging honestly would benefit me greatly!
Definitely -- but the problem isn't really "content" moderation. What it seems like you actually want is personality / tone / user moderation -- which Bluesky isn't really doing.
To analogize to real life, I have friends with whom I agree 100% on politics, but I never talk to them about it, because they're annoying when they do it. But I also have friends who disagree with me on political and other issues, but we have wonderful conversations because of the manner in which we disagree.
I don't what Bluesky is doing will actually help with this problem. For one thing, I think it's design as a "feed" basically precludes any solid sort of discussion (compared to an Internet forum). The medium kind of encourages the "one-off potshots" you mentioned, and moderation won't do much to cure it.
I could be wrong though!
Composable moderation means we’re not limited to what Bluesky does, however. If I want to set up a moderation server that does tone moderation, there’s nothing stopping me from doing that.
I tend to agree about the utility of Bluesky as a medium for discussion, but that’s not what I want to use it for, so that’s fine by me.
> isn't really "content" moderation. What it seems like you actually want is personality / tone / user moderation
As McLuhan didn't say, the content is the message. That is, all those things arrive at you via "content", which is where the moderation lies.
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In modern US political discourse, there is no nuance in “us vs them”. Your moderators that are meant to just tag “advocating for the mass killing of gay people” will also put a “here’s why I think you should vote for Trump” post in the same category.
I strongly disagree with this position and I believe that such a rhetoric-focused moderation tool as the chiller examples in the article will assist in my desire for intellectual discussion without dealing with inflamed nonsense.
That being said, if this affects one political group more heavy-handedly than another because their political strategy is more inflamed, I’m willing to hear less from them or only hear from the members who can communicate in a sensible manner.
Any moderated system depends on trust that moderators will act fairly. If moderators begin categorizing content into labels that they don't belong in, presumably either the moderator would be removed or the service will slowly devolve and go away.
Why do you think so?
I just edited my comment; see above.
BlueSky doesn’t care about eyeballs. It’s a non-profit enabling a common good.
Not to be nitpicky but it's not quite that simple. BlueSky is a Public Benefit LLCs which is explicitly for-profit but does have some other limits - so it does count for something. I can't find exactly what BlueSky's public benefit is claimed to be though.
https://theintercept.com/2023/06/01/bluesky-owner-twitter-el...
"Liu, who answered some of my questions, did not respond when I asked for the exact language the Bluesky PBLLC used to describe its public benefit mission when incorporating the company. She also didn’t say whether the company would publish its annual benefits reports — reports that PBLLCs are required to create each year, but PBLLCs incorporated in Delaware, where Bluesky was incorporated, are not required to make them public."
Our mission statement is in the first blog post we ever published about the company. https://bsky.social/about/blog/2-7-2022-overview
"Our mission is to develop and drive large-scale adoption of technologies for open and decentralized public conversation."