Comment by femiagbabiaka

I think it's less about content topic and more meta content topic. EG I don't want to remove pictures of broccoli because I don't like broccoli, I'm trying to remove pictures of food because it makes me eat more. Similarly, I don't want to remove Political Takes I Disagree With, I want to remove Political Takes Designed To Make Me Angry. The latter has a destructive viral effect whose antidote is inattention.

Echo chamber is a loaded term. Nobody is upset about the Not Murdering People Randomly echo chamber we've created for ourselves in civilised society, and with good reason. Many ideologies are internally stable and don't virally cause the breakdown of society. The concerning echo chambers are the ones that intensify and self-reinforce when left alone.

I've mentioned this a few times in the past, but I'm convinced that filters that exclude work much better than filters that include.

Instead of algorithms pushing us content it thinks we like (or what the advertisers are paying them to push on us), the relationship should be reversed and the algorithms should push us all content except the content we don't like.

Killfiles on Usenet newsreaders worked this way and they were amazing. I could filter out abusive trolls and topics I wasn't interested in, but I would otherwise get an unfiltered feed.

At least when you do this you are aware of it happening. Algorithmic feeds can shift biases without you even noticing.

> I personally dont feel like an ultra filtered social media which only shows me things I agree with is a good thing. Exposing yourself to things you dont agre with is what helps us all question our own beliefs and prejudeces, and grow as people.

You are the one who gets to control what is filtered or not, so that's up to you. It's about choice. By the way, a social media experience which is not "ultra filtered" doesn't exist. Twitter is filtered heavily, with a bias towards extreme right wing viewpoints, the ones it's owner is in agreement with. And that sort of filtering disguised as lack of bias is a mind virus. For example, I deleted my account a month or so ago after discovering that the CEO of a popular cloud database company that I admired was following an account who posted almost exclusively things along the lines of "blacks are all subhuman and should be killed." How did a seemingly normal person fall into that? One "unfiltered" tweet at a time, I suppose.

> To me, only seeing things you know you are already interested in is no better than another company curating it for me.

I curate my own feeds. They don't have things I only agree with in them, they have topics I actually want to see in them. I don't want to see political ragebait, left or right flavoured. I don't want to see midwit discourse about vibecoding. I have that option on Bluesky, and that's the only platform aside from my RSS reader where I have that option.

Of course, you also have the option to stare endlessly at a raw feed containing everything. Hypothetically, you could exactly replicate a feed that aggregates the kind of RW viewpoints popular on Twitter and look at it 24/7. But that would be your choice.

> Exposing yourself to things you dont agre with is what helps us all question our own beliefs and prejudeces, and grow as people.

I have another wise-sounding soundbite for you: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." —Voltaire. All this sounds dandy and fine, until you actually try and examine the beliefs and prejudeces at hand. It would seem that such examination is possible, and it is—in theory, whereas in practice, i.e. in application of language—"ideas" simply don't matter as much. Material circumstance, mindset, background, all these things that make us who we are, are largely immutable in our own frames of reference. You can get exposed to new words all the time, but if they come in language you don't understand, it's of no use. This is not a bug, but a feature, a learned mechanism that allows us to navigate massive search spaces without getting overwhelmed.

I saw that, and I'm sorry it happened. I thought both the response to your original post and the resulting backlash to both you and everyone who engaged with you sincerely were absurd. I think that because of atproto you have the flexibility to create a social media experience where that sort of thing cannot happen, but I also understand why you in particular would be put off from the whole thing.

> My account got flagged as spam, still no idea why.

This happened to me too, 3 weeks ago. The email said why I got flagged as spam, I replied to the email explaining I actually was a human, and after some minutes they unflagged my account. Did you not receive an email saying why?

Well that's the thing -- you might be flagged as spam in the Bluesky PDS, but there are other PDS's, with their own feeds and algorithms, and in fact you can make your own if you so choose. That's a lot of work, and Twitter is definitely easier, but atproto means that an LLM cannot steal your voice.

If you follow certain people, various communities will, en mass, block you and report you automatically with software "block lists". This can lead to getting flagged as spam.