I thought that was their entire reason to be, lefty Twitter? It's always going to be more profitable to "remain politically neutral". Lately I've come to believe that neutral means siding with...
but if he hasn’t actually broken the rules it would set a dangerous precedent and, in any case, would reinforce Bluesky’s reputation as a sectarian space — for many, a “lefty Twitter.”
I thought that was their entire reason to be, lefty Twitter?
It's always going to be more profitable to "remain politically neutral". Lately I've come to believe that neutral means siding with power and/or money, see Switzerland
Big companies are going to bribe and dine and go along with whatever the regime wants because it cost nothing to do so. Big companies are more than happy to watch small ones implode from being in the crosshairs of power.
They set out to be techno-libertarian twitter with a side of crypto bro, but those weren't the people looking to leave twitter so they sort of accidentally became "lefty but not mastodon-lefty...
They set out to be techno-libertarian twitter with a side of crypto bro, but those weren't the people looking to leave twitter so they sort of accidentally became "lefty but not mastodon-lefty twitter" and then also gained a bunch of of the Mastodon crowd too as it looked to have higher adoption
Techno libertarianism doesn't make sense to me. Tech requires a lot of regulations to protect patents and trade secrets etc, to say nothing of drawing talents from a publically educated world wide...
Techno libertarianism doesn't make sense to me. Tech requires a lot of regulations to protect patents and trade secrets etc, to say nothing of drawing talents from a publically educated world wide population. How do they figure it would have have worked.... But I guess that's moot now since they're comfortably at home with an autocratic govt and crony social media.
They redefine their preferred flavor of regulation to be the foundational bedrock of law - "everything is property". "There's no such thing as murder, only illegally using my property (stabbing...
How do they figure it would have have worked....
They redefine their preferred flavor of regulation to be the foundational bedrock of law - "everything is property". "There's no such thing as murder, only illegally using my property (stabbing it) without permission."
Thus the abstract and absurd appears simple and therefore exempt from the requirements of minimalism.
If you want to see whether they actually believe it's that simple, ask them if someone in debt has to hand over all their property (their body) upon bankruptcy.
Tech isn't monolithic. When you look at Twitter, you're mostly seeing entrepreneurial upstarts who of course want to weaken incumbents they're trying to unseat. The incumbents aren't...
Tech isn't monolithic. When you look at Twitter, you're mostly seeing entrepreneurial upstarts who of course want to weaken incumbents they're trying to unseat. The incumbents aren't techno-libertarian but are pro-regulation because it creates barriers to entry.
I imagine they'd prefer that everyone would use it; that is, growth is good. They seemed happy about lots of Brazillians showing up for a while when Twitter was banned there. A downside of a...
I imagine they'd prefer that everyone would use it; that is, growth is good. They seemed happy about lots of Brazillians showing up for a while when Twitter was banned there.
A downside of a political reputation is that other users might leave or decide it's not for them. This tends to limit growth of forums that emphasize free speech.
I thought the point of platforms like BlueSky is that you control the moderation. If one authority controls what is on 90% of users' feeds, doesn't that defeat said point? I get that people don't...
I thought the point of platforms like BlueSky is that you control the moderation. If one authority controls what is on 90% of users' feeds, doesn't that defeat said point?
I get that people don't want Jesse Singal on the main instance, but there's a deeper problem, which is that BlueSky employees have that power in the first place. That employees aren't listening to the community can only be solved temporarily. The community needs to learn how to function without the employees being fully aligned, otherwise BlueSky is just left-wing Twitter.
Open-source code and decentralized platforms, by definition, nobody can be prevented from using. The maintainers can accept or decline suggestions and sponsorships from certain people, but they can't control how their project is used. The maintainers don't even have full control the project themselves, in that others can "fork" it; the only advantage the original has over a fork is initial prevalence, but that can be lost (and has for some real code and platforms, e.g. OpenOffice->LibreOffice, freenode->Libera.Chat).
Personally, I'd rather use a service that can't ban people I don't like (but I can filter effectively), than one that can ban those I do.
The two refrains are Jesse Singal is reposting screenshots of BlueSky tweets on Twitter, which drives harassment for those users, and blocking him won't fix that. Personally I don't find this very...
The two refrains are
Jesse Singal is reposting screenshots of BlueSky tweets on Twitter, which drives harassment for those users, and blocking him won't fix that.
Personally I don't find this very valid, because banning him also won't stop that. BlueSky is a public social media site, you can just make another account. Not to mention that protocol-wise, it's literally impossible in this case because of how AT protocol works. Even in non-AT sites, though, the "make a new account" strat would work.
It's about signaling; if you ban Singal, that's a signal that the owners of the company align ideologically with this subset of the community that is mad. If you don't, then that is tacitly a signal that you are against this subset.
Idk, to me, it makes sense that BlueSky as an organization doesn't want to be that involved and opinionated.
I haven't really seen anything outside of those two as to why simply having him on the largest and most used community moderation lists would not work. And he is, for that matter.
I think this point is more complicated than that. What he's doing is IMO clearly against the Bluesky Community Guidelines. The problem is that their principles say this And He's been instigating...
Personally I don't find this very valid, because banning him also won't stop that. BlueSky is a public social media site, you can just make another account. Not to mention that protocol-wise, it's literally impossible in this case because of how AT protocol works. Even in non-AT sites, though, the "make a new account" strat would work.
I think this point is more complicated than that. What he's doing is IMO clearly against the Bluesky Community Guidelines. The problem is that their principles say this
Respect Others: We do not allow harassment, bullying, hate speech, or discrimination. This includes targeting individuals based on protected characteristics.
And
Respect Others
Anti-Discrimination: We protect people's fundamental rights by prohibiting identity-based harm and hatred.
Do not attack, harass, or incite hatred or discrimination against individuals or groups based on protected characteristics such as age, asylum-seeker/refugee status, caste, disability, disease, ethnicity, gender identity, immigrant status, race, religious affiliation, sex, or sexual orientation.
This includes hate speech, slurs, dehumanizing comparisons, supremacist content, conspiracy theories targeting protected groups, and coordinated harassment campaigns.
Anti-Harassment: We create space for everyone to express themselves by prohibiting harassment and toxic behaviors.
Do not stalk, persistently target, or create malicious content designed to humiliate or degrade individuals, including through coordinated campaigns.
Do not abuse Bluesky features (lists, labels, community moderation tools), engage in bad-faith mass reporting, use automated harassment systems, or create single-purpose harassment accounts.
Accounts that engage in extreme or persistent toxic or disruptive behavior may face restrictions or removal. This includes accounts with a high number or proportion of:
Extreme or repeated personal attacks, such as insults or ad hominem attacks
Posts or responses made primarily to anger, provoke, or belittle instead of to contribute criticism or a genuine opinion
The use of hostile or inflammatory language clearly intended to create or contribute to an unwelcoming environment
He's been instigating the harassment of people on Bluesky since before he joined. He continues to do so. By their guidelines he should be restricted or banned.
The question comes down to - will Bluesky enforce their policies against bigger names or just against "regular" people. I think that while some folks would like them to signal ideological alignment, many of us would really just like them to enforce the rules when trans people (and I've seen issues targeting black folks too for example) the target, especially when big names are involved. And yes I'm down with enforcing them against everyone who falls into this.
That is at least why I'm frustrated.
(Also they say they want to evolve with feedback and then mock users who are mad because they're not paying customers. Despite many folks interested in a subscription level that would support Bluesky and give them small perks. )
He doesn't do that on BlueSky. And on Twitter, he just reposts screenshots of BlueSky tweets. While the subtext is "hey, this person said something stupid, go at'em", it's hard to say that's...
He doesn't do that on BlueSky. And on Twitter, he just reposts screenshots of BlueSky tweets. While the subtext is "hey, this person said something stupid, go at'em", it's hard to say that's bannable when he posts it with no commentary whatsoever.
Yeah I don't really have a tolerance for the whole "loophole" thing as a way to avoid responsibility. Being technically innocent may work in court or in a fae contract but a website doesn't have...
Yeah I don't really have a tolerance for the whole "loophole" thing as a way to avoid responsibility. Being technically innocent may work in court or in a fae contract but a website doesn't have to operate on those same standards. If anything it requires a good amount of "know it when you see it"
For example, it appears his account has been flagged with a content warning. He's clearly aware of what he's doing to the point of trolling, he recently made a post caps locking the word "WAFFLES", where someone quotes him and he mocks them for calling it a dogwhistle, as if it wasn't intentional. That may just make him a shitty person but IMO the "he just posts it, he doesn't tell them to go harass them is not different from when JKR or Trump does similar things other than by scale.
They know what their audience will do,.they don't have to explicitly encourage the mob.
Maybe it happening off the site is enough, but I doubt that if someone coordinated a DDOS attack or the doing and swatting of admins in discord that, regardless of criminal penalties, Bluesky would leave that person's account active. Obviously this is a lot more severe but the question is whether the location of the behavior matters in relation to the Bluesky account.
Maybe for you this all adds up to enough technically that you think banning him is performative only but my point is mostly that the folks clamoring for it genuinely see it as a failure to enforce community guidelines. And in a world where it's no longer the norm to consider such things even against the guidelines on major social media sites, it doesn't shock me that particularly marginalized communities are pissed when they feel those standards aren't being upheld.
I don't disagree that the ToS isn't a contract, but that goes back to the original supposition: should Singal be banned because he broke the ToS? I think the answers are either: No, he didn't...
I don't disagree that the ToS isn't a contract, but that goes back to the original supposition: should Singal be banned because he broke the ToS? I think the answers are either: No, he didn't break the ToS, or, the ToS is not a contract and it doesn't matter.
In the end, the question is, what would banning Singal do other than reassure people that the owners of Bluesky are ideologically aligned? If I peruse his BlueSky he mainly just makes milquetoast ragebait on the site. The spicy things happen elsewhere.
If Singal is effectively banished into a unseen corner of BlueSky because the majority of users use popular community upheld moderation lists that automatically block Singal, what value or reason is there in banning him?
This line or argument means that banning anyone is functionally pointless, but that also means the Community Guidelines (not referring to the ToS) is fundamentally pointless. And maybe,...
This line or argument means that banning anyone is functionally pointless, but that also means the Community Guidelines (not referring to the ToS) is fundamentally pointless. And maybe, ultimately, it is. But it's not weird to be pissed off that a) the company didn't mean what they said when they promised no harassment, and b) that other people have been banned for bullshit.
So sure if the rules are made up and the points don't matter, banning scammers and trolls and spammers and bots and transphobes alike is pointless. But again my point is that the users are operating on the idea that there are Guidelines and they want them in place and enforced. You're saying what they want is pointless, I'm saying that the users feel lied by Bluesky either way and left out to dry when they get harassed.
Also folks who don't use those lists can still see posts and those people aren't typically on the block/mute lists themselves so moderation alone doesn't kill the possibility of harassment in general either regardless of what this specific guy does where.
The way I see it, the guidelines are just guidelines. They're rough statements of intent so people have a rough idea. But they're not definite one way or the other. In terms of content, it makes...
The way I see it, the guidelines are just guidelines. They're rough statements of intent so people have a rough idea. But they're not definite one way or the other.
In terms of content, it makes sense IMO for the guidelines to either entirely or almost entirely be about behavior exclusively on BlueSky itself. That's because, that's what bans effect. Jesse Singal will only be affected by the extent to which he posts on BlueSky if he is banned on BlueSky. The Guidelines and ToS are therefore mainly concerned with the question of what the benefit is if the poster is removed from BlueSky.
So the two main areas where the ToS is useful for BlueSky is 1) legal regulations, like child pornography, which must be removed to operate in many countries 2) if the user's bad behavior is amplified or due to BlueSky. If Singal was exclusively or mainly famous on BlueSky, and he was harassing on BlueSky, then banning him would have some effect. The reality, though, is that he's almost exclusively active off of BlueSky, and makes boring posts on BlueSky mainly because he knows his existence is annoying to people.
To summarize, I think it's logically consistent for the guidelines to only apply for behavior on BlueSky, and that that would be the expectation. If Singal was harassing people on BlueSky itself, then that would be a different story.
Also folks who don't use those lists can still see posts and those people aren't typically on the block/mute lists themselves so moderation alone doesn't kill the possibility of harassment in general either regardless of what this specific guy does where.
I mean, this gets into the philosophy of what BlueSky is. BlueSky wasn't made, in the end, with the intention to be the liberal, opinionated version of Twitter post-Elon. It was made to be a platform where users make their own social media "masks" - users make their algorithm, users make their moderation.
I think opinionated social media is not invalid or anything, but if anything it's users who have been deluding themselves of what BlueSky is if they think it's intended to be a place where the owners ideologically place their thumb on the left side of the scale.
I mean again if the Community Guidelines don't matter then they shouldn't put following them into their Terms of Service and shouldn't claim to follow them? I doubt someone's account would be left...
I mean again if the Community Guidelines don't matter then they shouldn't put following them into their Terms of Service and shouldn't claim to follow them? I doubt someone's account would be left unbanned in other situations as I said before just because the activity was coordinated off site.
As I said, I don't agree that the game of "technically" works here. I understand you do. But I maintain it's not unreasonable to interpret the other way and to genuinely want and expect the Bluesky site to follow their own written policies. Even if they're wrong about that, where this started was you essentially calling it pointless or performative. To many people the principle of a thing is worth something even if you personally don't think it's worthwhile. I just think ignoring that is missing why people are genuinely upset. Especially when they can explicitly document the harassment occuring after he shares their posts.
I mean, this gets into the philosophy of what BlueSky is. BlueSky wasn't made, in the end, with the intention to be the liberal, opinionated version of Twitter post-Elon. It was made to be a platform where users make their own social media "masks" - users make their algorithm, users make their moderation.
I dont understand the connection between the part of my comment you replied to. My point there wasn't about what political angle the service has, but that harassment happens even with the moderation lists and harassment is allegedly against their rules. That isn't about being "liberal"
They both use an algorithm for the Discover Feed and have a moderation policy.
While communities can build their own moderation tools, we remain responsible for setting and enforcing baseline rules that require careful judgment.
The users in question believe Bluesky isn't living up to that. Whether they're right or wrong is debatable. I tend to agree but also just have asshats moderated out. Regardless it's worth acknowledging this is the perspective of many actual people not just "be more leftist yell"
Drew DeVault has a blogpost about them, https://drewdevault.com/2023/09/17/Hyprland-toxicity.html tl;dr the community has many right-wing edgelords in important positions
I thought that was their entire reason to be, lefty Twitter?
It's always going to be more profitable to "remain politically neutral". Lately I've come to believe that neutral means siding with power and/or money, see Switzerland
Big companies are going to bribe and dine and go along with whatever the regime wants because it cost nothing to do so. Big companies are more than happy to watch small ones implode from being in the crosshairs of power.
They set out to be techno-libertarian twitter with a side of crypto bro, but those weren't the people looking to leave twitter so they sort of accidentally became "lefty but not mastodon-lefty twitter" and then also gained a bunch of of the Mastodon crowd too as it looked to have higher adoption
Techno libertarianism doesn't make sense to me. Tech requires a lot of regulations to protect patents and trade secrets etc, to say nothing of drawing talents from a publically educated world wide population. How do they figure it would have have worked.... But I guess that's moot now since they're comfortably at home with an autocratic govt and crony social media.
They redefine their preferred flavor of regulation to be the foundational bedrock of law - "everything is property". "There's no such thing as murder, only illegally using my property (stabbing it) without permission."
Thus the abstract and absurd appears simple and therefore exempt from the requirements of minimalism.
If you want to see whether they actually believe it's that simple, ask them if someone in debt has to hand over all their property (their body) upon bankruptcy.
Tech isn't monolithic. When you look at Twitter, you're mostly seeing entrepreneurial upstarts who of course want to weaken incumbents they're trying to unseat. The incumbents aren't techno-libertarian but are pro-regulation because it creates barriers to entry.
I imagine they'd prefer that everyone would use it; that is, growth is good. They seemed happy about lots of Brazillians showing up for a while when Twitter was banned there.
A downside of a political reputation is that other users might leave or decide it's not for them. This tends to limit growth of forums that emphasize free speech.
I thought the point of platforms like BlueSky is that you control the moderation. If one authority controls what is on 90% of users' feeds, doesn't that defeat said point?
I get that people don't want Jesse Singal on the main instance, but there's a deeper problem, which is that BlueSky employees have that power in the first place. That employees aren't listening to the community can only be solved temporarily. The community needs to learn how to function without the employees being fully aligned, otherwise BlueSky is just left-wing Twitter.
Open-source code and decentralized platforms, by definition, nobody can be prevented from using. The maintainers can accept or decline suggestions and sponsorships from certain people, but they can't control how their project is used. The maintainers don't even have full control the project themselves, in that others can "fork" it; the only advantage the original has over a fork is initial prevalence, but that can be lost (and has for some real code and platforms, e.g. OpenOffice->LibreOffice, freenode->Libera.Chat).
Personally, I'd rather use a service that can't ban people I don't like (but I can filter effectively), than one that can ban those I do.
The two refrains are
Personally I don't find this very valid, because banning him also won't stop that. BlueSky is a public social media site, you can just make another account. Not to mention that protocol-wise, it's literally impossible in this case because of how AT protocol works. Even in non-AT sites, though, the "make a new account" strat would work.
Idk, to me, it makes sense that BlueSky as an organization doesn't want to be that involved and opinionated.
I haven't really seen anything outside of those two as to why simply having him on the largest and most used community moderation lists would not work. And he is, for that matter.
I think this point is more complicated than that. What he's doing is IMO clearly against the Bluesky Community Guidelines. The problem is that their principles say this
And
He's been instigating the harassment of people on Bluesky since before he joined. He continues to do so. By their guidelines he should be restricted or banned.
The question comes down to - will Bluesky enforce their policies against bigger names or just against "regular" people. I think that while some folks would like them to signal ideological alignment, many of us would really just like them to enforce the rules when trans people (and I've seen issues targeting black folks too for example) the target, especially when big names are involved. And yes I'm down with enforcing them against everyone who falls into this.
That is at least why I'm frustrated.
(Also they say they want to evolve with feedback and then mock users who are mad because they're not paying customers. Despite many folks interested in a subscription level that would support Bluesky and give them small perks. )
He doesn't do that on BlueSky. And on Twitter, he just reposts screenshots of BlueSky tweets. While the subtext is "hey, this person said something stupid, go at'em", it's hard to say that's bannable when he posts it with no commentary whatsoever.
Yeah I don't really have a tolerance for the whole "loophole" thing as a way to avoid responsibility. Being technically innocent may work in court or in a fae contract but a website doesn't have to operate on those same standards. If anything it requires a good amount of "know it when you see it"
For example, it appears his account has been flagged with a content warning. He's clearly aware of what he's doing to the point of trolling, he recently made a post caps locking the word "WAFFLES", where someone quotes him and he mocks them for calling it a dogwhistle, as if it wasn't intentional. That may just make him a shitty person but IMO the "he just posts it, he doesn't tell them to go harass them is not different from when JKR or Trump does similar things other than by scale.
They know what their audience will do,.they don't have to explicitly encourage the mob.
Maybe it happening off the site is enough, but I doubt that if someone coordinated a DDOS attack or the doing and swatting of admins in discord that, regardless of criminal penalties, Bluesky would leave that person's account active. Obviously this is a lot more severe but the question is whether the location of the behavior matters in relation to the Bluesky account.
Maybe for you this all adds up to enough technically that you think banning him is performative only but my point is mostly that the folks clamoring for it genuinely see it as a failure to enforce community guidelines. And in a world where it's no longer the norm to consider such things even against the guidelines on major social media sites, it doesn't shock me that particularly marginalized communities are pissed when they feel those standards aren't being upheld.
I don't disagree that the ToS isn't a contract, but that goes back to the original supposition: should Singal be banned because he broke the ToS? I think the answers are either: No, he didn't break the ToS, or, the ToS is not a contract and it doesn't matter.
In the end, the question is, what would banning Singal do other than reassure people that the owners of Bluesky are ideologically aligned? If I peruse his BlueSky he mainly just makes milquetoast ragebait on the site. The spicy things happen elsewhere.
If Singal is effectively banished into a unseen corner of BlueSky because the majority of users use popular community upheld moderation lists that automatically block Singal, what value or reason is there in banning him?
This line or argument means that banning anyone is functionally pointless, but that also means the Community Guidelines (not referring to the ToS) is fundamentally pointless. And maybe, ultimately, it is. But it's not weird to be pissed off that a) the company didn't mean what they said when they promised no harassment, and b) that other people have been banned for bullshit.
So sure if the rules are made up and the points don't matter, banning scammers and trolls and spammers and bots and transphobes alike is pointless. But again my point is that the users are operating on the idea that there are Guidelines and they want them in place and enforced. You're saying what they want is pointless, I'm saying that the users feel lied by Bluesky either way and left out to dry when they get harassed.
Also folks who don't use those lists can still see posts and those people aren't typically on the block/mute lists themselves so moderation alone doesn't kill the possibility of harassment in general either regardless of what this specific guy does where.
The way I see it, the guidelines are just guidelines. They're rough statements of intent so people have a rough idea. But they're not definite one way or the other.
In terms of content, it makes sense IMO for the guidelines to either entirely or almost entirely be about behavior exclusively on BlueSky itself. That's because, that's what bans effect. Jesse Singal will only be affected by the extent to which he posts on BlueSky if he is banned on BlueSky. The Guidelines and ToS are therefore mainly concerned with the question of what the benefit is if the poster is removed from BlueSky.
So the two main areas where the ToS is useful for BlueSky is 1) legal regulations, like child pornography, which must be removed to operate in many countries 2) if the user's bad behavior is amplified or due to BlueSky. If Singal was exclusively or mainly famous on BlueSky, and he was harassing on BlueSky, then banning him would have some effect. The reality, though, is that he's almost exclusively active off of BlueSky, and makes boring posts on BlueSky mainly because he knows his existence is annoying to people.
To summarize, I think it's logically consistent for the guidelines to only apply for behavior on BlueSky, and that that would be the expectation. If Singal was harassing people on BlueSky itself, then that would be a different story.
I mean, this gets into the philosophy of what BlueSky is. BlueSky wasn't made, in the end, with the intention to be the liberal, opinionated version of Twitter post-Elon. It was made to be a platform where users make their own social media "masks" - users make their algorithm, users make their moderation.
I think opinionated social media is not invalid or anything, but if anything it's users who have been deluding themselves of what BlueSky is if they think it's intended to be a place where the owners ideologically place their thumb on the left side of the scale.
I mean again if the Community Guidelines don't matter then they shouldn't put following them into their Terms of Service and shouldn't claim to follow them? I doubt someone's account would be left unbanned in other situations as I said before just because the activity was coordinated off site.
As I said, I don't agree that the game of "technically" works here. I understand you do. But I maintain it's not unreasonable to interpret the other way and to genuinely want and expect the Bluesky site to follow their own written policies. Even if they're wrong about that, where this started was you essentially calling it pointless or performative. To many people the principle of a thing is worth something even if you personally don't think it's worthwhile. I just think ignoring that is missing why people are genuinely upset. Especially when they can explicitly document the harassment occuring after he shares their posts.
I dont understand the connection between the part of my comment you replied to. My point there wasn't about what political angle the service has, but that harassment happens even with the moderation lists and harassment is allegedly against their rules. That isn't about being "liberal"
They both use an algorithm for the Discover Feed and have a moderation policy.
The users in question believe Bluesky isn't living up to that. Whether they're right or wrong is debatable. I tend to agree but also just have asshats moderated out. Regardless it's worth acknowledging this is the perspective of many actual people not just "be more leftist yell"
What's the drama with Hyprland? I literally just heard about it in a comment over in the "I want to do a Linux halp" thread.
Drew DeVault has a blogpost about them, https://drewdevault.com/2023/09/17/Hyprland-toxicity.html tl;dr the community has many right-wing edgelords in important positions