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Block Party Aims to Be a 'Spam Folder' for Social Media Harassment

64 points by erehweb 6y ago

rektide 6y ago
huge fan of Amy Zhang's work on digital civics/harassment/governance/justice. She's one of the folks who worked on SquadBox[1], which is a similar sort of protection system, except it's run by your peers me/friends. Lets them filter & deal with troubling encounters, be a first line of defense. her other projects are similarly on the leadingest of edges, dealing with digital juries, construction kits for digital policy, information truthfulness collaboration tools, many more. so far almost all digital systems are authoritarian "we say so" little fiefs & moderations is warnings or bans, & that's it. it's remarkably savage & opaque & often imo cruel. glad to see some attempts to bring real governance & process & human sociological cooperativity into the wild wild net. thanks all you trying to advance our resocialization. [1] https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~axz/pub_details.html?id=squadbox https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~axz/pub_details.html?id=squ...
neom 6y ago
I remember when Tracy Chou did an AMA on Reddit and it devolved into such vitriol that it effectively became an advert for her own app.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Zak 6y ago
  I just took a look at her AMA and I think some of her complaints about reddit are mistaken. Of course the complaint that some people were being nasty and reddit would benefit from a reduction of such behavior is valid. She complains about insufficient positive engagement, but she erred in using a different account to reply to questions than the toplevel post. This makes an AMA post harder to navigate because comments from the OP are highlighted in most ways people view reddit, and many clients have an AMA mode with additional UI based around the assumption that the post and answers will use the same account. She complains that her comments were downvoted into oblivion. I don't know if many of them had negative scores briefly, but the only ones that do now are complaints about downvotes and a comment containing a personal attack. The currently-downvoted comments are not a positive contribution to the discussion. Finally, she didn't respond to what is now the highest-scoring question regarding her product collecting and storing data it doesn't obviously need, such as user location. If I was considering using this product, I'd like to know why it collects and stores my location.
  - a1369209993 6y ago
    > using a different account to reply to questions than the toplevel post > her comments were downvoted into oblivion Haven't investigated this specific AMA, but in general, any reply to a AMA, by a account other than the one that posted the AMA, pretending to be the account that posted the AMA, should in fact be downvoted into oblivion.
    - Zak 6y ago
      The toplevel post was edited to make it clear what account would be replying, but it still breaks the UI. I have the impression a third-party tool was involved in scheduling the post.
      - a1369209993 6y ago
        > The toplevel post was edited to make it clear what account would be replying > > pretending to be the account that []posted[] the AMA [emphasis added]
- yowlingcat 6y ago
  > it effectively became an advert for her own app. It does not read that way to me. Take a look at that thread -- if you were someone who asked a question in good faith only to get a flippant response by someone who doesn't respect the rules of the space, what do you think it tells you about that person? I can't imagine that earned her any political capital.
  - jessaustin 6y ago
    There may not be a great deal of overlap between Redditors and her target users.
- gnicholas 6y ago
  > that it effectively became an advert for her own app. From the title of the AMA, it was intended as an advert from the start. > I made Silicon Valley publish its diversity data (which sucked, obviously), got micro-famous for it, then got so much online harassment that I started a whole company to try to fix it. I'm Tracy Chou, founder and CEO of Block Party. AMA https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/icqpsm/i_made_silicon_valley_publish_its_diversity_data/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/icqpsm/i_made_silicon...
qPM9l3XJrF 6y ago
>women and people of color are particularly targeted for online abuse I think you have to be careful with the vocabulary here. If a white man is being abused online, and he complains about it, his complaint may be rendered illegitimate on the basis of being "tone policing". He may be told that "freedom of speech does not mean freedom from its consequences". He may be told that the people abusing him are under no obligation to educate him and are doing "unpaid emotional labor". "I call out bad behavior, they are trolling, you engage in targeted online harassment." If anything, I've noticed that women and minorities seem to have more of a blank check to get really crass and say things like "go fuck yourself", etc. I see people being mocked on the basis of being "mediocre white men" far more often on Twitter than I see them mocked on the basis of being "mediocre women of color". Gendered/racialized equivalents of "toxic masculinity" and "whiteness" aren't as widely employed. (Agreed that social media can be terrible; I hope this initiative makes it better.)
- butt_hugger 6y ago
  How did I know something like this would be the top comment?
- statstutor 6y ago
  I would take "go fuck yourself" to be a clear request for personal disengagement and, if that is as far as it goes, is crass/profane but not abusive (in the sense intended here).
  - qPM9l3XJrF 6y ago
    In the case I have in mind, the woman of color who said GFY initiated the interaction
    - statstutor 6y ago
      That seems unlikely.
      - qPM9l3XJrF 6y ago
Dma54rhs 6y ago
"I've experienced a pretty wide range of harassment," she said. "Everything from the casual mansplaining-reply guys... Incredible that the whole article (basically an ad) is full of attacks on people based on their gender and skin color, while singing the buzzwords of diversity snd tolerance. American society truly is bizarre.
- jakelazaroff 6y ago
  I grepped the article and I don't see anything that could be interpreted as such. Here is the single instance of the word "white": > As she sees it, it's because the predominately white men who start, run and invest in most big tech companies are less likely to personally experience harassment. And here's the single other instance of the word "men": > As she sees it, it's because the predominately white men who start, run and invest in most big tech companies are less likely to personally experience harassment. Basically every other mention of gender or race is some variant of "women and people of color are particularly targeted for online abuse". What are you reading as "attacks on people based on their gender and skin color"?
  - adjkant 6y ago
    So does anyone want to you know, respond to a question that literally just is declaring facts about words used in the article, or just silently downvote it because they don't like the "side" the point is coming from?
- readflaggedcomm 6y ago
  Lived experience isn't a buzzword.
  - sir_bearington 6y ago
    Lived experience is definitely a buzzword used to try and instill more credibility in anecdotes.
    - leesalminen 6y ago
strken 6y ago
These filters tend to be used less to block harassment, in the sense of targeted vitriol towards you or your group, and more to block any and all people who disagree with you, including the polite ones. I'm not sure how I feel about that. Certainly, individuals have the right to wall themselves off from counter-arguments, but polite public discourse between ideological opposites is a precious thing, as is the ability to sit down after a hard day at work and not read 10 spelling mistakes squeezed into a 280 character death threat.
- sfink 6y ago
  Where is "polite public discourse between ideological opposites" happening in practice, though? If it's not happening on a particular platform, then preventing the possibility of it happening isn't going to outweigh even modest benefits. The need for productive conversation between people of differing opinions will still exist and it is still critically important that it be solved, but if you're looking for diamonds, don't start digging in a dung heap.
  - strken 6y ago
    It's happening all the time all over every social media platform, concurrently with the harassment, and largely ignored. Check out any controversial twitter post and you'll see genuine replies as well as bullshit. The perception of the general public's social media output as a dungheap is tantamount to saying their posts are worthless and irredeemable, and that social media only has use as a broadcast platform for famous people. I think it's less like a dungheap and more like a big pile of every student paper from the entire world: mostly useless, but even some of the useless ones are genuine and took a lot of effort, and scattered throughout the pile there's some original and useful content. There's a baby in with the bathwater, is what I'm saying here.
- auganov 6y ago
  You quickly learn to ignore every kind of negativity on Twitter. Sincere conversations are so rare, even if a comment looks like a reasonable disagreement, chances still are you'll get hate in return if you reply (and you'll only feel like a fool).
monksy 6y ago
This is a strange article for me. It feels more like another push to be tribal rather to admit there is a problem. The problem that I see: Social media has emboldened people to look at attention and fame as something that has to be achieved. People actively fight over it. It's a pretty self absorbed approach to label people who disagree in an extreme manner (poes law here.. but trolls is what I was suggesting.. it's not far way from calling people nazis) . Also, something to mention.. it's rather frustrating to see people dealing with being a minor to major internet celebrity. (That's what people are fighting over and for) For the most part that was a self selected goal to get there, and when they're there they don't like the bad side of it. The article in question completely ignores who she's referring to when she talks about "hate". (Is it a pro troll army, how does she even get to the ire of their attention, has she been pretty aggressive towards them?) Sly edit: All those who downvote me support javascript and are haters. No reason to disagree with me. /s
- jakelazaroff 6y ago
  Have you talked to any women about their experiences online? I have friends who are not at all famous, who consistently get men messaging them out of the blue on social media. Commenting on their public photos. Some even make extra accounts after being blocked. If you’re a dude, it’s easy to assume that the issue only affects people who are “internet celebrities”. But that’s not the case.
  - abadcwm 6y ago
    It's basically the rapist mindset, but applied to online services. There are many men out there with diseased rapist minds.
  - monksy 6y ago
    In my comment I was referring to the article's approach to classifying the "trolls". According to the article.. the [implied numerous] people they classify as the enemy are there because of her "ground breaking work". The average person doesn't get a huge wave of trolls by just being there. Being the focus of an NPR puff piece interview, I would say she is a minor celebrity. Does she deserve the hate? The person no, the celebrity image: hesitant yes. (I have a hard time saying no to the second part due to the influence and analogues .. i.e. public figures/politicians) I believe that people are probably fighting with the celebrity image/influence. I mean why would you care about some individual that had some opinions as is with the person in the article. ---- On to what you mentioned: Yes, there are unhinged people. The levels of "abuse" (their definition, which I disagree with what's classified as) between someone that agressively tries to influence others and an individual. There are probably many reasons for their behavior, but I would agree that they aren't acceptable to society. Are group block lists a good reason for these individual 1 on 1 interactions? No, The Travis scenario is not healthy. (Scala reference right there.. it's a guy who maintains blocklists based on you who follow)
wombatmobile 6y ago
Gentlemen, Empathy is not imagining how you would feel if that shit was said to you. Empathy is more like imagining how you would feel if that shit was said to you right after you'd lost all your money and had your dick amputated.
- dang 6y ago
  Please don't do this here.
sir_bearington 6y ago
Another interesting blog post by the subject of this article: https://blog.blockpartyapp.com/p/what-counts-as-harassment-anyways https://blog.blockpartyapp.com/p/what-counts-as-harassment-a... I think Block Party more or less acknowledges that it's not about blocking actual harassment (though it probably tries to do that, too), and more about insulating people from "unwanted content". What exactly this means is only alluded to, but seems to amount to the exclusion of people who disagree with the poster. Is this actually about stopping harassment or more about the cultivation of echo-chambers? Are "unwanted reply-guys" people who e.g. point out identical male/female disparities among CS graduates in response to allegations that tech is biased against women? And what's the consequence of this kind of blocking? Is isolating people from viewpoints outside an accepted orthodoxy supposed to be a positive for society? If the "reply-guys" followed suit, and configured their Block Party to filter out people with opposing viewpoints, would that be a positive outcome? If Block Party is effective in actually curbing actual harassment, stalking, etc. then that's a great effect and Tracy is right that it's something platforms should do themselves. But I get the sense that it's less about harassment and more about "unwanted content".
- lovemenot 6y ago
  I dont see the problem. If someone chooses to ignore contrary evidence themselves, they are choosing to be ignorant. Their choice. If someone is forced to wade through offensive crap to see the quality posts, well they had no choice in the matter. The latter scenario is clearly worse and this service is not really flawed.
  - sir_bearington 6y ago
    The issue is that Block Party seems to be unwilling to distinguish the latter from the former. Although with the current implementation it looks like it doesn't really matter. All this app seems to do is make it so that all mentions by users outside a whitelist get sent to a spam folder: https://www.blockpartyapp.com/how-it-works/ https://www.blockpartyapp.com/how-it-works/
    - 6y ago
Jermaine_Jabi 6y ago
How does this work? Do you consume your Twitter feed through Twitter or through blockparty?
jasonpeacock 6y ago
I'm always annoyed by articles like this which never include a link to the actual web/app that's being discussed. I see many Wired articles do the same thing. Is there some publishing rule against providing a link to the website/app that's being discussed?
- rdl 6y ago
  Yeah, some publications (esp NYT) hate linking off-site because it loses them reader-time. For the app: https://www.blockpartyapp.com/signup/ https://www.blockpartyapp.com/signup/
netcan 6y ago
Early on, twitter seemed to be aiming for a much more open ecosystem with an eventual range of 3rd party clients and such. If twitter was an open protocol, instead of a company, it probably would have that. I suspect that an as open protocol, it would be withstanding the current political problems of social media much better. Wikipedia, rss podcasts, the www, email... these are all pretty unscathed relative to twitter or fb. A lot of this comes down to user control. Building on twitter or fb's platform isn't good enough. We badly need these networks to be displaced by open protocols. I suspect it's too late though. FB is already a too big to fail, economically. Ironic, considering their whole function could be filled bu a non-company or companies several order of magnitudes smaller. Whether your problem is too much abuse or too much canceling, your problem is protocol squatters like fb and twitter. You have far fewer of these problems in your podcast feed, email, on wikipedia or whatever. It's not that culture problems don't exist. They exist everywhere, but the protocols don't amplify them like platforms do.
- galuggus 6y ago
  Try email without a spam filter or open a web forum with no moderation.
katee 6y ago
Tools like this are extremely necessary and important. I think that platforms (Twitter, Reddit, etc) don't have a real incentive to build out powerful tools to stop this stuff. If you aren't detecting that comments are noxious garbage, then those comments just look like engagement. It's much harder for a platform to notice/quantify the loss from folks leaving or not engaging because of the bad behavior they see, not to mention the direct harm to folks receiving the hate. When I emailed Daniel (dang) about it ages ago it sounded like there wasn't much automation in moderation on HN. If HN doesn't have the tools, then I expect random Discord, subreddit, etc moderators are also doing their work by having humans wade through manually. I think Tracy Chou / Block Party are more likely to succeed than the platforms are, since in this case the incentives are actually aligned.
lunatuna 6y ago
Why not just walk away from all this garbage. Social media is trash. It can't help but be trash. Reddit, Twitter, FB is just dumpster diving in stolen and recycled garbage to only find the occasional nugget of something original and interesting. If you need an app on top of your app to manage your emotions you're going down the wrong path. You're headed for sewage plant. This whole things sounds like a Fat Bastard: I can't stop eating. I eat because I'm unhappy, and I'm unhappy because I eat. It's a vicious cycle. Now, if you'll excuse me, there's someone I'd like to get in touch with and forgive... myself.
- abadcwm 6y ago
  It's deliberately made to be addictive too. These social media sites really need to be heavily regulated, with that in mind. Preferably out of existence. A global ban on internet advertising, if it were possible, would probably be one of the few solutions to all of this mess that attacks the root cause.
- hellomyguys 6y ago
  I also have a feeling that having any sort of reach on these platforms inherently invites toxic behavior, but I think it is important to consider that certain groups often face more toxic behavior than others. And with that in mind, I think it is admirable to try and make these internet services less toxic for those groups. For better or for worse social media can provide a lot of social capital and real capital.
rdl 6y ago
I love services like these -- by having strong end-user read-side filtering, you can run services with less platform-level publication censorship. Platforms like Twitter have unique platform dynamics which make "dogpiling" and stuff like that particularly bad (no current social media platform is as good at handling moderation and abuse as USENET was...). Solving that is awesome.
Clampower 6y ago
I find that anybody who uses the term mansplaining loses credibility. If others opinion becomes disposable to you due to their gender identity, then you are a sexist.
- sfink 6y ago
  Wat? Mansplaining is a particular activity, an obnoxious one. The "man" part of the term is in reference to men being far more likely to engage in it. "Mansplaining" is not equivalent to "[a] man explaining". There's another term for that: "explaining".
gnicholas 6y ago
What would be the use case for this versus just having a Twitter account set to private? Personally I've never understood the appeal of private Twitter accounts since it seems to defeat the whole purpose of a fully-public platform, but it seems like this would largely do the same.
- novia 6y ago
  With this, people you don't know can still reply to your tweets and dm you and so on, the notifications for those messages are just put in a second folder. So when you have the mental energy to look through all of it, you can, but you're not exposed to it by default. Additionally, other people you don't know will still be able to see your tweets. You can still yell into the void. So, it's a public twitter account without the potential annoyances of a public twitter account.
yowlingcat 6y ago
The idea of a "spam folder" for social media harassment doesn't really make sense. An email is a private communication. But social media is public. If someone throws a hot take at you on social media, not only is it not private, it is about as public as it can get. Something about this degree of forced intimacy feels very unnatural; maybe because it is -- it's to some extent engagement hacking meant to juice ad dollars. So I appreciate the desire to try and encourage more intimate, tightly woven spaces over faceless sprawl. Unfortunately, the problem with rejecting the world and retreating into the woods is that you forfeit the commons. And that is the issue here. We won't solve the myriad issues of the public commons this way. What is needed is frankly a more ambitious and systematic solution, one that addresses the effective and perverse incentive structure for producing and selling conspiracy theories, tailor made to every tribe.
jessaustin 6y ago
How shit is Twitter, that most knowledgeable people agree this is a reasonable purpose for a new firm? This work should have been done a decade ago. It's not as if Twitter were busy working on profitability...

64 points by erehweb 6y ago

huge fan of Amy Zhang's work on digital civics/harassment/governance/justice. She's one of the folks who worked on SquadBox[1], which is a similar sort of protection system, except it's run by your peers me/friends. Lets them filter & deal with troubling encounters, be a first line of defense. her other projects are similarly on the leadingest of edges, dealing with digital juries, construction kits for digital policy, information truthfulness collaboration tools, many more. so far almost all digital systems are authoritarian "we say so" little fiefs & moderations is warnings or bans, & that's it. it's remarkably savage & opaque & often imo cruel. glad to see some attempts to bring real governance & process & human sociological cooperativity into the wild wild net. thanks all you trying to advance our resocialization. [1] https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~axz/pub_details.html?id=squadbox https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~axz/pub_details.html?id=squ...

neom 6y ago

I remember when Tracy Chou did an AMA on Reddit and it devolved into such vitriol that it effectively became an advert for her own app.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Zak 6y ago
I just took a look at her AMA and I think some of her complaints about reddit are mistaken. Of course the complaint that some people were being nasty and reddit would benefit from a reduction of such behavior is valid. She complains about insufficient positive engagement, but she erred in using a different account to reply to questions than the toplevel post. This makes an AMA post harder to navigate because comments from the OP are highlighted in most ways people view reddit, and many clients have an AMA mode with additional UI based around the assumption that the post and answers will use the same account. She complains that her comments were downvoted into oblivion. I don't know if many of them had negative scores briefly, but the only ones that do now are complaints about downvotes and a comment containing a personal attack. The currently-downvoted comments are not a positive contribution to the discussion. Finally, she didn't respond to what is now the highest-scoring question regarding her product collecting and storing data it doesn't obviously need, such as user location. If I was considering using this product, I'd like to know why it collects and stores my location.
- a1369209993 6y ago
  > using a different account to reply to questions than the toplevel post > her comments were downvoted into oblivion Haven't investigated this specific AMA, but in general, any reply to a AMA, by a account other than the one that posted the AMA, pretending to be the account that posted the AMA, should in fact be downvoted into oblivion.
  - Zak 6y ago
    The toplevel post was edited to make it clear what account would be replying, but it still breaks the UI. I have the impression a third-party tool was involved in scheduling the post.
    - a1369209993 6y ago
      > The toplevel post was edited to make it clear what account would be replying > > pretending to be the account that []posted[] the AMA [emphasis added]
yowlingcat 6y ago
> it effectively became an advert for her own app. It does not read that way to me. Take a look at that thread -- if you were someone who asked a question in good faith only to get a flippant response by someone who doesn't respect the rules of the space, what do you think it tells you about that person? I can't imagine that earned her any political capital.
- jessaustin 6y ago
  There may not be a great deal of overlap between Redditors and her target users.
gnicholas 6y ago
> that it effectively became an advert for her own app. From the title of the AMA, it was intended as an advert from the start. > I made Silicon Valley publish its diversity data (which sucked, obviously), got micro-famous for it, then got so much online harassment that I started a whole company to try to fix it. I'm Tracy Chou, founder and CEO of Block Party. AMA https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/icqpsm/i_made_silicon_valley_publish_its_diversity_data/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/icqpsm/i_made_silicon...

qPM9l3XJrF 6y ago

>women and people of color are particularly targeted for online abuse I think you have to be careful with the vocabulary here. If a white man is being abused online, and he complains about it, his complaint may be rendered illegitimate on the basis of being "tone policing". He may be told that "freedom of speech does not mean freedom from its consequences". He may be told that the people abusing him are under no obligation to educate him and are doing "unpaid emotional labor". "I call out bad behavior, they are trolling, you engage in targeted online harassment." If anything, I've noticed that women and minorities seem to have more of a blank check to get really crass and say things like "go fuck yourself", etc. I see people being mocked on the basis of being "mediocre white men" far more often on Twitter than I see them mocked on the basis of being "mediocre women of color". Gendered/racialized equivalents of "toxic masculinity" and "whiteness" aren't as widely employed. (Agreed that social media can be terrible; I hope this initiative makes it better.)

butt_hugger 6y ago
How did I know something like this would be the top comment?
statstutor 6y ago
I would take "go fuck yourself" to be a clear request for personal disengagement and, if that is as far as it goes, is crass/profane but not abusive (in the sense intended here).
- qPM9l3XJrF 6y ago
  In the case I have in mind, the woman of color who said GFY initiated the interaction
  - statstutor 6y ago
    That seems unlikely.
    - qPM9l3XJrF 6y ago

Dma54rhs 6y ago

"I've experienced a pretty wide range of harassment," she said. "Everything from the casual mansplaining-reply guys... Incredible that the whole article (basically an ad) is full of attacks on people based on their gender and skin color, while singing the buzzwords of diversity snd tolerance. American society truly is bizarre.

jakelazaroff 6y ago
I grepped the article and I don't see anything that could be interpreted as such. Here is the single instance of the word "white": > As she sees it, it's because the predominately white men who start, run and invest in most big tech companies are less likely to personally experience harassment. And here's the single other instance of the word "men": > As she sees it, it's because the predominately white men who start, run and invest in most big tech companies are less likely to personally experience harassment. Basically every other mention of gender or race is some variant of "women and people of color are particularly targeted for online abuse". What are you reading as "attacks on people based on their gender and skin color"?
- adjkant 6y ago
  So does anyone want to you know, respond to a question that literally just is declaring facts about words used in the article, or just silently downvote it because they don't like the "side" the point is coming from?
readflaggedcomm 6y ago
Lived experience isn't a buzzword.
- sir_bearington 6y ago
  Lived experience is definitely a buzzword used to try and instill more credibility in anecdotes.
  - leesalminen 6y ago

strken 6y ago

These filters tend to be used less to block harassment, in the sense of targeted vitriol towards you or your group, and more to block any and all people who disagree with you, including the polite ones. I'm not sure how I feel about that. Certainly, individuals have the right to wall themselves off from counter-arguments, but polite public discourse between ideological opposites is a precious thing, as is the ability to sit down after a hard day at work and not read 10 spelling mistakes squeezed into a 280 character death threat.

sfink 6y ago
Where is "polite public discourse between ideological opposites" happening in practice, though? If it's not happening on a particular platform, then preventing the possibility of it happening isn't going to outweigh even modest benefits. The need for productive conversation between people of differing opinions will still exist and it is still critically important that it be solved, but if you're looking for diamonds, don't start digging in a dung heap.
- strken 6y ago
  It's happening all the time all over every social media platform, concurrently with the harassment, and largely ignored. Check out any controversial twitter post and you'll see genuine replies as well as bullshit. The perception of the general public's social media output as a dungheap is tantamount to saying their posts are worthless and irredeemable, and that social media only has use as a broadcast platform for famous people. I think it's less like a dungheap and more like a big pile of every student paper from the entire world: mostly useless, but even some of the useless ones are genuine and took a lot of effort, and scattered throughout the pile there's some original and useful content. There's a baby in with the bathwater, is what I'm saying here.
auganov 6y ago
You quickly learn to ignore every kind of negativity on Twitter. Sincere conversations are so rare, even if a comment looks like a reasonable disagreement, chances still are you'll get hate in return if you reply (and you'll only feel like a fool).

monksy 6y ago

This is a strange article for me. It feels more like another push to be tribal rather to admit there is a problem. The problem that I see: Social media has emboldened people to look at attention and fame as something that has to be achieved. People actively fight over it. It's a pretty self absorbed approach to label people who disagree in an extreme manner (poes law here.. but trolls is what I was suggesting.. it's not far way from calling people nazis) . Also, something to mention.. it's rather frustrating to see people dealing with being a minor to major internet celebrity. (That's what people are fighting over and for) For the most part that was a self selected goal to get there, and when they're there they don't like the bad side of it. The article in question completely ignores who she's referring to when she talks about "hate". (Is it a pro troll army, how does she even get to the ire of their attention, has she been pretty aggressive towards them?) Sly edit: All those who downvote me support javascript and are haters. No reason to disagree with me. /s

jakelazaroff 6y ago
Have you talked to any women about their experiences online? I have friends who are not at all famous, who consistently get men messaging them out of the blue on social media. Commenting on their public photos. Some even make extra accounts after being blocked. If you’re a dude, it’s easy to assume that the issue only affects people who are “internet celebrities”. But that’s not the case.
- abadcwm 6y ago
  It's basically the rapist mindset, but applied to online services. There are many men out there with diseased rapist minds.
- monksy 6y ago
  In my comment I was referring to the article's approach to classifying the "trolls". According to the article.. the [implied numerous] people they classify as the enemy are there because of her "ground breaking work". The average person doesn't get a huge wave of trolls by just being there. Being the focus of an NPR puff piece interview, I would say she is a minor celebrity. Does she deserve the hate? The person no, the celebrity image: hesitant yes. (I have a hard time saying no to the second part due to the influence and analogues .. i.e. public figures/politicians) I believe that people are probably fighting with the celebrity image/influence. I mean why would you care about some individual that had some opinions as is with the person in the article. ---- On to what you mentioned: Yes, there are unhinged people. The levels of "abuse" (their definition, which I disagree with what's classified as) between someone that agressively tries to influence others and an individual. There are probably many reasons for their behavior, but I would agree that they aren't acceptable to society. Are group block lists a good reason for these individual 1 on 1 interactions? No, The Travis scenario is not healthy. (Scala reference right there.. it's a guy who maintains blocklists based on you who follow)

wombatmobile 6y ago

Gentlemen, Empathy is not imagining how you would feel if that shit was said to you. Empathy is more like imagining how you would feel if that shit was said to you right after you'd lost all your money and had your dick amputated.

dang 6y ago
Please don't do this here.

sir_bearington 6y ago

Another interesting blog post by the subject of this article: https://blog.blockpartyapp.com/p/what-counts-as-harassment-anyways https://blog.blockpartyapp.com/p/what-counts-as-harassment-a... I think Block Party more or less acknowledges that it's not about blocking actual harassment (though it probably tries to do that, too), and more about insulating people from "unwanted content". What exactly this means is only alluded to, but seems to amount to the exclusion of people who disagree with the poster. Is this actually about stopping harassment or more about the cultivation of echo-chambers? Are "unwanted reply-guys" people who e.g. point out identical male/female disparities among CS graduates in response to allegations that tech is biased against women? And what's the consequence of this kind of blocking? Is isolating people from viewpoints outside an accepted orthodoxy supposed to be a positive for society? If the "reply-guys" followed suit, and configured their Block Party to filter out people with opposing viewpoints, would that be a positive outcome? If Block Party is effective in actually curbing actual harassment, stalking, etc. then that's a great effect and Tracy is right that it's something platforms should do themselves. But I get the sense that it's less about harassment and more about "unwanted content".

lovemenot 6y ago
I dont see the problem. If someone chooses to ignore contrary evidence themselves, they are choosing to be ignorant. Their choice. If someone is forced to wade through offensive crap to see the quality posts, well they had no choice in the matter. The latter scenario is clearly worse and this service is not really flawed.
- sir_bearington 6y ago
  The issue is that Block Party seems to be unwilling to distinguish the latter from the former. Although with the current implementation it looks like it doesn't really matter. All this app seems to do is make it so that all mentions by users outside a whitelist get sent to a spam folder: https://www.blockpartyapp.com/how-it-works/ https://www.blockpartyapp.com/how-it-works/
  - 6y ago

Jermaine_Jabi 6y ago

How does this work? Do you consume your Twitter feed through Twitter or through blockparty?

jasonpeacock 6y ago

I'm always annoyed by articles like this which never include a link to the actual web/app that's being discussed. I see many Wired articles do the same thing. Is there some publishing rule against providing a link to the website/app that's being discussed?

rdl 6y ago
Yeah, some publications (esp NYT) hate linking off-site because it loses them reader-time. For the app: https://www.blockpartyapp.com/signup/ https://www.blockpartyapp.com/signup/

netcan 6y ago

Early on, twitter seemed to be aiming for a much more open ecosystem with an eventual range of 3rd party clients and such. If twitter was an open protocol, instead of a company, it probably would have that. I suspect that an as open protocol, it would be withstanding the current political problems of social media much better. Wikipedia, rss podcasts, the www, email... these are all pretty unscathed relative to twitter or fb. A lot of this comes down to user control. Building on twitter or fb's platform isn't good enough. We badly need these networks to be displaced by open protocols. I suspect it's too late though. FB is already a too big to fail, economically. Ironic, considering their whole function could be filled bu a non-company or companies several order of magnitudes smaller. Whether your problem is too much abuse or too much canceling, your problem is protocol squatters like fb and twitter. You have far fewer of these problems in your podcast feed, email, on wikipedia or whatever. It's not that culture problems don't exist. They exist everywhere, but the protocols don't amplify them like platforms do.

galuggus 6y ago
Try email without a spam filter or open a web forum with no moderation.

katee 6y ago

Tools like this are extremely necessary and important. I think that platforms (Twitter, Reddit, etc) don't have a real incentive to build out powerful tools to stop this stuff. If you aren't detecting that comments are noxious garbage, then those comments just look like engagement. It's much harder for a platform to notice/quantify the loss from folks leaving or not engaging because of the bad behavior they see, not to mention the direct harm to folks receiving the hate. When I emailed Daniel (dang) about it ages ago it sounded like there wasn't much automation in moderation on HN. If HN doesn't have the tools, then I expect random Discord, subreddit, etc moderators are also doing their work by having humans wade through manually. I think Tracy Chou / Block Party are more likely to succeed than the platforms are, since in this case the incentives are actually aligned.

lunatuna 6y ago

Why not just walk away from all this garbage. Social media is trash. It can't help but be trash. Reddit, Twitter, FB is just dumpster diving in stolen and recycled garbage to only find the occasional nugget of something original and interesting. If you need an app on top of your app to manage your emotions you're going down the wrong path. You're headed for sewage plant. This whole things sounds like a Fat Bastard: I can't stop eating. I eat because I'm unhappy, and I'm unhappy because I eat. It's a vicious cycle. Now, if you'll excuse me, there's someone I'd like to get in touch with and forgive... myself.

abadcwm 6y ago
It's deliberately made to be addictive too. These social media sites really need to be heavily regulated, with that in mind. Preferably out of existence. A global ban on internet advertising, if it were possible, would probably be one of the few solutions to all of this mess that attacks the root cause.
hellomyguys 6y ago
I also have a feeling that having any sort of reach on these platforms inherently invites toxic behavior, but I think it is important to consider that certain groups often face more toxic behavior than others. And with that in mind, I think it is admirable to try and make these internet services less toxic for those groups. For better or for worse social media can provide a lot of social capital and real capital.

rdl 6y ago

I love services like these -- by having strong end-user read-side filtering, you can run services with less platform-level publication censorship. Platforms like Twitter have unique platform dynamics which make "dogpiling" and stuff like that particularly bad (no current social media platform is as good at handling moderation and abuse as USENET was...). Solving that is awesome.

Clampower 6y ago

I find that anybody who uses the term mansplaining loses credibility. If others opinion becomes disposable to you due to their gender identity, then you are a sexist.

sfink 6y ago
Wat? Mansplaining is a particular activity, an obnoxious one. The "man" part of the term is in reference to men being far more likely to engage in it. "Mansplaining" is not equivalent to "[a] man explaining". There's another term for that: "explaining".

gnicholas 6y ago

What would be the use case for this versus just having a Twitter account set to private? Personally I've never understood the appeal of private Twitter accounts since it seems to defeat the whole purpose of a fully-public platform, but it seems like this would largely do the same.

novia 6y ago
With this, people you don't know can still reply to your tweets and dm you and so on, the notifications for those messages are just put in a second folder. So when you have the mental energy to look through all of it, you can, but you're not exposed to it by default. Additionally, other people you don't know will still be able to see your tweets. You can still yell into the void. So, it's a public twitter account without the potential annoyances of a public twitter account.

yowlingcat 6y ago

The idea of a "spam folder" for social media harassment doesn't really make sense. An email is a private communication. But social media is public. If someone throws a hot take at you on social media, not only is it not private, it is about as public as it can get. Something about this degree of forced intimacy feels very unnatural; maybe because it is -- it's to some extent engagement hacking meant to juice ad dollars. So I appreciate the desire to try and encourage more intimate, tightly woven spaces over faceless sprawl. Unfortunately, the problem with rejecting the world and retreating into the woods is that you forfeit the commons. And that is the issue here. We won't solve the myriad issues of the public commons this way. What is needed is frankly a more ambitious and systematic solution, one that addresses the effective and perverse incentive structure for producing and selling conspiracy theories, tailor made to every tribe.

jessaustin 6y ago

How shit is Twitter, that most knowledgeable people agree this is a reasonable purpose for a new firm? This work should have been done a decade ago. It's not as if Twitter were busy working on profitability...