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Bluesky's stackable approach to moderation
- Spivak 3y agoThis is honestly pretty great. It's the official scalable version of those browser add-ons that let you recursively block people, block twitter blue users, block anyone who's posted in x subreddit, masstagger. Big fan of making programmable blocklists a first-class feature. I don't think it's going to save them from https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you-speed-run-the-content-moderation-learning-curve/ https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you... this kind of drama but it's nonetheless welcome. It will be interesting to see how people react to ending up on a popular 3rd party blocklist.
- esafak 3y agoWhat's recursive blocking?
- pfraze 3y agoI assume a foaf expansion of the block graph
- Spivak 3y agoYep, I stopped using Twitter so I don't need them anymore but they were a godsend at avoiding internet drama and discourse I had no desire to engage in. You pick someone famous at the center of the drama and let the algo do its thing blocking them, all their followers, all their followers followers and so on. It's a coarse heuristic to be sure but operating on the principle that I can live without any given person's tweets it made discovery so much nicer.
- account42 3y agoGuilt by association as a service.
- avodonosov 3y agoCan you name some such extensions? I was thinking about similar functionality and considered to create a similar service / extension / etc, even experimented a little long ago. Interesting to know what exists.
- echelon 3y ago> block anyone who's posted in x subreddit Careful. Just because someone posts in /r/conservative or /r/liberal does not necessarily make them either.
- account42 3y agoGreat argument for why this is a really bad idea.
- extraduder_ire 3y agoThis is a really cool idea. I love the "Spider Shield" example they came up with. I look forward to this being used for all kinds of moderation-adjacent things like spoilers, and topics you don't care to read about for the time being.
- metalcrow 3y agoThis seems very similar to the idea of Mastodon's server system, where you join the server whose policies match yours, except it's much easier to switch "servers". Which is a really good idea.
- CuriousCosmic 3y agoIt's actually pretty substantially different in that mastodon's instances/servers are everything whereas here each part is separate and you can generally use multiple of each. Bluesky has: Identity via DIDs. With web DIDs this identity is tied to your domain name and there is no bluesky infrastructure associated with it. It's 100% in your hands (but you can't change names or domains easily). But alternatively you can use a plc DID which does use their centralised infrastructure (currently) while allowing you to easily change your name or domain. With these you get one DID per account. PDS (personal data servers) or "data repositories" that hold your post content. You can self host this or use Bsky's central PDS. You can only use one of these per account. Indexers that aggregate posts from all the PDS/data repos. These create what bluesky calls "the firehose". Relays that route and cache traffic. App views which give you your actual application like bluesky. Feed services that give you your "algorithm" for what your page looks like. You can subscribe to as many of these as you like or host your own. Then you finally get labellers like what is discussed here. Compared to with mastodon you can follow multiple labellers at the same time. Those labellers can provide automated content warnings, etc or manual moderation. But importantly at the end of the day no matter what the labellers do, you control how they act and whether they are just a warning/blur or if they actually hide the content. ---- That all compares to mastodon where everything is tied up under one server/instance and your control over moderation boils down to "run your own instance and do all the mod work yourself" or "rely on some other instance with no oversight whatsoever". This isn't to say that mastodon's approach didn't make sense at the time but like you said the bluesky approach makes quite a bit more sense and makes it way easier for the user to move around between their options.
- account42 3y agoThe advantage of Mastodon is that you can actually run the whole thing on your own to not be forced under anyones moderation whereas with bluesky there are still central parts run by a US corporation that will censor you. Not saying that the fediverse is a great design - tying identities to instances is inexcusable. But Bluesky's central corporate backing makes it a nonstarter.
- pfraze 3y agoI'm on the team that implemented this, so I'm happy to answer questions. I'll give a brief technical overview. It's broadly a system for publishing metadata on posts called "Labels". Application clients specify which labeling services they want to use in request headers. Those labels get attached to the responses, where they can then be interpreted by client. This is an open system. Clients can choose which labelers they use, and while the Bluesky client hardcodes the Bluesky moderation another client can choose a different primary Labeler. Users can then add their community labelers, which I describe below. We aim to do the majority of our moderation at that layer. There are also "infrastructure takedowns" for illegal content and network abuse, which we execute at the services layer (ie the relay). Within the app this looks like special accounts you can subscribe to in order to get additional filters. The labels can be neutral or negative, which means they can also essentially function as user badges. Over time we'll continue to extend the system to support richer metadata and more behaviors, which can be used to do things like community notes or label-driven reply gates.
- samstave 3y agoMaybe add some screens of actual moderation on the landing? It looks like it just shows profile settings?
- cornholio 3y agoModeration 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.
- pfraze 3y agoThis 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.
- echelon 3y agoAmazing. This is sorely needed for Reddit.
- arsome 3y agoI'm sure our extremely divided society will benefit greatly from configurable echo chambers.
- LVB 3y agoThese seem more like notch filters and I’m hoping they work. At least they are trying something, and a large scale experiment can only help figure this out (even through failure).
- kgwxd 3y ago[flagged]
- numpad0 3y agoNot really. Legal limitations to free speech as well as ethical standards are geo-divided and are often mutually incompatible. There are little that can be spoken without offending someone.
- naasking 3y agoNo doubt division is exaggerated by the media and politicians for self-serving ends, but there absolutely is plenty of division on many topics.
- account42 3y agoThe trick is to just discard everyone who disagrees with you has driven by hate or some other excuse to dehumanize them. Then the remaining people are not divided. Societal unity achieved! /s
- mvelbaum 3y agoThe irony is lost on this one.
- snapcaster 3y agoI think I agree with their point though (despite their comment being divisive). In my actual real (off the internet) life people with diverse opinions and backgrounds all get along more or less fine and manage to "make it work". If you really think everyone is totally divided and falling apart I recommend just touching grass and getting off the internet. You'll realize it's really not that bad
- Slava_Propanei 3y ago[dead]
- sneak 3y agoBluesky still retains final cut with centralized censorship. This is a problem that strikes directly at the heart of the danger of social media. Also, calling them “community guidelines” instead of “unilateral censorship rules” is deceptive.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- charcircuit 3y agoThis post says you can opt put of their moderation filter, but yes if you are using bluesky's app then bluesky can control what can and can't be shown. In that case you can use a different client or PDS.
- account42 3y agoSo effectively there will still be centralized censorship.
- logicchains 3y agoIt's only with their clients; if you use a different client you don't have to use their centralised filter. They need some form of censorship in their own client for plausible deniability so they don't get shut down (or face extreme deplatforming like Gab).
- loceng 3y agoWhich is a serious issue still to consider. The previous playbook was for the small handful of major "social" media platforms to be infilrated-captured by bad actors, including but not limited to how pre-Elon Twitter was illegally working with the US government to suppress and censor free speech - many people and experts who were suppressed or outright ban from the platform - who were solely posting talking points that are now proven-known to be correct but were against the COVID-19 narrative. So in this new evolution there will be how many different clients bad actors will attempt to nudge the system design to benefit a censorship-suppression-narrative control apparatus - even as simple as helping facilitate the creation and reenforcement of information bubbles. E.g. the establishment's goal or directive will be to direct as many people towards the captured or vulnerable-capturable clients that have gained a critical mass, and as we can see there is a campaign to drive people off of Twitter-X - arguably in an effort to prevent people from seeing Community Notes that may start users from developing their critical thinking and seeing different perspectives, where going on more of a wild west platform or network like Bluesky et al - can allow bubbles within bubbles to form, where bubbles will be far less likely to ever be exposed to general consensus Community Notes. At minimum people need to be educated of and aware of these isolation tactics - part of divide and conquer: you need people to have wildly differing beliefs, perpetuating fear mongering to weaponize an ideological mob - to the point of having them turn a blind eye to the actions of or becoming Gestapo themselves. Reddit's forum design has similar dark patterns that allows for easy narrative control and crafting, creating bubbles of acceptable argument points - and to keep people with incongruent beliefs from being exposed to logic and evidence that would cause cognitive dissonance and start to break the illusion for them. I think part of what can help manage the weaponizable ideological mob of mobs being isolated is to create a public matrix outlining accounts and displaying what content-keywords, and also perhaps who specifically they are "outlawing" - which then can allow a concerted effort to reach those people to do the hard work that takes more than keyboard warrioring to reach them. This online censorship-suppression-narrative control of course spills over into the real world once the control desperate establishment's apparatus isn't sufficient - where people like the Tate brothers continue to have a platform to reach people to educate them on certain structures of reality, most notably the strategies of the establishment attempting to maintain the narrative control; and so they attempt other tactics to suppress the truth like the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, the cancellation attempts of Alex Jones, the imprisonment attempts of the Tate brothers because the ongoing smear campaign is failing; whereas Julian Assange was successfully imprisoned, and Edward Snowdon has been exiled - all for being a threat to or shining light on-exposing the inner workings of what many are calling the "deep state" or the establishment.
- walterbell 3y agoDoes the Bluesky blog have an RSS feed?
- bertman 3y agoLooks like it doesn't. There is, however, this feed (https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:z72i7hdynmk6r22z27h6tvur/feed/bsky-team https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:z72i7hdynmk6r22z27h6tvur/fe...) which collects all posts from the Bluesky team. Unfortunately, it's not possible to consume bsky feeds as RSS feeds either, but you can at least subscribe to individual accounts via RSS by appending `/rss` to their profile URL, e.g. https://bsky.app/profile/safety.bsky.app/rss https://bsky.app/profile/safety.bsky.app/rss , which is the account that posted the OP's announcement.
- kleftarcle 3y agohttps://bsky.social/about/rss.xml https://bsky.social/about/rss.xml
- account42 3y agoMissing the <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" ... /> tag though :| Even with browsers trying to destroy RSS that link is still useful because it lets you pase the normal blog URL directly in the reader to subscribe to the feed. Honestly, this disregard for existing standards does not make me confident in Bluesky.
- ChicagoDave 3y agoThis is the way it should be. People that post things I don’t want to see can be blocked. Groups of people that post things I don’t want to see can be blocked. Conversely, people and groups I do want to see posts can be identified and cleared for my timelines.
- concordDance 3y agoWorth noting this is not truly "choose your own" moderation. People who do things like advocate for a lower age of consent will still be banned: https://bsky.social/about/support/community-guidelines https://bsky.social/about/support/community-guidelines EDIT: though it seems like you could in theory make your own client... I'm unclear how that would work in practice. Presumably content they dislike would not be stored on BlueSky servers?
- intended 3y agoSo here’s the fun part of content moderation - you have to let communities talk about bad things as well. You cant have your own community banned for talking about something bad that happened to them. I would be curious how that scenario plays out. Perhaps the content is only greyed out. What do you do about users though? Is their content greyed out?
- bastawhiz 3y agoNothing is stopping the community from talking about bad things. If you want to opt out of certain topics, that doesn't stop anyone from doing their own thing, it just stops you from seeing them. If you choose to allowlist your friends, you'll see whatever they post. If you blanket hide any posts that mention something, that's entirely your prerogative.
- thoughtpalette 3y agoHackernews moment, Hi Dave!
- ChicagoDave 3y ago
- LightHugger 3y agoVery nice, this is an idea i've posted about before, and i'm glad someone is implementing it. Very interested to see how well it works out!
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- sifatbinr 3y ago[flagged]
- ThinkBeat 3y agoAnother term for moderation is censorship. Something that has been well demonstrated in existing social networks. but as long as whatever is a node in BlueSky is of limited reach / users then it is not much of a problem. I do see this creating a lot more safe spaces/ echo chambers and even more olarization for all forms of opinions, both politically correct and politically incorrect, unless the company enforces one side of the other in a specific way.
- baq 3y ago[flagged]
- frereubu 3y agoAlthough GP's comment feels like needless semantic nickpicking, what you've said isn't true: "Censorship can be conducted by governments, private institutions, and other controlling bodies." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship Essentially, any organisation can have a "censor".
- snapcaster 3y agoNot correct in any sense (reference a dictionary) but why would you even want to define it narrowly like this?
- baq 3y agoI briefly lived in a country with censorship and the difference is substantial. A corporation can't put you in jail for writing bad things about it.
- owisd 3y agoSeems obvious that we would want a way to distinguish speech that is completely suppressed for all platforms vs speech that’s outside of the parameters of what’s expected on a particular platform but that you’re free to conduct elsewhere. If I can’t publish a paper on cell microbiology in a computer science journal it seems unhelpful to lump that in the same category as Putin arresting people in Russia for reporting on the war in Ukraine. I guess ironically some of the people trying to equate the two are doing so to suppress discussion of moderation by shouting it down as censorship.
- asgerhb 3y agoI can see many benefits to this approach, but there is one area where I'm sceptical: The article mentions moderation in different cultures several times, and this made me curious – what would be the "default" culture assumed by the site-wide moderation? (Unitrd States?) Will the moderation team paid for by blue-sky be responsible for all languages or only English posts, and what would it mean to be from a culture without "official support"?
- victorantos 3y ago[flagged]
- baq 3y ago+5, Inspiring Are there any platforms from the 21st century which support metamoderation?
- sumeno 3y agoIs this LLM generated? It sounds like it
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoI don't think so, but it looks like it was worded by a marketeer in the style of a press release or a linkedin post. Very impersonal / nonhuman. edit: comment history says a lot of their comments are suspected chatgpt.
- dang 3y agoCan you please stop posting these? It's not what HN is for, and we're getting complaints.
- skenderbeu 3y agoWho decides what's rude or discourse?
- dev1ycan 3y agoI don't get why this social media exists, twitter was pretty bad before he sold it, I remember he went out of his way to hide the feed of people you actually follow, and people were just abusing keywords to get on my timeline with garbage. Trends were also insanely manipulated. I for one will not and won't even remotely consider using another of his "social medias", it must be fun for him to go sell his garbage-fied social media make billions then attempt to create the same exact thing and have sheep follow him to it, get rug pulled every few years so he inflates his pockets, no thank you.
- steveklabnik 3y agoJack Dorsey does not have a stake in BlueSky. He has an advisory board seat, but deleted his account. He’s invested in nostr, not BlueSky.
- ianopolous 3y agoBut he did set the mission and goals for bluesky, thus determining it's long-term direction. Personally, I think it's the wrong direction in terms of what's best for society. Source - I was one of the first members in the private bluesky group he and Parag set up.
- steveklabnik 3y agoI don't know what mission he set up, but I am no fan of Jack, yet do like what the current team is doing.
- ianopolous 3y agoThe team is great. They do have to work within the mission though.
- scudsworth 3y agojust another few years of solving moderation before you can finally add support for basic media types
- efitz 3y agoI’ll be honest. I really liked the BlueSky idea and was an early adopter. But I deleted the app last week when you announced your Trust & Safety team, or at least hired a new leader for it. In my mind (and many other people), “Trust and Safety” is a synonym for censorship. We live in a time where censorship is becoming a huge risk to freedom. A free society needs to be able to debate, and anyone or anything that decides that it has the wisdom to set limits about what people can discuss, is a threat to freedom. I had hope that BlueSky was choosing a different path but now I guess not.
- breischl 3y agoIf I understood the article correctly, you can get a feed that isn't moderated by their team. So I'm not sure what your complaint is? That other people can get moderation if they choose to?
- w10-1 3y agoSo, is this getting incentives right? Not really, IMO. Even when users select moderation, they should be able to transiently unselect moderation features to get the unfiltered view - to take off the glasses at any time. Otherwise, moderation can devolve to censorship in ideological contexts, and BlueSky becomes a friend to those herding opinion. Even if users can take off their glasses, moderation will likely still suppress production of content. (Why speak if no one's listening?) But by enabling users to experiment with turning off moderation, each user will always be able to assess whether the moderation is supportive or censoring. That in turn can temper the moderators to be reasonable, since their moderation is easily discoverable and measurable. I think this is good for groups, too. If group-wide moderation rules are definitive and users cannot peek through them, then moderation itself is a powerful position, and you'll get the usual leadership contests as people game to manage opinion. If moderation instead is weakened by being ever-consensual, there will be less gaming to control opinion. It's better for groups to manage themselves through membership. It may be hard to get in, but once in, your voice is hearable by all, moderation notwithstanding. So weak moderation also makes group membership more valuable, which in turns makes it easier to have the conditions of entry that can help people trust each other. (Making those conditions observable and consistently applied is another question.)