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I'm afraid that Bluesky's approach to moderation is one of the worst possible ways to do it. When the internet was first starting to be mass adopted in the 90s,

I'm afraid that Bluesky's approach to moderation is one of the worst possible ways to do it. When the internet was first starting to be mass adopted in the 90s, there was optimism that having access to such a huge variety of viewpoints would expand people's horizons. Instead, what seems to have happened is that people could find the group of people that shared their exact viewpoint, and ignore every other viewpoint. Bluesky's "choose your own moderators" approach gives a lot of power to the mods to set those viewpoints and block out anything else. I'm not sure what the solution is to getting people's viewpoints widened again (it's certainly not Twitter or YouTube's approach of throwing controversial content at you and letting you find the people in the comments that explains why your side of the controversy is right and everyone else's is wrong), but this isn't it. Ultimately I see Bluesky's technical aspects as mostly social signalling to the appropriate groups of Twitter power users rather than a fundamental shift in social media.

5636588 3y ago
It's understandable to feel disillusioned by the current state of online discourse. Expecting social media platforms alone to broaden horizons is akin to relying solely on a library's size to educate the illiterate. Perhaps it's time for a more holistic approach to digital literacy and critical thinking, rather than outsourcing the responsibility to tech giants like Bluesky.
ragebol 3y ago
If people can choose their own moderators, then they can choose to have one that does allow wiew-broadening content, but eg. presented without conspiracy loonies, hate, violence. Imagine there's a checkmark: "only stuff I agree with". At least it would be explicit that way. Or have a slider of how often am opposing view comes by, so you can control how often you get worked up. One can dream...
- willcipriano 3y ago
  > without conspiracy loonies The term "conspiracy theory" was invented by the CIA after Kennedy's head exploded shortly after he started to move to withdraw from Vietnam. It was later used on people who didn't buy the Iraq WMD story. It was used on people who suspected mass government spying before Snowden proved them right. Recently it was used for people who thought a US funded biolab experimenting with making bat coronaviruses miles from the epicenter of a coronavirus outbreak was suspicious. You can try to censor untrue things but censoring "conspiracy loonies" means sticking to the mainstream narratives, for that you can go on Reddit and watch CNN.
  - Almondsetat 3y ago
    Using the origin of a word to discredit its current use is quite simply a bad faith argument to sidetrack discussion. Conspiracy has a meaning and it doesn't matter who coined it. If you want to make this argument be sure to carefully analize the entire etymology of every single word you're writing
    - brvsft 3y ago
      > Conspiracy has a meaning… Yeah, and “conspiracy theory” has a meaning, which, in bad faith, currently encapsulates, “Things I disagree with broadly, which can be linked to and invalidated by the existence of other people online who are either trolls or extremely stupid.” That way I can say that anyone who engages in wrongthink—perhaps, that a healthy 30-year-old might be allowed the choice to take a vaccine or allow natural immunity to take effect, without being threatened with loss of employment for choosing the latter—is lumped in with idiots or trolls who think that they’re making vaccines with microchips in them. Now they’re all “conspiracy theorists.” I don’t believe even 5% of the people using the term are doing so in good faith.
    - alephknoll 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - Almondsetat 3y ago
        [flagged]
  - beardicus 3y ago
    > The term "conspiracy theory" was invented by the CIA ooh, a recursive conspiracy theory. neat!
  - jeezfrk 3y ago
    what about all those that turned out to be deranged imagination / fascism / communism / racism / cultic or just plain moneymaking FUD? You remember all those? Strange. Thst seems to be blocked from you reading it.
dwb 3y ago
"Expanding horizons" being a job of the internet is the viewpoint of a particular kind of optimist. I very much doubt it's what most ordinary people want, certainly as something that is thrust upon them. For me, if I want to expand my horizons, the internet is clearly very useful and I do make use of it like that. I want that to be under my control, though, and not part of some semi-coerced product design. Bluesky's approach therefore seems like a good attempt to me. I mean, I certainly don't trust Twitter or Meta to do it for me.
comte7092 3y ago
What you’re outlining is an issue with moderation in general, not something particular to blue sky. The issue is, given the power inherent to moderation, how is that power best managed? Do you want it applied by whoever happens to own the platform (previously “liberal” publicly owned Twitter, Elon owned Twitter, etc?), or do you want to have decentralized control over that power? You talk about getting “viewpoints widened”, as though all speech has inherent value to all people. I’m not sure the evidence bears that out. Simply being exposed to other people’s viewpoints doesn’t necessarily lead to a mind opening experience, especially when that exposure is little more than shouting over text, piling on, and mudslinging. Discourse requires a base level of accepted rules of engagement and norms of behavior that lead to some level of mutual respect. I’m personally optimistic that blue sky’s approach is closer to the ideal.
- fsiefken 3y ago
  I really liked the Slashdot system with meta-moderation and option to filter based on comment length.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    I agree. Although it was certainly imperfect, I think that nobody has ever done moderation as well as /. did (during their heyday, anyway. I haven't been there for years so don't know if it's still the same).
haltIncomplete 3y ago
If you have a suggestion for avoiding that, go for it. Tribalism seems endemic to humanity though given physical reality sees us dispersed across the globe. Every attempt at a singular hivemind of social and economic thought has failed as generational churn costs awareness of the origins of a social norm; generational tribalism is even a thing. How do we defeat physics? Still waiting for those who stare deeply into the machine to answer that. Mathematical generalization of computer behavior is not really upending the time-space continuum but keep staring and believing, I guess.
13years 3y ago
Global communities have also resulted in precisely the opposite of expectations. They created collections of uniform behavior. I would argue the private moderated communities allow for far greater diversification of ideas. The reason being is that you can exist in multiple such communities. The individual experiences the diversity and not the community. It is the premise of an argument I laid out some time ago for why social media has been destructive to diverse views even without the algorithmic manipulations. https://www.mindprison.cc/p/uniform-thought-machines https://www.mindprison.cc/p/uniform-thought-machines
evbogue 3y ago
Yes, exactly. The original article linked on this HN thread mentions Nostr and how Bluesky compares to it. I don't believe either protocol has landed a fix for social media yet, let me explain. Social media posts are at the most simple level a blog post without a title field. Messages are written by an author, they are given a timestamp, and they contain some kind of content. To create a distributed social media product, we need authored posts with timestamps. Now one big problem with distributed blogs is authors go back and modify their content in all kinds of ways after the fact. How many times have you been to a blog where they've taken off the timestamps so that their most popular post doesn't appear to be from 2010, for example. Secure-Scuttlebot tried to solve this issue by using ed25519 signing key cryptography to create append-only logs of content. This is great, and as acknowledged in the Nostr original readme, it might ultimately be better than Nostr. But append-only logs syncing from post 0 until 1000 leads to UX-level problems for new users, which can be overcome with the right dev team. Nostr uses the same cryptography as Bitcoin, and has no association between the posts. This means you send a request for a pubkey to a relay and the relay sends you some stuff authored by that pubkey. It's kind of up to the relay what it sends. I've experienced UX issues with Nostr clients where I am being blasted 10,000 messages by a relay to my client just so I can render a thread. This probably can be fixed, but it would help if there was some kind of protocol level ordering to/relationship with the posts. But Bluesky managed to make it so identities do not really exist outside of your PDS. The PDSes hold onto your private keys for you, and until there is an option to sign your own messages your posts and your identity do not really exist outside of a PDS. The Bluesky PDS has authority over you, and then if you switch to another PDS the Bluesky PDS still has authority over you because they can still decide not to show your posts to mainline Bluesky people. For those of us who got into distributed social media because some anonymous server-side admin 'took action' against our account without getting in touch to correct the behavior first, Bluesky begins to raise all kinds of red flags with the way they've made it hard to separate yourself from the moderation team. Really Bluesky has redeveloped a very similar problem to the criticisms the original Nostr readme had about Mastodon. And don't get me started about Truth Social, which is what happens when you have a Mastodon PDS that does not talk to other Mastodon PDSes! It's not too late to fix these issues of course. I mean the PDS has your keys, so you can always rewrite the whole network! If there's anything I'd like to encourage Bluesky commenters to do is to keep speaking about how to solve this social media issue in a way that allows a global conversation, and also lets people not see content that they have reasons to not want to see. I'm happy to discuss this forever, for you social media dorks out there. Call me/email me/etc.
P_I_Staker 3y ago
My views have changed greatly, due to hearing these ideas. I may have ultimately ended up more extreme, but it's not an extreme version of what I had before.

5636588 3y ago

It's understandable to feel disillusioned by the current state of online discourse. Expecting social media platforms alone to broaden horizons is akin to relying solely on a library's size to educate the illiterate. Perhaps it's time for a more holistic approach to digital literacy and critical thinking, rather than outsourcing the responsibility to tech giants like Bluesky.

ragebol 3y ago

If people can choose their own moderators, then they can choose to have one that does allow wiew-broadening content, but eg. presented without conspiracy loonies, hate, violence. Imagine there's a checkmark: "only stuff I agree with". At least it would be explicit that way. Or have a slider of how often am opposing view comes by, so you can control how often you get worked up. One can dream...

willcipriano 3y ago
> without conspiracy loonies The term "conspiracy theory" was invented by the CIA after Kennedy's head exploded shortly after he started to move to withdraw from Vietnam. It was later used on people who didn't buy the Iraq WMD story. It was used on people who suspected mass government spying before Snowden proved them right. Recently it was used for people who thought a US funded biolab experimenting with making bat coronaviruses miles from the epicenter of a coronavirus outbreak was suspicious. You can try to censor untrue things but censoring "conspiracy loonies" means sticking to the mainstream narratives, for that you can go on Reddit and watch CNN.
- Almondsetat 3y ago
  Using the origin of a word to discredit its current use is quite simply a bad faith argument to sidetrack discussion. Conspiracy has a meaning and it doesn't matter who coined it. If you want to make this argument be sure to carefully analize the entire etymology of every single word you're writing
  - brvsft 3y ago
    > Conspiracy has a meaning… Yeah, and “conspiracy theory” has a meaning, which, in bad faith, currently encapsulates, “Things I disagree with broadly, which can be linked to and invalidated by the existence of other people online who are either trolls or extremely stupid.” That way I can say that anyone who engages in wrongthink—perhaps, that a healthy 30-year-old might be allowed the choice to take a vaccine or allow natural immunity to take effect, without being threatened with loss of employment for choosing the latter—is lumped in with idiots or trolls who think that they’re making vaccines with microchips in them. Now they’re all “conspiracy theorists.” I don’t believe even 5% of the people using the term are doing so in good faith.
  - alephknoll 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - Almondsetat 3y ago
      [flagged]
- beardicus 3y ago
  > The term "conspiracy theory" was invented by the CIA ooh, a recursive conspiracy theory. neat!
- jeezfrk 3y ago
  what about all those that turned out to be deranged imagination / fascism / communism / racism / cultic or just plain moneymaking FUD? You remember all those? Strange. Thst seems to be blocked from you reading it.

dwb 3y ago

"Expanding horizons" being a job of the internet is the viewpoint of a particular kind of optimist. I very much doubt it's what most ordinary people want, certainly as something that is thrust upon them. For me, if I want to expand my horizons, the internet is clearly very useful and I do make use of it like that. I want that to be under my control, though, and not part of some semi-coerced product design. Bluesky's approach therefore seems like a good attempt to me. I mean, I certainly don't trust Twitter or Meta to do it for me.

comte7092 3y ago

What you’re outlining is an issue with moderation in general, not something particular to blue sky. The issue is, given the power inherent to moderation, how is that power best managed? Do you want it applied by whoever happens to own the platform (previously “liberal” publicly owned Twitter, Elon owned Twitter, etc?), or do you want to have decentralized control over that power? You talk about getting “viewpoints widened”, as though all speech has inherent value to all people. I’m not sure the evidence bears that out. Simply being exposed to other people’s viewpoints doesn’t necessarily lead to a mind opening experience, especially when that exposure is little more than shouting over text, piling on, and mudslinging. Discourse requires a base level of accepted rules of engagement and norms of behavior that lead to some level of mutual respect. I’m personally optimistic that blue sky’s approach is closer to the ideal.

fsiefken 3y ago
I really liked the Slashdot system with meta-moderation and option to filter based on comment length.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I agree. Although it was certainly imperfect, I think that nobody has ever done moderation as well as /. did (during their heyday, anyway. I haven't been there for years so don't know if it's still the same).

haltIncomplete 3y ago

If you have a suggestion for avoiding that, go for it. Tribalism seems endemic to humanity though given physical reality sees us dispersed across the globe. Every attempt at a singular hivemind of social and economic thought has failed as generational churn costs awareness of the origins of a social norm; generational tribalism is even a thing. How do we defeat physics? Still waiting for those who stare deeply into the machine to answer that. Mathematical generalization of computer behavior is not really upending the time-space continuum but keep staring and believing, I guess.

13years 3y ago

Global communities have also resulted in precisely the opposite of expectations. They created collections of uniform behavior. I would argue the private moderated communities allow for far greater diversification of ideas. The reason being is that you can exist in multiple such communities. The individual experiences the diversity and not the community. It is the premise of an argument I laid out some time ago for why social media has been destructive to diverse views even without the algorithmic manipulations. https://www.mindprison.cc/p/uniform-thought-machines https://www.mindprison.cc/p/uniform-thought-machines

evbogue 3y ago

Yes, exactly. The original article linked on this HN thread mentions Nostr and how Bluesky compares to it. I don't believe either protocol has landed a fix for social media yet, let me explain. Social media posts are at the most simple level a blog post without a title field. Messages are written by an author, they are given a timestamp, and they contain some kind of content. To create a distributed social media product, we need authored posts with timestamps. Now one big problem with distributed blogs is authors go back and modify their content in all kinds of ways after the fact. How many times have you been to a blog where they've taken off the timestamps so that their most popular post doesn't appear to be from 2010, for example. Secure-Scuttlebot tried to solve this issue by using ed25519 signing key cryptography to create append-only logs of content. This is great, and as acknowledged in the Nostr original readme, it might ultimately be better than Nostr. But append-only logs syncing from post 0 until 1000 leads to UX-level problems for new users, which can be overcome with the right dev team. Nostr uses the same cryptography as Bitcoin, and has no association between the posts. This means you send a request for a pubkey to a relay and the relay sends you some stuff authored by that pubkey. It's kind of up to the relay what it sends. I've experienced UX issues with Nostr clients where I am being blasted 10,000 messages by a relay to my client just so I can render a thread. This probably can be fixed, but it would help if there was some kind of protocol level ordering to/relationship with the posts. But Bluesky managed to make it so identities do not really exist outside of your PDS. The PDSes hold onto your private keys for you, and until there is an option to sign your own messages your posts and your identity do not really exist outside of a PDS. The Bluesky PDS has authority over you, and then if you switch to another PDS the Bluesky PDS still has authority over you because they can still decide not to show your posts to mainline Bluesky people. For those of us who got into distributed social media because some anonymous server-side admin 'took action' against our account without getting in touch to correct the behavior first, Bluesky begins to raise all kinds of red flags with the way they've made it hard to separate yourself from the moderation team. Really Bluesky has redeveloped a very similar problem to the criticisms the original Nostr readme had about Mastodon. And don't get me started about Truth Social, which is what happens when you have a Mastodon PDS that does not talk to other Mastodon PDSes! It's not too late to fix these issues of course. I mean the PDS has your keys, so you can always rewrite the whole network! If there's anything I'd like to encourage Bluesky commenters to do is to keep speaking about how to solve this social media issue in a way that allows a global conversation, and also lets people not see content that they have reasons to not want to see. I'm happy to discuss this forever, for you social media dorks out there. Call me/email me/etc.

P_I_Staker 3y ago

My views have changed greatly, due to hearing these ideas. I may have ultimately ended up more extreme, but it's not an extreme version of what I had before.