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> This helps you maintain control over a thread you started, ideally limiting dog-piling and other forms of harassment. On the other hand, quote posts are often

> This helps you maintain control over a thread you started, ideally limiting dog-piling and other forms of harassment. On the other hand, quote posts are often used to correct misinformation too. To address this, we’re leaning into labeling services and hoping to integrate a Community Notes-like feature in the future. I'm confused. It seems like they're acknowledging why this is a bad idea yet are proceeding with it? If you don't want people to be able to reply critically to a post, why not have a private profile or not post it in the first place?

josefresco 2y ago
It is confusing language but basically they're saying "we're giving you this ability, but will be adding a new feature to fix this unfortunate side effect". I think it will cause a shift to "screenshots of posts" as is done on Twitter/X when the retweeter does not want to @ / mention the original author.
- Jare 2y ago
  That's perfectly fine. Screenshots as posts deter 90% (my guess) of people from going through the trouble of finding the original post/author, but still allow dedicated people to do that. It reduces the ability to trivially post mindless shit to someone on a whim. I totally believe that this approach can significantly increase the signal/noise ratio, without allowing anyone to silence anyone else arbitrarily.
  - GrinningFool 2y ago
    It's also completely untrustworthy. It's not complex to make a fake tweet screenshot. It doesn't even always have to pass close scrutiny.
    - Jare 2y ago
      This feature doesn't change that. Whoever wanted to doctor a screenshot will still do, and whoever wanted to post a real screenshot can still do. Now, if someone wanted to quote-reply with the legitimacy of a link but now has to make do with a screenshot that their readers may not trust, well, sounds like they haven't earned a good reputation among their readers, and that's entirely their problem.
roblabla 2y ago
They're acknowledging that it has some downsides, that they think they can resolve through other features that they'll develop later. > If you don't want people to be able to reply critically to a post, why not have a private profile or not post it in the first place? The problem isn't people replying critically, it's people being assholes on the internet, leveraging their follower base to harass someone. This feature gives tool to the bluesky posters to protect themselves against this form of harassment. Hence why they're going with it despite the downsides: it's a necessary feature for people to protect themselves against harassment.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- richbell 2y ago
  > The problem isn't people replying critically, it's people being assholes on the internet... it's a necessary feature for people to protect themselves against harassment. The problem is that "harassmemt" is a nebulous term. Many people inappropriately (in my opinion) claim any sort of dissenting voices are "harassment".
  - xg15 2y ago
    Are you claiming there are no such things as shitstorms, dogpiling or cyberbullying?
    - richbell 2y ago
      > Are you claiming there are no such things as shitstorms, dogpiling or cyberbullying? Please quote where you believe I made this claim.
      - xg15 2y ago
        Well, how would you protect against cyberbullying then?
malwrar 2y ago
I think they’re intending to address something like THE X GROUP DID Y THING TO THE Z GROUP (which we will assume to be false) by allowing for factual corrections via “community notes” and “labels” that I assume the T&S team plans to control. Depending on how the specifics of this future plan manifest, I think this could be useful for quelling legitimate adversarial or genuinely uninformed and harmful misinformation. I still worry about the bias and transparency of whoever controls these labels, and the general potential of these features to enable the creation of echo chambers, but least this will all be transparent and observable via the developer API so factual investigation and reporting can be done on how this actually plays out in practice. I hate censorship and the general cowardice of people who would abuse these features to stifle legitimate dissent, but I think these features are a good compromise between that and the opposite real problem of malicious/harmful legitimate misinformation.
newsclues 2y ago
Sounds like they are making a tradeoff of creating community bubbles or silos in order to limit unwanted interactions. Seems like safe spaces online, where people can be happy but perhaps they will be sharing opinions and information that are incorrect, but they won't be unhappy from people they disagree with providing the facts.
anonfordays 2y ago
>If you don't want people to be able to reply critically to a post, why not have a private profile or not post it in the first place? Exactly. Someone will post something abhorrent, critical replies will be removed, supportive replies will stay. It will make echo chambers worse than they ever have been. Then again, that may be exactly what the users want.
- skrbjc 2y ago
  This is a key criticism of reddit, and everyone knows how much of an echo chamber reddit is
  - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
    I don't. Enlighten me, please.
    - ineedaj0b 2y ago
      it's sorta like reading the breitbart comment section but it's all left wing. there's some good stuff, but there's also good stuff on mass email chains if you read enough of them. reddit ain't what it used to be.
    - Levitz 2y ago
      Reddit enforces echo chambers mainly on two levels, the user level and the mod level. Nobody respects etiquette anymore, and rather than upvoting valuable content they upvote whatever they like. As an extreme example, you can make the best, most honest, rational argumentation of a political issue, if the users don't agree with your stance it's going to be downvotted and hidden. Similarly, they will tolerate content that might be against the rules or the spirit of the subreddit if it's something they agree with. On top of that, the vast majority of the time moderators enforce echo chambers themselves through bias, with a few of them going as far as banning every single user that posts in communities they disagree with, even if they have never engaged with the community they themselves moderate.
      - 2y ago
bangaroo 2y ago
bluesky currently doesn't support private profiles, so that's a no-go. while i fundamentally agree with what you're saying, the cases where a quote-skeet contains a polite or well-intentioned correction vs. is explicitly designed to enrage the quoter's follower-base and dunk on that person are way out of balance. there are many people who will, rather than attempt to correct a misunderstanding (or simply ignore an opinion they don't agree with,) immediately jump to quote-tweeting and dunking on someone, trying to drag their followers into a dogpile. it's often just blatantly unnecessary and it is frequently a miserable experience to be on the receiving end of that. i worry i'm coming across as lamenting cancel culture or something - i'm not - but i've absolutely had cases where someone with a different flavor of an opinion i agree with will see something i said, take my slightly different view on it, and quote skeet it with some nasty comment tearing into me. their friends, with no context of the discussion i was initially having, will just dive in and tear into me because they are clearly having fun doing it, not because it's actually correcting a problem or resolving a misunderstanding. i frequently have this happen from completely random passers-by to whom i wasn't speaking and who really would have no reason to see my post in the first place. i'm really not a controversial poster on bluesky, either. i really don't think i'm saying anything particularly offensive or earth-shattering. it's just a dumping ground for shower thoughts, mostly. great example of this is some guy who randomly found a post i made about the fact that i was disappointed in joe biden's debate performance, which i'd say is a pretty uncontroversial opinion. he said some nasty stuff, i made the mistake of responding trying to explain myself, and then he just started replying to me exclusively in quote-skeets, berating me and mocking me, and the gaggle of idiots following him just dove on in and also decided to tear in to me for reasons that still don't make a whole lot of sense. all this to say, if you've had any meaningful interaction with folks on these platforms, i feel like you understand the idealized version of a quote post and how far it is from how it's most frequently used.
- Kye 2y ago
  Another real world example: A famous comedian once grossly misunderstood something I said, quote tweeted it with a framing based on that, and sent tens of thousands of views, hundreds of replies, and thousands of notifications my way over the course of a few minutes. All extremely hostile. It can go well: SwiftOnSecurity once QTd me and their comment led to lots of good conversation on the quote and in my own notifications. But they cultivate a good community of followers and understand the responsibility they hold with a 6 digit follower count. The thing about quote posting is that the very act completely collapses context, and puts all the power and responsibility on the quoter. An innocent mistake can be as harmful here as malice because, as I experienced, no amount of trying to address the mis-representation to people coming at me helped because I was just some nobody and someone they trusted told them what's what.
impossiblefork 2y ago
On Reddit I mostly see this feature used for political manipulation. Especially by people who to me are obviously propagandists. It's a very common pattern for me to encounter something, writing a reply I think is superb, seeing it highly upvoted, and then seeing the person I replied to delete that comment. It's incredibly effective-- you get your propaganda out, and when it gets questioned it just disappears-- the lies will have affected many and the rebuttal seen by few.
- BeetleB 2y ago
  That's why you quote the relevant portions...
  - impossiblefork 2y ago
    Yes, but upon the deletion visibility is greatly reduced.

josefresco 2y ago

It is confusing language but basically they're saying "we're giving you this ability, but will be adding a new feature to fix this unfortunate side effect". I think it will cause a shift to "screenshots of posts" as is done on Twitter/X when the retweeter does not want to @ / mention the original author.

Jare 2y ago
That's perfectly fine. Screenshots as posts deter 90% (my guess) of people from going through the trouble of finding the original post/author, but still allow dedicated people to do that. It reduces the ability to trivially post mindless shit to someone on a whim. I totally believe that this approach can significantly increase the signal/noise ratio, without allowing anyone to silence anyone else arbitrarily.
- GrinningFool 2y ago
  It's also completely untrustworthy. It's not complex to make a fake tweet screenshot. It doesn't even always have to pass close scrutiny.
  - Jare 2y ago
    This feature doesn't change that. Whoever wanted to doctor a screenshot will still do, and whoever wanted to post a real screenshot can still do. Now, if someone wanted to quote-reply with the legitimacy of a link but now has to make do with a screenshot that their readers may not trust, well, sounds like they haven't earned a good reputation among their readers, and that's entirely their problem.

roblabla 2y ago

They're acknowledging that it has some downsides, that they think they can resolve through other features that they'll develop later. > If you don't want people to be able to reply critically to a post, why not have a private profile or not post it in the first place? The problem isn't people replying critically, it's people being assholes on the internet, leveraging their follower base to harass someone. This feature gives tool to the bluesky posters to protect themselves against this form of harassment. Hence why they're going with it despite the downsides: it's a necessary feature for people to protect themselves against harassment.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
richbell 2y ago
> The problem isn't people replying critically, it's people being assholes on the internet... it's a necessary feature for people to protect themselves against harassment. The problem is that "harassmemt" is a nebulous term. Many people inappropriately (in my opinion) claim any sort of dissenting voices are "harassment".
- xg15 2y ago
  Are you claiming there are no such things as shitstorms, dogpiling or cyberbullying?
  - richbell 2y ago
    > Are you claiming there are no such things as shitstorms, dogpiling or cyberbullying? Please quote where you believe I made this claim.
    - xg15 2y ago
      Well, how would you protect against cyberbullying then?

malwrar 2y ago

I think they’re intending to address something like THE X GROUP DID Y THING TO THE Z GROUP (which we will assume to be false) by allowing for factual corrections via “community notes” and “labels” that I assume the T&S team plans to control. Depending on how the specifics of this future plan manifest, I think this could be useful for quelling legitimate adversarial or genuinely uninformed and harmful misinformation. I still worry about the bias and transparency of whoever controls these labels, and the general potential of these features to enable the creation of echo chambers, but least this will all be transparent and observable via the developer API so factual investigation and reporting can be done on how this actually plays out in practice. I hate censorship and the general cowardice of people who would abuse these features to stifle legitimate dissent, but I think these features are a good compromise between that and the opposite real problem of malicious/harmful legitimate misinformation.

newsclues 2y ago

Sounds like they are making a tradeoff of creating community bubbles or silos in order to limit unwanted interactions. Seems like safe spaces online, where people can be happy but perhaps they will be sharing opinions and information that are incorrect, but they won't be unhappy from people they disagree with providing the facts.

anonfordays 2y ago

>If you don't want people to be able to reply critically to a post, why not have a private profile or not post it in the first place? Exactly. Someone will post something abhorrent, critical replies will be removed, supportive replies will stay. It will make echo chambers worse than they ever have been. Then again, that may be exactly what the users want.

skrbjc 2y ago
This is a key criticism of reddit, and everyone knows how much of an echo chamber reddit is
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  I don't. Enlighten me, please.
  - ineedaj0b 2y ago
    it's sorta like reading the breitbart comment section but it's all left wing. there's some good stuff, but there's also good stuff on mass email chains if you read enough of them. reddit ain't what it used to be.
  - Levitz 2y ago
    Reddit enforces echo chambers mainly on two levels, the user level and the mod level. Nobody respects etiquette anymore, and rather than upvoting valuable content they upvote whatever they like. As an extreme example, you can make the best, most honest, rational argumentation of a political issue, if the users don't agree with your stance it's going to be downvotted and hidden. Similarly, they will tolerate content that might be against the rules or the spirit of the subreddit if it's something they agree with. On top of that, the vast majority of the time moderators enforce echo chambers themselves through bias, with a few of them going as far as banning every single user that posts in communities they disagree with, even if they have never engaged with the community they themselves moderate.
    - 2y ago

bangaroo 2y ago

bluesky currently doesn't support private profiles, so that's a no-go. while i fundamentally agree with what you're saying, the cases where a quote-skeet contains a polite or well-intentioned correction vs. is explicitly designed to enrage the quoter's follower-base and dunk on that person are way out of balance. there are many people who will, rather than attempt to correct a misunderstanding (or simply ignore an opinion they don't agree with,) immediately jump to quote-tweeting and dunking on someone, trying to drag their followers into a dogpile. it's often just blatantly unnecessary and it is frequently a miserable experience to be on the receiving end of that. i worry i'm coming across as lamenting cancel culture or something - i'm not - but i've absolutely had cases where someone with a different flavor of an opinion i agree with will see something i said, take my slightly different view on it, and quote skeet it with some nasty comment tearing into me. their friends, with no context of the discussion i was initially having, will just dive in and tear into me because they are clearly having fun doing it, not because it's actually correcting a problem or resolving a misunderstanding. i frequently have this happen from completely random passers-by to whom i wasn't speaking and who really would have no reason to see my post in the first place. i'm really not a controversial poster on bluesky, either. i really don't think i'm saying anything particularly offensive or earth-shattering. it's just a dumping ground for shower thoughts, mostly. great example of this is some guy who randomly found a post i made about the fact that i was disappointed in joe biden's debate performance, which i'd say is a pretty uncontroversial opinion. he said some nasty stuff, i made the mistake of responding trying to explain myself, and then he just started replying to me exclusively in quote-skeets, berating me and mocking me, and the gaggle of idiots following him just dove on in and also decided to tear in to me for reasons that still don't make a whole lot of sense. all this to say, if you've had any meaningful interaction with folks on these platforms, i feel like you understand the idealized version of a quote post and how far it is from how it's most frequently used.

Kye 2y ago
Another real world example: A famous comedian once grossly misunderstood something I said, quote tweeted it with a framing based on that, and sent tens of thousands of views, hundreds of replies, and thousands of notifications my way over the course of a few minutes. All extremely hostile. It can go well: SwiftOnSecurity once QTd me and their comment led to lots of good conversation on the quote and in my own notifications. But they cultivate a good community of followers and understand the responsibility they hold with a 6 digit follower count. The thing about quote posting is that the very act completely collapses context, and puts all the power and responsibility on the quoter. An innocent mistake can be as harmful here as malice because, as I experienced, no amount of trying to address the mis-representation to people coming at me helped because I was just some nobody and someone they trusted told them what's what.

impossiblefork 2y ago

On Reddit I mostly see this feature used for political manipulation. Especially by people who to me are obviously propagandists. It's a very common pattern for me to encounter something, writing a reply I think is superb, seeing it highly upvoted, and then seeing the person I replied to delete that comment. It's incredibly effective-- you get your propaganda out, and when it gets questioned it just disappears-- the lies will have affected many and the rebuttal seen by few.

BeetleB 2y ago
That's why you quote the relevant portions...
- impossiblefork 2y ago
  Yes, but upon the deletion visibility is greatly reduced.