6 ms·

It is definitely a perk. If I see someone whose posts are abhorrent and someone is following them, then I understand that they share values in some way and I do

by iteria 2y ago

It is definitely a perk. If I see someone whose posts are abhorrent and someone is following them, then I understand that they share values in some way and I don't want to see them either. Some people are block happy, but being able cut off chains of people is a perk. I'm also pretty sure OG Twitter and Mastodon let you see followers. If you could make them private, I never found any user that actually did that.

Ukv 2y ago
> then I understand that they share values in some way Is it expected that people only ever want to see content that aligns with their views in their feed? I feel it's relatively common for someone to want to keep an eye on, say, what Trump is posting even if they detest him. Probably becomes self-reinforcing in that by treating follows as a public endorsement, many people start following only what they want to be seen endorsing instead of what they want on their timeline. Which leaves a void for a timeline of what I want to see instead of what I want to be seen endorsing, probably currently filled (slightly awkwardly) by using an alternate account or visiting the profiles manually.
- Spivak 2y ago
  It depends on what your personal philosophy of blocklists is. If you believe that on a supermassive social network that no single person's content is worth anything and can safely discarded then what you're interested in is signal and a low false negative rate. Who a person follows is a pretty strong signal of their values. Is it always accurate, no, you stand as an example of such a person but their feed is still full and the kind of people they have in mind they don't want to see are gone. Reddit has a similar culture with extensions that let you hide users that subscribe to or have ever posted in certain subreddits. It works better than it has any right to.
  - haswell 2y ago
    > Who a person follows is a pretty strong signal of their values I strongly disagree, and believing this to be true is a problem for public discourse IMO. What a person posts and who they repost is a strong signal of their values. I dislike/disagree with the validity of a social construct where people who choose to stay informed are assumed to hold values they do not.
    - whimsicalism 2y ago
      absolutely agreed + most of my inclusion in these blocklists is due to actions taken by someone i follow after i followed them (some AI person I followed who posted bluesky posts on huggingface). it really is ridiculous to read a follow as an endorsement i think this is more of a cultural issue with bluesky than a technical issue/flaw
    - sumeno 2y ago
      Nobody cares about your public discourse. Your opinion is not that important to 99.9999% of the people on this planet. I use social media to follow people I like and see funny jokes and if a few people undeservedly catch a block oh well, that's the price of a curated feed. Call it an echo chamber, but nobody has a right to have their posts be seen
      - haswell 2y ago
        I was reacting to the very direct and unqualified statement that who a person follows strongly indicates their values. If you’re just using social media for entertainment, I don’t care who you block or how. But perpetuating the idea that “follow equals endorsement” is a problem regardless. This has less to do with people having a right to be seen and more to do with the perpetuation of ideas that make society more polarized in spaces where such things matter. To put this another way, I’d react less strongly to “blocking people based on who they follow weeds out almost everyone I don’t want to see and I accept the false positives”. I’d still express concerns about the resulting echo chamber but that’s a far more reasonable position.
    - Spivak 2y ago
      I don't think you can really decide whether something is a useful signal or not. I don't and can't assume anything about an individual because they follow Evil McBaddington. But the fun thing about statistics is I that I can assume a great many things about the set of all people who follow Evil McBaddington. I see this "scale invariant fallacy" all the time with programmers. The forward direction being a thing and that thing in a for loop are equivalent in essence, and the reverse being that a property being true about a set means it's true for its members (can decompose aggregate statements into an equivalent for loop acting on each member).
- mensetmanusman 2y ago
  “Is it expected that people only ever want to see content that aligns with their views in their feed?” It is for those that need safe spaces. I love hearing the nonsense on both sides so I’m sure I would be blocked by people not ready to listen to such views due to fragility issues.
- haswell 2y ago
  > Is it expected that people only ever want to see content that aligns with their views in their feed? Emphatically no, and it’s one of the things that I dislike about what blocklists have become on Bluesky. The fact that many people now view follows as some kind of endorsement speaks to how much social media has deteriorated and arguably makes the polarization problem worse - not just because people are making themselves ignorant of what public figures are saying, but they’re isolating themselves from the people they actually do align with who choose to keep themselves informed, further reinforcing the echo chamber. Depending on your primary reason for using social media, I realize how attractive it is to quickly lock down your feeds. But it comes with a dark side, and blocking someone for no reason other than following an account is part of that dark side IMO.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  It can be a decent _heuristic_ for “I probably don’t want to hear from this person”. Like, it’s not bulletproof, but the _cost_ of a false positive is low. I think “follows Trump” would be a not-great heuristic, for the reason you mention, but, say, ‘follows libsoftiktok’ is probably a good heuristic for filtering out arseholes. It can also be pretty effective for stopping brigading. Back in the day, when he was still a darling of the far-right, I managed to offend Milo Yiannopolis on Twitter (turns out he twitter-searched his own name) and he siced his followers on me. It took about a day of mass blocklists (back when these kinda worked on Twitter), and individual blocking, to stem the flow of spam; a button to simply block everyone who followed Milo Yiannopolis would have been convenient, and nothing of value would have been lost.
  - Ukv 2y ago
    > It can be a decent _heuristic_ for “I probably don’t want to hear from this person”. Like, it’s not bulletproof, but the _cost_ of a false positive is low. I think “follows Trump” would be a not-great heuristic, for the reason you mention, but, say, ‘follows libsoftiktok’ is probably a good heuristic for filtering out arseholes. I feel you're calling something a good heuristic based solely on how predictive it is, and not considering the impacts of using that heuristic. A property tax based on the number of windows in a house[0] may have acceptably low false positives, but encourages people to brick up their windows. Here it makes follows performative rather than just about what I'm interested in seeing on my timeline, since I'd now be hesitant to follow content that doesn't align with my views. In addition, everyone on the site being discouraged from receiving content from outside their bubble seems likely to exacerbate echo chambers. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_tax
whimsicalism 2y ago
> If I see someone whose posts are abhorrent and someone is following them, then I understand that they share values in some way and I don't want to see them either yeah, a lot of bluesky members seem to hold this attitude - but it is not correct & moreso incentivizes epistemic bad practices
NitpickLawyer 2y ago
> then I understand that they share values in some way and I don't want to see them either. komerad iteriasky, our sources tell us that you poses book on kaptialism. Why you share depraved views, komerad? This very bad for you. alternatively... Mr. iteria, we see that you've checked out a book by Marx from the public library. Why are you a communist mr iteria, and do you know that by being one you're putting our brave republic in grave danger? We shall revoke your right to work in any government position from now on. Red danger, mr iteria. ---- How on earth did we go through all that crap in our recent history, and people still think that reading something is sharing those values?! And banning them preemptively?

by iteria 2y ago

Ukv 2y ago

> then I understand that they share values in some way Is it expected that people only ever want to see content that aligns with their views in their feed? I feel it's relatively common for someone to want to keep an eye on, say, what Trump is posting even if they detest him. Probably becomes self-reinforcing in that by treating follows as a public endorsement, many people start following only what they want to be seen endorsing instead of what they want on their timeline. Which leaves a void for a timeline of what I want to see instead of what I want to be seen endorsing, probably currently filled (slightly awkwardly) by using an alternate account or visiting the profiles manually.

Spivak 2y ago
It depends on what your personal philosophy of blocklists is. If you believe that on a supermassive social network that no single person's content is worth anything and can safely discarded then what you're interested in is signal and a low false negative rate. Who a person follows is a pretty strong signal of their values. Is it always accurate, no, you stand as an example of such a person but their feed is still full and the kind of people they have in mind they don't want to see are gone. Reddit has a similar culture with extensions that let you hide users that subscribe to or have ever posted in certain subreddits. It works better than it has any right to.
- haswell 2y ago
  > Who a person follows is a pretty strong signal of their values I strongly disagree, and believing this to be true is a problem for public discourse IMO. What a person posts and who they repost is a strong signal of their values. I dislike/disagree with the validity of a social construct where people who choose to stay informed are assumed to hold values they do not.
  - whimsicalism 2y ago
    absolutely agreed + most of my inclusion in these blocklists is due to actions taken by someone i follow after i followed them (some AI person I followed who posted bluesky posts on huggingface). it really is ridiculous to read a follow as an endorsement i think this is more of a cultural issue with bluesky than a technical issue/flaw
  - sumeno 2y ago
    Nobody cares about your public discourse. Your opinion is not that important to 99.9999% of the people on this planet. I use social media to follow people I like and see funny jokes and if a few people undeservedly catch a block oh well, that's the price of a curated feed. Call it an echo chamber, but nobody has a right to have their posts be seen
    - haswell 2y ago
      I was reacting to the very direct and unqualified statement that who a person follows strongly indicates their values. If you’re just using social media for entertainment, I don’t care who you block or how. But perpetuating the idea that “follow equals endorsement” is a problem regardless. This has less to do with people having a right to be seen and more to do with the perpetuation of ideas that make society more polarized in spaces where such things matter. To put this another way, I’d react less strongly to “blocking people based on who they follow weeds out almost everyone I don’t want to see and I accept the false positives”. I’d still express concerns about the resulting echo chamber but that’s a far more reasonable position.
  - Spivak 2y ago
    I don't think you can really decide whether something is a useful signal or not. I don't and can't assume anything about an individual because they follow Evil McBaddington. But the fun thing about statistics is I that I can assume a great many things about the set of all people who follow Evil McBaddington. I see this "scale invariant fallacy" all the time with programmers. The forward direction being a thing and that thing in a for loop are equivalent in essence, and the reverse being that a property being true about a set means it's true for its members (can decompose aggregate statements into an equivalent for loop acting on each member).
mensetmanusman 2y ago
“Is it expected that people only ever want to see content that aligns with their views in their feed?” It is for those that need safe spaces. I love hearing the nonsense on both sides so I’m sure I would be blocked by people not ready to listen to such views due to fragility issues.
haswell 2y ago
> Is it expected that people only ever want to see content that aligns with their views in their feed? Emphatically no, and it’s one of the things that I dislike about what blocklists have become on Bluesky. The fact that many people now view follows as some kind of endorsement speaks to how much social media has deteriorated and arguably makes the polarization problem worse - not just because people are making themselves ignorant of what public figures are saying, but they’re isolating themselves from the people they actually do align with who choose to keep themselves informed, further reinforcing the echo chamber. Depending on your primary reason for using social media, I realize how attractive it is to quickly lock down your feeds. But it comes with a dark side, and blocking someone for no reason other than following an account is part of that dark side IMO.
rsynnott 2y ago
It can be a decent _heuristic_ for “I probably don’t want to hear from this person”. Like, it’s not bulletproof, but the _cost_ of a false positive is low. I think “follows Trump” would be a not-great heuristic, for the reason you mention, but, say, ‘follows libsoftiktok’ is probably a good heuristic for filtering out arseholes. It can also be pretty effective for stopping brigading. Back in the day, when he was still a darling of the far-right, I managed to offend Milo Yiannopolis on Twitter (turns out he twitter-searched his own name) and he siced his followers on me. It took about a day of mass blocklists (back when these kinda worked on Twitter), and individual blocking, to stem the flow of spam; a button to simply block everyone who followed Milo Yiannopolis would have been convenient, and nothing of value would have been lost.
- Ukv 2y ago
  > It can be a decent _heuristic_ for “I probably don’t want to hear from this person”. Like, it’s not bulletproof, but the _cost_ of a false positive is low. I think “follows Trump” would be a not-great heuristic, for the reason you mention, but, say, ‘follows libsoftiktok’ is probably a good heuristic for filtering out arseholes. I feel you're calling something a good heuristic based solely on how predictive it is, and not considering the impacts of using that heuristic. A property tax based on the number of windows in a house[0] may have acceptably low false positives, but encourages people to brick up their windows. Here it makes follows performative rather than just about what I'm interested in seeing on my timeline, since I'd now be hesitant to follow content that doesn't align with my views. In addition, everyone on the site being discouraged from receiving content from outside their bubble seems likely to exacerbate echo chambers. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_tax

whimsicalism 2y ago

> If I see someone whose posts are abhorrent and someone is following them, then I understand that they share values in some way and I don't want to see them either yeah, a lot of bluesky members seem to hold this attitude - but it is not correct & moreso incentivizes epistemic bad practices

NitpickLawyer 2y ago

> then I understand that they share values in some way and I don't want to see them either. komerad iteriasky, our sources tell us that you poses book on kaptialism. Why you share depraved views, komerad? This very bad for you. alternatively... Mr. iteria, we see that you've checked out a book by Marx from the public library. Why are you a communist mr iteria, and do you know that by being one you're putting our brave republic in grave danger? We shall revoke your right to work in any government position from now on. Red danger, mr iteria. ---- How on earth did we go through all that crap in our recent history, and people still think that reading something is sharing those values?! And banning them preemptively?