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> 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. Wha

> 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).
- haswell 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. Maybe I misunderstood your comment, but isn’t that exactly the opposite of what you’re saying here? > Who a person follows is a pretty strong signal of their values If your position is closer to “on average, people who follow other people tend to be more aligned with the people they follow”, I’d probably agree. But this is a vastly different statement than “following someone strongly indicates endorsement”. > I see this "scale invariant fallacy" all the time with programmers. I think it’s problematic to bring too much of an engineering mindset to a social issue like this. Algorithms can be cleanly and rigidly defined. Social issues tend to be messy and complicated. In terms of pure utility, it may be true that blocking people based on who they follow results in a clean feed at a low (effort) cost. But perpetuating the idea that following someone equals endorsement has longer term social costs and gets into dystopian territory pretty quickly, and depending on why someone is using social media, the impact of entirely excluding the group of people that “follow but disagree” is likely not small. If you’re on there for cat memes, probably not a big deal. If you’re trying to stay informed or be politically active, probably a bigger deal. And regardless of use case, believing things about other people reflexively based on something like follow status is not a healthy place for society to be. Most people do not appreciate the nuance of what you’re describing as “scale invariant fallacy”. My biggest issue here is the framing and the questionable/harmful conclusions that can be derived from it.
  - 2y ago

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).

haswell 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. Maybe I misunderstood your comment, but isn’t that exactly the opposite of what you’re saying here? > Who a person follows is a pretty strong signal of their values If your position is closer to “on average, people who follow other people tend to be more aligned with the people they follow”, I’d probably agree. But this is a vastly different statement than “following someone strongly indicates endorsement”. > I see this "scale invariant fallacy" all the time with programmers. I think it’s problematic to bring too much of an engineering mindset to a social issue like this. Algorithms can be cleanly and rigidly defined. Social issues tend to be messy and complicated. In terms of pure utility, it may be true that blocking people based on who they follow results in a clean feed at a low (effort) cost. But perpetuating the idea that following someone equals endorsement has longer term social costs and gets into dystopian territory pretty quickly, and depending on why someone is using social media, the impact of entirely excluding the group of people that “follow but disagree” is likely not small. If you’re on there for cat memes, probably not a big deal. If you’re trying to stay informed or be politically active, probably a bigger deal. And regardless of use case, believing things about other people reflexively based on something like follow status is not a healthy place for society to be. Most people do not appreciate the nuance of what you’re describing as “scale invariant fallacy”. My biggest issue here is the framing and the questionable/harmful conclusions that can be derived from it.
- 2y ago