Block Party Aims to Be a 'Spam Folder' for Social Media Harassment

This is a strange article for me. It feels more like another push to be tribal rather to admit there is a problem.

The problem that I see: Social media has emboldened people to look at attention and fame as something that has to be achieved. People actively fight over it. It's a pretty self absorbed approach to label people who disagree in an extreme manner (poes law here.. but trolls is what I was suggesting.. it's not far way from calling people nazis) .

Also, something to mention.. it's rather frustrating to see people dealing with being a minor to major internet celebrity. (That's what people are fighting over and for) For the most part that was a self selected goal to get there, and when they're there they don't like the bad side of it. The article in question completely ignores who she's referring to when she talks about "hate". (Is it a pro troll army, how does she even get to the ire of their attention, has she been pretty aggressive towards them?)

Sly edit: All those who downvote me support javascript and are haters. No reason to disagree with me. /s

Another interesting blog post by the subject of this article: https://blog.blockpartyapp.com/p/what-counts-as-harassment-a...

I think Block Party more or less acknowledges that it's not about blocking actual harassment (though it probably tries to do that, too), and more about insulating people from "unwanted content". What exactly this means is only alluded to, but seems to amount to the exclusion of people who disagree with the poster.

Is this actually about stopping harassment or more about the cultivation of echo-chambers? Are "unwanted reply-guys" people who e.g. point out identical male/female disparities among CS graduates in response to allegations that tech is biased against women? And what's the consequence of this kind of blocking? Is isolating people from viewpoints outside an accepted orthodoxy supposed to be a positive for society? If the "reply-guys" followed suit, and configured their Block Party to filter out people with opposing viewpoints, would that be a positive outcome?

If Block Party is effective in actually curbing actual harassment, stalking, etc. then that's a great effect and Tracy is right that it's something platforms should do themselves. But I get the sense that it's less about harassment and more about "unwanted content".

Tools like this are extremely necessary and important. I think that platforms (Twitter, Reddit, etc) don't have a real incentive to build out powerful tools to stop this stuff. If you aren't detecting that comments are noxious garbage, then those comments just look like engagement. It's much harder for a platform to notice/quantify the loss from folks leaving or not engaging because of the bad behavior they see, not to mention the direct harm to folks receiving the hate.

When I emailed Daniel (dang) about it ages ago it sounded like there wasn't much automation in moderation on HN. If HN doesn't have the tools, then I expect random Discord, subreddit, etc moderators are also doing their work by having humans wade through manually.

I think Tracy Chou / Block Party are more likely to succeed than the platforms are, since in this case the incentives are actually aligned.

I remember when Tracy Chou did an AMA on Reddit and it devolved into such vitriol that it effectively became an advert for her own app.

Early on, twitter seemed to be aiming for a much more open ecosystem with an eventual range of 3rd party clients and such. If twitter was an open protocol, instead of a company, it probably would have that.

I suspect that an as open protocol, it would be withstanding the current political problems of social media much better. Wikipedia, rss podcasts, the www, email... these are all pretty unscathed relative to twitter or fb. A lot of this comes down to user control.

Building on twitter or fb's platform isn't good enough. We badly need these networks to be displaced by open protocols. I suspect it's too late though. FB is already a too big to fail, economically. Ironic, considering their whole function could be filled bu a non-company or companies several order of magnitudes smaller.

Whether your problem is too much abuse or too much canceling, your problem is protocol squatters like fb and twitter. You have far fewer of these problems in your podcast feed, email, on wikipedia or whatever. It's not that culture problems don't exist. They exist everywhere, but the protocols don't amplify them like platforms do.

huge fan of Amy Zhang's work on digital civics/harassment/governance/justice. She's one of the folks who worked on SquadBox[1], which is a similar sort of protection system, except it's run by your peers me/friends. Lets them filter & deal with troubling encounters, be a first line of defense.

her other projects are similarly on the leadingest of edges, dealing with digital juries, construction kits for digital policy, information truthfulness collaboration tools, many more.

so far almost all digital systems are authoritarian "we say so" little fiefs & moderations is warnings or bans, & that's it. it's remarkably savage & opaque & often imo cruel. glad to see some attempts to bring real governance & process & human sociological cooperativity into the wild wild net. thanks all you trying to advance our resocialization.

[1] https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~axz/pub_details.html?id=squ...

I love services like these -- by having strong end-user read-side filtering, you can run services with less platform-level publication censorship.

Platforms like Twitter have unique platform dynamics which make "dogpiling" and stuff like that particularly bad (no current social media platform is as good at handling moderation and abuse as USENET was...). Solving that is awesome.

How does this work? Do you consume your Twitter feed through Twitter or through blockparty?

The idea of a "spam folder" for social media harassment doesn't really make sense. An email is a private communication. But social media is public. If someone throws a hot take at you on social media, not only is it not private, it is about as public as it can get.

Something about this degree of forced intimacy feels very unnatural; maybe because it is -- it's to some extent engagement hacking meant to juice ad dollars. So I appreciate the desire to try and encourage more intimate, tightly woven spaces over faceless sprawl. Unfortunately, the problem with rejecting the world and retreating into the woods is that you forfeit the commons.

And that is the issue here. We won't solve the myriad issues of the public commons this way. What is needed is frankly a more ambitious and systematic solution, one that addresses the effective and perverse incentive structure for producing and selling conspiracy theories, tailor made to every tribe.

These filters tend to be used less to block harassment, in the sense of targeted vitriol towards you or your group, and more to block any and all people who disagree with you, including the polite ones.

I'm not sure how I feel about that. Certainly, individuals have the right to wall themselves off from counter-arguments, but polite public discourse between ideological opposites is a precious thing, as is the ability to sit down after a hard day at work and not read 10 spelling mistakes squeezed into a 280 character death threat.

I find that anybody who uses the term mansplaining loses credibility. If others opinion becomes disposable to you due to their gender identity, then you are a sexist.

I'm always annoyed by articles like this which never include a link to the actual web/app that's being discussed. I see many Wired articles do the same thing.

Is there some publishing rule against providing a link to the website/app that's being discussed?

How shit is Twitter, that most knowledgeable people agree this is a reasonable purpose for a new firm? This work should have been done a decade ago. It's not as if Twitter were busy working on profitability...

Why not just walk away from all this garbage. Social media is trash. It can't help but be trash. Reddit, Twitter, FB is just dumpster diving in stolen and recycled garbage to only find the occasional nugget of something original and interesting. If you need an app on top of your app to manage your emotions you're going down the wrong path. You're headed for sewage plant.

This whole things sounds like a Fat Bastard:

I can't stop eating. I eat because I'm unhappy, and I'm unhappy because I eat. It's a vicious cycle. Now, if you'll excuse me, there's someone I'd like to get in touch with and forgive... myself.

What would be the use case for this versus just having a Twitter account set to private? Personally I've never understood the appeal of private Twitter accounts since it seems to defeat the whole purpose of a fully-public platform, but it seems like this would largely do the same.

>women and people of color are particularly targeted for online abuse

I think you have to be careful with the vocabulary here. If a white man is being abused online, and he complains about it, his complaint may be rendered illegitimate on the basis of being "tone policing". He may be told that "freedom of speech does not mean freedom from its consequences". He may be told that the people abusing him are under no obligation to educate him and are doing "unpaid emotional labor".

"I call out bad behavior, they are trolling, you engage in targeted online harassment."

If anything, I've noticed that women and minorities seem to have more of a blank check to get really crass and say things like "go fuck yourself", etc. I see people being mocked on the basis of being "mediocre white men" far more often on Twitter than I see them mocked on the basis of being "mediocre women of color". Gendered/racialized equivalents of "toxic masculinity" and "whiteness" aren't as widely employed.

(Agreed that social media can be terrible; I hope this initiative makes it better.)

"I've experienced a pretty wide range of harassment," she said. "Everything from the casual mansplaining-reply guys...

Incredible that the whole article (basically an ad) is full of attacks on people based on their gender and skin color, while singing the buzzwords of diversity snd tolerance. American society truly is bizarre.