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Comment by richbell | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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>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.

This is a key criticism of reddit, and everyone knows how much of an echo chamber reddit is

I don't. Enlighten me, please.

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.

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.

The corners of Reddit I inhabit do not suffer from these issues.

I spent a lot of time on usenet in the 1990s discussing politics there (mostly talk.politics.theory which was riven with libertarians). Given that I've lived another 40 years since then, I would simply not bother to do this anymore. Mass discussion of political issues is, in my eyes, mostly a dead end.

By contrast, locale-based subreddits, equipment-based subreddits, how-to-based subreddits remain, in my experience, relative gold mines.

Locale-based subreddits are some of the worst sub-reddits available.

You mean places like /r/korea, /r/australia, /r/melbourne etc. right?

They are the bottom of the barrel and the biggest wasted spaces due to moderator power trips and propaganda. Seriously, the moderators at these places are absolute shut-ins that subscribe to very extreme ideas and ban anything slightly away from what they believe in.

For example, Australia day is a day that celebrates Australia the country. You can be banned on Australian sub-reddits for saying "Happy Australia day" (something most Australians do). This is due to some insane, extremist ideas about Australia day.

Another example, /r/korea will silence anyone who does not agree with the US constant overwriting of Korean culture and Korean social mores. To speak on topics such as whether Korea should legalise drugs (it would be a disaster to do so, but Americans going to America) is a bannable offence.

It seems that a common thread is that Reddit (and Redditlikes) fail when the topic is too big.

I generally use Reddit for small topics. My home town is 80,000 people embedded in a county with a total of 150,000. Our locale-based subreddit works fine (admittedly with a lot of predictable and repeated whining from certain demographics). Our moderators are rarely in sight or even detectable.

Agreed, but locale sub-reddits are usually the fastest sustained growth forums on there and the power of the mods is exceptionally realistic.

Love how he used locale based smaller subreddits as some gotcha when those are some of the most heavily propagandized and censored subreddits. He comes off as one of those "I'm too smart to be propagandized" types, won't believe the narrative has been shaped in his small subreddits even when proof is staring at him right in his face.

I don't know what you read, but it wasn't anything that I wrote.

I've written only about my specific experience. I am not too smart to be propagandized.

Big subreddits clearly have major issues, and I acknowledged that. Presumably some small ones too. The ones I tend to hang out in ... I don't see any of the issues discussed here. There are no overarching mods, there is no groupspeak (to speak of), there is little to no banning/blocking.

So sure, maybe you have experience of smaller locale based subreddit that does. That's fine, no argument from me.

See my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41383744

Reddit is a good example of how insane that can make discourse look in some subreddits, with one large one in particular showing how you truly can just engineer a faux consensus by deleting and banning every single comment and commenter that differs even slightly.

Reddit also overhauled user blocking, which means that both mods and normal users are able to create a narrative.

https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/sdcsx3/test...

If we're going all in on how they've ruined their site, their change of the default sort to use a variety of engagement metrics rather than upvotes is why the frontpage is mostly ragebait and gossip posts, as those drive engagement metrics like comments, replies, and time spent reading comments.

https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/o5tjcn/evolving_the_b...

There's also the fact that nearly 100% of frontpage posts are pruned by moderators within 12 hours now. Tracked by a subreddit (RedditMinusMods) that reddit banned without reason, but you can still find a link to a graph of that happening on HN of all places: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36040282

> Exactly. Someone will post something abhorrent, critical replies will be removed, supportive replies will stay.

Precisely and this is the misguided approach to moderation I see everywhere - it basically turbo charges cry-bullies, trolls, and people devoted to spreading misinformation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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".

Of course. But there are also very real cases of people quote-posting someone with an opinion they don't agree with, leveraging their follower-base to start dogpiling. Even without the harassment problems, this is already not a very good way to have a conversation, as you'll end up with a ton of people with the same viewpoint replying. But then things can go even further with people starting to send death-threats and other niceties of this kind to the OP - which is definitely harassment territory.

Currently, there just isn't many good tools to protect yourself against this kind of dogpiling.

---

Personally, I think both are necessary: A tool to protect against using quote-posts for dogpiling, and another to correct misinformation.

I'd dare say: social media promotes the idea that any sort of dissenting voices is harassment. It's not a spontaneous belief on the part of the people who claim that.

Are you claiming there are no such things as shitstorms, dogpiling or cyberbullying?

> Are you claiming there are no such things as shitstorms, dogpiling or cyberbullying?

Please quote where you believe I made this claim.

Well, how would you protect against cyberbullying then?

> 1. We must do something.

> 2. This is something.

> 3. Therefore, we must do this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism

Point taken.

Yeah, it's of course legitimate to argue against some specific tool or strategy to combat harassment, like the changes proposed here.

But your post sounded as if the whole concept of "harassment" was problematic, due to the risk of people abusing the anti-harrasment tools for censorship. I agree, the risk is there and needs to adressed, but situations of real harassment and "mob dynamics", in which an individual user suffers real harm but can't do anything about it themselves, also happen frequently. I think it's dangerous to ignore those by throwing the whole concept under the bus.

Dissenting voices from a ton of anonymous people looks a lot like harassment, especially when their expectations for what normal debate and politeness look like don’t match yours.

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.

That's why you quote the relevant portions...

Yes, but upon the deletion visibility is greatly reduced.

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.

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.

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.

You put it a lot more succinctly than I did:

> The thing about quote posting is that the very act completely collapses context, and puts all the power and responsibility on the quoter.

There have been plenty of circumstances online where I was, in fact, the fool. I've had many interactions where I benefitted from being corrected. Almost universally, these corrections came in the form of a reply or private discussion designed to engage me specifically and not in a performative manner, and I found them very helpful.

I see less value to someone having the right (or perceived duty) to amplify my meager reach while correcting me in front of people who don't know me and who lack any empathy for me. I don't see the difference between this and someone, during a conversation in a bar, standing up on the bartop and yelling HEY EVERYONE, CHECK OUT WHAT THIS GUY JUST SAID! and then loudly correcting me while egging everyone else on.

I have questions about the impact of this feature on more famous figures - for example, I'm not sure I'd want a politician to employ this functionality against me. There is some balance that likely needs to be struck that takes into account the reach and impact of the original message and thus the potential for damage. They seem to be touching on that with the future community notes feature. I can see why that's a more appealing approach. That allows the opportunity for correction/response while not actively promoting the thing that's being responded to - just providing context when people come across the post organically.

I've had two pull-aside moments exactly like this on social media! They changed me for the better. The pull out and up of a quote never had that effect even if that's the stated intent of its most ardent defenders.

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.

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