Bluesky is ushering in a pick-your-own algorithm era of social media
newscientist.com
newscientist.com
Can't disagree more. Call me old-fashioned but I hate any algorithms at all meddling with what I see. If I follow someone, I want to see their posts, all of them, without exceptions. If I don't follow someone, I only want to see their posts if they were knowingly reposted by someone who I do follow. If I want some posts filtered from my feed, I'll set up word filters myself, thank you very much.
It's a recurring theme in the modern IT industry that "the average user" can't be trusted to take their own responsibility. It's sometimes taken as an indisputable truth, even. Why does this keep happening? What can I do to put an end to this?
This was simply a lie press released by Facebook, and endlessly repeated uncritically. Facebook became Facebook with a chronological feed. It began to manipulate the feed because it was profitable and the government didn't object. That confused the hell out of people for years, when they couldn't figure out why their aunt posted something that never showed up.
And after that, social media transformed into something other than keeping track of your family and friends because of the paid injections of crap.
You can't possibly do anything to "put an end to this."
Twitter and Bluesky both allow you to see a chronological feed, though you have to jump through some hoops to get to it. Just use that.
You can't possibly do anything to "put an end to this".
It also tries really hard to direct you over to the For You feed silently at any chance it can get.
Also among followers it will surface tweets that it thinks will drive engagement and show/not show retweets based on algorithm.
And this is where the goals of the platforms and their users are at odds with each other.
> Just use that.
The problem is that while I can "just use that", which of course I do, the mere presence of an algorithmic timeline, let alone as the default option, still substantially shapes the way people post and share.
People post differently when they expect interactions from outside of their usual network vs when they don't. I had my tweets get uncomfortably popular on several occasions, presumably because the algorithm decided so, and I didn't enjoy that.
Then there's also the problem that some people you follow will use the algorithmic feed and will repost things from there. Again, this wouldn't happen if it didn't exist, and it's not something I can influence with my choices.
What I want is for content to spread organically again. I want the platform to be a dumb pipe between me and the people I follow. I don't want it to have any agency whatsoever. And I don't want "influencers" to be possible.
They can be, but they usually mostly aren't. Showing people what they like is the best way to get them to come back.
I think you need to accept that what you want is different from what most people want.
> I want the platform to be a dumb pipe between me and the people I follow.
I guess your only hope would be to make it illegal, worldwide, to provide algorithmic feeds.
Hacker News uses an algorithmic feed, and that's why we're here talking. https://news.ycombinator.com/newest exists but it's not very good. You can also browse Reddit chronologically https://www.reddit.com/new/ but, seriously, don't bother.
So, as long as someone can do algorithmic feeds, someone will, and people will use it, even you, because algorithmic feeds are just better than chronological feeds.
> I don't want "influencers" to be possible.
This one is truly hopeless. We've had influencers at least as long as we've had the written word.
There are different usage scenarios of social media. You seem to imply that people use it for entertainment, and yes, the companies themselves sure make them optimized for that. But I want to use social media for staying up to date on my friends' lives and nothing else. Most existing platforms actively resist this use case because it doesn't grow metrics.
> I guess your only hope would be to make it illegal, worldwide, to provide algorithmic feeds.
Well, at least I'm working on two fediverse projects. There are no algorithms on the fediverse. You see posts from the people you follow, in the order in which they were posted, and nothing else.
> We've had influencers at least as long as we've had the written word.
That's different. Those "influencers" always became such organically, because people voluntarily spread their "content". This is vastly different from the platform itself stepping in and non-consensually shoving this content into millions of faces because its black-box algorithm said so.
Many (90%+ I would say but the exact proportion doesn't matter for this) people do not have the time to process every social media post from every person they are connected to. They are only going to see N "posts" (videos, texts, questions, etc) per time unit (day / week / bathroom break). It is 100% genuinely and obviously worse to, if someone only sees...3 posts on your social network for those posts to be [someone complaining about commute, breakfast photo, angry election post] as opposed to [wedding announcement, request for a resource the user has, a close friend sharing something exciting that the user hasn't seen]. Telling users that you are showing them less interesting stuff because "they happened in chronological order" is a bad answer.
Of course social media companies do a bad job at this! They push high-conflict high-engagement content into our feeds because it makes them more money. But I think the problem of "there is a lot going on and you would like a machine to help you prioritize how to process things" is genuinely one of the pressing problems of our age and I get so frustrated when people downplay it. There is more stuff happening in my social world than I have time to fully process - that's just true. I am not interesting in living such a small life that I have time to fully engage with every single happening - I would like a machine to help me.
Cool. I would not. It would be nice to have that option.
Then they are following too many people. Decades ago, a professor at school quipped "if you can't keep up with your news feed using 'more' to read the spool then you follow too many newsgroups"
Like - if the only way you're going to know about someone's wedding is from a social feed... you aren't friends with that person, you're just acquaintances.
Most folks do a great job at informing you of the things that are relevant in your relationship with that person when you... talk to them.
> I am not interesting in living such a small life that I have time to fully engage with every single happening - I would like a machine to help me.
You think that life is small... but I think yours is utterly dehumanizing. You aren't interested in engaging with individuals, you seem to just want their life's highlights thrown at you repetitively until you've burned yourself out on them, like slamming the oxytocin button for your brain without actually doing anything nearly so drab as actually talking to someone.
---
I think my reaction to your comment is driven by your idea that friendships and human interactions are formed over big events (like weddings or exciting happenings). I'd argue fairly strongly that they're driven instead by precisely the small, boring, daily things you're not at all interested in: Commutes. Meals. Emotional responses to small things (politics or not).
I find it distasteful to think you're friends with someone when you only give a shit about the big exciting news they have to share. That's not friendship, it's a weird twisted form of paparazzi/voyeurism. You don't want to know them, you just want their life's highlights presented to you...
---
Emotional response aside - Hard disagree on
> It is 100% genuinely and obviously worse to, if someone only sees...3 posts on your social network for those posts to be [someone complaining about commute, breakfast photo, angry election post] as opposed to [wedding announcement, request for a resource the user has, a close friend sharing something exciting that the user hasn't seen]. Telling users that you are showing them less interesting stuff because "they happened in chronological order" is a bad answer.
The person posted (barely) 3 paragraphs. Like, less than 10 sentences.
Seems pretty hasty to label their life "utterly dehumanizing" from that. Your whole next paragraph is drawing a lot of (frankly, quite rude) conclusions based on nothing. You've read so much into their short comment that you've created an entire fictional person, and then got angry at the fictional person you created.
Looking at their comment and your reply, I would say they have a healthier approach to socializing on the internet than you appear to.
And while you might wish it's fan fiction... it's the very real reason we see things like nation-wide social media bans by age. Calls to reduce or reform social media in general. And a huge number of negative social outcomes since the advent of that style of social media.
It's really, really hard to argue that form of media consumption is healthy. Or appropriate.
Okay, you're disgusted or confused at the fictional person you created.
>And it's not really pointed at the above poster explicitly,
It certainly seems like it is very explicitly pointed at the poster you replied to considering you directly quote their opinion and then, based on that opinion, say that their life is "utterly dehumanizing".
>attitude that human interactions should be prioritized on the scale of "entertain me"
This is not what the parent poster said.
That's fine! I am not asking you to understand that desire. I'm asking you to understand it's a genuinely held desire that people actually want. We can (and will) have different preferences and live in the same society. That's a fine thing.
You have a totally fine and healthy preference for how you manage your own social life, but you are mistaking that preference for a universal standard about how everyone should best manage their social lives. That is the thing I am critiquing. You are allowed to do what you want and I support you! But so often people describe the fact that their preferences are not "the standard" and imply that the balance would be better for everyone - without considering that different people want different things.
Edit: We could also have a discussion about "what is the ideal social model for society" - but that is a different conversation with different claims than the one we are having now. If you are trying to talk about how you think our current society sucks by attacking my points about the benefits of how social media algorithms interact with us - I think you are coming at me in a confused way.
Even if a version of life where we all had smaller social circles and all had less information coming at us was healthier (totally possible!) - that's not the world I find myself living in. I would like tools to help me live in the world I find myself in and I find it distressing that so many fellow tech workers think that's immoral somehow.
P.s. I think you're being quite rude to me and I don't appreciate it.
Correct, but really don't want to. I want to open the app and get the pulse of what is happening in that moment. Not 8 hours ago. Not 4 weeks ago. Right now.
I think at the end of the day, people will flock to the place they love, and that's OK.
Bluesky is not like Mastodon. You control own your data, but traffic chokes at a central point, and the firehose is still controlled, AFAIK, so you can't just federate, and run your own algorithm on your instance and call it a day?
If you write a custom feed, you control what’s in it. If you use a feed by someone else, they control what’s in it.
In theory Bluesky could secretly change their client to mess with the feed subtly, but if you aren’t using their client, then they can’t.
Feeds are on top of the firehose, not below it.
This is my point. How many people won't use "their" client, sans the knowledgeable people?
Mastodon is much more fragmented than Bluesky, so an intentional feed manipulation is only visible to the users of that instance.
I never used Twitter back in the day. I’m trying out BlueSky and not sure what my account should be. I could post software stuff, eg a career related account. I could post pictures from around the city. I could post my personal political thoughts. Or maybe hobby-related, like board games.
But if I’m following someone who’s respected in the career, I’m expecting career content, not random political thoughts. If someone is following me, I want to be able to post more personal content, and more random stuff. Unless it’s a personal friend, I probably don't need to see everything they post!
So I don’t necessarily want a chronological timeline. Custom algos like BlueSky has are pretty interesting. “Here are all the developer posts” and “keep the political posts over here out of your main feed”
I mean do we really need to remember the Facebook posts that people were making 10ish years ago that really was pointless?
That being said, that's the power of having some choice in the matter. If you don't want it, you don't need to use it. Both can be perfectly valid ways to consume social media content.
First is algorithms to select content for users.
This is often an issue because the algorithm is designed to maximize time on site, which results in content that pressed emotional buttons and engages the fight or flight reflex built into us.
The other issue is that users can’t be trusted to use a tool correctly.
I don’t think this last point is wrong, but I don’t think it links to your primary point.
When I was on Instagram, they introduced a chronological feed, but that view hid Stories for some reason. Tinfoil hat theory is that it's to show users prefer their personalized feeds full of ads when in reality they made the chronological view frustrating to use as people use stories more than regular posts these days.
Consider even that most people would throw a fit if what you just asked for was the case and the only case. Most people probably want "most recently posted" given no other options, which is a different algorithm and the reverse order that you say you want.
The notable difference is that no one considers the latter harmful. Undesirable, maybe, but not actively harmful.
"But users prefer algorithmic feeds": There's no evidence of this. The KPI is measuring an increase in hours spent with the app; it is not scientific-method A/B testing a preference between two options. Even if an app could do this, what does "preference" mean? You could measure how many users pick one experience versus another, but I've never found an app that, if it offers both experiences, durably and reliably saves your choice for a chronological feed between re-launches. Also: Maybe I want both experiences, at will. Hours spent in one experience versus the other? This is not communicating a preference; if I choose spending an hour driving during my commute to one job, versus ten minutes walking to another, have I revealed a preference for a longer driving commute? Obviously not.
You can ask users directly: And users may actually reveal their preference that social media never existed at all because your company isn't actually delivering value to the world [1]. Oops. Uh, don't run that survey again, bury it, make sure shareholders don't find out.
All social media is trash, and should not be consumed by anyone who has even an ounce of self-respect. Honestly: HackerNews is in that bucket, but at least its not as bad as most platforms.
[1] https://fortune.com/well/article/nearly-half-of-gen-zers-wis...
Threads does have a chronological feed but it's very well hidden. In the mobile app, you have to tap the logo to reveal the selector. On desktop you click the arrow button next to "for you".
How can something that is not disclosed, e.g., a secret algorithm to support an online advertising business, be more confusing than something that is well-known, e.g., chronological ordering.
There is a simple way to find out what the "average user" prefers. Provide an option to select chronological ordering instead of the so-called "tech" company algorithm to support advertising. No "default". Ask the user to make a selection.
What happened when Apple gave iOS users the option to avoid tracking by Facebook. Zuckerberg hissy fit.
Plus, it has that nice chronological feature in the default algorithm that really focuses on recent news, which was always my issue with Threads.
Not a starter pack, but it might be useful to you!
I fear the recent US election is going to kill it, though.
How? Aren’t there a lot more people migrating to Bluesky now in light of Musk’s antics on X?
About anything that is currently legal and permitted on Twitter seems to be specifically prohibited by design (and can’t be opted out of wrt moderation) in Bluesky. If the Mastodon case is any guide, there will be a great effort to ensure that nothing wrt software can conflict with it.
Nothing. They probably do.
> That is, what makes the Bluesky perspective more valid other than just being on a platform that hates Twitter?
Nothing. It probably isn't.
> About anything that is currently legal and permitted on Twitter seems to be specifically prohibited by design
Trump's FCC chief has signaled he would like to remove Section 230 which would make these things that are prohibited a downside for BlueSky and open them up to litigation and I doubt they have the wallet to litigate like Musk does.
The underlying protocol is the "anything legal is fine" layer, the bluesky app is the "we will engage in moderation" layer.
I am worried about the commercial aspects though. I am willing to pay them a subscription if they just ignore ads altogether. The fact that all of it is oss (the protocol, and the implementation!) does give me hope that they won’t turn into an ad infected slop.
Other than that, yet to be determined. But it’s clearly some form of a platform play. Lots of options.
(I don't necessarily disagree that this is the future, but it is quite funny that the "bring your own algorithm" approach was basically forgotten about for about 25 years, and then revived...)
So they invented (copied) following/friending individuals, which was the opposite of USENET's newsgroup (topic) system and also (sadly...) a proxy for social status.
In reality there's always been huge interest in topic media. Reddit sort-of owned the space for non-real-time posting, and Twitter got some way there with lists for news and the breaking hashtags.
BlueSky feels somewhere between those - still short posts (bad...), more topic than social graph, but not so obsessed with clout chasing and status.
It will be interesting to see how Bluesky is able to continue operating when it needs to generate a profit though. I'm curious what their plans are. The need for profit on social media platforms often results in loss of quality & user experience.
There are an infinite number of activities available to humans. Some people will find some of those activities enjoyable, and others will not. Is there value in joining a conversation about every activity to declare that you don't enjoy it personally?
A more constructive way of engaging might be to say how it might add value to your life if it were different in some way. Or you could warn others that it's harmful in ways they don't recognize. But just an unqualified, "I don't see the point of that," is not so helpful.
I took their post as an implicit request that commenters share their own experiences and how they receive value from these services. A bit like the nuance between the statements "This is pointless" vs "I don't see the point", where the latter has something of an implicit (yet).
>Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
>Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
That said I've done my usual due diligence and created an account very obviously under my IRL name now to hold down the username.
If people sharing your profession or hobbies are there, it's a way to hobnob or talk shop.
If you follow a bunch of reporter-type people, it's an alternative to the newspaper.
The actual site itself is mostly irrelevant, except for how easy or hard or makes it to do specific things.
I think one of the most useful cases of these sites is looking for conversations by people on a subject you are interested in but don't have a lot of real life connection to. For example I was really interested in China studies, so I found a list of Sinologists. Just reading what they write, what sources they recommend and "listening in" on it is a very good way to get exposed to all kinds of stuff you wouldn't even know to search for.
And there's lots of fields like this. Maybe you are interested in abstract expressionist art. What's the chances you know a lot of scholars unless you are one? These networks of really interesting people is I think where the value is in platforms like this.
How comes ? What works, what doesn’t?
Yeah, if you didn't like old/pre-Musk Twitter, you're probably not going to like Bluesky; as far as the user is concerned it's a slightly refined version of the same thing.
The reason algorithmic ordering is so common is because that's what gives the most runway for advertising, behavior manipulation/tracking, and its downstream financial effects.
You’re both right. Algorithmic feeds boost engagement, both by surfacing the most-engaging content and removing the burden of trimming one’s follow list, and also aids in serving ads. (Both by making them easier to sneak in and in the same engine that surfaces engaging organic content being useful for serving engaging ads.)
If you are trying to take users away from twitter, you're going to focus on some 'nice for the user' things (or, at least, 'nicer than twitter for the user').
Like most things in life, this isn't a binary choice (user or advertiser). They're going to try to optimize for both, striking a balance.
I could understand feeding people rage-bait content as a method of false engagement but these are people you followed. Most liked/boosted/retweeted among the people you want updates from seems ideal.
That is a group of users.
Another group of users follows only few active others and therefore sees only little content, but the platforms wants to show them something new all the time, to keep the platform "relevant" (in order to show more ads)
This then of course ignore the fact that they probably purposely follow only few.
It's the majority of users. Those who "follows only few active others" are a very small subset.
On Fediverse, I can open the page, read the things that are new since the last time, and close it.
Best would still be RSS feeds and everyone having their own blog. Just saying.
I think Bluesky/Mastodon are the outliers here, not Twitter.
Some people use Facebook as a primary means of keeping in touch with family.
Some people's Facebook networks mirror their family-and-friends networks.
It's socially awkward to unfollow your relatives, even if you don't particularly want to see what they post, or can't deal with the volume they post.
But it's not socially awkward for Facebook to notice what you do and don't engage with, and try to show you more of what you engage with, regardless of who you follow.
If you treat following someone on X, or Fediverse, or Bluesky, as nothing more or less than a means of seeing what they post, then you can carefully and selectively choose who you follow, such that your chronological timeline is a manageable amount of content. You can choose, for instance, to not follow people who post a massive amount of content, or whose content you mostly don't want to see. You can make lists for people whose posts you might want to sample from time to time and not read all of. You can rely on other people you do follow to repost things that are interesting.
But if you're following so many people, or such high-volume people, that your chronological timeline is a firehose you can't possibly read all of, then an algorithmic timeline becomes more tempting.
Like maybe you, that's all I want, so it feels like chronological should just be the default option that all this algorithm and trending business is nonsense. I just want a nice aggregation of the information I know I want from the sources I personally know, appreciate, and can contextualize.
But "at scale" you end up with a lot of users who are more interested in idle discovery, seeing what their peers are seeing so they can talk about it, etc -- as well as platform maintainers hearing the siren call of advertising and paid placement as way to offset the high costs of maintaining a multimedia network for millions upon millions of users. Together, this becomes the wind behind algorithmic feeds and paid visibility features, because the algorithmic feeds are something users actually enjoy and breaking away from chronological feeds opens tons of revenue opportunities in an expensive and intensely competitive business.
I no longer expect to find my kind of service from any platform that's positioned for the global mainstream. The winds are always going to take that somewhere else, even if it looks promising today.
I don't want to discover anything on my personal feed unless it comes from one of the sources that I have chosen to follow, and I want information relayed to me in the order in which it is posted. For Discover, I couldn't care less.
It's currently running either under my desk or in the living room on my homelab Kubernetes cluster. It's a fun little thing to look into every so often to get a vertical slice of humanity.
I am aware that there are services that let you create custom feeds. But they are mostly for simple compositions like a feed for the following set of words and/or set of people, etc.
There's more complicated feeds, but right now the easy to make feeds are more prevalent because they're easy to make.
If we get a few good years of Bluesky before it turns that's not bad, I'll take that, but I feel like the turn is inevitable, right?
Have we had this period of such large players all trying to do the same thing in this segment of social media? We have Threads, X, Bluesky, Truth Social (I think?), and then the federated instances that I can think of.
Between Threads, Bluesky, and the federated ones we have three platforms where users can take their toys and leave pretty easily, and Threads tying into the federated platforms adds another way for people to move freely among platforms.
There's a chance it _all_ turns, but is it less inevitable since people can move?
Old Media centralizes. New media decentralizes. New media becomes old media.
I’m tempted to say that the only rule is that information networks with humans on it tend to centralize.
I have no idea why, or how to explain the behavior, and I’m pretty sure this has happened since print came into existence.
If you have the term or field that research would come under, do share. (economics ? media economics? Information x?)
So the pattern is if you let extremely wealthy people accumulate without limit, they will.
There are certain people in certain, specific, situations that have a strong enough ideological stance to make a decision based on that ideology, counter to the one they're incentivized to make. But the majority of the people in the majority of situations are going to make the incentivized choice. If you want to really change something, you have to change the incentives.
I completely understand why social media companies need to have some kind of an algorithm. Without one, when you first join, your feed would be completely empty and I'm sure that user retention after the first visit would be near zero. I do not understand _at all_ why it isn't at least an option to, at some point, decide I only want to see content from people I have actively selected.
Yes, like most social media, Bluesky has a “Following” feed available (and, unlike many that always start on a different feed, with Bluesky Following can be — and I think is initially — the default feed it opens to.)
I'll throw out a warning, though, to make sure you tune your settings unless you're ok with seeing buttholes and other risque images. I don't have any followers and it's constantly showing me accounts that post all kinds of sexual content by default. It's probably closer to the supposed "free speech" Twitter is claiming but without all the Nazi stuff.
Probably because browser bookmarks exist.
I'm working on my own (Fediverse) site that I hope will some day give you the power to tweak your feed exactly the way you want, but so far nothing about it works, so don't hold your breath on that one. I don't really care about Bluesky doing it because I don't really care about proprietary social media anymore. I want a Fediverse site that does this.
Does anybody else get this vibe or am I going crazy?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Is it really so unexpected that a new platform supposedly gaining traction is tracked with milestones, user experiences, etc on a site such as HN?
1) People were wondering since 2022 what would happen to Twitter (and it's users) since Musk's acquisition.
2) Musk decided to become actively political and to actively change Twitter as a company and a service.
3) Bluesky had previously existed as a spiritual successor to Twitter and is now gaining steam as a true successor (Mastodon didn't really get that spike, and Threads is quite different from Twitter and heavily integrated with FB and Insta).
But I'm in the middle of a big re-work so it'll get a lot better when I finish that.
You might have a better experience if you could set your own level of discovery but your session could also be shorter and that's unacceptable to an advertising company that needs your eyeballs for as long as possible.
Just ask Facebook why I could never see only my friends posts and then twisting the knife by showing me "suggested" click bait junk before it had even exhausted the posts available from my friends.
I might be old fashioned but RSS is future of subscribing content for me.
Most normies embrace the out of the box algorithms because it is the least amount of effort. Lazy always wins.
https://github.com/stevendborrelli/bluesky-tech-starter-pack...
Besides, as we have seen with Signal and Mastodon — people will just go back to what they are used to and where most of the crowd and noise is.
I.e. it's not really "weird", is my point.
If you want to suggest that moderation and censorship are the same—two concepts with obviously differing senses in English—take a stab at making the argument instead of just asserting it in, ironically, a cliche.
The protocol is ambivalent towards it, so if you seek hate, you could host your own. I'm very fine (happy even) with the bsky team not being invested in that side of history.
Everything has been reduced to “hate”, to the point that it actively muddies the waters wrt actual hatred.
Some people believe that whether you're a man or a woman is based on thoughts in your head, rather than the material biological reality of your sex. They also believe that these thoughts mean you can be neither woman or man, which they call 'non-binary'.
Of course to everyone else this is a rather absurd thing to believe. Like the healing power of crystals or some nonsense like that.
[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gender#Noun [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gender#dictionary... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex
Also, as the Wikipedia article you linked discusses, 'intersex' is not a type of sex additional to female and male. It's a word used to group various disorders of sexual development.
Anyone who looks at Levine and thinks something along the lines of wearing a dress, must be a woman rather than that is obviously a man in a dress has deeply sexist ideas about how women should present themselves.
You can label this as "transphobia" if you like but that's just a tacit acknowledgement that the "trans" belief system is built upon sexist principles.
What people really have a problem with here is that they are called out for the intolerance because it reflects upon them.
This quote from their article highlights the absurdity:
"Levine is the U.S. assistant secretary for health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where he serves proudly as the first man in that position to dress like a western cultural stereotype of a woman."
Really the only "intolerance" here is from those who can't stand their ideological beliefs being made fun of, and decide to retaliate via the platform's moderation system.
If that's all that's happening, the really bad part is contributing to the perception that Bluesky is just a left-Gab (and if that's what you want, there are perfectly good Mastodon cliques already).
There used to be a US-politics labeller, of value to non-Americans, but it seems to have fallen over.
https://x.com/salltweets/status/1857595757882188086
Sall Grover is the creator of a woman-only social app in Australia that was taken to court over that sex exclusivity. Posted a few controversial statements to test the atmosphere and this is the result.
So, purely as a random example: One of those unstated arguments is often the "don't let trans women into women's bathrooms" debate. I sympathize greatly with women who don't feel comfortable sharing a bathroom with trans women, and don't think anybody should be put through that (and I also sympathize with the trans woman's side of that problem, and have no good solution to offer to either side, but that's beside the point I'm making), but despite sharing that sympathy, I don't pretend to be unable to recognize hateful versions of that "sympathy" - that would be petty ideology.
And if you look at the history of what Sall Grover has had to endure regarding this issue - being harassed, threatened, dragged through the legal system - it's very obvious why she strongly disagrees with the idea that some men are women, and why she is so very outspoken in drawing a line in the sand on this.
First, even if we give you the benefit of the doubt and say it is factual, you do not need to lie in order to spread hatred, or at the very least provoke/troll people. "But it's true" is a childish defense in that context. If you were being honest, you would defend the practice of provoking/trolling people regarding gender identity (rather than merely defending the generic concept of saying something factually true, which is akin to the classic "I'm not touching you" game of provocation). And to be clear: I am not arguing against that theoretical argument in this comment - I am just saying that you should make that argument, since clearly you believe it but are being oblique about it.
Secondarily (and I do mean secondarily - it's entirely subservient to the first point and basically just an exercise in argument): The statement isn't factual, since it's just disagreeing with a context in which a word is used. It's literally a semantic argument, which is always more or less subjective.
Would you still be making the claim that she is "spreading hatred"?
I would still say she was making a factual statement that she was censored for. As we have evidence that this person was a historical figure and not just some figment of fiction. Only those with a particular ideological belief, i.e. most Christians, think there's more to it.
Fortunately that's not what happened, and such ideologues are not in charge of imposing those beliefs on others via Bluesky's moderation system. But it's clear that those who assert that some men are women are imposing their beliefs. Which is exactly what Sall demonstrated.
These looks like reasonable defaults - frankly I'm a bit delighted they are configurable. A lot of these are things most social platforms would outright ban without an opt-out. I think it makes sense to start medium-narrow and let users broaden it (not to mention it's kind to new users - though I understand that kindness is a bit dead in our culture currently, since it's been falsely accused of being mutually incompatible with having hard, real conversations). And I do get the pros and cons - I get the argument about starting broad and making the user narrow it down. But, specifically, I think "brutally censored" is pretty dramatic.
??? You can literally post porn on twitter. You could in 2021, too. Pretending it was censoring people seems asinine.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/17/24298790/bluesky-moves-d...
This sounds more like an attack then a byproduct of a growth bump.
We're on a silicon valley forum my guy, it's as western as it gets before wrapping around and becoming east again!
Where are you getting that from? Do you mean blocklists? Like, you are not required to use blocklists. They are not even the default; you have to affirmatively use them.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/x-twitter-elon-mus...
Idk if it's because HN is populated with engineers who can't wrap their head around a non-deterministic solution, but a team of humans with a set of goals are capable of dealing with a problem that doesn't have a concretely defined algorithm.