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Comment by bertil | Hacker News Reader

The difference in moderation is night and day.

Soon after Musk took over, I started having accounts wishing me violent deaths, repeatedly commenting on everything I said with graphic details (broken bones, poisoning, dragging my body over the pavement, etc.). That happened occasionally before, but they typically got banned. After the takeover, those were gone (and my account got blocked a couple of times for quoting them).

That hasn’t happened after a year on BlueSky and Threads.

Scams were rampant on large accounts and people looking at cryptocurrencies: more than three-quarters of comments were obvious patterns that I had flagged dozens of times. I noticed those earlier today on Threads; let’s see if they reappear and make up most of the discourse there.

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Right. After the pay-to-play change that boosted Blue Checks to the top of everything it became unusable. No better than going into the local news comment section or Craigslist discussion forums.

I had some success with a -lot- of training but mostly it’s 10% useful and 90% pure blue check engagement garbage. The following tab is still fine though. I’m pretty selective there and only include software people, science feeds, news orgs, etc that aren’t full of garbage. Also twitter control panel works pretty well delete all blue checks from comment sections.

Man, I wish I could be even a hundredth as effective at pissing people off online. I only piss off boring people I guess.

A lot of the hate you get depends not on what you say, but what you are.

the impact of existence on perception is mediated by group attitudes, which are lessened in influence by anonymity ... my personal maxim is that hatred does vary on what is said and more so by where it is said

On the internet, I'm a dog.

What the hell are you doing or saying to warrant that kind of negative attention?

It's pretty easy to get that kind of vitriol if you say that you want people like you to continue existing.

And you say this to people you label not like you. You probably have more in common than you think. You both agree to label the other and you decided to fight a proxy battle from the agreed among identities. Do you want the other side not to exist as well? If yes let them know.

People defending themselves from bigotry, and bigots themselves, are not equivalent. Black people not wanting racists to exist, and racists not wanting black people to exist, do you see a distinction?

There has been such a consistent attempt at ramming square pegs into round holes online in trying to “both sides” a bunch of these issues.

One trait is immutable and the other is not.

One trait is entirely internally focused and is not defined by a rejection of anyone external to the subject, the other's trait is entirely defined by such an external focus on the rejection of another person's immutable identity.

You guess racist? I had a different first guess. Then I had a better second guess. I then had a three and fourth guess. Then I wasn't sure at all. None of them were racism. This becomes a personality test that speaks about who you are and what battles you always see.

Substitute homosexuality, being transgender, or whatever you'd like.

Try words you may not like too like right wing or Trump supporter. Still work?

Being a right wing trump supporter is an immutable characteristic like being black or gay?

lol I don’t want the bigots and people sending death threats to exist, I’ll stand on a soapbox and say that

Your guess is bigots. Care to provide more details. Racism or a broader bigot definition?

I’ll be honest, I have better things to do with my time then help you narrow down your personal definition of bigot. Sorry.

I haven't heard that word since the 70s. It's outdate like 'to the moon Alice'. What were you trying to convey with that word?

Let’s not pretend the disagreement is about fiscal policy.

Lets pretend we know what the disagreement is about. What's your guess?

That kind of attention is never warranted.

I got some of this years back, by offending Milo Yiannopoulis (who apparently used to search his own name for stuff to point his followers at), back when he was still a far-right darling. Took about a day of mass-block-lists to weed the enraged Nazi teenagers out of my at-mentions.

That was just a single incident, being noticed by far-right weirdos thankfully not being a regular thing for me. But I can imagine it would get old quickly if you were the sort of person who was. Bluesky’s far superior self-moderation is absolutely very useful here.

All you have to be is a proponent of ________ politics, LGBTQ, an opinionated woman, etc and you will receive death/rape threats on twitter. I’m sure 99% of them are bots, but still it can be unnerving. A strong opinion on a contentious topic will get you death threats eventually. That’s why I have DMs turned off and block/mute rather than engage trolls

I don’t even mention any of that.

I’ll let you guess. The thing that pisses people off the most is quoting well-known facts and statistics. Ironically, it’s making Elon Musk sound like a hero.

The fact that you don’t know and people offer dozens of credible guesses should probably tell you the problem is widespread.

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