Who Is Jay Graber, the CEO of Bluesky?
lemonde.fr
lemonde.fr
Just an anecdote but I wanted to contribute it. A big reason I ended my Twitter involvement and switched to Bluesky is simply because I expect them to succeed and replace it, indifferent of the ideological alignment of either platform.
I’ve seen right-leaning satire sites get flagged as “Intolerance”, which is fueling a fire that Bsky will cater to a left-leaning audience.
I don’t think they’re wrong either based on past precedent and their mental model of how most social networks work.
I’d propose that Bsky instead asks the user if they want to view the content or block it, allowing them to change the setting right then and there (and not have to dig), instead of outright saying “Intolerant” and making them jump through hoops every time they want to view it.
Of course anyone who wants to stick around should eventually learn a bit about how the moderation works so they can decide what they want to see and what they don't.
Reddit hit a decent balance by calling it “NSFW” and letting people change the setting as they encounter it.
Kasey links to some examples of how prevalent anon accounts spewing outright racism is in this thread from today: https://x.com/kaseyklimes/status/1862323859321483316
Did you miss the fact that X is a platform based on free speech? People are allowed to out themselves as whatever they want, which is a good thing. The examples you’re linking to have 0 likes on them, so I wouldn’t be all that worried about anonymous teenager provocateurs who are trying to get a reaction out of people.
How can you say this with a straight face? I am genuinely baffled by people who hold this view.
Just because you say that your platform is all about “free speech” doesn’t mean it is and there are clear actions that X/Elon took which go against that claim.
The primary of which being that posting “cisgender” gets your post flagged and demoted in the algorithm and that Elonjet was banned. How can you seriously claim free speech absolutism when there are direct examples showing the very opposite.
Of course you can’t, since you’re just a conspiracy theorist.
You’re the conspiracy theorist. Conspiracies go hand in hand with your ideologies.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2023/06/21/musk-sa...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ElonJet#History
Where is your evidence?
https://x.com/NickJFuentes/status/1854015641218355621?lang=e...
X is not actually a free speech platform (e.g. https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/26/24255298/elon-musk-x-bloc...), that’s just a claim they use to dismiss any responsibility for the nazi crap their algorithm promotes.
Personally I’m spending less time there not because of overt racism specifically, but because even innocent posts end up pulled by trolls into adversarial, low-information stupidity.
I’m not trying to convince you to join Bluesky though, if you prefer X I think both Bluesky and X are better if you continue to spend your time there!
Vance dossier had his personal information like address and phone number, and was deleted for doxxing.
Of course the other part is Bluesky's PDS (the 'instance' hosting content for those who sign up on bsky.app) - they're free to moderate their infrastructure however they see fit. You might find yourself banned from there, but you can always host your own PDS and still be followable on bluesky.
There’s an odd tendency amongst the modern far-right to want to (a) be openly bigoted but (b) not to be judged for it. I feel like this ‘snowflake bigot’ phenomenon was born a couple of decades back, with some homophobes getting very upset about the term ‘homophobe’, not because they felt it was inaccurate as such, but because they felt it cast their thing as a _bad_ intolerance, like racism.
(Also it's really a very, very good analysis of Bluesky, by the co-author of ActivityPub, so if you're into that kind of thing...)
I feel like the XKCD perfectly reflects the free speech arguments I see online.
If a big chunk of your society make a habit of censuring people for disliked speech, organizations that are in the business of relaying speech make a habit of dropping customers over disliked speech, etc? Then your society is not practicing the principle of freedom of speech.
The stupidest thing I've read today
Also what’s the mechanism to prevent AT from turning into a firehouse of usenet bot spam?
The mechanism for spam filtering is the same as any other network. You can drop posts from low-trust PDSes, or use Bluesky's existing labeling system to apply advisory "spam likely" labels to accounts or posts that some heuristic decides are spam. This can be done in a composable way with their algorithmic feed aggregator and labels.
Someone else who's interesting is CEO of Signal https://www.wired.com/story/meredith-whittaker-signal/
So the way that this worked is that Jack tweeted that, and they created a Bluesky Twitter account at the end of 2019. I got really excited. I was currently working on a social app of my own that was an alternative to Facebook Events called Happening, and I’d been building on decentralized social protocols, playing around with them, doing a lot of research, published a lot of research on it.Now I don't mind that stuff in forums and 4chan (some folks find that content funny) but if I have to do work, it cannot coexist with that content.
I suspect there's a difference between an already-curated account and a new account.
Now I can’t open it at work because the main page is likely to contain horribly racist or otherwise bigoted memes and diatribes from people I’ve never followed or interacted with.
https://x.com/RedPillSayian/status/1861982472847716721
Deleted, but from a Warp affiliate, oof.
I'm a software engineer who's already seen the field of software. Talking about it isn't that interesting to me. I make more money than I need selling a rather simple subscription service, written in an obscure language that never gets mentioned here.
And finally, the obligatory "no u", since telling someone that this website is not for them is the epitome of this website not being for you.
This is so rich. You know we can see your comment history?
>I’m not here to argue with socialists
And told them to read a book instead of asking your opinions. Sounds like you’re just here to whine about things you don’t like and insert your opinions.
I really have no skin in this game but surely, surely the big social sites got caught red handed being overly censorious in during COVID and so on
These types of users are not some noble vanguard of the free speech of the wise masses, or whatever else proponents try to portray them as - quite the opposite. Who do you actually know IRL who's a bitcoin-obsessed tradcath neo-nazi?
The "freedom of speech" being afforded here isn't going to the benefit of scientists or economists with technical misgivings of a small part of some overreaching left-anarchist agenda. If it were, the "free speech" crusade would be much easier to understand. But for every Jordan Peterson, there's twelve Nick Fuenteses, being treated as if their opinions have the same value. These types of users are a very vocal minority exceedingly committed to flowing a firehose of low-quality, sneery, fact-free, outrage-bait content. And fewer and fewer people are interested in any of it.
"Free speech" is the government-level abstraction. Private platforms are better to moderate their service, because this specific contingent ruins every platform they're permitted to dominate. It's the Nazi bar problem in a nutshell.
X's usership is dropping like a rock[1] as Bluesky's growth surges[2]. Nobody wants to be forced to engage with these types of users, and the trends demonstrate this. If I were one of X's investment partners, I would be fuming at Elon's abject squandering of my perfectly good investment capital.
If this is the platform Elon actually wants, then fine and dandy. Just don't complain when the result is different than what you expected and huge amounts of people leave instead of assimilating to the hivemind.
[1]: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/x-formerly-twitter-los... [2]: https://www.euronews.com/next/2024/11/26/bluesky-plans-to-qu...
You may be right about X but this is the most on point description of BlueSky ever written.
At least we know it's getting to him.
Being immature is fine if you're alone in your basement hacking away, not when you have the power to single-handedly control the (formerly) most useful digital public square in the world, and use it to your own political ends.
If you mean pre-buyout then I have bad news for you: Musk has been baselessly calling people pedophiles since at least 2018.
If you mean pre-presence then I have bad news for you: If you only liked someone before they were really expressing themselves, you probably never actually liked them.
Anti-immigration sentiments also don’t have to be racist, like they aren’t in the case of that post.
You asked for something high-engagement, but the stuff that tends to be “in your face” is low engagement/high volume, as in this case I shared with you elsewhere in the thread. https://x.com/kaseyklimes/status/1862323859321483316
My point is that X isn't some propaganda tool of hateful content. It's a platform that has a little something for everyone, just as it should be.
Does Twitter actually ban or suppress speech on the left or right these days?
What Bluesky gives all users is the choices and control at an individual level, and the ability to operate their own moderation labellers if they so choose
They have taken the controls from the corporation and given them to the people. People use these tools to remove the trolls and unproductive discourse, the fresh start means it is not a sisyphean task to keep your feed and comments cleaner
This post from Mark Cuban sums up the general vibes: https://bsky.app/profile/mcuban.bsky.social/post/3lbx7p3vdgs...
I love this
Anyone have a link for the full thing?
> one of bluesky’s mottos is “the company is a future adversary,” so we have to design this service in a way that preserves user choice & freedom
> users should own their data, identity, and relationships on the social internet, and devs should never get locked out of the ecosystems that they build
https://bsky.app/profile/emilyliu.me/post/3jzkm4kezos2d
For all the shrill man-child cries of 'censorship!', there's protocols underlying already for you to host yourself! People do! Heavens spare us from these X-grade losers.
We're yet to see how this turns out in practice. I do fear that the ATProto model means that Bluesky is still a pretty central component in the ecosystem. Mastodon, in comparison, seems to be more resiliant to one 'instance' screwing things up.
If Bluesky shut down all their servers tomorrow with no notice, what will happen to the network? If Mastodon shut down their servers (mastodon.social), users on that instance would be screwed, but me and many of the people I follow aren't on there so we would be fine.
If you get no engagement because you're on everyone's blocklist well that can't be on anyone except you since every user opts in to them.
These folks can go run their own PDS! But generally I think nothing of value was lost, that the network has rightly refused to let itself be degraded.
If they keep making them, I'll go with it.
I don't think that they're making identical mistakes, but we can't assume that it will last.
Obviously it’d be nice if it was the first social network not to either implode (Livejournal, Tumblr, Twitter), or fade into irrelevance (Friendster, Bebo, MySpace, Digg), or just ossify into mind-numbing tedium (Facebook, LinkedIn), but, well, if it does, presumably there’ll be another one along at some point.
(I realise that you could probably argue Digg either way, here. Digg had a multi-paradigm end.)
Focusing on the things that are good and beautiful and making the future better than today would be a good start for someone with your mindset.
I have a hard time imagining how they'll manage to do it. As far as I can tell the profitable blockchains are pretty tightly coupled to either financial speculation or more obvious crime. I'm not so sure it will work in this domain.
Sometimes I think that the efficient moderation on HN hides the extent of the problem in this community. When Trump won the election, the HN ‘new’ page was briefly filled with posts saying things like “Eat shit n**s and f*gs!!!”
But since the efficient moderation quickly hides all this for users who don’t go out of their way to enable viewing dead posts and comments, we can blissfully go on discussing the finer points of tariffs and whatever, ignoring the fact that a growing number of people around really just want to see minority scapegoats suffer. It feels a bit like frogs in a boiling kettle.