Is it expected that people only ever want to see content that aligns with their views in their feed? I feel it's relatively common for someone to want to keep an eye on, say, what Trump is posting even if they detest him.
Probably becomes self-reinforcing in that by treating follows as a public endorsement, many people start following only what they want to be seen endorsing instead of what they want on their timeline. Which leaves a void for a timeline of what I want to see instead of what I want to be seen endorsing, probably currently filled (slightly awkwardly) by using an alternate account or visiting the profiles manually.
Emphatically no, and it’s one of the things that I dislike about what blocklists have become on Bluesky.
The fact that many people now view follows as some kind of endorsement speaks to how much social media has deteriorated and arguably makes the polarization problem worse - not just because people are making themselves ignorant of what public figures are saying, but they’re isolating themselves from the people they actually do align with who choose to keep themselves informed, further reinforcing the echo chamber.
Depending on your primary reason for using social media, I realize how attractive it is to quickly lock down your feeds. But it comes with a dark side, and blocking someone for no reason other than following an account is part of that dark side IMO.
It is for those that need safe spaces. I love hearing the nonsense on both sides so I’m sure I would be blocked by people not ready to listen to such views due to fragility issues.
Who a person follows is a pretty strong signal of their values. Is it always accurate, no, you stand as an example of such a person but their feed is still full and the kind of people they have in mind they don't want to see are gone.
Reddit has a similar culture with extensions that let you hide users that subscribe to or have ever posted in certain subreddits. It works better than it has any right to.
I strongly disagree, and believing this to be true is a problem for public discourse IMO.
What a person posts and who they repost is a strong signal of their values. I dislike/disagree with the validity of a social construct where people who choose to stay informed are assumed to hold values they do not.
+ most of my inclusion in these blocklists is due to actions taken by someone i follow after i followed them (some AI person I followed who posted bluesky posts on huggingface). it really is ridiculous to read a follow as an endorsement
i think this is more of a cultural issue with bluesky than a technical issue/flaw
I see this "scale invariant fallacy" all the time with programmers. The forward direction being a thing and that thing in a for loop are equivalent in essence, and the reverse being that a property being true about a set means it's true for its members (can decompose aggregate statements into an equivalent for loop acting on each member).
Maybe I misunderstood your comment, but isn’t that exactly the opposite of what you’re saying here?
> Who a person follows is a pretty strong signal of their values
If your position is closer to “on average, people who follow other people tend to be more aligned with the people they follow”, I’d probably agree. But this is a vastly different statement than “following someone strongly indicates endorsement”.
> I see this "scale invariant fallacy" all the time with programmers.
I think it’s problematic to bring too much of an engineering mindset to a social issue like this. Algorithms can be cleanly and rigidly defined. Social issues tend to be messy and complicated.
In terms of pure utility, it may be true that blocking people based on who they follow results in a clean feed at a low (effort) cost. But perpetuating the idea that following someone equals endorsement has longer term social costs and gets into dystopian territory pretty quickly, and depending on why someone is using social media, the impact of entirely excluding the group of people that “follow but disagree” is likely not small. If you’re on there for cat memes, probably not a big deal. If you’re trying to stay informed or be politically active, probably a bigger deal.
And regardless of use case, believing things about other people reflexively based on something like follow status is not a healthy place for society to be. Most people do not appreciate the nuance of what you’re describing as “scale invariant fallacy”.
My biggest issue here is the framing and the questionable/harmful conclusions that can be derived from it.
Maybe it's a semantic thing but is that not what is meant by this usage of the word signal?
"A child growing up in an affluent neighborhoods is a strong signal of their future success." implies => "The proportion of the set of all kids who live in affluent neighborhoods who achieve success as adults is high."
Putting people on lists for who they follow is a growing trend and it’s pretty clear in Bluesky culture that many people actually believe following someone implies some kind of support for that person and “taints” the follower somehow. This goes alongside a host of problematic behaviors ranging from all-or-nothing thinking “if you’re not with us you’re against us” to simple bad faith.
My goal isn’t to argue here, but to understand and clarify what you meant.
It sounds like you didn’t literally mean that on an individual basis, following someone strongly indicates their values, but that in the aggregate (due to the current social climate), it’s more likely they won’t follow people they disagree with.
I don’t think this is just a matter of semantics given the context, but a necessary clarification.
In the affluent neighborhoods example, there’s no call to action (block people), the situation isn’t a highly charged issue in the cultural zeitgeist, and there aren’t a lot of reasons someone would interpret that example in some other way.
The same is not true for the current social media climate.
Call it an echo chamber, but nobody has a right to have their posts be seen
If you’re just using social media for entertainment, I don’t care who you block or how. But perpetuating the idea that “follow equals endorsement” is a problem regardless.
This has less to do with people having a right to be seen and more to do with the perpetuation of ideas that make society more polarized in spaces where such things matter.
To put this another way, I’d react less strongly to “blocking people based on who they follow weeds out almost everyone I don’t want to see and I accept the false positives”. I’d still express concerns about the resulting echo chamber but that’s a far more reasonable position.
It can also be pretty effective for stopping brigading. Back in the day, when he was still a darling of the far-right, I managed to offend Milo Yiannopolis on Twitter (turns out he twitter-searched his own name) and he siced his followers on me. It took about a day of mass blocklists (back when these kinda worked on Twitter), and individual blocking, to stem the flow of spam; a button to simply block everyone who followed Milo Yiannopolis would have been convenient, and nothing of value would have been lost.
I feel you're calling something a good heuristic based solely on how predictive it is, and not considering the impacts of using that heuristic. A property tax based on the number of windows in a house[0] may have acceptably low false positives, but encourages people to brick up their windows.
Here it makes follows performative rather than just about what I'm interested in seeing on my timeline, since I'd now be hesitant to follow content that doesn't align with my views. In addition, everyone on the site being discouraged from receiving content from outside their bubble seems likely to exacerbate echo chambers.
komerad iteriasky, our sources tell us that you poses book on kaptialism. Why you share depraved views, komerad? This very bad for you.
alternatively...
Mr. iteria, we see that you've checked out a book by Marx from the public library. Why are you a communist mr iteria, and do you know that by being one you're putting our brave republic in grave danger? We shall revoke your right to work in any government position from now on. Red danger, mr iteria.
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How on earth did we go through all that crap in our recent history, and people still think that reading something is sharing those values?! And banning them preemptively?
yeah, a lot of bluesky members seem to hold this attitude - but it is not correct & moreso incentivizes epistemic bad practices