https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spamhaus_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Anti-Cheat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerGuardian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Safe_Browsing https://web.archive.org/web/20250107144929/https://blocktoge... https://web.archive.org/web/20241230160146/https://gardenfen...
folks just get riled up when their diatribes don't get traction
Why should I listen to the endless amount of slop flat earthers shat upon the internet at large?
The early internet was a pretty decent place to talk, debate, and see opinions you didn't agree with. But those days are long gone. He'll, these days the other side of the conversation could just be a bot that will never change its mind, and waste your time you could be talking to an actual human.
Kill files were required for reading Usenet. There were less bad posters, but since saw everything in newsgroup, it helped to filter the problems.
And also with people who just add people they consider enemies for whatever reason to all sorts of lists, and others who just subscribe to those lists blindly, without ever checking any. Why would they want to, it's supposedly unsavory.
Blocking things as they actually become a problem for you has a way higher chance of success than outsourcing it. Just because it says "list of X" doesn't mean it's a list of X, it just means anyone can title things however they like.
On small sites, yes. You can actually do this in human bound time limits.
On a big site that attracts millions of small time spammers along with commercial and nation state level scammers, you've already lost. The rate new scam channels are created are faster than you can even click the UI button to remove them.
If you value your time you'll make a whitelist of a few trusted channels and avoid the rest. If those channels have recommendations that fill your interest, add those channels to your whitelist. This will stop the constant doom scrolling and brain rot traps we humans love to fall into.
Simply put, there is too much information in the world for you to ever be able to see and filter it all. Propaganda techniques like the 'firehose of falsehood' will exploit this to wear you out and make you ineffective. Select your media choices wisely.
Bluesky is not that site though? There used to be a lot of fake follows a few weeks ago, and many people posting about it, but I didn't have one in over a week. It may get to that, of course, as the site grows.
What I've actually seen a lot is people posting about lists they've been added to, and it's just silly. I've been added to one or two "MAGA" lists myself, heh.. I'm not even American, have no love for Trump, but I disagreed with "the people who are against MAGA" on something (I don't even know what it was), so now I'm "MAGA" according to that list, DNI haha.
Anyone interested, you can check what lists accounts are on here: https://clearsky.app/
It simmered down now, but people seemed positively obsessed with blocking and letting their enemies "whither in silence" etc. That's the main reason I care, because it fascinates me, because I find it kind of sad. But in practical terms, the people who use social media like that are no loss to me, and I'm no loss to them, so it's actually totally fair, I don't mind being put on block lists for petty reasons. But I know not everybody is that jaded. Some people probably do mind.
And it also seems kind of insidious how it makes people disappear from each other who never interacted, so they will never find out it was for a BS reason. It's not exactly Black Mirror, it's just Bluesky, no harm no foul, but still. How people (seemingly, maybe my perception is wrong) go "oh nice, this is useful thanks" and subscribe, without much discussion or concern, does rub me the wrong way a little.
I like my echo chamber. I like talking to my friends online. I don't want things I don't want to see.
Crazy people can't follow protocols, and most realizes they're in the wrong before blocking million accounts. References to useful contents from blocked accounts will occasionally leak through channels, and that should validate/invalidate choices.
It's probably a pain for spammers and an extra processing cost for serving platform, though.
edit: if you consider it must to block massive amount of real users(i.e. not script bots and/or third world hired guns trying to destroy a platform) to use a platform normally, that's just not sane.
It's impossible to discuss health care approaches for example. Americans believe in for profit Healthcare, while (most everyone else) tend to favor universal health care (despite its many imperfections. )
And that's before we discuss other tricky topics like the military etc. There are plenty of folk ready to downvote based on opinion rather than discussion.
So yes, there's plenty of echo chamber here - but equally plenty of alternate thinkers, not to mention nutters.
This is ultimately how human societies work.
Even if you write a well argued and decently sourced comment, it's very likely to get flagged by people with ideological disagreements to this. And there are a lot of them on HN, so your comment will likely disappear pretty quickly.
Those are both the same example, and sometimes comments get downvoted because they're just making a bad or vacuous argument for an indefensible position.
It's obvious why intelligence agencies want to do bulk data collection, and the reason is related to why it's a problem -- the public needs to be protected against bulk data collection by foreign intelligence agencies, and by domestic ones with insufficient oversight. "Oversight" in a democracy means the public knows about it, otherwise how can there even be a debate about whether it's worth it? But intelligence agencies aren't in favor of oversight of intelligence agencies, so they'll always be in favor of surveillance even if it isn't worth it, which is why they can't be allowed to do it in secret and anyone bringing it into the light is acting in the public interest.
Moreover, bulk surveillance isn't worth it, because if you don't build technology that can resist bulk surveillance then foreign governments will do it to your population and the cost of that exceeds any benefit from you being able to do it to others, even before you account for the domestic cost of having a surveillance apparatus already in place in the event that an oppressive administration comes to power.
Even the fucking salad, such as they are, are in plastic bags and dumped into a bowl. Pointing this out though, was worthy of more than one downvote. Why? Does HN have some deep bench of experts on American casual dining chains? Is it a technology topic? No, the echo chamber had already decided, and going against this insults the echo chamber even if there is no emotional investment.
When I said there was an echo chamber, I pointed out that I was excluding politics because you kind of just expect that. But it's literally about everything no matter how trivial it should be. I have had many examples over the years, and if there were a point to it I could give you an exhaustive list. This is the human condition. Forever arguing over stupid shit for the rest of eternity, or at least until doomsday, which I suspect is less than a century off.
I mean, what?
So for example, Thai Chicken Salad:
https://www.thecheesecakefactory.com/menu/salads/thai-chicke...
It has leafy greens that would get soggy if frozen or combined with the other ingredients for shipping. There is a slice of lime on the side. I doubt they ship them pre-sliced or heat the lime with the rest of the food.
It's presumably "from scratch" in the same way that Blue Apron is and not in the sense that there is a local chef shopping at the local wholesale market to decide what to put on the local menu. But it's possible to distinguish the former from the thing where your meal comes out of a freezer and goes into a microwave as a single unit, with the latter implying that it contains no ingredients that haven't been frozen or stuffed so full of preservatives that they'll biodegrade some decades after the wrapper does.
And even if some items have ingredients that could be frozen, that doesn't tell you whether or not they actually were. Or, for that matter, that a meal made "from scratch" couldn't have any frozen ingredients.
> It has leafy greens that would get soggy if frozen or combined with the other ingredients for shipping.
You know those plastic bags of chopped lettuce, often with carrots and cabbage in them too, you can buy at the grocery store? Sysco has those in their catalog, bigger ones.
Everything's in a package, dumped in a bowl or on a plate, reheated (if needed) and sent out to your table. But all of HN was absolutely certain that they were some gourmet operation, and that some very large majority of their menu was made there, in the restaurant. And everyone still thinks so. Who thought this originally (if anyone) I do not know, but then you all sort of agreed. Enough of you agreed that disagreement wasn't welcome, and that was that. We live in giant echo chambers, and it's not just the polarized politics doing it.
> And even if some items have ingredients that could be frozen, that doesn't tell you whether or not they actually were.
I'm telling you that. I'm giving you an educated opinion, having worked in restaurants and knowing what non-previously prepared food looks like, having eaten in the restaurant in question multiple times, having studied the menu the day the story hit HN.
No sauce, no pasta, no soup, no meal, no dessert, absolutely nothing there is "made from scratch". No primary ingredients are even available in the kitchen of that restaurant save tapwater and the few spices they would sprinkle on their overpriced sirloin steak on the grill are back there. And it's bizarrely naive to think so.
It's also weird how insulted this forum is from people who don't sit in an office chair to earn their living. I guess there's only one Cheesecake Factory in all of San Francisco though, and the workers there live in the homeless tent camps so none of you talk to them.
Slashdot had a superior moderation system whereby the ability to downvote (mod points) was given out selectively and in limited quantity. In all honestly it was years ahead of its time.
Was it the hot grits ?
I say this as someone who still has an account over there with a lowish UID.
I vaguely remember such was their commitment to free speech, if you browsed at -1 they allowed posts to remain up that broke the HTML and page rendering, and refused to take them down on principle, until they could update their filters. Those early days of the web were a wild west.
Twitter was better then.
We don't have to guess how that works, it existed.
This is how normal in-person social interaction works too, by the way. If you’re in a pub and someone comes up and starts ranting at you about how the pizza restaurant basements are turning the frogs gay, you’re probably not going to engage them. And if they keep at it, they’ll probably get kicked out.
The internet is full of people who (a) insane, and (b) insane in a very boring, same-y way. Filtering these people out is _fine_. There is no moral obligation to listen to every ranting idiot who comes along.
People are constantly dragging up topics like transsexuality in completely unrelated discussions. I completely disagree with their opinion and I like challenging them on it (for example, what is it to them what other people do with their bodies?). They've never been able to give me a good answer to that so far. But they're constantly derailing topics about completely different things. They seem so obsessed with this topic. It's also getting so tediously repetitive. Always the same slurs without any kind of actual discussion.
The thing is, here in the Netherlands we used to have 'echo chambering' as the foundation for the country. We used to call it 'verzuiling' (literally translated "pillarification"). After the war the country was made up of several groups that didn't get along so well so each had their own newspapers, social circles, TV and radio broadcasters etc. There were the Catholics, the super-strict Calvinists, the Labour/progressive atheist crowd etc. They basically lived alongside without really interacting. And really, lately I'm starting to think this was not such a bad idea at all.
The thing is… if you had grown up in someone else’s life, you would be the one censored. Your intelligence has nothing to do with it. It’s a historical perspective.
But of course, you’re a genius and can’t nobody else tell you nothin. I believe John Stewart Mill wrote at least a volume on that topic!
Choosing to ignore people is not censorship.
Also I would note that the lunatic-fringe far-right stuff I was referencing with the pizza restaurants turning the frogs gay did not _exist_ when I was growing up; it's quite new, really emerging in the past 15 years (of course, it does take a lot from older far-right concepts, but it is to some extent a thing onto itself). This isn't something that was forced upon people as kids because their great-grandparents were into dank Pepe memes, it is something that they have embraced themselves.
Defend it all you like. I think it is a move of people with weak character who aren’t actually so sure in their ideas that it makes them uncomfortable to be challenged.
Yes, absolutely.
"Better for discourse?"
Incredibly. You actually have conversations. You talk about topics. You replace all the meaningless arguing and yelling with actual conversation.
"Better for protecting your echo chamber from things that might challenge you?"
... The whole world is challenging right now.
It has been my entire life.
The only way to protect my echo chamber is to make the world better.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-71263-z
https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/430608-trending-science-...
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/press/mit-sloan-study-finds-thinkin...
They help make Bluesky usable; for instance I subscribe to one which nukes transphobes, because, really, I do not have the patience to listen to their One Joke anymore, thanks. And another which warns on people with AI-generated profile pics (these are virtually always some form of scammer, or, worse, AI evangelists).
The blocklists are not mandatory.
I've seen an instance where an innocent user added to a blocklist that blocks Nazi ideology or something like that.
Honestly if that happened to me, I'd quit Bluesky instantly
Now I had a good look and I'm pretty sure the people added to this list haven't posted anything to warrant this accusation. Yet if you go to their profiles on Clearsky or whatever it will show them in this pedophile list, like https://clearsky.app/messyjhesse.bsky.social/lists
That's not right, and the worst thing is you can't see on the app if you've been wrongly labeled that way, you have to use a third-party website to find out.
These are 3rd party lists and a user has to opt into them to leverage their blocking choices. If a list blocks 1M accounts but only has 100 followers, it's not such a big deal.
When you subscribe to a well built list, you are given options for how like mute vs block, your choice, or label | warn | hide, per label, a subchoice within an opt in labeller.
What ATProto gives us as users is choice and competition. Bad lists will not gain subscribers and will be marginalized by the market effect. High quality lists will be shared and gain network effect.
We shouldn't expect or want a one-size fits all solution to moderation. Our social graphs in real life and online are not a giant blob where everyone has to listen to everyone. We naturally break down into subgraphs or communities. Online communities or groups should be able to exclude people for any reason they wish. They should be seen similar to a private group in real life. You shouldn't expect to be allowed into or to participate in a group if your going against the group's rules or customs in real life. Online should be no different.
Imagine if HN had a "block" option you could select against a user, that when you click it, it wipes out every comment that this user ever made on a post that you both commented in, past and future - but not just for you, for every other HN user as well. And there's no "showdead" option to see them either, for anyone.
Like if I or anyone who replied to you blocked you now, with this hypothetical Bluesky-like feature on HN, no-one at all would be able to see your comment. Except maybe dang if he went poking around in the database.
That's basically how Bluesky blocks work. It's absurd.
You might be responding to a spreader of disinformation with facts, but if they then block you, no-one else will be able to read your response.
if alice blocks bob: it hides all posts bob made in response to alice posts; blocks bob from replying to future posts of alice; but more importantly it erases bob from alice's feed wich is often the only healthy thing to do because bob is a deranged lunatic and alice does not owe bob the attention he seeks
> it hides all posts bob made in response to alice posts
Exactly, it hides these from anyone else who might read the thread, including others participating in the thread.
This offers Alice not just the means to control her own Bluesky experience, but also to unilaterally control which parts of the conversation that all others on Bluesky can see.
It is in effect a feature to selectively delete the posts of others for any reason.
> because bob is a deranged lunatic and alice does not owe bob the attention he seeks
That is generally not the reason why users on Bluesky hit the block button. There's a strong tendency there of blocking because someone disagrees with you, or they explained why you're wrong about something, or they pointed out that you're spreading misinformation.
On Bluesky, blocking is a way to quickly and conveniently hide any dissent.
i dont't think we're going to agree on why people generaly block others. you seem to see yourself as some sort of dissenter, or a truth-teller of some kind, but when you get blocked for interjecting into someone else's coversations it's just because no one asked you to be part of that conversation and now you lost your access privileges. this rejection probably fucks with your self-esteem more than it should but i'm no therapist so maybe go find one instead of annoying folks on the internet.
I'd go so far as to say that social media without a block button is unethical, and promotes propaganda and harassment. The block button means the user heard you, use used your free speech! Congrats! Now they want to walk away from you. Ooops. No, you are not entitled to get any response, nor to continue talking at them if they choose to leave the area.
the one other point that seems to be ignore though is: you are still capable of continuing that conversation on your own terms on you own feed. your posts will not be visible to the people blocking you but everyone else can still see them.
Right, that's the problem.
> your posts will not be visible to the people blocking you but everyone else can still see them.
They can see them if they go digging for them, but they can't see them in any reasonable place.
it's the purpose of the block, it's intentional, and works wonderfully.
what's your point?
Bluesky provides a richer set of options. I should be able to choose who interacts with my posts. If that's not your style, fine, there are other options out there. Bluesky users like this feature. It reduces the toxicity and makes it a more enjoyable platform.
The culture around "don't engage, just block" the trolls helps keep the discourse more civil. With a fresh start, we can stay ahead of the trolls and bots. It's a group effort
See https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/7021 for more detail.
A relevant comment from that issue:
> As it stands, if 20 people are involved in a discussion, and ONE single person decides to block someone, then all of a sudden, the 19 other people in the discussion (+ any other viewers) are now inconvenienced simply because one person had an issue with someone else.
> Bluesky does have a bit of a block culture, and as such, this issue is only going to get worse and worse, and threads are going to get harder and harder to read and follow as more and more people get blocked.
> Just the other day I got a notification, and I clicked on it, and once again, the post they were replying to was "blocked", not because of me, but because the person who made the post blocked the person they were responding to. I was trying to make sense of their post, but now I couldn't as I had no idea what the hell they were replying to... then I think I found the post they replied to; it showed "1 reply", but when I clicked on it, no replies were shown.
> Now, this functionality was probably done with good intentions - but you know what they say, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions".
Another comment explaining the problem:
> This is working as intended but I agree it should be reassessed. For example:
> 1. In a popular thread, User A posts some nonsense
> 2. User B replies to that reply explaining why it's nonsense
> 3. User A blocks User B
> 4. Now User A has successfully hidden the rebuttal to his comment from everyone. The only defense against this is if the thread OP happens to block User A.
> This is a pretty serious downside of the "nuclear block" system imo. It creates an escalation ladder of blocking where the first user to hit "block" is advantaged. On the other hand it causes me personally to avoid blocking where I otherwise would, because I want the conversation to still be visible for others.
> There should at least be a "show reply" button on posts that are hidden for this reason IMO. Otherwise you've given every user the unilateral power to hide a reply, for everyone, permanently. If I hide a reply the normal way, it's not deleted for everyone! There is a "show hidden reply" button! The effect of hiding someone else's reply should be consistent across these two ways to do it.
Choice and competition will make this network a better long-term social fabric than the centralized systems we are used to.
By any account, it is far less than building an independent social network application. The components are also decoupled so you don't have to rebuild everything. If you want to build an App View, it's just a webapp or react native. You don't have to rebuild everything
re: incentives, there are many, people have different perspectives and motivations to do so
This is significantly more complex than making a few small changes to the frontend app.
If I post something that gets traction, and someone replies with an ad for ED pills, I should be able to remove that spam from the discussion on my thread and not just from my view of it. If others have already "engaged" with a plug for boner pills, their replies are not lost but are just no longer part of the thread stemming from my post.
If you as the OP don't want this behavior, there are other tools at your disposal (mute the replier instead, "hide for everyone", etc).
I have written my own webapp (https://blebbit.com) and I can see content and accounts I have blocked on Bluesky. I just validated this to be the true. This because I have not implemented block respecting in my own code yet. It's more work to actually respect the blocking.
The full backup of ATProto is more than 5T now.
You seem really misinformed about all of this.
Or maybe you created an account to intentionally spread falsehoods about Bluesky? There has been a flurry of this on HN lately
https://i.ibb.co/CJkZWBG/image.png
No-one has blocked anyone at this point, so the conversation is visible to all parties and any onlookers.
Your own app shows the same:
https://i.ibb.co/3kxp5Q9/image.png
Now for whatever reason, user B decides to block user A. The entire subthread starting with user B's response to user A is removed, which includes making the discussion between user A and user C no longer viewable in that thread, to anyone:
https://i.ibb.co/j6f9z92/image.png
This appears exactly the same in your app:
https://i.ibb.co/2Px9bw5/image.png
The root cause is that the app.bsky.feed.getPostThread endpoint omits the entire tree of replies for that subthread in its response:
https://i.ibb.co/F45n6QV/image.png
Please feel free to verify this in your own browser and explain why you believe this to be incorrect.
That's your opinion. The vast majority of ATProto users like the enhanced controls over their conversations. If you don't like it, use a different social media platform
That one user blocking another user makes chunks of the conversation disappear for everyone else viewing the thread is verifiable fact. As it is a verifiable fact that this is done server-side via the getPostThread endpoint, by which posts in the parent and replies fields of the response are omitted.
This is not "absolutely and provably wrong", as you put it. Maybe do some research yourself before accusing others of intentionally spreading falsehoods?
It's working as expected
You have made multiple other inaccurate statements about Bluesky / ATProto throughout your comments with your new account
You have been arguing that blocked posts still appear in your custom client, which is a different claim than nastoy. As detailed by the GitHub issue that started this disagreement, bluesky relays have introduced thread breaking behavior that one can not get around simply by forking the appview.
"relay" does not appear in that issue, not sure where this idea that relays have introduced thread breaking behavior is coming from
That being the case, when you want to get posts of a thread, the information of which posts belong to which thread are the responsibility of a relay, which is doing the firehose-level-aggregation of which posts belong to which threads, am I misunderstanding?
You have a list of public people that piss you off and avoid, when you are asked about them you say "ugh I don't like x because". Now, you might get someone say "dont be mean about x, they had y, which is why they did z" and you might accept or reject the point they made.
However that person is unlikely to blast you with content or facts to do with said public figure, unless they want to drive you away.
It is part of human nature, infact its the basis of society. The only way we can function is by having effective way to have some shared core "principles" (formally around religion, feudal chiefs, now around semi cult leaders) This means rejecting other ideas as heretical. (see civil rights marches, universal suffrage, silver/gold standard the fracturing of protestantism)