Comment by NitpickLawyer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NitpickLawyer | Hacker News Reader

Interesting idea, but I'm not sure it's gonna work in the long run. There is a key difference between reddit / forums and bsky / other apps like it. Forums are many to many, and the focus is around community. Someone (doesn't really matter who) posts something, and lots of people comment. You go there to read the voices of many people. Bsky / birdapp on the other hand focus on one to many. The person posting matters the most, and the commenters are usually "followers" or people interested in what one person has to say.

It's a key difference IMO, and the main reason I like forums and heavily dislike the twitter-style apps. I want to read the voices of many, not the voices of few "influencers". You can make it look like a forum, but it's still gonna be focused on the voices of few.

That being said, with reddit going crazy over the last few years (and especially this last election cycle), I'm open to suggestions on new places to try that focus on forum-style discussions.

Agreed and there's also the problem that on Bluesky, one user blocking another means that the thread of conversation gets broken for everyone else who may read it.

See e.g. https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/7021

> 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.

Trying to create a Reddit-like experience around this limitation would be very difficult, as the thread breakage is done server-side so the clients don't even get enough info to reconstruct the conversation.

I haven't looked at how Threadsky does it, and I don't want to weigh in on the merits of different approaches.

But blocking in ATProto happens at the application (AppView) layer. A different application can absolutely make different choices from the Bluesky app about how blocking works and is displayed.

Presumably you still need server code to prevent blocked users from interacting with each other, no?

If I block you, then my client will prevent me from seeing your records.

There's nothing at the protocol level that prevents you from seeing my records, even when blocked, because all records are public. Anyone (even without an account) can see everyone else's records.

Well behaved clients are guided not to show posts to a blocked user, but this is a developer norm to enhance user experience all around -- seeing posts from someone who blocked you generally doesn't do anyone any good. But the protocol fully lets you build a client that shows you exactly who has blocked you and what they're posting.

Right, but there's more to blocking than content filtering (which is more akin to muting in twitter nomenclature). It should also restrict the blocked person from interacting with my content. At least that's what I'd expect (and I suspect most would).

I'm struggling to come up with what intent this behavior was supposed to perform. I block probably one person every other thread.

I don't block you because I had some kind of conflict, I blocked you because I don't like what you tweet and I don't want to see it and it's not clear what "not interested" actually does. Why this would impact anyone other than whom I'm blocking is perplexing. I certainly can't vouch for what they want to see and whom they want to interact with.

The reason this impacts other people is because Bluesky wants to discourage “dunk” culture in which one user continues to make fun of or harass another user who has indicated they do not wish to interact or participate. By orphaning interactions after users block each other, it becomes much harder for unrelated users to QT a post and add their own commentary to something that has already been definitively concluded.

Dunking on people is like half the value of twitter-like platforms. I only go on twitter (or I'm guessing bluesky) to see politicians and journalists and pundits and celebrities get dunked on. It's a public square: open moderation of social values is half the point. It's the conflict that makes us stronger.

Haters will say dis/misinformation makes it not worth it, but i simply point out that it's the truly stupid people who speak the loudest and you need to look deeper. There's no going back to a world where for-profit media is above critique. The relentless violence in palestine firmly endorsed and enabled by western media has pretty much destroyed any faith I had that our for-profit media is capable of self-regulation. Dunking on these morons is a public good.

What we really need to figure out is a way to systemically encourage punching up, not down.

The way blocking works on Bluesky is easily the most frustrating part of the platform I've encountered. I'm all for blocking trolls, spammers, etc but it seems even a mild divergence from the crowd gets you whacked. It's a bit stifling in my experience. I wonder if they'll change the way it works..

They won’t change the way it works as the “nuclear block” is part of what most Bluesky users like about the platform.

There's Lemmy and nostr, for example.

But I absolutely agree that the individual-centered social media is as toxic as it can be. Forum-style social media is just a bit less toxic but can be more constructive since it's centered about community and ideas rather than particular individuals/personas.

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