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Comment by parl_match | Hacker News Reader

I don't like Jesse Singal's work or his political positions (he fucking sucks!), but this is hardly antagonistic except to maybe a small group of terminally online posters who take posting too seriously.

Although, I guess that is the audience bluesky was targeting when they first started. So I guess I understand the criticism.

Also, it is a very ironic demonstration of the pancakes/waffles meme. Interjecting into an unrelated topic to ask the mods to ban someone you don't like is a tradition as old as dial up BBS. So I'm glad to see the torch is being carried forward to a younger generation.

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I don't even think having Jesse Singal on the platform is the problem (like it or not, I believe that all beings must have the right to communicate); the problem here was the communication failure when communicating this decision to the userbase. They could have just reiterated their rules and left it at that; instead, they chose to mock their userbase, write them off as harassment, and banned users left and right, abusing their position in network to censor people at every layer of the protocol.

> instead, they chose to mock their userbase

Doing the pancakes/waffles thing in the thread about pancakes/waffles is so fucking on the nose and demonstrates a complete lack of self awareness.

> They could have just reiterated their rules and left it at that; instead, they chose to mock their userbase, write them off as harassment, and banned users left and right, abusing their position in network to censor people at every layer of the protocol.

The more I dig into it, the more your one-sided whinging falls apart. I agree they could have handled it somewhat better, but I have very little sympathy for the terminally online bullshit that I'm seeing coming from the banned users.

Anyways, I feel we're apart on this issue. Feel free to have the last word if you wish.

> Doing the pancakes/waffles thing in the thread about pancakes/waffles is so fucking on the nose

Wait what do you think “the pancakes/waffles thing” refers to? You posted 2 hours ago that you had never heard of it.

I can see that how it could be confusing because there’s “the pancakes/waffles thing” where Jay wrote about about people complaining to the CEO when the moderation team doesn’t respond as being equivalent to that meme, and then there’s “the pancakes/waffles thing” where Jay started posting pictures of pancakes and waffles as some sort of… joke or dunk? I never quite got the 4D comedy chess there.

It doesn’t seem like anybody is “doing the pancakes/waffles thing” in either case. Nobody is asking Jay, as CEO, to ban anyone in the thread about Jay not being the CEO anymore. And I don’t think I’ve seen anyone ironically posting metahumor pictures of pancakes.

The term has become so overused that definition creep now means that it could mean “anything that might bother Jay” in this context.

> Wait what do you think “the pancakes/waffles thing” refers to? You posted 2 hours ago that you had never heard of it.

Quote me where I said I've never heard of the pancake/waffles thing? Of course I've heard of it, it's been around for a decade or so.

> I can see that how it could be confusing because there’s “the pancakes/waffles thing” where Jay wrote about about people complaining to the CEO when the moderation team doesn’t respond as being equivalent to that meme, and then there’s “the pancakes/waffles thing” where Jay started posting pictures of pancakes and waffles as some sort of… joke or dunk? I never quite got the 4D comedy chess there. It doesn’t seem like anybody is “doing the pancakes/waffles thing” in either case. Nobody is asking Jay, as CEO, to ban anyone in the thread about Jay not being the CEO anymore. And I don’t think I’ve seen anyone ironically posting metahumor pictures of pancakes. The term has become so overused that definition creep now means that it could mean “anything that might bother Jay” in this context.

I want you to read this out loud, to yourself. Maybe you'll feel as insane as I did when I read it.

> Quote me where I said I've never heard of the pancake/waffles thing? Of course I've heard of it, it's been around for a decade or so.

Here is a link to your comment about not having seen it in the context of the discussion you are posting in. When people talk about the pancakes/waffle thing in this context they are not talking about a meme from several years before Bluesky existed but rather a specific event (which I have apparently failed to communicate to you).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47314798

> I want you to read this out loud, to yourself. Maybe you'll feel as insane as I did when I read it.

That seems unnecessarily hostile, especially given I was responding to this comment of yours.

> Doing the pancakes/waffles thing in the thread about pancakes/waffles is so fucking on the nose and demonstrates a complete lack of self awareness.

I was talking about the topic of the thread, you seem kind of focused on swearing and insulting people. My bad, I hadn’t seen your other posts and did not realize how much this subject has flustered you.

> When people talk about the pancakes/waffle thing in this context

That makes sense. The original meme was widespread and this is fairly niche.

> That seems unnecessarily hostile, especially given I was responding to this comment of yours.

No man, I really mean it. Maybe it's hostile, but also, people talking about this legitimately sound, I don't know... unhinged? Off? I am flustered, because of how ridiculous this all is to me. I'm serious.

Like, "the CEO of blue sky said waffles to me and it was a 4d comedy dunk!" or whatever. It's like a Ralph Wiggum quote. What the fuck?

So, I think this topic is at its end. But really, read aloud what you wrote. Seriously, try it, you might find it grounding.

It is ok if you just didn’t/don’t know what people were talking about, I hope you are doing well.

To put my point as simply as possible for someone that isn’t ‘terminally online’ and understands that ‘posting isn’t praxis’ but also uses those phrases unprompted: People have criticized Jay for getting Poster’s Madness because of a time when she, as an admin, appeared to respond to any criticism saying everybody else has Poster’s Madness.

im also one of those people who is struggling to understand why people seem so passionate. its a twitter clone.

i also dont know whats going on, although it is a obscure drama from a relatively small community

i think maybe that is this disconnect. that relatively small community is extremely important to you but many other people here lack similar footing. i dont think the hostility is warranted but i can feel myself furrowing my brow and asking out loud what is happening when i read some of the posts from bluesky users in this thread

i guess i am glad i never got big into twitter or bluesky or the attention economy

The offended people are the type I least respect on the internet and remember how much better it was before they existed

> instead, they chose to mock their userbase

It's a CEO's personal account. CEOs do this on Twitter all the time without it becoming a techcrunch article.

Let's just be honest about what happened - the CEO of Bluesky gave a (still not proportionally as) absurd response to an extremely absurd harassment campaign. That's what this and the article intentionally obscure.

Again, this is never how the web was supposed to work, and it (BARELY) holding on to that is the real story.

> Although, I guess that is the audience bluesky was targeting when they first started. So I guess I understand the criticism.

I was in the invite only cohort of Bluesky users and I don't really think so. I think what happened is after the election a bunch of very online, political news addicted anti-Musk folks migrated to Bluesky and created the current culture. Even though I'm pretty sure most folks on the network shared pretty much the same politics, the culture on the network changed completely within a few days of this.

The central complaint doesn't seem to be distaste, but rather the fact that he is uniquely privileged over other users, despite violating Bluesky's terms of service.[0]

[0]: https://www.change.org/p/bluesky-must-enforce-its-community-...

The central complaint isn't "distaste" because you can't call for someone to be banned because of a "distaste".

"Jesse Singal has distributed private medical information on Bluesky without the consent of the patient" translates to publishing a quote from a patient included in a therapist's letter of support for hormones.

The problem in this situation is that the complaint itself as well as the whole drama surrounding the person is an exercise of harassment towards Singal. In this context, I don't think that saying "waffles" is out of order. I'm not sure of what else can be done about crybullying, since by its very nature innocent bystanders would be surely affected if action was taken against those complaining.

Distributing private medical information without consent is a violation of Bluesky's terms.

And to me, that sounds like a much more concrete example of someone being a bully.

Is it private if it is in a public affidavit?

In my opinion, inappropriately leaked information should probably still be considered private, even if it was made publicly accessible. But even if not, Singal says the same leaker directly contacted him with a new leak, which he also published.

> In my opinion, inappropriately leaked information should probably be considered private.

How is that relevant to BSky's terms of service? The information was public and did not identify the person.

> But even if not, Singal says the same leaker directly contacted him with a new leak, which he also published.

I notice that you didn't say whether this new leak was private information, or whether it was also already public knowledge, or whether it in any way identified a person.

> I notice that you didn't say whether this new leak was private information

The new leak was, according to journalist Jesse Singal himself, absolutely private information.

Please cite Singal's statement and let's see what he actually said.

I think this entire thread has run its course; if it's not this detail, it'll be another, as a few others have already moved goalposts further down the discussion than the ones you're setting here.

But if you wish to sate personal curiosity, it is in his Substack, linked from the first link I posted, which was itself from the link posted by its GP.

The only thing that seems remotely related to your claims is this:

    When the office of Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey began an investigation, [Reed] said she handed over the spreadsheet, after scrubbing out the personally identifying information that could spark HIPAA problems. She shared a copy of it with me as well — it contains 17 alleged detransitioners or desisters and 60 allegedly worrisome cases.

What's your problem with what happened exactly? Is it your position that your "private information" cannot be used, ever, to expose what some see as a medical scandal, even though it cannot identify you or in any way be associated with you? What does "private" even mean to you if sharing this dataset did not violate HIPAA?

> In my opinion, inappropriately leaked information should probably still be considered private.

I'd love to see the limitations of this opinion you definitely hold honestly and without favor.

You started by posting a change.org petition that links to a deleted post - in other words an "appeal to petition" that has no evidence. Now you are suggesting there is another leak that was published (presumably not mentioned in this petition?) that also has no evidence. Where is the evidence?

Everything from an actual search engine request for these posts (which to be clear, are deleted) suggests that these are anonymized and public, and contain no identifying information.

>“Don’t use Bluesky Social to break the law or cause harm to others,”

Is this, quoted in the change.org, the relevant line?

The law was not broken, it is also fairly evident that the intention was not to "cause harm to others", nor has any harm has seemingly come upon the patient for this (it requires a huge stretch of imagination to think of a case in which it could)

Why do people keep lying about this?

He pulled a quote from a publically available affidavit.

There was no identifying information whatsoever either.

Yeah here's the problem with this argument:

1. People want him banned for any and no reason, so this is a post-hoc justification. The same people (let's be real, likely including you) wanted Singal banned the second he made his account.

2. This change.org petition, despite proving how many uninformed people will blindly click agree on a petition, proves nothing about how Singal broke literally any rule anywhere, in law or on Bluesky.

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