David Gerardbluesky are hilariously evil as a company. rationalist vibecamp crypto bro dipshits with nazi pals. their USERBASE, however, is awesome. i expect the company is wondering how the hell they deal with being the land of queer shitposters who bully people like Ian Dunt off.
Jon (now at neuromatch.social)@davidgerard it's a similar dissonance as between Twitter's previous owners and (large chunks of) their user base, magnified because of the small scale, blooski's initial users, and the general "stakes are low so let's let it all hang out" feel. šæ
Misuse Case@davidgerard Thereās also the disconnect between how they are trying to promote themselves (as federated, although they arenāt, so they can wash their hands of managing moderation) and what their user base actually wants (a centrally managed and moderated platform).
They kind of got pressured into actually hiring and fielding moderators, despite their best efforts.
@MisuseCase oh don't worry! they're taking care to *still* fuck up moderation as hard as they can.
@davidgerard I heard that the CEO said āyes we have moderatorsā and it turned out the developers had locked the moderators out of the system and were refusing to permit them access, which says bad things about the organizationās governance and the platformās design.
@MisuseCase they keep hitting new serious moderation issues and ignoring all best practice, e.g. they blocked someone for posting what they said was suicidal ideation and ignored the unanimous and informed response that this was a good way to get blood on their hands
@MisuseCase these really are rationalist cryptobro dipshits and they are ABSOLUTELY impervious to any idea they didn't work out from first principles of praxeology themselves
@davidgerard I kept hearing on Reddit while I was still on there that human moderators would be replaced by AI but I knew it was bullshit and I am being proven correct in real time.
@MisuseCase i just posted "here's the new lemmy refuge" notices to both subs i'm a mod on and restricted further posts
none of us have any interest in working for spez for free
Rep Rap Ryn :3@MisuseCase @davidgerard while mod bots have a place, only a fool thinks a Markov chain with Moxy can replace a human at stopping a human from doing awful stuff
Glitch (over count 1999)@davidgerard they'll probably just proceed to alienate that userbase away with time by making incomprehensible project decisions.
honestly im mostly disappointed in those queer shitposters because if you're moving from birdsite to bluesky and stick around even once you know the hostile nature of the leadership... idk, it feels like at that point you're just a glutton for being alienated by big tech?
i mean if that gets them going sure, but i'd personally prefer a healthier approach.
honestly im mostly disappointed in those queer shitposters because if you're moving from birdsite to bluesky and stick around even once you know the hostile nature of the leadership... idk, it feels like at that point you're just a glutton for being alienated by big tech?
i mean if that gets them going sure, but i'd personally prefer a healthier approach.
@glitch frankly bluesky works for the job in ways that mastodon just doesn't seem to.
all platforms will die, along with humanity and civilisation. shitpost while we can.
i'm actually surprised bluesky has remained fun this long.
@davidgerard i guess, but i somehow still can find more respect for the people moving to say, cohost, than the people moving to bluesky.
like youre moving to a platform that's still centralized (cuz decentralization is one of those things only tech nerds like me care about, its something im willing to concede on) but at *least* you're not sitting with leadership that openly thinks the people who want you dead are a valid voice to be heard.
like youre moving to a platform that's still centralized (cuz decentralization is one of those things only tech nerds like me care about, its something im willing to concede on) but at *least* you're not sitting with leadership that openly thinks the people who want you dead are a valid voice to be heard.
@glitch i think you're fundamentally in error to treat the dynamics of the platforms as fungible. the observable evidence is they aren't.
also, "sitting with leadership that openly thinks the people who want you dead are a valid voice to be heard" is literally most of twitter's history
@glitch like, you're sitting on mastodon telling people on another platform that they should move to your preferred platform, i'm sure you can appreciate they are unlikely to take that seriously
@davidgerard at least twitter has the excuse that people like jack were just genuinely stupid libertarians at the time who invented mass t&s over many years (which musk pissed away with the acquisition). same deal with reddit. to put it mildly, the average persons stance on moderation was a lot looser back then.
the idea of completely deplatforming only seriously took off as an "acceptable" opinion after it became clear how many social media sites were responsible for the mess that was 2016 US elections.
and no, like i said - i can bring up more respect for people that move to cohost (or heck, even back to tumblr if we're being honest here). i don't care if you move to fedi or not; for many people it's not the right answer and i get that. what i *can't* comprehend is why people would, after leaving a site because the owners openly despise them, move to a site where the owners would again equally despise them.
also - i realize you might be trying to annoy me here but i do not use mastodon thank you. i have not bought into Gargrons vision for the social media network mastodon, i prefer the fediverse tyvm
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the idea of completely deplatforming only seriously took off as an "acceptable" opinion after it became clear how many social media sites were responsible for the mess that was 2016 US elections.
and no, like i said - i can bring up more respect for people that move to cohost (or heck, even back to tumblr if we're being honest here). i don't care if you move to fedi or not; for many people it's not the right answer and i get that. what i *can't* comprehend is why people would, after leaving a site because the owners openly despise them, move to a site where the owners would again equally despise them.
also - i realize you might be trying to annoy me here but i do not use mastodon thank you. i have not bought into Gargrons vision for the social media network mastodon, i prefer the fediverse tyvm
.> people like jack were just genuinely stupid libertarians at the time
Jack personally stopped Richard Spencer from being banned. He is cryptofash in the techfash tendency, like his peers.
@davidgerard yes but at the time, at least the general perception wasn't on that side of the coin. the perception was that he was a stupid techlibertarian rather than an cryptofascist.
the acknowledgement that "hey, these social media sites are hosting nazis is like really bad" to the general public only happened after 2016 (if you want to get specific, only after unite the right in 2017 where twitter banned jason kessler for organizing that whole crap).
the "wow, jack was just doing damage control/really wanted people like spencer to stay" is for most people 20/20 hindsight.
the acknowledgement that "hey, these social media sites are hosting nazis is like really bad" to the general public only happened after 2016 (if you want to get specific, only after unite the right in 2017 where twitter banned jason kessler for organizing that whole crap).
the "wow, jack was just doing damage control/really wanted people like spencer to stay" is for most people 20/20 hindsight.
@glitch i think at this point your point has gone past coherence
@davidgerard its definitely drifted off-topic. shouldn't have gotten caught up in talking about jack.
still dont get why people would want to use bluesky of all websites though. like... almost any other social media is better.
still dont get why people would want to use bluesky of all websites though. like... almost any other social media is better.
@glitch @davidgerard having talked to some folks who talk mad shit about Mastodon being hard and having bad UI, being queer doesn't make you immune from being a corpo simp.
Some folks can't fathom using an internet based on consent, paying for the actual stuff that runs it, and communities being self managed instead of a bunch of underpaid mods being forced to look at the worst stuff all day.
@reprapryn @davidgerard had a day to think and i donāt think itās quite corpo simpery for the shitposters. many of the shitposters ive seen move to bluesky (used to follow a small chunk of them on twitter) arenāt corpo simps, at least not nominally.
rather, i think the reason they move to bluesky is that they just want to be a bully, and fedi comes down way harder on bullying and toxicity (mostly due to how its moderation tooling is set up) while bluesky explicitly doesnāt give a shit.
most of them donāt actually want the nazis completely gone, not as easily as fedi allows for it (while fedis mod tools arenāt great, the ability to suspend any direct instance interaction is a very good dampener on toxicity). theyāre perfectly fine with the corporate whack-a-mole, but if itās not there, thatās fine too. their popularity came from ridiculing nazis, theyāre not about to give that up.
i donāt want to name specific people on this, but it does stand out that the queer shitposters whose biggest claim to fame was ālol, look at me ratioing this dumbfuck naziā are the ones mostly on bluesky.
fedis mod tools (as well as having a history of defederating these types of instances from regular instances due to āfriendly fireā - see witches dot town for an older example i happen to be familiar with) reduce that kind of interaction, which helps keep toxicity down.
bluesky pretty much doesnāt moderate and allows that kind of content to fester and get as popular as it was before. hence why they flock over to it and want to claim its superiority over mastodon - they want their audience and fedi doesnāt want to give it to them.
at least, thatās my current theory.
@glitch @davidgerard sounds legit.
Dunk discourse and that sort of shitposting isn't fun to me. And it sounds like even a modicum of moderation and they will get nuked too.
@glitch @[email protected] you spend way too long ranting in complete confidence about a site you have never looked at
@davidgerard I have enough confidence that blueskys current popularity with queer shitposters is explicitly because the (lack of) moderation encourages dunking on Nazis rather than the moderation actually banning the Nazis.
I'm confident about it because I specifically blocked most of the initial group for constantly dumping their "funny dunks" in my twitter feed (indirectly through friends RTing them), making that site even more toxic than it already is on a regular basis.
I'm confident about it because I specifically blocked most of the initial group for constantly dumping their "funny dunks" in my twitter feed (indirectly through friends RTing them), making that site even more toxic than it already is on a regular basis.
@glitch yeah that's great thanks
Oliver Ghingold@davidgerard Like all tech companies they're dealing with the fact that the people who are building the damn thing know they're valuable enough to ignore the tone-from-the-top when it conflicts with the userbase or their own moral center. Paul (AT handle "@pfrazee.com") is very embedded in the community and seems to have more of a seat at the table for sitewide policy than eg. ex-Twitter Jack does.
The fact that AT Protocol is federated (even if it doesn't natively talk to ActivityPub, that doesn't stop people from writing shims, see also: Diaspora, Zot, and I think Secure Scuttlebutt?) means that the tone from the top matters way less than it would in a centralized social network anyways.
If the community hates tech-bro libertarianism, and boy howdy do they ever, then the admins have their work cut out for them if that's an important part of how they plan to make money.
@emceebois it's important to note that Paul was 100% company line on moderation until they made the devs do the actual moderation. only *then* did he get there was a problem here.
@davidgerard On the one hand that's not ideal, on the other hand you love to see it.
@emceebois i'm glad he's getting it rather than not getting it, to be clear
@davidgerard That's what I was meaning with "you love to see it", I was just being glib and phrasing that sentiment in meme format because the internet has broken my brain and I am happy enough not fixing it.
kƦt@davidgerard I thought bluesky was an interesting idea, and signed up for a code but then they mentioned crypto-AI-blah-blah, and so revealing the cut of their jib, so I deleted the app.
Nemo_bis š@davidgerard Hopefully they conclude they'd be better off turning it into an ActivityPub instance and then sell it to someone who's on the lookout for a ready-made community. (Who?!)
@davidgerard honestly it seems popular with the same type of people that made twitter suck, and makes mastodon so refreshing. main characters trying to "win" social media
@kaimac sorry, I'll try to make my posts much more annoying
@davidgerard The fact that the user base is great doesnāt mean you should use it. Weāve seen how fast a siteās ownerās proclivities become the siteās obligatory ideological line with Twitter.
Doctor Memory@davidgerard I expect weāll find out very soon that they were sub Rosa rolling out the red carpet to Dunt, Erickson et al in order to provide ābalance.ā
@memory oh they tried with Yglesias and the reaction from the queers was *visceral*. same here.
šandrzejš@davidgerard dw they'll follow him to wherever he goes next
Idealistic Pragmatist 
@davidgerard wait, waitā¦what happened to Ian Dunt there?
@IPEdmonton he said "hi" and was greeted with calls to go away because he was a horrible transphobe (UK media variety) with extensive receipts attached
@davidgerard heās a horrible transphobe???
Phlawless@davidgerard ... wait, so I *should* join after all, even though it's a Dorsey honey-trap?
@daphlawless i'm actually surprised it's stayed fun this long
derek@davidgerard I'll just drop this bit of bluesky bovine droppings here:
https://mastodon.social/@atomicpoet/110284332592567100
I have no interest in being part of a social network that is being built by this sort of person even if the community has somehow overcome the attitudes of the creators.
@derek as i said in the toot you're answering