> However, as time has gone by, Bluesky’s traffic has declined (X’s has as well) and some of its users have become increasingly upset at its moderation decisions, including allowing U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance and anti-trans writer Jesse Singal to remain as users of the platform.
The problem, if you can call it that, is Singal hasn't broken any of their TOS or guidelines.
Right now, AFAICT this is a people with pitchforks problem, who are asking for something which they don't have any business asking.
Sure, if you want to stick your fingers in your ears, block Singal. There are widely used block lists for people who even merely follow Singal. Asking for his ban from a public use platform is too much without more than "He wrote some articles for the NY Times, The Atlantic, and NY Magazine, I didn't personally enjoy."
It's worse than that, as the linked TC article links to an explanation of his ban-worthy views that, if applied to everyone, would lean to a ban of probably 85% of the US. (Purposefully not referencing them here. The question is not whether those views are right, it's whether those are mainstream.)
Bluesky has a problem of its user base demanding purity, and it will 100% be the death of it.
You'll need to explain this a little bit more, because the TC article seems to indicate the issue is that he is accused of targeted harassment. I doubt you could design a poll to make people vote 85% in favor of targeted harassment.
> he is accused of targeted harassment
yeah but that's an accusation without basis in reality.
oh, there's tons of basis in reality. How could you even say that? Just a cursory google:
https://www.professorwatchlist.org/
https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-makes...
https://www.azregents.edu/news-releases/abor-chair-statement
That's for Charlie Kirk et al, not Jesse Singal.
> Bluesky has a problem of its user base demanding purity, and it will 100% be the death of it.
Yup.
As someone who describes themselves as Leftist, I wanted to enjoy Blue Sky, but the purity tests are insane.
To give a concrete example, I was called a Nazi for owning a Tesla Model 3. The fact that I bought the car 6 years ago, long before Elon Musk made his hard-right turn, was irrelevant. They literally expected me to sell the car and take a huge financial loss (Since I need a car and would then need to buy a new one, and the trade-in value of my M3P is shit) just to virtue signal.
Not to mention that it's unreasonable to levy that accusation even to someone who buys a Tesla today. Doing business with someone does not construe agreement with everything that person does. And while it's everyone's right to decide that they, personally, don't wish to buy a Tesla on the basis of Elon's beliefs, it's nobody's right to demand that everyone else must do so or else they're a Nazi.
The _actual_ trouble with Bluesky is that it's just a retread of Twitter with only a few minor tweaks, right down to the inevitable moderation and governance problems from shoving every user into a single shared social space and having a single centralized point of failure.
It's not 2012 anymore, and the modern mainstream social media ecosystem has turned into an utter disaster area. If you're going to do social media in the 2020's, you need something better, not the same tired ideas and empty promises about "We'll do it _right_ this time around, honest."
Mastodon, for all its faults, at the very least was truly and demonstrably decentralized.
> would lean to a ban of probably 85% of the US
A decentralized system would allow for that to happen tbh. That 85% can exist in their bubble but other actors who see them as dangerous and unsafe should have the means to mute/disconnect.
Wouldn't the remaining 15% be the section in a bubble?
Could you rephrase that please, I’m not sure what you mean
Wouldn't the remaining 15% be the portion of the populace that is in a bubble, rather than the 85%?
Even better: the only “evidence” of Singal’s “anti-trans” views are that his work has been quoted by anti-trans politicians and activists. This is an absolute ridiculous bar to have. Anyone who follows him would be hard-pressed to describe him as “anti-trans” unless you think anything less than a full throated endorsement of self ID and medical transition interventions for minors is “anti-trans”.
Indeed, Singal is a journalist you go to when you want to read a thoughtful, data-driven analysis of a controversial issue.
He's exceptionally skilled at taking complex and highly polarized topics and picking them apart in a way that invites readers to consider different perspectives.
Unfortunately, that in itself is a polarizing approach, as many people just want their pre-existing beliefs reinforced.
Speaking of confirmation bias, do you disagree with Singal about anything in particular? What about agreement?
Who else have you read on this 'controversial issue'? Why did you consider them less persuasive than a journalist with no particular expertise?
Why have you not named what the 'issue' is?
Are 'people' an 'issue' to be solved in general, or just in this case?
If we changed topics to 'what should be done about the "autism issue"', does your opinion change? If so, why? There are perfectly valid questions being brought up by heterodox thinkers all the time. We're not even certain that those people experience emotions, there's literally no way to tell, and we shouldn't shy away from hard questions and even harder truths, don't you think?
Do you believe that the executive branch of the federal government is best-suited to dealing with undesirable minorities generally? If so, what national-level 'solutions' currently being discussed in the halls of power are your favorites?
In the spirit of cooperation, I'll go first. Openly trial-ballooning the revocation of the second amendment for trans people is my favorite in terms of pure audacity.
What's with this barrage of questions? Pick one or two if you want a conversation. I'm not interested in an interrogation.
> unless you think anything less than a full throated endorsement
That is absolutely how some of the more "passionate" activist types have been for the past 5+ years on a number of social topics, not just trans.
Which ones? Everyone in this thread is afraid to stand on their beliefs and I find that annoying. Just say what you mean!
First though, a clarifying question, do you think the civil-rights movement, as it existed in history, was 'too passionate'?
If not, in what specific way is the current 'activist' movement worse than those movements of our recent past?
Which civil rights organization has gone too far recently and what is the preferred middle ground that you do accept?
QED
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I wanted to give you (and the website you linked) the benefit of the doubt since with all the accusations they make there is a link in there. I thought it was sources of Jesse actually doing any of this stuff (which he didn't but I am willing to be proven wrong) .. but no. Those links are all just internal info dumps and almost nothing of the accusations on the page is sourced .. at all.
Right, the website lists the accusations with links, but the links seem unrelated to the accusations.
For example, I'd expect "criticizing expert medical and scientific consensus on healthcare for our minors" to link to some kind of article describing what Jesse Singal said about this topic and why it's incorrect, but instead it links to a general page about "healthcare providers serving gender diverse youth" that doesn't even mention anything about the accused person or their writings.
> I'm fine with labelling this person "anti trans"
You should probably at least give Jesse the right of reply here: https://unherd.com/2023/11/the-rage-behind-transgender-map/
Why
How dare they write for... The Atlantic!
Why are some people like this?
That's the one thing you pick up?
I had never heard of Singal but I went ahead and started following him. Thanks!
How exciting
>if applied to everyone, would lean to a ban of probably 85%
I'm not American but looking in from the outside i can't figure out anything 85% of you would agree on there right now.
"People who disagree with me should not be allowed to speak" is definitely up there.
Even that only applies to one side of the political aisle
It really really doesn't. If you pay attention, $yourside does it just as much as - possibly even more than - $otherside.
As evidence, consider the fact that from your comment, I literally have absolutely no idea which political side you are on.
Dolly Parton!
Facebook and Twitter no longer bother with moderation, do you think the experience on those platforms is better or worse than 5 years ago?
It used to be common sense to immediately ban creeps of all stripes, especially the obvious ones. Singal certainly qualifies. Putting aside the super annoying 'just asking questions' vitriol that he publishes to national papers, his pdf-file chat log stuff alone would warrant an instant perma from me without a second thought.
Speaking to your broader point about the 'death' of a platform. The people that made bsky what it is now (good and ill) are precisely the people you are blaming for its downfall, which is weird. Normally when you run a business you want your users to remain so that you might profit.
Relatedly, I'm very very tired of the 4chan/crypto/ai gas-leak that has enshittified everything, aren't you?
I've seen bsky users chat casually about their rpe and death-threat ratio before and after leaving twitter, and for that alone, I would choose the 'threat lite' platform for as long as it remained so.
> "The question is not whether those views are right, it's whether those are mainstream."
I don't agree that this is the question, nor do I agree with the your unsupported number. This isn't an election, and popularism is a coward's appeal. Was the Gaza genocide not a genocide until the polls caught up with what we could all see was happening?
I don't even think you believe what your wrote. If the 'views' in question are truly shared by 85%!* of a population that never agrees on anything, then surely there's no problem with sharing them on this forum? A guarantee of 85% positive karma is awaiting you if you just speak your truth. It's the Trump era, and you can say the 'r-word' and the 't-slur' now. What was actually holding you back?
> This isn't an election, and popularism is a coward's appeal.
These platforms were supposed to be the "digital town square". Implicit in that is the idea that anyone and everyone can discuss and share their ideas. When would you remove someone from an actual town square? Only when they are being extremely disruptive or violent.
Further, it cannot be a "town square" if half the town isn't allowed to be there.
"digital town square"
These are privately owned for-profit hundred-billion+ dollar publicly traded advertising companies. These are, almost definitionally, not honest actors! Are you serious, you still believe their marketing copy from 8 years ago verbatim?
What am I witnessing here?
> Facebook and Twitter no longer bother with moderation, do you think the experience on those platforms is better or worse than 5 years ago?
I haven't used FB in years but Twitter is very (stupidly and incoherently, but very actively) moderated. Unless you are being technical and saying that Twitter doesn't exist and so isn't moderated, and the moderated thing is X, but...
X then. By unmoderated I mean it's a cess-pool of pay-boosted groypers, crypto ad accounts, ai accounts, sex accounts, pure scams, ai generated underage girlfriends, and actual CSAM, that go mostly ignored if they shell out 8 USD.
I'm sure some actual humans manage to still get banned from time to time, but you can't be telling me that things haven't changed for the worse right? Do they even have a 'trust and safety' team anymore?
Do you have a source for any of this? I've never seen any of those.
Well, except the groypers, but that's a feature, not a bug, as they otherwise are not breaking the law or platfom rules and therefore deserve to be on the platform just as anyone else does.
> Facebook and Twitter no longer bother with moderation, do you think the experience on those platforms is better or worse than 5 years ago? > It used to be common sense to immediately ban creeps of all stripes, especially the obvious ones. Singal certainly qualifies.
The experience on these platforms is somewhat better than it was five years ago, because the people making moderation decisions for these platforms have been largely replaced by people who are less prone to banning people because someone who dislikes their political speech labels them a creep. There are still serious moderation issues on these platforms, but yeah compared to five years ago there is somewhat more freedom to speak without risking getting arbitrarily banned, and a wider range of topics being talked about.
> Putting aside the super annoying 'just asking questions' vitriol that he publishes to national papers, his pdf-file chat log stuff alone would warrant an instant perma from me without a second thought.
You should be able to perma-ban anyone you want from your own feed for any reason. If it is possible for you to make the platform ban Singal (or anyone else) in a way that affects anyone other than ypu, then that platform is not meaningfully decentralized. I've occasionally read articles by Singal but I don't follow his output closely and don't have a strong opinion about him one way or the other. I should still be able to read what he posts even if you think it is not worth reading.
> Relatedly, I'm very very tired of the 4chan/crypto/ai gas-leak that has enshittified everything, aren't you?
I don't think 4chan, cryptocurrency, or AI have much to do with each other, nor that online discussion related to to these phenomena in some way universally constitutes enshittification or not.
4chan has changed the way that discourse happens online, and it has definitely leaked to X at the very least. Incel lingo especially, you might even use it yourself being completely unaware. I'd call it as a style of reactionary discourse, where the most 'controversial/engaging' thing is elevated and 'ironic' nihilism is the default viewpoint. This is now fully automated, but it needn't be forever so. These companies would do well to learn how to enter the post-exponential phase of their life-cycle.
crypto (and gambling I suppose these days) is a barometer of the advertising/fake user space. There's a fundamentally different vibe to a site trying to trick the gullible into getting 'free' crypto from musk and a site trying to sell you 75% off crocs at Target. You are free to disagree.
AI is the source of a huge wave deeply inauthentic and frankly boring/weird content. This reduces the signal/noise ratio, and thus the perceived value of any website. Again, your are free to disagree, but to me this is all symptomatic of cyclical autophagy.
There was an article about this issue on techcrunch yesterday, and it linked to a long discussion on Bluesky about whether "clanker" was a slur that should be banned. JC. What a waste of time by some people.
There seem to be a lot of people on Bluesky who don’t think it’s wrong to post reply-spam about their favorite grievances even when it’s entirely off topic. Complaining about Singal is an example. It’s the sort of thing that would be downvoted to oblivion on Hacker News.
For the most part they’re fairly easy to avoid, but reading the replies for popular accounts is a minefield.
This is sort of like email in the old days before the spam filters got good. Bluesky needs better reply-spam filters. Or maybe they already exist somewhere, but it needs better ways to find the good filters?
If that gets fixed then maybe it has a chance to become a more welcoming place.
"he didn't technically break any rules so I won't ban him" has been the death of _many_ social spaces
good moderation requires discretion and keeping the users happy, not slavish legalism
That's an argument that proves a lot, given that it kind of implies that a quorum of customers can simply vote other customers off the island.
well... yes? does that not happen regularly on many platforms?
even on a free service, users have some tiny leverage; they can vote with their feet
Not on any viable investor-funded ones, nope.
even billion dollar corporations like cloudflare (with a "free speech absolutist" CEO) absolutely do drop unpopular customers due to user pressure
If you're talking about moot and kiwifarms that wasn't merely "user pressure" like large customers threatening to walk - it was a harassment campaign hitting up the legal department and cloudflare decided they didn't want to bother dying on that hill
> moot
Do you mean null? Ironically, 4chan actually still uses Cloudflare to this day, and did through that whole controversy too.
I assure you there is way, way worse things posted to /pol/ than there ever was, or will be, to Kiwi Farms.
Right, sorry, Moon not moot.
I enjoyed his interview with Nina Paley and Chris Cohn on life after cloudflare: https://heterodorx.com/podcast/episode-107-how-the-internet-...
Interesting, thanks for sharing.
I have been halfway following the Farm's status for the past couple years from null's telegram/forum posts, I didn't know he spoke about the situation at length anywhere.
This can backfire. eg Twitch moderators.
Discretion should be rarely used. For everything else, create a set of rules and stick to them.
But I guess users also expect that there's freedom of opinions on the platform within the set rules. If users are merely being banned based on their opinion, that doesn't sound like a healthy environment.
Good on Jay Graber that she's sticking to a reasoned set of principles instead of bowing down to the braying mob.
if you call your userbase a braying mob, you're not going to have a userbase for long
It's a small fraction of the userbase that is up in arms about this, who want special exceptions made for their demands.
He /doesn't use the service at all/. I agree that is a way of not breaking its rules.
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Why do you believe that description applies to Singal? His work is well-researched, grounded and reasonable.
Perhaps his journalistic output conflicts with your beliefs, but that's no reason to cast false aspersions on him.
> Why do you believe that description applies to Singal? His work is well-researched, grounded and reasonable.
To answer your question: because truth is no defense. How many times have you seen some statement accused of being something-ist, instead of simply false? How often did in further arguing the factuality of the original statement not even come up?
> His work is well-researched, grounded and reasonable.
Do you intend this to include his almost entirely uncritical coverage of so-called “rapid onset gender dysphoria”? How well do you believe he researched and fact-checked the claims of Lisa Littman? Was he simply misled that her retracted study was real science?
> Perhaps his journalistic output conflicts with your beliefs, but that's no reason to cast false aspersions on him.
Perhaps his journalistic output reinforces your beliefs, but that’s no reason to overstate the quality of his journalism.
Why is the idea that children are impressionable so controversial?
> Why do you believe that description applies to Singal? His work is well-researched, grounded and reasonable. Perhaps his journalistic output conflicts with your beliefs, but that's no reason to cast false aspersions on him.
Singal's work is not well-researched or reasonable. There have been countless analyses documenting the factual inaccuracies in his work, not to mention the routine and egregious violations of journalistic ethics.
Nobody has cast false aspersions on him, least of all the person that you are responding to. On the contrary, your comments on this post suggest to me that your defense of Signal and your description of him as "grounded and reasonable" has more to do with your approval of his beliefs rather than an honest assessment of his work.
Could you link to some of those analyses?
I'm sure that Hacker News would love to delve into the arguments instead of trying to downvote or flag your posts into non-visibility because they disagree with you.
The most comprehensive “Singal does bad journalism” montages come from the left-wing media outlets and leftist bloggers that he’s targeted over the years. The typical HN commenter is going to immediately gloss those accounts as partisan hyperbole. And why not? It’s purely academic for some of them, and internally worldview-challenging for others.
But if you really are honestly curious and unbiased, M. K. Anderson wrote a well-researched article for Protean in 2022.
> But if you really are honestly curious and unbiased, M. K. Anderson wrote a well-researched article for Protean in 2022.
He misrepresents Singal's writing, uses guilt-by-association smears, and focuses more on personal vilification of Singal than substantive critique.
For example his claim that Singal's writing "endangers trans lives" is hyperbolic and unsupported.
This is nothing more than a hit piece penned to destroy the heretic.
> For example his claim that Singal's writing "endangers trans lives" is hyperbolic and unsupported.
Partially due to Singal’s sensationalist journalism, trans people in the United States are about to lose access to some forms of healthcare—treatments that will remain accessible to cis people, like hormone replacement therapy.
So I think history has vindicated this particular claim. I don’t expect you to agree, however.
I am honored that you made an account just to respond to this! Welcome to HN.
Couldn't it be possible that chemically altering minors isn't be best course of treatment? The UK, Finland, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway have all stopped routine prescription of puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria on the grounds that their efficacy is not clear but the negative side effects are. It's extremely hard to claim the science is settled at this point.
The allegations of harm seem to come from an a priori conclusion that these treatments are beneficial.
I welcome any novel, high-quality scientific research on better treatments for gender dysphoric children.
But, in the States at least, there is no longer any funding for that. They cut all of it by grepping the NIH and NSF databases for “gender”, more or less.
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/nih-terminating-active-researc...
What there soon will be in the States, assuming SCOTUS overturns the Colorado ban this term, is a renaissance of conversion therapy. If you abuse the child hard enough and long enough, they’ll have bigger problems than gender dysphoria or—coming up in the next wave of manufactured outrage—same-sex attraction.
Hard to say that the “just asking questions” club has the child’s best interests at heart.
There has been quality research published recently on treating gender dysphoria. For instance, A 2020 study on treating GD with hormone therapy: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08039488.2019.1...
Somewhat unique among studies on pediatric gender affirming hormone therapy, this study had a control group that wasn't prescribed blockers. The group on blockers fared no better than the control group. This is the study that primarily motivated Finland to stop routine prescription of puberty blockers to children, with half a dozen or so other European countries following suit after their reviews of the evidence.
Researchers in the US have typically balked at the idea of including a control group in their studies on blockers, arguing that it's unethical to withhold live-saving medicine from patients. This, conveniently, lets authors frame null results as positive, by claiming that gender dysphoria patient would have fared even worse without blockers. This is what Johanna Olson-Kennedy did in her latest study: she observed no change in the patients' outcomes, and claimed that this indicates that blockers are beneficial because they prevented the patients from getting even worse. But without a control group in her study, this is statement is just speculation.
The retreat from gender affirming care is motivated by the absence of good evidence in favor of their usage. And it's hardly a US-specific phenomenon. It's uniquely politicized in the US, I'll grant that, but this shift in stance on altering children's endocrine systems is happening in plenty of other countries too, so I'm not so convinced this is solely borne out by this latest President.
And again, I find the attempts to equate anti-gay conversion therapy aimed at suppressing homosexual desire with exploring ways to become more comfortable in one's natural body. It's fundamentally different to[ tell a boy attracted to other boys that his feelings are wrong than it is to tell a boy identifying as a girl on account of his same sex attractions, "boys can like other boys, not only girls can like boys". The former is telling someone to reject a part of themselves, the latter is expanding's one's concept of gender to include one's natural state of being.
I’m not interested paying to read your study. The bulk of your comment is a non sequitur that conflates “novel, high-quality scientific research” with a single N=58 study that may very well be high-quality, but in any case does not propose a novel course of treatment. It has always been the case that many gender dysphoric children do not receive puberty blockers.
You conflate the European change in medical policy, which still permits the use of puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria, with American legislative bans that do not permit that. “Not routinely prescribed” is logically distinct from “never prescribed.”
Finally, you misrepresent conversion therapy. “Exploring ways to become more comfortable in one's natural body” is simply an inaccurate description of both conversion therapy as practiced in the past and “gender exploration therapy” as practiced today.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10018052/
> Proponents of gender-exploratory therapy acknowledge that some consider it a form of conversion practice, paradoxically resenting the suggestion while opposing bans on conversion practices on account that it would prohibit their approach. As for critiques of gender-exploratory therapy, they are presented as evidence of trans health care’s ideological capture. Yet a close comparison of gender-exploratory therapy and conversion practices reveals many conceptual and narrative similarities. How proponents talk about gender-exploratory therapy is nearly identical to how individuals offering conversion practices targeting sexual orientation frame their own work. Despite the language of exploration, gender-exploratory therapy shares more with interrogation, if not inquisition.
Well, anyway. I cannot quote the entire article here.
> You conflate the European change in medical policy, which still permits the use of puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria, with American legislative bans that do not permit that.
No, it largely does not. Most European countries at this point, if they do permit blockers at all, only permit it as part of a clinical study, not as routine treatment for gender dysphoria. This excludes all but a slim minority of (if any) patients. Pointing out that it's still legal as part of experimental trials is a nuance that doesn't affect the >99% of patients that aren't part of a trial, and thus cannot be prescribed these substances.
Your linked publication doesn't actually interview patients who've worked with clinicians or otherwise try and dig into real-world evidence about what this clinical practice does. It's just one author postulating her opinions as fact, with no effort to back up her claims with evidence.
That's quite the leap of causation
https://commonslibrary.org/the-anti-trans-movement/
Singal is part of the “Disinformation and Conversion” faction, as a promoter of so-called “rapid onset gender dysphoria.”
> But if you really are honestly curious and unbiased, M. K. Anderson wrote a well-researched article for Protean in 2022.
Wow. I've read that article and if you think that was unbiased or even-handed...
There is a tech blogger who I really don't like and this blogger happened upon a comment where I said I really didn't like anything they had written, and happened to ask, "Why?" And my answer was how deeply incurious they were, and how incurious they invited their readers to be. This blogger never acknowledge the potential they might be wrong. Even as a nodding feint to fallibility as something we simply expect of people writing about any complex topic.
That's what that article is like to me.
I explicitly said it and every other example of the genre was biased, so I don’t know why you’re claiming otherwise. Thanks for confirming my priors on HN users.
I said it was well-researched, which is true.
Thanks. I'm well acquainted with Hacker News' proclivities for mob censorship, but I didn't know a ton about this specific incident.
> I'm sure that Hacker News would love to delve into the arguments instead of trying to downvote or flag your posts into non-visibility because they disagree with you.
I've been a member of this site for fifteen years. I know that nearly any material - not abstract - defense of transgender rights will get downvoted into invisibility, as will any attempt to name transphobia, no matter how civilly presented or exhaustively-cited.
For that same reason, I also know that it's not a worthwhile use of time to delve into substantive "debate" on these topics in this thread, or any place where transphobia is being trafficked openly, for that matter (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45508592).
> The problem, if you can call it that, is Singal hasn't broken any of their TOS.
Well, no, he did unambiguously break the TOS back when he originally joined. Then Bluesky amended their TOS, which gave them an avenue to avoid banning him.
My understanding is their TOS was unclear and they clarified it after the outrage, but their moderation policy didn't actually change. They're not going ban people that break the TOS outside the S, because that's practically unenforceable.
> They're not going ban people that break the TOS outside the S, because that's practically unenforceable.
Before they amended the ToS, they did do that. It's completely possible to enforce, especially when the person in question is the one sharing the evidence of the offending behavior. There's no dispute of facts at play.
> Well, no, he did clearly break the TOS back when he originally joined.
Care to explain? The links in the article re: potential violations are mostly BS.
Doxxing people off-platform used to be against the ToS. When people began reporting him for that, Bluesky amended their ToS.
> Doxxing people off-platform used to be against the ToS. When people began reporting him for that, Bluesky amended their ToS.
Even by the loosest definition what Singal did was not doxxing?
For instance, Alejandra Caraballo, like it or not, is a public figure. A role, I would add, that she has chosen for herself. She testifies before Congress FFS. When she says something in public, including on Bluesky, I'm not sure she deserves some radical right to not have it heard anywhere else. No matter what vague term you can point to in the Bluesky guidelines or TOS.
Also Caraballo was the one who was actually harassing and doxxing. Singal was just reporting on it, as any journalist might do.
Yeah they changed the policy on off-site behavior to specifically allow his posts. For another example he routinely posted screenshots of posts from people that had blocked him. Block evasion is/was against the ToS as applied to most users other than Jesse Singal.
People mix up “users wanting him banned for having abhorrent views” (which is the opinion of some people) with “users wanting him banned for the same stuff they see other people get banned for”. It serves as a kind of cover because even when you point to a concrete example of him violating the rules the moderation team will dismiss your report as being personally motivated. It’s a funny defense, “This guy couldn’t possibly be breaking the rules and be near-universally considered an asshole by the users on this site! It has to be one or the other!”
> For another example he routinely posted screenshots of posts from people that had blocked him. Block evasion is/was against the ToS as applied to most users other than Jesse Singal.
This is an insane thing to ban in the terms of service, and it is in and of itself a good reason to avoid using BlueSky. I would not want to rely on any service to communicate that made it against the rules to post a screenshot of a public message from someone who blocked my account on their end.
> This is an insane thing to ban in the terms of service, and it is in and of itself a good reason to avoid using BlueSky.
That’s a perfectly reasonable opinion to have. The post you were responding to was not about the merits of the rule, it is about uneven enforcement of it.
That rule would be a reason to avoid BlueSky if you are not Jesse Singal, because you could get banned for breaking it. If you are Jesse Singal it is not a reason to avoid BlueSky, because that rule does not exist for you.
The strange thing about this is that Jay and the moderation team are sympathetic to your point. They don’t think that evading blocks (or doxxing) should always be grounds for taking action against an account. For at least one user they ignore all instances of it
Block evasion is creating an alt account to interact with someone who has blocked you.
Screenshotting someone's public post is not block evasion.
> he routinely posted screenshots of posts from people that had blocked him
I don't like platforms that try to keep me ignorant of what others are publicly saying, keeping me in a non-consensual information bubble. It is basically deception.
> I don't like platforms that try to keep me ignorant of what others are publicly saying
That’s neither here nor there. The nuclear block is a big part of how Bluesky works, and abiding by it/was part of the rules for users other than Jesse Singal.
The point I made is that other users that share your disagreement with the nuclear block would get suspended or banned for evading it, whereas Jesse Singal would not/does not. The message to other users was “if you don’t like it, tough”
I say is/was because I don’t read his posts. I stopped paying close attention to all that some time after it became clear that retroactive changes to the ToS to justify (lack of) actions is the baseline for how Jay and Aaron run the site.
> The nuclear block is a big part of how Bluesky works
I don't use Bluesky, but it sounds insane. It sounds like the bank robber who openly robbed a bank, made no attempt to disguise himself, and when questioned by the police, said he didn't understand because he'd rubbed lemon juice on his face so the cameras couldn't see him. He was so certain that would work.
Or when the idiot Boris Johnson said to national newspapers that he'd negotiate with the EU by promising them something, but he'd get the drop on dirty Brussels and he'd stick up for the plucky UK by undermining that agreement later (playing to his safe space / audience of Daily Telegraph readers)... and then he'd turn up at the negotiating table and the EU say to him "er, you know we can read your newspapers, right?"
Having some site rule about how person X can't seen person Y's posts is a trifling irrelevance if person X is a public figure and there's a legitimate journalistic interest in what person Y is saying about person X, in public.
Here are some of the things I understand Bluesky users have said:
* "i think if we all tried hard enough we could get Jesse Singal to kill himself, but that's just me"
* "me and my friends would beat Jesse Singal to death with hammers i can tell you that much"
* "I think Jesse Singal should be beat to death in the streets"
* "Jesse singal get fucked and die stupid kiddy fucker piece of shit trash sub human bitch. Fuck I hope someone breaks every bone in your body and castrated you penis and balls then beat you to death stupid bitch."
* "Jesse Singal has said many times he enjoys getting punched in the face. I am in no way endorsing or inciting violence. I am simply asking the question why not punch Jesse Singal in the face as hard as you can? It's not wrong to ask questions after all."
Now, firstly do you think Bluesky users should be posting these messages at all? But if you do, do you think Bluesky should do its utmost to make sure the target of these threats never gets to see them, and should sanction him if any concerned citizens pass on these messages to him and he acknowledges on Twitter that he has seen them?