Jonathan Bellack

Rudy is the GOAT

and this kind of collective pluralism is what makes his work a real revolution

There is no online safety without anonymity Last week, I said we need real-world identity online. This week, I rebut myself. Nobody said this Internet thing was going to be easy.

www.platformocracy.com/p/there-is-n...

I agree! I wrote a piece to that effect in my newsletter a couple of weeks ago. The thing is, giving out accounts like free candy is also bad. It enables abuse at scale & leads to mass surveillance in the name of safety. Ideas like zero knowledge proofs and webs of trust have some promise to help.

100%. Also, though, FWIW, the avalanche of garbage is so big because of easy, anonymous signups, which is a gigantic gift to bad actors who can do terrible stuff at scale, and even if they get caught and banned, can walk right back in the front door and do it again.

if you know solid software engineers who want to be part of our open source software adventure, email hiring@roost.tools

+10 if they've worked on trust & safety
+10 if they have worked with graphql and/or typescript
+100 if they like chicken puns
+1000 if they want to change the world

Want to work on open source full time? The @roost.tools engineering team is starting to hatch! Come build OSS tools making a difference in Trust & Safety.

This is a fully remote role, though some schedule overlap with North American time zones is expected.

www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/43...

And I just want to reiterate this ( from a thread deep in replies). I started doing this work before any of these tools existed. The number of my contemporaries in the field who have died by suicide is NOT A SMALL NUMBER. The work is incredibly traumatizing.

Time to up your donation amounts folks

Suspension of accts from Bluesky has called into question the mission and very existence of Blacksky. "If bsky can still suspend you, what's the point?"

For one usually Bluesky doesn't just suspend you. They delete all of your data AND suspend you. Moving to Blacksky prevents that. 4/11

I had a back and forth with a member of Bluesky's team about decentralization in my second blogpost, which takes a bigger deep dive into several details, including challenges with what will happen if Bluesky's architecture actually *was* federated.

Also maybe worth a re-read. How does it hold up?

This, right here, is the problem. Nobody can foster a healthy community if they can only afford to spend 30 seconds on each decision. If the money is not there, involve the community. Reddit is not perfect, but it at least has delegated a lot of moderation to subredditors.

💯💯💯👏👏👏

Bluesky trust and safety is too important to be left to Bluesky Bluesky is open about almost everything, except setting and enforcing their community guidelines. They have an opportunity to lead the Internet forward with a democratic alternative.

At a minimum. Full separation of powers would be better. I wrote this back in June.

Great point, +1 to all. Most social media platforms have a huge gap around coordinated abuse. Forcing the target to report one bad post at a time revictimizes them and doesn't get moderators the needed context anyway.

Perhaps hire ombudsmen or citizen advocates to investigate + support.

Another one would be looking into the current kerfluffle around the user Link being apparently permabanned. Map out the warnings and notifications he received, what he had to do in order to appeal, and what that process was like.

This would be a longer discussion but happy to discuss. A good place to start would be what people have to go through to report organized harassment rather than individual bad posts. This research paper has excellent insights. arxiv.org/pdf/2202.11168

Optimistically I could imagine a market for different instance governance. Free but admin rules; everyone pays a share of the cost but gets a vote; etc.

Yeah, I didn't mean to suggest it would fix your situation so apologies for coming across that way. I meant more that in the fullness of reality it would be nice to have a choice of platform governance models rather than every place being some variation of absolute monarchy.

s/think/know/

It doesn't have to be this way and probably shouldn't. Imagine an instance that could give the admin a vote of no confidence and have someone else take it over.

...if you make it easy & effective to report toxicity (& for people to defend themselves if accused) you are creating healthier patterns that will increase reporting rates, platform experience at handling cases, and ultimately lead to better enforcement and lower toxicity levels. Everyone wins. 4/4

...these user flows are usually bad because they are low frequency paths. But to the user who has had a toxic experience or been accused, these are the *most important flows of their product experience.* They are the chance for your platform to earn loyalty or destroy it. And also... 3/4

...what is the user journey *after* you encounter toxicity? Blocking, reporting, handling harassment, etc. What is the response from the platform? Also, what is the user journey if you are accused of toxicity? If you have your account deactivated? Is there an appeals flow? Because... 2/4

Thanks for reaching out to learn. Respectfully, I suggest a different question would do more to help improve user experience. All social media will have some toxicity because, well, humans. The opportunity is to look at the user experience *when* someone encounters toxicity, and critically... 1/4

Due to recent trolling by the Bluesky CEO, I finally decided to try out another server - namely the myatproto.social server offered to non-Black users by Blacksky. Followed the transfer instructions below and it went fine! (Had to use my DID id instead of my username, but other than that, all good!)

Dublin is lovely.

I don’t know how often the CEO of a social network is personally involved (Musk being a notable exception.) From what I’ve seen, more often the senior execs hire someone to “take care of moderation” and their success criteria is not justice or democracy, but growth, cost, brand image, & legal risk.

Most of the big tech cos set up their European headquarters in Ireland years ago for tax and regulatory reasons, so there are now a ton of experienced tech people there, including many people from around Europe or further afield who moved there for the opportunity.

YouTube video by The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society Moderating AI and Moderating with AI (RSM Speaker Series)

There’s a project out of Stanford called CoPE that uses relatively cheap AI to interpret platform policies for Trust & Safety purposes. It could perhaps be inverted to give individuals a tool to set their own polices with natural language. Here’s a video about it.