I swear, every time most of the time I see someone being particularly rude, ignorant, and inappropriate on a post (usually political in origin, or they swing it to being political) I click on their profile and see it has been created that same day.
They are only there to sow discord. Only to piss people off. Idk if we can just report them (for what?) but I’d like to try exposing them before responding and interacting…
I am guilty of gobbling up the bait. I’ve started looking at profiles of people that piss me off exceptionally and noticed they’re burner bot loser accounts.
I guess i just want to say I’ve noticed it!
I mean, let’s be clear: The choice lies with the users. If users want to allow disruptive speech (or what’s worse), they can go to the instances/communities that allow that kind of speech. If not, they can go to other instances/communities that have stricter moderation.
You don’t have to personally live with it - go somewhere else if you don’t like where you are right now.
This place is like a black mirror episode. “It’s okay, just block the Nazis and it’s like they’re not there terrorizing and indoctrinating others, bc I can’t see it”
I don’t mean each user needs to block people, I mean go to instances and communities that are well-moderated.
Sure but the outcome is the same. Just someone else clicking for you and your group at scale.
That matters a lot though. If users feel unwelcome and have to block lots of other people before they’ll get a nice experience, they’ll just leave. If instead, they are greeted with kindness and interesting stuff, then they’ll stick around. It’s not scalable to have every user block lots of users before they have a good experience.
No disagreement, that’s true, it will help increase growth by reducing friction for new users. Also, that doesn’t mitigate my thesis statement that we’re wearing blinders while the evil infects and hurts others.
I have been spending relatively more time on Bluesky now you mention it. They way they do block propagation is just 😘👌
What is block propagation?
I’m not super sharp about the details, but if you block someone, by default other people don’t see their replies on your stuff. There may be more features but I’m not sure.
Anyway, it remains functional even when overrun with shitheads because not everyone needs to block everyone.
I see.
I feel like defederation is the tool for this on the Fediverse. But just to be clear, when I said “go somewhere else if you don’t like where you are right now” I didn’t mean go away from the Fediverse, I just meant another community or instance basically.
I would argue that defederation is a completely fucking brain dead way to deal with bad faith users.
And the “fediverse” has no answers here.
How come? I mean if there is a concentration of bad faith users on an instance or maybe the instance attracts such types because it has no rules or directly encourages such behaviour, is it not good that other instances can choose not to interact with that instance?
Try being a bad faith actor for a week and see how much defederation affects you.
It’s just drama fuel that does nothing to improve the quality of discourse on the network because it’s trivially bypassed.
It only punishes users with permanent identities, that is good faith users. Trolls just move. They do it all the time anyway to evade blocks.
But isn’t that the case on all platforms? How can you get around this? Could the Fediverse do better somehow?
Yeah. Maybe if mods weren’t constantly removing factual information as “disinformation”, you’d have a point.
But again, you choose your mods. If you think your mods are being unreasonable, use other communities with better mods - or start your own community and become the better mod yourself.
It’s a “this type of website” problem, not limited to one page or instance.
Hmm. Maybe? I’d like to think it’s possible to do a website of this type without those problems. But I could be wrong I guess.