Contrast this with some of the observations made here (and to some degree, its followup) about Google Search: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

When your goal condition isn't giving people results, it's keeping them on the website as long as possible, your incentive becomes maximizing search time and making it hard to leave. Except for ad clickstreams, of course.

This is core to why sites choose to platform bad actors. Conflict keeps people on the site.

Anyway, to kind of summarize here: I think engagement is a terrible metric.

It's central to this idea that, from a website's perspective, people are monetizable eyeballs whose only useful output is growth and, eventually, buying product (and generating derivative revenue getting there, like ads).

And I'm... sort of relieved that there are still plenty of places to go that still care about the qualities of the website and community instead.

Postscript: an alternate hypothesis being floated for why Bsky is doing this: they're scared of the orange and X shitlords burying Bsky in expensive litigation and/or hostile government action (eg, requires login: https://bsky.app/profile/insortediaboli.bsky.social/post/3ldb23jr4vs2f ). In that scenario, they're trying to make themselves less of a target in the short term, to kick this down the road until a more favorable legal or political reality.

IMO, if Bsky or AtProto can't navigate that, they have a huge problem. And if they're afraid of a reality in which social media sites are litigated or regulated out of existence outside of sites sanctioned by rightwing billionaires, well.

One: decentralized solutions will survive. Folks will find a way to keep hosting and posting, even in a regressive and repressive US.

Two: that tells us the problem isn't engineering or Bsky, it's rightwing billionaires and their ability to buy power.

@Goldkin It also kind of comes at zero surprise from the website that's just doing what it told people it was going to do. When websites tell you what they are, believe them, and this website told people that they would have a literal racism slider they could adjust to control how much they see among other hate speech forms.

@Goldkin If social environments continue to let themselves be bullied by right-wingers, we are not going to be able to change the social environment at large. (Because common discourse/centrist perspective/etc will remain right-dominated.)

This seems so obvious to me and I don't get why it's so hard.

@Goldkin also looks like a potentially funny outcome https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:lyw3m7azmqpxy5rrzapttea3/post/3ldbob6nc4k2i

@KayOhtie I was reading somewhere that he quickly became the highest per-user block and mute on the website.

While they should still deplatform his ass, if he's having a bad time? Good.

@Goldkin having a bad time is funnier than being in their hate chambers exclusively. Maybe it causes a few more folks to deradicalize from hate. Maybe at least. I do agree it sucks overall though.

@KayOhtie Not sure I personally go that far, BUT:

If one of the accidental outputs of people moving to Bsky and using these new tools is a crash course in opsec and being really cautious about who you engage with at all, and people start to learn that through the website, that would be a really useful and really funny way for folks to learn about how useful site moderation is.

@KayOhtie Despite my being absolutely pissed at Bsky's concept of not moderating the discussion directly, their scalable mod tooling is great.

It's still not as robust as tools we used to kick around on ye olde forum days -- ie, moderation lists are really just RBLs/DNSBLs in fancy clothes, and we had tools that could refine from there -- but they scale a bit better and are easy for users to understand. And I like that a lot tbh.