Have a merrily bigoted Xmas! » « Who is going to profit?

Land of the List Lords

There’s a new phenomenon sweeping across the social media platform, BlueSky: lists. Lots of lists.

The way this works is that anyone can make a list of other BlueSky users and post about its existence — then everyone who sees it can click on the list and follow, or block, all the people on the list. For instance, here’s a list called “Bug Macrophotography” which contains the names and BlueSky accounts of people who do macrophotography of insects. Handy! With a single click you can subscribe to all of their feeds…or if you’re horrified at bug closeups, block them all. It’s a way to quickly fill up with people you follow.

I mostly like it, except for the fact that, a while ago, the only content you’d see is people posting their lists. I haven’t made any lists, because as some of you may know, I have an aversion to List Lords dating back to my old talk.origins days. Peter Nyikos left scars.

Anyway, there is also a tool called ClearSky.app that lets you see who you, or anybody for that matter, has blocked. Here’s everyone I have blocked in my short tenure on BlueSky:

Pitiful. I have to do better.

I can also see a list of all the people who have blocked me. It’s much longer so I won’t post it here; just go to ClearSky.app and enter my user name, pzmyers.bsky.social for yourself and you can see how many people dislike me. I don’t mind being blocked at all, I encourage more to shut me off.

You can also see a list of lists, all the lists that have my name on them. Some of them are from people encouraging more people to follow me, some are lists encouraging more people to block me. I discovered that there is a list called “FtBullies” that brought back old memories. It’s been years since all the bloggers here were called “FtBullies,” I guess the slymepitters have found a new home.

Still, I think it’s a good development that BlueSky has tools to help you curate your social media feed.

Have a merrily bigoted Xmas! » « Who is going to profit?

Comments

  1. inflection says

    One thing about block lists – they stay updated with the maintainer’s additions. We are seeing a few bad actors, who have talked (on Twitter and elsewhere) about their explicit intent to begin with a clean-looking block list of people like, say, MAGA trolls, and later add some group like trans posters. So if you’re using block lists to not think about your own troll problem, great, but BlueSky leaves zero reminders of blocked people, so curate your lists occasionally to make sure you aren’t getting caught by any bad-faith actors.

  2. Reginald Selkirk says

    Elsewhere on the Interwebs:
    Elon Musk Says He Owns Everyone’s Twitter Account in Bizarre Alex Jones Court Filing

    The people behind the Onion recently won InfoWars in an auction, sold as part of a legal judgment against Jones who was found guilty of defaming the families of teachers and students who were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. The families won a $1.4 billion judgment against Jones and selling off InfoWars was part of the liquidation process for the conspiracy theorist’s assets in order to pay down that debt. But a company tied to Jones has challenged the validity of the Onion’s purchase. And X is trying to help stop the sale.

    X’s legal filing on Monday, posted online by 404 Media, argues that all of the social media accounts in the auction can’t be transferred.

    “Put simply, accounts are inherently part of X Corp.’s Services and their ‘use,’” the company said in Monday’s court filing. “A user must use X Corp.’s Services to create an account in the first instance, and to continue using the account going forward.”

    X insists it wasn’t claiming ownership of the content in the accounts, and is only saying it controls the accounts themselves…

  5. says

    Peter Nyikos? The same guy who once posted very long, incessant comments on Ed Brayton’s blog pretending to prove ID and refute “Darwinism?”

  7. John Morales says

    Indeed, Pierce.

    cf. https://www.reddit.com/r/ClassicUsenet/comments/1awkl91/peter_nyikos_is_dead_talkorigins/

    “I am surprised. For those who never encountered him, Nyikos was an obsessive mathematics professor from South Carolina who haunted the usenet group, talk.origins, for at least the last 40 years. He was an oddball who mainly hated all the regulars at the newsgroup, especially if they had legitimate degrees in biology, so he would regularly pop in to spew his contempt for people like Larry Moran and John Harshman and me, and just generally anyone who battled creationists. He wasn’t very good at expressing his position, though — he was mainly just bitter and repetitive. I think he was such an angry authoritarian that he resented anyone who had any authority at all in the subject of evolution. The arguments never ended with him.

    Until now. Nyikos is officially deceased. I guess it’s safe to visit talk.origins again.”

    (Tone concerns immediately follow that, but it’s a good summary)

  8. says

    The guy who put together the FtBullies block list (daosorios.bsky.social) appears to be a journo, David Osorio; looking at his own list of people he has blocked he really hates a lot of atheists. No great surprises among the blocked.

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