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Here’s a thing I’ll add, as someone who’s been there: if you’re the CEO of a platform with millions of users, you don’t get to have as much fun on that platform, period. And your job is to eat shit every time a legitimate critique of policy comes up. That’s the gig. Don’t sign up if you aren’t game.

jenn da joker@jennschiffer.com

i am catching up on the moderation discourse and it’s really annoying that this episode basically goes back to leadership trying to have a goof and a gag. there’s not a lot of room-reading happening which comes across as immature and unprofessional

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I think this is true as a practical matter but man, the bluesky team has tried from the beginning to be accessible and understandable to users and it's netted them exactly zero community goodwill. Is "shut up and eat shit" really the sum total of practical community relations advice?

how about "stop making decisions that make your entire community want to feed you shit", huh? *some* people are always going to be mad about *something*, sure, but there would be a lot less heat if they didn't consistently act to harm their most loyal userbase

besides, the idea that no one ever had goodwill for the bluesky team is just ahistorical. do you know how many trans people in the wake of the singal debacle were like "man i would gladly have bought a subscription to keep this site alive, even w/o any extra features, but now they've fucked it"?

I think it’s earned them a ton of community goodwill? Like, I’m not on here tagging Jay and telling her to go jump down a well. I think other platform CEOs should literally be charged by international tribunals. By contrast, I’m offering up sincere critique *because* I have goodwill, as do many.

Bluesky could have a better and more charitable relationship with its users - it *absolutely* could. Not by tone policing its PR, but by giving a damn about fixing systemic issues on the site, and by not telling critters that complain about systemic issues that their concerns are irrelevant.

you're assuming they can't possibly have really done anything wrong that's silly there was plenty of community goodwill at the start (I've been here since it was invite only) and it's been burned out perfect users don't exist working in tech will break your brain if you can't tolerate that

and 'eat shit' here really just means coping with feeling bad about something without lashing out in anger a lot of people have figured that out it's not that hard

the bluesky team joked about how trans women talking about singal was the only thing that made him relevant, he was since cited in antitrans legislation multiple times and got published in international media. you are dumb as fuck.

You dont even have to be a CEO of a huge platform. Being an admin or mod on a medium large forum (10k+) in the early 2000s would have been the same thing. You dont get to push boundaries if you are the one setting them.

Like, it sucks that you don’t get to have fun because everybody wants to keep pointing out how you fucked up, but *that’s what the group chat is for*. Go talk to your exec coach or your therapist. Nobody in leadership should be publicly woe-is-me-ing about users saying their trust is broken.

Twitter circa 2021~22 was peak. There were so many layers of bureaucracy and redundancy and no one was identifiable as a primary actor behind any decision. At a certain point no human can function under that much scrutiny

They signed up for the job fully informed, because we have all known it for well over a decade. It's not a surprise so just do the work you signed up for.

Leadership also shouldn’t be publicly telling users that Bluesky definitely won’t budge on the issue that lost their trust, nor should they call complaints to official verified Bluesky leadership accounts about said loss of trust “endless brigading.” Insanely bad response!

Have they ever heard of pseudonymity? I have a friend who is a moderator at a much, much smaller sight than this; and when he wants to actually participate in a non-moderator fashion, he does so pseudonymously, so as not to get caught up in mod drama while 'playing'.

it's probably harder when the place is small enough in the early days that you actually CAN have more fun but, well, congratulations, you've succeeded Too Much, this is your new job

Don’t say anything on your alt that you wouldn’t want to see on the front of the NYT/Washington Post/Wired/Fast/Company/industry specific news outlet, but sure. Like, Mitt Romney’s alt, forgot everything about it other than the fact that it happened, so that, even if you’re more interesting.

Yes! For sure have fun if you can do it while still engaging in an intellectually honest way and taking your lumps as appropriate

I feel like they could have saved themselves a year of grief if they had been transparent about the root cause of this situation. Why was JS allowed to keep posting? And why did they spend so long avoiding the topic? After all, it's not like the right ever liked this place anyway.

I think it’s part that and part how terrible moderation was here in the days after the incident in Utah a few weeks ago which was the first time a lot of people had seen a very deliberate self interested thumb on the scale from moderation here

From an old friend to n finance “professional CEOs are professional actors. They have to embody the corporation 24/7. That’s the gig. We do keep a different classification for founder CEOs, because they didn’t understand the gig when they started. But that only goes so far.”

I was not the person in charge of making decisions about livejournal, I was mostly trying to get them to stop fucking up while I was working on the other products. But thanks :)

It is so profoundly bizarre to see. I get at least 2 emails a day that I handily resist the urge to say "eat shit and fuck off" to. It's actually SO easy. If I REALLY need to shit-talk somebody, I do it with friends, and not in the middle off my office where EVERYONE can hear. IT'S SO EASY.

Reading this over, I can unsee the implication that I say "eat shit and fuck off" to every email I get above the 2-count and it's an amusing enough concept that I won't tag the Bluesky account demanding an edit button this time.

That's the whole thing here, right? You aren't a poster who incidentally attracted a humorless response from a passerby (aka a waffles interaction), you are a CEO who a user sees and thinks, "Hey while I have you, and I don't think I'll get another chance, there's an issue with your service."

Here's another example of the same principle: Don't go into officiating if you love the competition aspect of the sport. You can't talk with your friends about it. You can't hold any public opinions about anyone or any decisions that are made. … and you eat shit on all decisions you make.

I’m reminded of Paul Ford’s line that “irony doesn’t scale” - when you have a big microphone, you have to be boring/straightforward in your communication

I think the problem is they know their only likable quality is being in a position of power, its not good posting that they get the engagement dopamine from.