Does Bluesky want full-stack community moderation or just metadata labelers?

[scarnecchia]

Yesterday, @bnewbold posted the following:

"meta" labels like !hide are powerful because they are silent. subscribers should have more control over these for non-mandatory labelers, or even just disabled them for those cases.

I'm strongly opposed to it and would likely shut down Skywatch if the ability to apply these labels was removed from community moderation services or if an opt-out was given to users (beyond unsubscribing to the labeler).

The choice the labeler wants the user to make is to not use it if you would prefer to see something we’ve hidden behind a !warn or !hide label. We want to force that choice and offer an editorial voice. Otherwise, you essentially neuter community moderation and I don't see any point in running ozone with all its overhead to create what amounts to a glorified mutelist. As rahaeli notes:

Either the purpose of a labeler is to issue opinionated statements about what content its subscribers should not be exposed to, or they're just one overridable signal among many others. And the former conceptualization is an absolute necessity if you want full-stack moderation services to exist.

At the end of the day, something needs to be done to distinguish between fun labelers that apply badges and moderation services, but by removing the !warn and !hide option as currently implemented will simply remove the only actual moderation tool available to moderation services.

[scarnecchia]

And to illustrate how we use the !warn and !hide labels:

We apply !hide to posts which share things like animal crush videos, some other examples of extreme gore, or some violent extremist content. We pair this with a report to Bluesky moderation.

We apply !warn to to accounts which are explicitly branded as certain types of extremists along side the appropriate label. We also will selectively (but very rarely) apply !warn to other accounts as an editorializing action—one that is intended to say "If you follow this account and use our service, you need to understand that this service does not think its users want to see this content." Again, we want to shape the information space by making it inconvenient to follow that user and thus force the binary choice between the using the service and following said user.

If users disagree, they will unsubscribe (this is where having more metrics would be very useful) and register their complain. The market will take care of abuse of these labels, and if there is disagreement with certain choices we make but a need for other labels we offer, then the market will fill that by standing up another labeler.