> - If someone replies to this HN comment I just wrote, and I don't like it, and I can delete their comment (because there is an thread ownership concept on BlueSky, and the earliest comment is the owner);

You can hide it - which I agree is functionally equivalent to deleting it as people are very unlikely to go dig for hidden comments. FWIW this is kinda similar to "flagging" a comment on HN, which (as far as I understand) will cause it to be hidden for everyone - at least until someone vouches it back.

> - If someone links to this HN comment I just wrote, and I don't like it, I can make that hyperlink disappear, or invalidate in some way (because BlueSky is a locked API garden and hyperlinks are not plain text, but magic cloud API tokens)

You can just make the hyperlink disappear to anyone using the default BlueSky frontend. But from my understanding, the hyperlink will still be accessible through the API.

To clarify how flagging works on HN: Flagging only hides a comment once "enough" users flag it, and even then remains visible to users with the showdead option set in their profile.

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12173809

Where "enough" = two accounts.

I think. I know N>1 because I sometimes flag something and it is not suppressed right away. Often though I flag something and then it is suppressed a few minutes later so I believe N=2 or N=3 or something small like that.

For that matter a lot of posts get suppressed right away, particularly from people who visit HN and immediately start posting stories from the same blog over and over again.

I think you can estimate the threshold by just counting the ratio of times you flag something and it immediately dies. You would wait a while to see which items die or do not die, and discard the subset which never die, and consider only the subset of items that transitioned to [flagged][dead].

If the [flagged] logic is simply "flags >= N", then of the subset of samples that are flag-killed with your involvement, you will be final flag in 1 of N of those.

The null hypothesis is "this experiment converges to a reciprocal integer".

I feel like this requires an assumption that any post you flag is equally likely to be flagged by other users, and at a similar time as you, in other words that your flagging behavior is very similar to others that use this feature.

I guess this might give you a pretty nice upper estimate though. Unless N is very high / very few users use the feature, and you are frequently much later to the scene as the average user of the feature. Then N may be underestimated.

Hacker News is biased so that the threshold for flagging is very low, in order to maximize the effective separation of signal from noise as much as possible (for as broad a definition of "noise" as possible.) If I had to guess it's probably 3, or it's tied to user karma (flags from higher karma accounts count more.)

And certain topics are likely to be flagged by multiple people, this can be assumed based on the topics that people complain aren't "HN worthy." Anything that can be considered politics, for instance, is probably going to get flagged because of the number of people who don't believe political stories of any kind have a place here.

This post was my first in this experiment. I flagged it when it was 10 min old and was already downvoted at least once.

PS. @PaulHoule. I flagged it for valid reasons, not just to conduct this experiments, and not because it is political.

No prob. It is not like I can’t afford to lose a few points.

That's probably a decent approximation, but it assumes the distribution of latencies for flagging is the same for you and the aggregate "everyone else."

I think so. It depends however on how fast I think I am compared to the other flaggers. If I was really, really fast I could always be the first flagger.

Which is fine, since plenty people don't flag, but will vouch.

> You can hide it - which I agree is functionally equivalent to deleting it as people are very unlikely to go dig for hidden comments.

My understanding is that hidden replies are just one extra click away. From TFA: “All hidden replies will be placed behind a Hidden replies screen — so they’re still accessible, but much less visible.” Probably not much different from a collapsed subthread on Reddit.

The difference is that on actual HN, it takes more than one flag vote to hide a comment. (I suspect it's in the range 2-5, but I don't actually know.) So one person can't make a post they don't like disappear.

Also, anyone can flag a comment, not just the thread starter (I personally suspect flags from the thread starter are actually down-weighted).

HN flagging is not meant to hide people you don't want to see reply to your comments, it is meant to identify rule-breaking comments.

> The difference is that on actual HN, it takes more than one flag vote to hide a comment. (I suspect it's in the range 2-5, but I don't actually know.) So one person can't make a post they don't like disappear.

I don't know, but I would suspect if the user who wrote the parent comment flags a reply, it would be less weight than if another random user flagged it.

> which I agree is functionally equivalent to deleting it as people are very unlikely to go dig for hidden comments.

I think you're being very optimistic here.

Pretty much, the first one being more like you can hide a comment that you don't like and if someone wants to see it they can click "see hidden replies"

My reading of "hiding replies" was that people who follow the replier would still see the reply as part of their normal feed. So you are not silencing them for their audience. Which is fair.

The removal of links to yourself is also very welcome.

Both tools have cons, and there's methods to work around them / prevent them from taking effect. But they address the default easy/trivial ways in which people can pollute other users, so in practice the value for users should prove high.

Only at the app level. At the protocol level, each user has a repo with their own posts and you can't delete other people's posts.

Not really correct. You can

A) Make it so YOUR NAME and YOUR POST doesn't appear attached to a post that somebody else makes. Their post will still be visible to their followers.

B) Make it so that YOUR FOLLOWERS don't see somebody else's reply unless they click a "hidden replies" button. Their post will still be visible to their followers or someone looking at their timeline.

In no case can you prevent somebody's posts being visible to their followers.

The former doesn't make much sense in a distributed system where we expect to have multiple clients--and, preferably, no dominant one!--as there is no reason for the people you are restricting to opt in to that restriction.

> B) Make it so that YOUR FOLLOWERS don't see somebody else's reply unless they click a "hidden replies" button. Their post will still be visible to their followers or someone looking at their timeline.

Like, for this latter use case, if I am following you, I am buying into your frame and am often am going to agree with your moderation choices on the people who reply to you, so it actually makes a lot of sense to me that I would accept your ability to hide replies I "shouldn't" / "wouldn't want to" see.

Meanwhile, the only recourse to be heard for the person whose reply was hidden is to do so to their own audience; this not only seems fair, but strips them of the power they were trying to "steal" from you when they replied to your post in the hope of gaining access to your audience.

> A) Make it so YOUR NAME and YOUR POST doesn't appear attached to a post that somebody else makes. Their post will still be visible to their followers.

However, this former use case does not have the same structure: if I am following someone else and they talk about something you said, but now I can't see what/who they are talking about, I'm just going to get annoyed, as the goals of this feature don't align with the direct user of the client anymore.

At best, this just leads to people using workarounds, as the recourse is too powerful: anyone--not even merely the quoter--can add a reply with a screenshot of the post and a permalink through an external link shortener. At worst, it leads us down the dishonorable path of people demanding client DRM :/.

It sucks, because I was kind of excited about BlueSky actually caring about distributed incentive issues in a world where they were not the only client; but, this is the kind of mistake that people get goaded into making when they build a distributed system and start to assume centralization.

...and like, by the way: this feature is also inherently dishonest, as, even if it is documented how it works, a lot of users aren't going to understand it, and so they are going to assume they have a safety net in place that doesn't really exist in the protocol.

This honesty issue is similar to the way Snapchat claims people won't be able to (at least secretly, though I remember the original claim to be stronger) save the photos they send. Of course, people often can secretly screenshot your photos--such as using jailbroken devices or even merely a second camera via the good ol' analog loophole--but people send riskier photos because they trust the feature to protect them.

And yes, I totally understand that Snapchat's feature sort of works and maybe is better than nothing?... but, it only works due to continual effort Snapchat invests--from both their engineers and lawyers--to enforce the feature by embracing DRM, implementing user behavior profiling / banning, and sending legal cease and desist notices to alternative clients.

I hope (but no longer can assume) that BlueSky won't (or can't) ever go to such lengths; and so, in some sense, the feature is even less honest, right? :/ Even if the feature "sort of works", the power only comes from "pretty much there is only one client everyone has", and so the incentives are broken.

If I were building this, I would have done the exact opposite: if someone "quotes" you, there should be a copy of that content stored on the quoter's end, so that it is still visible even if the original is deleted... but like, that copy would be trivially editable, so no one ever treats previews as truth.

You have to implement it like that, as it has to be functionally equivalent to the analog loophole version of the feature -- the one where the quoter just attaches a potentially-forged screenshot of the post along with a link through an external shortener -- in order to align everyone's incentives.

Since I'm someone who believes in consent, then if someone else doesn't want me to reshare their post with my audience, then I respect their wishes. Particularly since that's the default.

It's possible to override this with a screenshot, but it's a clear escalation. The question is, how often do people do that? Does it become routine, or an exception? If you do a screenshot, maybe it would be a good idea to blur the username, if it doesn't really matter?

When people stop caring about mutual consent, things get messy, but I think tools that assume it are a good default that avoids unintentional conflict. Maybe it's a default that most Bluesky clients will follow?

Compare with robots.txt: if you don't want your website crawled, okay then, says the well-behaved crawler.

(I might want a client that keeps a snaphot regardless, just in case, but doesn't show or publish it.)

I like the robots.txt comparison, at the root it is about respecting someone else's wishes

I'm trying to decide how I feel about this unlinking quote feature, something about it strikes me as undesirable, kind of insulting, like the way I'm treated at airport security, presumed to be a bad actor

Of course, social media is rife with bad actors and harassment campaigns, so bsky is trying to create a world with tools to prevent that, but it just seems very reactive - here's one way harassment happens so we're building a button into every post that prevents that particular touch. Makes me think bsky is not forward thinking or creative, but just patching the old ship.

Last time I used Twitter for a couple months I feel I became enculturated very quickly into the popularity contest of picking a gang on some divisive issue and then making arguments or insulting arguments for internet points (Twitter is a very metric-forward interface, it's hard to use it without adjusting your behavior to try and make the numbers go up, and you make the numbers go up by jumping into a contentious drama and shooting your shot, aiming for reshares, requoting an opponent to dunk on them / make an example out of them)

I noticed this behavior change in myself looking forward to getting into internet arguments and deleted my account, it was a waste of time for me but the people inside the matrix seem to enjoy it.

The point I'm attempting to arrive at is that the design of Twitter encouraged this kind of behavior where you're ganging up on each other and so I find it foolhardy to duplicate the general design of a tool and patching it up in places hoping that people use it differently than the original.

They want to be a Twitter clone without the bits that made Twitter interesting and addictive.

(I ran in anti-e/acc and x-risk circles and also argued with people about Israel a lot, your cultural bubble may vary)

They do copy Twitter more closely than I would prefer (while improving in it), but given where they started, it seems understandable.