I think "microblogging" format, such as Bluesky, Twitter, Mastodon etc, just seems to bring out the worst in people, I don't think it's possible to combat it properly when the format itself encourages it.

Microblogging is one of the many aspects of the internet where the only winning move is not to play.

Glad it made you laugh, but in my experience as a moderator, these types of efforts result in the complete opposite and only empower trolls.

Like this is 10000% going to happen:

someone makes an inflammatory tweet. Bunch of replies, back and forth. The original poster will get someone to say something absolutely horrible when taken out of context of the argument, hide all other replies except the horrible one and act like a victim (while continuing to post inflammatory rage bait).

Trolls spreading misinformation will use this to hide any criticism. Serial scammers will do the exact same thing.

Not one single thing about this will reduce inflammatory and combative behavior on the internet, let alone bluesky.

> No, the comments aren't deleted, just hidden for you and your own followers.

I understood this and nowhere in my post did I say I thought they were deleted. "hiding" is barely better and the effect is essentially the same since people aren't often going to go trolling through hidden replies.

Nothing about these changes prevent or mitigate the situations you are describing.

I do think the second situation is the most prevalent by far, and I think that hiding the origin tweet from bloodlusty followers would add enough friction to severely limit harassment, don't you think? Find the tweet your edgelord hero is responding to before writing an insulting DM?

In the first situation, I agree you can't do anything, but isn't the second one we'll mitigated? And if you don't think so, why?

Sorry, I'm kind of unsure I an following the scenario you are describing here - are you expecting the edgelord hero to have the goodwill to hide the comment so his followers won't harass? Or, are you saying that the person potentially being harassed can hide comments to avoid being harassed (not clear this would even work?)

All of these measures, however they are expected to work, can also be done with blocking.

The person being harassed hiding the edgelord comment would also hide their post from the edgelord followers, making them harder to find. That's the feature I think is extremely usefull. The rest, meh.

But all it takes is the edgelord or one of his followers screenshotting the comment and retweeting it before it’s hidden and this is effectively nullified. Their followers know the username, what’s actually being stopped here? this type of thing does nothing but hide information and empower trolls.

The plus side is that it empowers content creators to control the conversation, which I truly believe is a good thing, however in practice I find it completely abused especially at scale by bad actors. I do truly hope they reverse course on this decision.

People who would do this are a minority (I hope): that would be active harassment, and my experience is that in most cases, the community doing the harassing doesn't really means to, it's an outrage side effect.

No message are deleted, its basically just removing the link in between two posts to limit heat in the discourse.

For me, Twitter/mastodon/BlueSky are not really discussion boards and more announcement places, so removal of causal links do not disturb me, but I guess for you it seems more discussion oriented, which I did not understand in my first message.

Hidden, by all accounts, is a deletion on a platform like this.

US free speech allows someone to protest on public property (within reason, of course). If they could only protest in their home, would that be free speech? By forcing them to "hide" the protest from public view, you've essentially removed their capability of protesting.

But it's not hiding them from public view, it's hiding them from the view of your followers

It's a different problem than censorship, more of a split reality issue, each person sees a different world

> US free speech allows someone to protest on public property

Social media is not public property or a public square. Social media also spans all geographies and legal speech landscapes.

Nobody said it was. I'm not trying to assert that social media should guarantee free speech. That's for the platform to decide.

All I was demonstrating is that hiding is equivalent to deletion. Claiming otherwise is disingenuous.

But it isn't my point?

I wasn't clear, but to me that thing you're focusing on isn't important, the 'remove your tweet from the hidden person timeline' is.

Let's say you posted pro-Y content (I wanted to say pro-X but Elon kinda ruined X as undefined variable in public discourse :/) that a pro-Z influencer with 10M followers dislike and heavily engage on. You _will_ receive at least thousands of DMs from this guy's follower (even on non-political subjects that freaking happen btw). You would then have to change your usage of bluesky. Unless you use this new functionality on the influencer tweet. Then his followers would have trouble finding you, and unless the harassment is organized (it isn't 99% of the time imho), you will be able to continue your life as nothing happened.