A polite disagreement bot ring is flooding Bluesky — reply guy as a (dis)service

One of the most useful concepts for understanding why social networks so often drive us to despair is context collapse: taking multiple audiences with different norms, standards, and levels of knowledge, and herding them all into a single digital space to coexist. Predictably, this regularly leads to conflict — and, at the scale of an entire countr... See more

Pol.is asks people to make assertions that take the form of a single-sentence comment. Those reading those assertions don’t have a means to argue with them—there are no replies. They can agree, disagree, or pass. And then they can make a separate assertion of their own. Colin notes, “Doing away with replies gets you something very special. It gets

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Communities develop social norms that social media sites don’t. People in communities take moderation seriously. Moderators help improve the community’s information quality. They remove off-topic content, spam, trolling, and more.