Sam Liebeskind

A crucial element to lowering the stakes of any particular moderation decision is the knowledge that the user has the genuine option to go to another community or start his own. The same applies to moderators: The ultimate check on a moderator’s power is that if most users start to believe he is using it poorly, users can either protest until a new... See more

When I say “everything is turning into television,” what I mean is that disparate forms of media and entertainment are converging on one thing: the continuous flow of episodic video.

Bluesky’s approach to curation is based on the idea that people “must have control over

our algorithms if we’re going to trust in our online spaces” (The Bluesky Team, 2022).

The platform’s support for custom feeds supports this mission, offering “essentially a

farmers’ market of algorithms” (Graber quoted in SXSW, 2025, 54:18). Yet custom feeds

exist... See more

The mistake of the 1.0 platforms was to optimize for engagement—likes, clicks, and shares. This was a successful short-term growth strategy, but at the long-term cost of sustainability. For engagement includes not only joy but rage, not only mirth but sadness. Incentivizing these things creates hellishness, driving people to disengage, to become... See more