Proposal 0002 - Balance of Categories for Labelling

[Bossett]

I sat down to get my thoughts in order about community management and how I wanted to respond to the three proposals. That turned into a longer document available at https://bossett.io/bluesky-on-community-trust-safety/ which more clearly details my thoughts. This is an except from that that I've edited to make it stand-alone and not have a bunch of issues all conflated. I would appreciate any attention/feedback on that document (but not here - maybe at https://bsky.app/profile/bossett.bsky.social).

100% my own thoughts here - I've expressed it as 'recommendation' but only so that there's a strawman to argue the toss about.

Balance of Categories

I don't believe the labels proposed adequately separate network concerns from human concerns, nor do they adequately provide an 'escalation gradient'.

The mix of 'scam' and 'net-abuse' into a misinformation category, with 'spam' and 'clickbait' in another I don't believe provides enough separation for a user to consider category-wide blocks. These may be grouped differently in a UI, but the grouping as-proposed encourages unblocking 'Misinformation' in order to see 'unverified' information (which may be breaking news).

The presence of an 'Unpleasant' category is also of concern - the majority of those labels are very subjective (i.e. 'bad-take') and will strongly encourage their use only as meme or unserious category markers, or ways to bully and harass users by applying the 'tiresome' marker to them.

Depending on implementation, the more subjective categories are an avenue for deniable abuse. For example, if a very right-leaning service were to mark all sex workers as 'shaming' such that they could be harassed when they appear on feeds.

Recommendation

Vastly simplify the list, and favour objective measures esp. for labels that are not applied by the poster.