Bluesky CEO responds | 2023-07-22 Letter to the Community (blueskyweb.xyz)

submitted 11 months ago by trashhalo@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

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The social media platform Bluesky recently had an incident where a user created an account with a racial slur as the handle. The Bluesky team quickly removed the account but realized they should have had automated filters in place to prevent such issues. They are now implementing a two-step automated filtering and flagging system for user handles while still involving human moderators. The team acknowledges they were too slow to communicate with the community about the incident and are working to improve their Trust and Safety team and communication processes going forward. They are committed to learning from this mistake and building a safer and more resilient social media platform over time.

Previous post about this topic https://beehaw.org/post/2152596

Bluesky allowed people to include the n-word in their usernames | Engadget

Bluesky, a decentralized social network, allowed users to register usernames containing the n-word. When reports surfaced about a user with the racial slur in their name, Bluesky took 40 minutes to remove the account but did not publicly apologize. A LinkedIn post criticized Bluesky for failing to filter offensive terms from the start and for not addressing its anti-blackness problem. Bluesky later claimed it had invested in moderation systems but the oversight highlighted ongoing issues considering Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey backs the startup. The fact that Bluesky allowed such an obvious racial slur shows it was unprepared to moderate a social network effectively.

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[-] dingus@lemmy.ml 52 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

It's from a technical team that ostensibly should know better, because they have been working in this space for a long time. That's evidenced by their speed in handling it. However, it can easily be argued that this is a major thing that should have been implemented before invites started going out. Further, the amount of time it has taken for the company to muster a public response isn't encouraging, as they themselves seem to readily admit, by saying "they were too slow to communicate with the community about the incident and are working to improve their Trust and Safety team and communication processes going forward."

If this was the early 2000's and these people were the fresh-faced college students like Mark Zuckerberg who started these services, maybe this would be different, but it's not.

Jack Dorsey started Twitter in 2006, 17 years ago, when he was 29 years old. He's 46 now, and his nearly twenty years running a similar service didn't teach him to start with this kind of thing?

It speaks to them being oblivious to these being problems to begin with, and waiting for problems to arise before they respond to them. It's absolutely true that their response time was commendable, but why even need a response time when it could have easily been implemented in the closed beta, before it became an invitation based public beta. Which in turn doesn't speak to the likelihood of the service being run effectively in respect to consideration for harassment and abuse, first waiting for them to happen instead of being proactive.

I mean, you're a Beehaw user. Beehaw implements such things as username validation to prevent abuse and they're pretty fucking new too and they're not being run by a fucking nearly 20 god damn year microblogging veteran. Pot calling the damn kettle black. These Bluesky people are supposed to be professionals. If a bunch of ragtag nerds who do this shit in their spare time can figure it out, so can Jack fucking Dorsey.

EDIT: typos

[-] fades@beehaw.org 12 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Beehaw is utilizing lemmy whereas bluesky is not utilizing an existing framework.

Additionally, blue sky is still in active dev, early beta.

How is 40 minutes within the report too slow? It was 40 minutes in a beta product. They said they were too slow because that was the PR post lmao

there are many other factors such as timelines they are dealing with. I have had projects where the timings were tough (competition, sometimes just contract/SOW delivery date changes, etc) and UX was specifically disengaged or delayed.

Now is the ideal time to strike, fediverse and IG threads/lemmy/mastodon/etc are all still in flux when it comes to community favorites. They are all motivated to get out to market first.

The thought behind this approach is to get the foot in the door functionality wise and revamp UX overtime based on user feedback once established in addition to internal evolution of UI. It’s not like they said “yeah fuck it let’s let ‘em name themselves anything”, and more likely prioritized issues in the backlog and being a startup, have more flexibility to leave UX for later or losing the finer details of community safety to different phases or whatever. They want to move fast so this isn’t to say it’s “not important”

I submit that this whole situation was a failure of management as you said but not the disaster people are trying to make it out to be. These things happen when the dev team is forced to move quickly, it says nothing about the company’s values or what it really cares about. They clearly care, it’s just that they see getting to market as the penultimate hurdle that all others are secondary to. I don’t advocate for this approach as I prefer the show not tell approach but I understand the thought process.

Bluesky is not even released yet, it’s still in early beta. Yes that validation should have been there for signups, but I don’t agree that this signifies anything. How can anyone speak to their priorities and what is or isn’t essential to them when the product is still in active development with no release date in sight. Their sign up is a waitlist and the hosting provider (first question they ask) has options for dev and staging servers.