People Are People, or Why I Don't Want to Be a Landlord

People Are People, or Why I Don't Want to Be a Landlord(oddevan.com)

59 points by oddevan 217 days ago | 22 comments

munchler 217 days ago |

I understand that the author doesn’t want to get caught up in the details of any particular online drama, but without more concrete information (about either Bluesky or their own project), I find this too abstract to be insightful. YMMV, of course.

oddevan 217 days ago | |

That's fair! I'd give more details about Smolblog <https://smolblog.com/> if the project was anywhere approaching "done".

tptacek 216 days ago | | |

But it's really not even clear in this post what you're reacting to. What's the pressure you're trying to address? What does it mean to be a "landlord" here? What are you doing instead?

jp57 217 days ago | |

Agree.

I have heard BlueSky described as a kind of self-made ghetto for the most terminally online, left-wing remnants of pre-Elon Twitter. If that's true then it suggests some shape to the distribution of possible dustups, but I spend no time there (or on X, or Mastodon) I don't really know for sure.

dsr_ 216 days ago | | |

That's... not how people familiar with BlueSky would describe it.

I would say it's where the people who realized that Twitter wasn't going to recover fled in search of as similar an experience as possible, and mostly got it, right down to a centralized moderation system that is being co-opted to the operating company's desires.

jeffbee 217 days ago |

The substance of this article must have been included by tacit reference. Without reference to that substance (which I do not have), the article seems pointless.

AlienRobot 216 days ago |

If I was a landlord, I'd make a list of political terms, and use a simple SQL regex to shadowban all accounts that have any of those terms in their bios. That's probably the only way to fix social media. Sometimes I wish I was a landlord just to try and do this.

Cockbrand 216 days ago | |

This has been solved a long while ago, for better or for worse.

See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics) or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algospeak

neutronicus 216 days ago | |

If you have a landlord, that entity will be getting a lot of very angry correspondence from your tenants forthwith.

Tade0 216 days ago | |

+have LLMs argue with the shadowbanned comments lest they catch on.

jrowen 216 days ago |

Framing it as landlords and serfs is such a tell of the culture of the community. What about curators?

What are they looking for? Anything-goes anarchy? This idea that any kind of centralized direction or authority is evil just leads to a chaotic mess.

andrewmcwatters 216 days ago |

> Every relationship that lasts long enough or goes deep enough eventually hits a point where expectations meet reality.

I think about this all the time and it’s nice to see someone explicitly say it.

It is, of course, a part of life, but it is a phenomenon to look out for that governs all pf your most valuable relationships.