Maybe it's just my feed, but I haven't seen this type of dogpiling on Bluesky.
On Twitter, you can't get away from some random offensive racism, e.g. against Indian students at football games, or whatever the 2 minutes hate is ranting about on a certain day. In BlueSky, I get all signal and pretty much zero noise.
BlueSky also has far better tools for stopping dogpiling than Twitter, by stopping the quote-tweet phenomenon. All around a much much healthier place if one chooses the healthy direction.
https://bsky.app/profile/safety.bsky.app/post/3mukm26duos2c
Amazingly, the top replies to their post about targeted harassment are from accounts trying to redirect anger at several accounts that are common targets for dogpiling. It's deeply baked into the BlueSky culture and I don't know how it came to be like that.
I've tried to prune my feed to keep it out, but now the problem is that journalists I follow eventually find themselves targeted by a BlueSky dogpiling campaign and leave the platform.
EDIT: A lot of responses are trying to blame the dogpiling victims are saying the problem doesn't exist. Let me give you one recent example, where Rick Brewster made a proof of concept of Paint.NET running on Wine and got dogpiled so hard that he deleted the post and backed out: https://bsky.app/profile/rickbrew.bsky.social/post/3muiv4phe...
The earliest bluesky users tended to be the most toxic users of old Twitter, it's not too surprising
Paconbork, I see no sign of this. You are being ridiculous. And this network doesn't deserve any of this slander.
That being said, there's also the tumblr->twitter->bluesky contingent who have always loved dogpiling and they're mostly there because the site doesn't have musk boosting nazi posters.
Literally victim blaming.
The recent high profile example was a person who made a proof of concept of Paint.net on Wine and got dragged across the website so hard he felt he had to delete it, apologize, and abandon the project:
https://bsky.app/profile/rickbrew.bsky.social/post/3muiv4phe...
Literally victim blaming.
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If you say something outrageous in the 'public square' and you get mocked for it by the public, how are you a victim?
I don't know why that would happen to someone trying to make a paint.NET clone, but that's also certainly not the type of post the person you replied to was talking about.
You’re not seeing it. Everyone who dogpiled the Paint.NET on Wine guy also thought they were doing legitimate mocking of a guy who said the wrong thing in a public square. The people who didn’t like AI thought it was valid to create a harassment campaign against him for using AI as part of his process. The people who thought all things Microsoft must be opposed thought it was valid to create a harassment campaign for making a Microsoft product work in more places.
Everyone in each of these campaigns thought their crusade was valid and the victim brought it upon themself. That you can see it being invalid in some cases is getting close to realizing why it’s a problem. Not everyone agrees on what’s right or wrong, but these public shaming campaigns serve to try to force everyone who disagrees out of the platform to strengthen the echo chamber.
You’re already noticing that you’re outside of the acceptable echo chamber thoughts because you don’t understand why the Paint.NET project would attract harassment. If you supported that guy and your post got traction, you too could get dogpiled. Do you think you would have said anything “outrageous” in the public square by questioning why anyone would criticize that guy?
Do you?
For example, if 500+ people replied to my comment here with why I'm wrong, I don't see how I'm some victim. People have their right to voice their opinions. I'd just ignore replies to that comment when I'm tired of engaging.
> Do you?
Being pedantic about the word to describe it isn't useful.
I don't care what word you use to describe the behavior. The behavior is common, it makes the site less pleasant, it drives away users I want to follow, and it's bad enough that Blue Sky is taking official steps to counter it.
Call it whatever you want, I don't care. Doesn't change anything about the issue.
That's how the mob moves.
Consider two ways of responding to someone saying something you don't like.
1) You post a reasoned critique of what they said. People who agree with you repost your critique so that a lot of people read it. Your purpose and effect is to convince people that they're wrong rather than punish them for disagreeing with you.
2) You accuse the other person of being an evil villain/pedo/nazi/terrorist. No reasoning is provided because their guilt is self-evident from the fact that you're pointing at them in an accusatory manner while wearing your tribe's official colors. The others are expected to not only do the same but also cut ties with them and try to have them harassed/fired/arrested/assaulted. Anyone who tries to rise to their defense is subjected to the same treatment.
The second one is just bullies using tribal loyalty as a pretext to rationalize their vacuous hostility.
But generally these things cluster very strongly around specific people.
Alas Journalists I think are high value targets. Ideally they'd use tools like blocklists to help each other defend against dog piling. Ideally we'd have more automated response systems to detect and manage problems, which we could build, because of how Bluesky data is (so far, "spaces" incoming which change the gane) all public data. Blocking posts etc. The ability to handle this problems is much higher on Bluesky than elsewhere.
This can happen on Bluesky. It sucks. But for most people it's not an issue at all. It does unfortunately drive off some higher profile people though.
HN sure seems desperate to believe BlueSky is the bad spot. I suspect other networks too have metrically built up this defense systems for themselves, to justify their continued use. x spectacle of posts to sing the propaganda song that this is the bad place over here, it's too left, it's too woke, it's too activist, it's too digpiley. It seems unmoored, completely unhinged to me.
It's intrinsic to the medium. The Twitter-like format is inherently toxic and irredeemable. It can't be fixed.
The microblogging format with likes and reposts selects for short highly viral stuff that pokes at the brain stem. Rage bait, trolling, lynch mobs, and stupid brain rot stuff are all ideal forms of content for this medium. Nuanced and genuinely insightful ideas are too long.
I think short form content in general is bad. Short form video seems to be less actively toxic but more brainless and attention-destroying. Short form content is the refined sugar (or in some cases the crack or the fentanyl) of discourse.
Reddit-style sites (like this one) are better but still suffer from these problems. HN avoids the worst of it by having a culture and mod policy of downvoting trolling and low-effort crap.
I often think back to this early networked communication as stark contrast to the ease and rapidity we communicate today and how that same easy and rapidity has driven the quality into the ground.
I was active on Reddit up to 2018 or so, and at that point it was already sliding full speed towards the cesspit it is today. Public votes destroy dissenting views, and moderators treat the site as their personal fiefdom. There aren't a lot of danish communities left on the internet, but r/denmark was getting unbearable because of constant tone policing, finger wagging and micro management by the mods. That, and constant low effort meme spam. And that subreddit was far from being the worst case.
I miss the dk.* Usenet days.
Bluesky was the refuge for Blue MAGA after Elon came out for Trump. That group (myself included at the time), comprised the majority of the user base and growth. Most have since returned to X, I stopped using Big Social media altogether. Bluesky leadership had a number of fumbles along the way that I suspects puts them post peak forever.
I'm not defending the dogpiling behaviour or even anti-AI sentiments in general. However, no one is entitled to saying things to people who don't want to hear it and receive only positive feedback for it. Sometimes even if you're excited about a thing, you have to keep it to yourself until you're in a room with others who would actually share your excitement. AKA maybe bsky isn't the place for him to share that excitement, and IMO that's neither good nor bad, but it's important to know that when you're cultivated a large-ish audience.