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

Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago

oddevan

59 points

22 comments

oddevan.comOtherstory

calmmixed

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60/100

Social Media ModerationOnline CommunitiesPower Dynamics

Key topics

Social Media Moderation

Online Communities

Power Dynamics

The author reflects on their reluctance to be a landlord, drawing parallels to online community moderation, sparking discussion on the challenges of managing online spaces and the role of authority.

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Moderate engagement

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25m

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01Story posted
Oct 13, 2025 at 2:26 PM EDT
3 months ago
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02First comment
Oct 13, 2025 at 2:51 PM EDT
25m after posting
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03Peak activity
10 comments in 0-1h
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04Latest activity
Oct 13, 2025 at 4:06 PM EDT
3 months ago
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Discussion (22 comments)

Showing 16 comments of 22

munchler

3 months ago

2 replies

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.

oddevanAuthor

3 months ago

1 reply

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

tptacek

3 months 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

3 months ago

1 reply

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_

3 months ago

3 replies

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.

jp57

3 months ago

1 reply

All you've done is take the description I provided and packed all the politics into the word "recover".

neutronicus

3 months ago

Hey, now - some of them got put into "fled" too

PakG1

3 months ago

What you just said is completely compatible with what the parent comment said. I would say you're saying a 95% match to the parent while subtracting only the political undertones.

georgeburdell

3 months ago

Yes but the problem is that the people most strongly opposed to Elon left, while everyone else either embraced the change, or grumbled and carried on.

I remember the opposite thing, politically, happening when Reddit clamped down on a number of rightwing -isms (and -philias) and then a site called Voat got created as the “free speech” alternative, except it only attracted the right wingers who saw the -isms as their core beliefs, and so the whole site was just that. Eventually Voat shut down, having failed to bring enough new to the table to attract regular, fairly politically indifferent folks

AlienRobot

3 months ago

3 replies

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.

Tade0

3 months ago

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

Cockbrand

3 months 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

3 months ago

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

jrowen

3 months 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

3 months 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.

jeffbee

3 months 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.

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