[bhupy]

You already do this today with email for anything that isn't already swept away by your spam filter, i.e. by clicking "Mark as Spam". Over time, you end up having to do that less because the filter learns your preferences. You can also always go back into your spam folder and teach the system to unlearn something it shouldn't have in case it overcorrected.

It's not perfect, and there's a very real concern that spam filters are becoming increasingly biased, but (to my knowledge) the level of outrage around spam filters is much MUCH lower than that around platform "censorship". It's a stable equilibrium.

[Zetice]

I don't spend all day on email blocking! Gmail does a great job.

[bhupy]

Correct, and with blocklists / opt-in moderation, whatever system that is would do a similarly great job.

With email, you can manually block wherever anything falls through the cracks, and that's effectively what your parent commenter is proposing. I don't think anyone thinks that having to manually block every single person from scratch is a sustainable equilibrium.

[Zetice]

Oh I read it as "I only want to block people manually". For sure if there are existing "moderation" tools in place to clear spam and wildly offensive material then yeah manually blocking the rest seems... mostly fine?

I guess the problem arises when we talk about what "wildly offensive" means. Deadnaming people and trying to claim there is no racial inequality in the American criminal justice system are two "wildly offensive" concepts to me that may not be to others, for example.

[bhupy]

I like your examples a lot, because they illustrate the challenges well.

“there is no racial inequality in the American criminal justice system” is not particularly offensive to me; even if I may disagree, I’m still interested in commentary. Ditto deadnaming, it isn’t a dealbreaker for me, especially if it’s done within a post that is making some greater point that I find to be insightful.

In an ideal setup, there would be an off the shelf moderation blacklist that caters to your needs, and another off the shelf moderation blacklist that caters to mine (both updated on an ongoing basis), and neither of us have to do anything manually to get the experience we both separately desire. Pluggable spam filter algorithms, if you will.