We've just had a case that makes it clear how damaging blacklisting is when it has nothing to do with plagiarism. Have you heard of it? I don't want to mention it.
I don't see what these tools will bring to the community if they're going to be used for public scorn.
I think witnesses should invest in the positive things like SMT that we've been waiting for years
I admire your work and I'm very grateful, but in this case, no
As to why we're looking at doing this change now, it's being driven by performance problems associated with the current way that the blacklists are used. We're working to speed up hivemind performance, and we found that blacklisting as coded now was a performance problem. So since we needed to speed up performance anyways, it seemed like a good time to make some quick changes to make them opt-in and give each user the choice of how he interacts with those lists.
One of the points of this change is to make blacklisting "opt-in". Currently, they are not: when you use a given interface like hive.blog or peakd.com, the blacklists are chosen for you. This change will allow each user to make choices about which blacklists they want to subscribe to (or if they don't want to subscribe to any at all). From what you're saying, I would think you would be in favor of this change.
Any type of blacklist should be opt-in and I appreciate your push to make it so. Having blacklists chosen for me is troublesome because I have no idea why someone is blacklisted(there literally is no reason given) and it also sets a precedent that POWER USERS who have elevated technocratic power know better than me on who I want to mute/not see posts from. There are some people who are blacklisted in the #informationwar tag for example and they stopped posting awhile ago because they couldn't get off the blacklist.
Starting off on a fresh account on any other social media I have nobody blocked/muted to begin with and that is how it should be. There should also be an option to import a given person's blacklist AND make changes to your own copy.
For example, if I wanted to use the hivewatcher blacklist because they are correct about spammers/plagiarists 99% of the time, well that 1% of the time they are wrong I would not want those innocent users on the blacklist I follow. The ability to use hivewatchers blacklist and EDIT MY OWN copy would be great. It would have properties of following everything hivewatchers does, when they update the blacklist it updates mine as well, BUT I would like to have the option to manually remove someone from that blacklist that ONLY is applied for my account. If they muted @informationwar then I would remove myself from that list so that on my @truthforce account I can see it, I would still be on the hivewatchers global blacklist though just not on the local copy @truthforce follows if that makes sense.
Also an added ability to submit counter blacklists could be a function in the future, or a proposal to "remove this person from blacklist due to error" that would notify hivewatchers.
The ability to "use a whitelist to filter a user's blacklist" has been suggested, and it seems like a useful idea, but I didn't consider it essential to do it right away, as blacklists don't actually mute anyone, they just add some information beside the account name (and warn on transfers).
But it could be interesting in conjunction with the ability to also follow someone else's whitelist. Some good ideas in your comment, thx!
That sounds better. Thanks for explaining. I also hope you take into account what happened yesterday for all that change, greetings
As a short term fix, this is the best thing I could think of to improve the process, and reduce misuse of blacklists. Of course, there was also the option to just entirely drop blacklists, but they do serve important functions, especially to prevent phishing accounts with similar names to Hive services causing people to lose their funds due to typos.