I have a question for #amethyst users. I'm not asking this to dish on
@Vitor Pamplona , but only because his users are my users, and I care about my users' (for lack of a better word) "safety" on nostr.
Currently, when you report something, Amethyst does two things:
- Publishes a kind 1984 report event
- Reacts on your behalf with a ⚠️ kind 7 reaction
TLDR; do you find the emoji reaction to be a problem? Full background below.
I've always been skeptical of public reports, because regardless of intent, they publicly and permanently associate your public key with objectionable content. This may be as harmless as reporting spam, which is fine to do publicly, or as sensitive as reporting directed abuse (sharing additional information about your associations), or reporting CSAM (which is a legal gray area in some jurisdictions, since it may constitute "advertising" the content).
I personally use
@npub1pu3v...tfch 's
@npub12m2t...e68j to anonymously and privately process reports in Coracle, because I want to protect my users as much as possible. But I'll admit that use of kind 1984 is nuanced and open to debate.
Much worse than using kind 1984 though, which semantically fits the concept of "reporting", is using reactions to signal reports. First of all, this doesn't really add any new information that kind 1984 doesn't already contain. It also has the effect of generating content on behalf of a user that they may not know they're consenting to.
In many clients (formerly including Coracle), "likes" are not filtered down by emoji, and so these kind 7 "reports" end up showing up as "likes". Completely fixing this problem is impossible, because it requires mapping a high-fidelity subjective medium (emojis) to a low-fidelity objective medium (up/down vote) in order to show likes. This can only be done with a reasonable degree of reliability for a very few emojis. This creates a problem for like-based clients in that lots of reactions can't be included in like tallies, resulting in lower social signal.
At any rate, I implemented the partial fix of whitelisting "obviously positive" emojis when calculating "likes" a long time ago, because reactions can be negative. I however didn't apply this to the "likes" tab on user profile pages, which was brought to my attention earlier this year when an Amethyst user asked me why a bunch of CSAM was showing up under his "likes". He wasn't aware that "reporting" in Amethyst created a public record of his consumption (unintentional or otherwise) of illegal porn.
This problem has since been fixed in Coracle, but likely still occurs in other clients that haven't yet addressed this problem, "trending" algorithms, and coracle custom feeds based on retrieving kind 7 (since kind 7 sentiment can't be filtered against on the relay side).
This is a Really Bad Thing, because it results clients advertising content as connected with the person who had intended to dissociate themselves with it. While clients processing reactions can mitigate this, the root issue is that a field for user-generated content is being overloaded for use in an application-specific context.
So, that's my opinion. What do you think? Do you find it surprising that reports in Amethyst may be treated as "likes" in other clients? Is it Amethyst's fault for creating the reactions, or other clients' fault for not filtering them out?
For more discussion, see the thread on github:
GitHub
reactions should not be used to mark posts as spam/unwanted · Issue #88 · nostrability/nostrability
client initiating action not sure but I think Amethyst, maybe others as well client receiving or observing action (or lack thereof) any what happen...
Replies (39)
Honestly was not aware of the reaction part... Seeing as a report hides the post immediately, "my" reaction is hidden from me as well.
prob he did this cause snort started doing it... why the switch from 1984 i wonder?
i agree its all very problematic. relay.tools relays will not post the reaction used for mod action, but if you send them to other relays then same problem. thats why itd be nice if clients would allow events to be targeted to a specific relay..
the ironic thing is we wouldnt even have these events if it wasnt so damus could get in the app store, now theyre a legal nightmare. a trojan horse.
I did one report so far. Very happy to read this post. Since I completly confused the answer.
I thought this is a user which is angry with my report for the ⚠️ reaction. I would have prefered a 👍 reaction or something positive like this as a confirmation.
Yikes, not cool. IMO, #Amethyst should drop the kind 7 reports. If other clients ignore 1984, that's on them.
I had no clue I was adding a reaction. I don't like that
Yeah, I didn't know it was still doing the reaction thing. Not really a fan of that personally.
That's a penalty
yeah, that thing about likes is a problem
the solution would be a negative/positive tag added to kind 7s i think?
no point in bothering with changing what is passed i think, but perhaps to give some clear guidance for client devs... having a negative/positive sense to reactions makes a lot of sense
but also, at the same time, i think amethyst should consider at least asking first time about this and letting teh user disable this part of the report, or just expose the whole thing in the modal
btw, composing this post, coracle froze up on me, and i had to dig around in the console to root out the actual text and remove the automatically added html tags inside it
it was because for whatever reason, alby signer had locked my key and refused to sign it
What say you, #Nostr? Do you like the idea of your reports in #Amethyst very likely showing up as "likes" in other clients?
View quoted note →yeah, i think the thing about putting a weight on the reaction would mean that if the reaction has no weight assigned you don't count it, that's the point
i mean, you can't expect everyone else to search for 1984s as well for every single event you fetch???
as always, the most conservative response is usually the best... this is why many of these younger devs especially these javascript ninjas with their woke programming are so irritating, they are so prone to overreacting schemes of logic
> i mean, you can't expect everyone else to search for 1984s as well for every single event you fetch???
Why not? It means something different from a reaction, so if you want to know about them you have to ask about them
well, ok, i think that works
same for labels i guess
it's just more features... gotta be systematic about adding them, or they turn your code into spaghetti
This is very true
1984 is enough, did not know about this kind 7 approach but that's clearly not working as intended.
I fetch 1984-s to build the user's wot along with mutes and follows ofc. But I just use these to exclude all notes of a user in satshoot for now.
Clients should never advertise content based on reactions. There are plenty of reactions that are negative. Reaction is not a boost. If you want to advertise reactions, at least filter to only show the positive ones or break the UI it down by reaction type.
A client treating every reaction, or all non minus reactions as a like is doing a disservice to their users.
IMHO NIP-25 is wrong in the assessment of what is a like and dislike and contributes to the sentiment that drove the anti-reaction (dubbed only zaps) mode in damus. Its literally all characters and shortcode emojis other than the minus symbol as an upvote, diluting the usage of emojis when clients adhere to that.
Emojis are up to interpretation by the viewer and may not always be interpreted to mean what the originating poster intended. This is just the nature of symbols, culture and context.
If you want to tally or have a view of liked content based on reactions, then Id recommend sticking to one character to convey that (content = +). Otherwise the reactions are simply expressions.
Most of the network seems to disagree with you. Reactions are a great source of social signal. Yes, clients should be smarter about not over-simplifying the meaning behind emojis. But you're missing my point, which is that coupling reactions with reports is also bad. I know you keep saying that's not what you're doing but... it is. The same button does both things, and you only tell the user about the report, not about the reaction,
I forgot to convey my thoughts on Amethyst here..
I think the reaction, in addition to 1984, is unnecessary. The fact that its happening without the user being informed is an unexpected result.
If users wanted to leave a reaction they could do that before the 1984 report. Or the dialog/panel that the user goes through could offer that as a choice.
Got your test correctly marked with the warning and the report.
This. It boils down to the client doing something automatically without me authorizing it. When I report content, I expect to send a report. Not a report + a preset reaction.
Very odd resistance towards removing this clearly unwanted behavior but it's his software and he has the final say.. doesn't mean I like it.
"Most of the network" is not even coding reactions correctly, so apologies if I don't give them any credit...
I'm quite surprised that Amethyst creates a reaction on the user's behalf; I really don't see the utility and, as you explained, this action can have severe consequences.
I didn't know about this Amethyst automatism since I don't usually report using kind 1984, exactly to avoid being linked to questionable content.
I think
@npub12m2t...e68j is a good solution.
Finally, if you really must choose a negative reaction, why not use “-” as NIP-25 requires? At least clients would hopefully not show these notes as pinned content in the user's profile.
> Emojis are up to interpretation by the viewer and may not always be interpreted to mean what the originating poster intended. This is just the nature of symbols, culture and context.
Exactly. See the 🤌 case.
Agreed on all points, with the qualification that there are probably some emojis you can safely map to + (❤️ and 👍) come to mind. But I could probably be convinced otherwise.
yeah, that's the point... it should have a polarity extra to the decoration... but then we run into issues with clients picking their own mappings... and client complications and user cognitive burden...
probably the most practical way is [+][-] and each, if enabled, pops up an emoji board, and adds a sign indicator tag
👍 can also be neutral or sarcastic implying a negative depending on context and participants. like a "thats cool but we dont care"
That's fair. Human language is much more than can be compressed into a binary up/down vote, even for the simplest single-character pictograms.
The fact that human expression is always and unavoidably subject to interpretation is something we have to come to terms with as we build reputation systems. This realization has been a key influence on my design of the grapevine.
Does reporting auto-mute as well? After I sent this you were suddenly muted in Coracle.
I just mute/block now.
I'm not confident reporting helps anyone & I don't want the spammer/scammer to know I've even seen their stuff.
Yep.
IMHO nostr has likes ("+") dislikes ("-") and emoji reactions. Emoji reactions should not be counted as likes or dislikes. Some clients/people always use emojis and never "+", others always use "+" and never emojis, and some clients/people can do either one. This is not ideal but it is what we have.
I wouldn't consider a post somebody emoji-reacts to as a post that they like. Gossip client, for example, has 2 separate reaction counts: likes + reactions.
But also, I think 1984 reports don't also need emoji reactions, and although the additional emoji reaction isn't wrong, it's probably a bad idea given what you have poitned out.
This is, I think, the only safe posture if you're using #Amethyst right now. Unfortunately, must new users on the network have no idea what a kind 7 event is, let alone how they might be inadvertently associating themselves with objectionable, even illegal content just by using the report function in their client of choice. Folks coming from centralized legacy social platforms just run with it and never think twice.
I only recently found out of + being positive and - being negative recently by manually looking up how satellite.earth tagged up/downvotes in it's events. I knew about holding the zap button in amethyst to get to zap settings so out of curiosity, gave holding the react button a try. Lo and behold I can change the reaction options! And + was a heart/- was a thumbs down.
Back in the day reddit was my fav so hope such compatibility for voting can be somewhat unified in a few nostr clients.
Though till learning of the - reaction, I considered ALL reactions to be positive. After all some dvms will no doubt provided content based on all activity a post gets and you wouldn't help someone providing bad content get more views.
Recently started using Coracle and it's my fav for web. I prefer android though and Amethyst is my fav there. Yall are great thank you both for your work!
I'm by no means a pro but think if there's now a future universal reports kind we should move to it. A toggle in settings is always an option when there's differing opinions along with a warning on first use of the report function "heads up some clients will see this report as a reaction unless you disable in settings!"
On another silly note this reminds me of the debate between laptops having usb-a vs usb-c. Some are mad at laptop designers for not including the old a type. I'm mad at device creators for continuing to sell it. Quicker it stops being sold the quicker people won't need dongles!
If you mute the author, that's also publicly association, isn't it?
It's pretty clear what your intentions are when you add someone to your Mute list.
I agree with you
