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The convenience does make the potential for harassment worse. Just think about how Community Notes are more effective than Snopes. The same principles apply in the opposite direction too. Labelers can work if the Labelers themselves are so strictly moderated that they’d become irrelevant.

One issue I think is that it makes drive-by harassment easier, and could have a chilling effect on speech. If I don’t know you but you engage with my post and I see you’ve been labeled, I can maybe use that info to harass or demean you in a specifically hurtful way.

Is there a list of labelers somewhere? Didn't even know this existed til your post.

Here's what it looks like for this post bsky.app/profile/sena...

Unless I misunderstand the feature, I think the label is only "pushed into your face" if you explicitly subscribe to the labeler.

From my experience actually setting this up, noone is going to bother with using the label system as a way to target harassment or vector people while the list system still exists - labels basically only exist for this very limited use case, and are a bit of a royal pain to actually set up and use

Bluesky has an open API (as does Mastodon), so if someone wanted to build a custom app for targetted harrasment there would be nothing to stop them from doing that So labels is less friction for building something like that - but I agree that less friction does matter

To be honest I'm baffled that anyone thinks this is a good idea! But it does seem like one of the first instances of the crypto culture of bsky origin showing up (very alienated techno libertarian vibe)

It’s info that’s already published, just a new way of organizing and delivering it for consumers. As long as the labels are accurate, I don’t see the issue, but unsurprising some public figures may be uncomfortable with the factual record

Are those labels visible to anyone who hasn't opted in to seeing them?

Baffling. Some guy creates signs you can hang around the neck of people you don't like...before you, er, invite them into your house. Seems like that anyway. Scratching about for a use case.

Right, so how would a bad actor set something up is the question without people knowing it was "bad" "Bad" is probably relative in some cases