[wdpk]

valid points, time will tell how well this will work. For the ban lists there are directories they are typically updated by people you trust or are in the circles you care about. One can indeed imagine manipulating ban lists, I'm personally not too worried about that because typically accounts that post "reasonable" useful or interesting content are very few, most of the other "organic" accounts are just readers. The readers tend to prefer a good ratio of "signal/noise" and in my experience the noise part of the equation is the problem. Trimming down all the accounts whose purpose it just to insult, flame war, yell or post garbage is the goal.

[ignactro]

We looked into that just before the big migration wave, when bsky was ~5M (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3646547.3688407) and there is plenty of growth in terms of the number of labels/feeds, the posts that are labelled, and the popularity of the feeds. So while the default option is likely to matter lots, opening up content recommendation/moderation is having an effect.