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Comment by mminer237 | Hacker News Reader

It still doesn't seem to have a public feed though, so you can only view individual posts.

I will say as someone has an invite: you're not missing out on anything. It definitely has far less activity than either Twitter or Threads, but somehow it also just has worse content. You would think they were invite-only to keep the quality high, but everything is either furry porn or hate-filled rage bait, neither of which I am personally a fan of at all. I keep telling trying to tell it as much, but I honestly don't think I've seen one post I truly wanted to see. I tried to do it for like a week hoping it would get better, but honestly it seems like there's just nothing worthwhile on the whole site. Personally, the only way I can see me ever using Bluesky is if they manage to totally invert their userbase. You need to just start over when you somehow get a crowd worse than either version of Twitter, in my opinion.

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Being able to view individual posts, even if there is no public feed, is really important if people are going to post things that may get picked up by other media channels.

As someone who doesn’t use Twitter, my biggest gripe with Twitter right now is that 70% of the time I will click a link or search result to see a single post and I’m greeted with a giant X telling me to login or sign up. I simply leave, and think Twitter is a worse as worse site every time I run into that. It’s a move that reeks of desperation and makes me not want to sign up. I should feel compelled to make an account if I want to follow someone or post something, not just to read a single post. I’m not sure how they expect to grow when they hide what’s inside and word of mouth is largely negative. Walled gardens have their place, but it’s not the “town square” Elon has been taking about. In the town square I can walk through and overhear conversations without identifying myself or joining in.

> As someone who doesn’t use Twitter, my biggest gripe with Twitter right now is that 70% of the time I will click a link or search result to see a single post and I’m greeted with a giant X telling me to login or sign up. I simply leave, and think Twitter is a worse as worse site every time I run into that.

This has been a real irritant since Elon Musk took it over and started making a lot of terrible decisions. Depending on what platform you’re on, you could rewrite the Twitter link to nitter.net (just replace, manually or through an extension, twitter.com with nitter.net) and you’ll not only avoid those signup/login prompts but also be able to see the complete thread instead of just a single tweet.

I was never into Twitter because of the noise and extreme levels of anger, but this has allowed me to view the minority of tweets and tweet threads that could be interesting and/or useful.

FWIW, this side of Bluesky definitely exists but if you're diligent about curating your follows and avoiding certain custom feeds this type of content is pretty easy to avoid. There is no blackbox algorithm blasting rage bait onto your timeline.

Depending on how you build your social graph, your experience can run the gamut of anything from peak political Twitter to peak pedantic Mastodon. It's up to you.

I just used the normal hot and trending feeds. I tried to tell it by hiding posts, but I literally couldn't find anyone I wanted to follow to really curate it.

> It still doesn't seem to have a public feed though

There is one at https://firesky.tv/

I think it exists as a proof that there is activity on Bluesky. If you were looking for a feed that highlights trending posts, this is not it.

I get that this rage bait works on some percent of the population. 20%? 50%? 75%? What that leaves unanswered is, why aren't these platforms smart enough to adapt to what actual individuals react to? Sure, they picked the most successful single formula, but you'd think they'd want to increase the platform's engagement at the margins rather than just milking one approach for all it's worth.

I suspect these megalithic corpos are actually in it to make a dollar, no matter the cost to reputation or society. You'd think reputation would matter but it turns out once you reach the point of no return ("I keep Facebook so I can share with my grandma"), you'll come back even if there are rats chewing on your toes

But my point was they could make more money if they had algos that worked on more people.

My vague impression was that Threads clamped down on the rage bait, and as a result it did not get adopted. Is that correct?

You are just describing a (good) recommendation algorithm. TikTok's is infamously good at figuring out your niches and catering to your taste by looking at your minute interactions with the content it shows you. My TikTok "for you" page has absolutely 0 mainstream politics, rage bait, or any other "normie" topics. It's mostly technically fascinating stuff and good absurd humor that caters to my absurd taste.

Optimizing for engagement is not inherently bad, nor does it necessarily result in socially suboptimal outcomes. My TikTok feed is very engaging without having to resort to triggering my anger.

A recommendation algorithm that only sticks to a handful of given topics (rage bait and furry porn?) is not a very good one.

Ah. I don’t use TikTok because I strongly dislike video content.

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