I finally tried it and as a new member literally every recommended post was US culture wars stuff. Is that the normal experience, or am I getting some kind of bias based on who I received an invite from?
- people who like to argue online
- people who can easily turn any complex topic into a 100-odd character slogans
- people who like to put the world into hashtag-sized boxes
- masochists who enjoy getting into the ragebait du jour
- a vanishing minority who didn't get the memo and somehow the Algorithm has kept them in a bubble of sanity
- bots
Coincidentally most of these groups, including bots, really love the entire US culture war bullshit. They're the one that are keeping it alive, with the help of journalists, the last category of people that live on that type of social media and then report on some newspaper @oneidiotontwitter's troll post as if it were public opinion, in a perpetual cycle of mental and cultural noise.
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Look outside. People are going about their lives. The sun is somewhere in the sky. Probably not much is going on around you. That's the real world.
But each platform's mechanics encourage certain behaviours over others. The Twitter website (not the culture of it's users), as an advertising-funded platform, is highly geared to optimise for 'engagement', which encourages all of these behaviours.
We blamed the Algorithm, but perhaps the issue was the users all along.
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It's one of the strangest things about the meta-conversation regarding social media. The "left" (I'll use quotes because these things aren't strictly defined) thinks that, for example, anti-immigration sentiment or support for Trump comes from "Russian bot farms" fooling the public. It's unfathomable to some people that smart, good, hard-working people could hold those views.
It is probably due to how Bluesky was populated - a specific demographic of twitter were the first movers to bluesky, and it has attracted more of the same. I guess there is a market for this.
As a side note on Thread and Mastodon: the experience there was different. Thread has a larger tech community so there is actually interesting content (for me at least) and Mastodon, it really depends on the instance, but even on the first instance (mastodon.social) you can find good content if you search by hashtag, and you can find some real nice people to follow (and since it's the multiverse, you can follow from any instance anyway) so it's all about building the social graph you want)
Yes, this is the tricky thing about internet communities. Bluesky is mostly made up of older school Twitter addicts angry at Twitter's takeover and yeah all they tend to talk about is that and culture war adjacent stuff.
Shows a bit of the naivety of the Bluesky devs they didn't clock this as a problem and try and help people who don't want to talk about that find their community on there.
Exactly. Bluesky was born in the shadow of Elon taking over Twitter. But Twitter still exists, so who went to Bluesky? A lot of people who disagree with Elon's (recent) politics. The politics of Bluesky will reflect that.
Also, did you scroll all the way through https://bsky.app/feeds for various interests?
Oh, and one really useful thing that I found for discovery is the little + icon to the left of the Follow button on people's profile pages. It shows suggestions of who they are following, so I built up a bunch of good follows that way.
"My default experience is openly hostile and promotes division"
"My experience is that if you tailor it then it's very valuable".
"OK, but the default experience was hostile and I don't have the means to coerce the good vibes experience"
"Skill issue".
It happens on every conversation about Twitter, less so regarding TikTok and co. But it's an interesting pattern I see all too often.
Troubleshooting does fit common patterns maybe?
I think it's right to try to help people, I often mark things as "Not Interested" if it's divisive, but since we tend to have less control about emotional responses, we all have a sense that we have a duty to fairness and with the understanding that humans tend to want to correct bad information rather than letting it go uncorrected (that's why the best way to get an answer to your question is to post an incorrect answer rather than ask). -- combined, these issues mean you will likely interact in some way with the divisive content if it's delivered to you.
Seeking to actively diminish it is difficult, it requires thought and intentional moves to ignore and flag content as uninteresting or to heavily curate your feeds.
This, I feel, is why it's victim blaming; because the intent of the media platform by default is to engage and they do so by baiting emotional or corrective responses in the interest of fairness.
It doesn't surprise me that BlueSky goes in the same direction, to be honest.
And 2024 is probably going to be particularly nasty for obvious reasons.
Let people argue in their own bubbles and leave the rest of us in peace.
You mean you moved from a place that showed content you disagree with, to your own bubble. You can admit that without claiming everything outside your point of view is silly.
It used to be that regardless of your position, even active disinterest, this stuff was forced on you, and now that is not the case.
Same shit as on Twitter and Bluesky
The whole point of Mastodon is to only get what you want, not the rest. It's easy to build your own network of sources. The explore feed is useless :)
However, my actual Mastodon feed only has content from people I follow, without any recommendations, and that works great.
If you mean said minority groups just trying to exist in a space without harrasment then that is not fine at all.