An exploration of Bluesky's public opening
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
I have no issues with that kind of a site, I just didn't find anything there that would make the site interesting or worth returning to, for me. Spending some time on finding the "right" feeds and trying to curate my timeline didn't really help much either. Maybe the surge in popularity has helped with this issue though, with people actually posting stuff in other, non-political feeds.
It's plausible that the English vs Japanese toxicity difference also comes from this: political posts tend to be rant-y and negative even when people are agreeing with each other, and the English community developed from such a nucleus. Maybe the Japanese community didn't have any such initial influencing factors, and maybe developed more diverse, less toxic community overall.
I think this would be more to do with individuality being so taboo.
> English content tends to have higher toxicity scores [...] on average, the toxicity of English content is three times higher than that of Japanese content
This is remarkable especially since section 4.3 says there are more Japanese posts compared to English posts after the public opening.
Maybe it's just because I'm American, but I think most people have some amount of rebellion in them. It's necessary to look at other viewpoints if for no other reason than to know what alternatives exist.
Being an asshole doesn't make you a cultural rebel or iconoclast, it just makes you an asshole.
However, the toxicity and polarization that some Western countries have been evolving to is not good either. There should be a middle ground.
Unfortunately this is not the case. The current structure of the Internet is surprisingly fragile, and a dedicated attacker going after your website’s various network dependencies can cause a lot of headache. It’s rare, but it is still something important to note, especially if you have beliefs that are unsavory to those in power.
And it was never that their speech was “immediately getting people killed” (which is an exaggeration given even their most liberal “kill count” isn’t even in the double digits), but that certain people with tech connections (who have been redacted on HN) don’t want their “consent accidents” on public websites.
It again feels like a very ineffective way to socially network. It feels narrow cast. No one else is going to show up one day and contribute something to your email thread. It's again not very social, to me.
Some might argue that Mastodon lets you follow users on other instances, but my experience is that the federation depends on agreement between the instance operators, and it didn't work for the two instances I was using (mastodon.social and doll.social). It's also unclear if posting things that are off-topic to a particular instance is good etiquette.
I'm not aware of an actually decentralized equivalent of what Hacker News is (basic threaded text forums) but that might be an interesting project for someone to build on an existing protocol.
the second link goes directly to the largest instance. It has all the same federated interoperability features that Mastodon or Bluesky have, but with a thread/topic format instead of a microblog format.
You may be thinking of distributed systems, like blockchains, which have no centers at all. Nobody is using those for social media yet.
The "center" that matters in this context is the server and owning entity, not the taxonomy of the content. Decentralized platforms aren't owned and operated by a single entity, centralized platforms are. You can't just spin up a new instance of Hacker News with different moderators and just federate with it, because "Hacker News" as a network is entirely owned and controlled by YCombinator. Not so with, say, "Mastodon."
Also yes unfortunately there are already multiple blockchain-based social media platforms.
unless you actually meant /g/ :)
> Fast-forwarding a year and a half, today the network is openly federated with hundreds of PDS instances.
https://bnewbold.net/2024/atproto_progress/
He goes over everything else required to be truly distributed... The multiple PDS's isn't everything. But it's been a lot of progress. Decentralization & walking away remains a focus. And there's a fairly strong 3rd party developer community that's very promising.
(Personal note, your post in my view contains reprehensible & gross mud-sling & slant. Holier than thou left-leaning academics itself sounds like a really judgemental case of projection.)