Bluesky gains 1.2M in 2 days, 12M total after X disables blocking | Hacker News Reader

Bluesky gains 1.2M in 2 days, 12M total after X disables blocking

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In addition to the improved UX for blocked users, Twitter also announced in its new ToS that any disputes must be handled by a conservative friendly northern district Texas court, despite the new HQ residing in the western district (1). Under the new rules it is possible that disputes with Twitter may be handled by judge Reed O’Conner, who is a Tesla investor (2).

1 https://www.statesman.com/story/news/state/2024/10/19/x-new-...

https://www.npr.org/2024/10/16/g-s1-28620/texas-judge-elon-m...

The new TOS also requires you to grant Twitter the right to use anything you post for AI training. They added an opt-out consent toggle for that not so long ago, but I guess they're still scrambling to sell all of the copper in the walls so they're already walking it back.

Quite the "flood the zone with shit" of a tactic. Make things broadly worse in many dimensions all at once, to diffuse rgse against any specific one of these incredibly hostile anti-user capabilities. Impressive asshattery!

I'm really wondering how this change passed Apple's App Store review process. They can be strict on features like this.

But I guess the rules are different for Big Companies, coz for example, none of us can have a single letter for an app name, like X.

I don't get how this is so hard to understand (in general, so many people seem to be reading this completely backwards).

Previously, if X blocks Y, X isn't recommended Y's posts, Y can't interact with X's posts, Y can't see X's posts.

Now, if X blocks Y, X isn't recommended Y's posts, Y can't interact with X's posts, but Y can see X's posts.

The new system changes nothing in terms of what the person doing the blocking experiences. It fixes abuses of the previous block system, where scammers, grifters and impersonators hide behind blocks to reduce the chances of being caught. It also eliminates the silly fiction that a block prevented stalkers from stalking their target on a platform that has free accounts and the ability to easily switch between multiple accounts.

Apple's policy is that apps must have "The ability to block abusive users from the service." They don't say that users should be able to block other users from seeing their posts. In fact, this is also how blocks work on other platforms like Discord. If I block a user, I don't see their posts unless I click on them, they can see mine, but they can't directly ping or reply to me. Similarly with Reddit, being blocked from a subreddit makes me unable to interact with it, but lets me continue to view it.

Can they subscribe to Y’s posts? (I mean, without creating another account.)

More generally, though, I agree. Twitter’s aggressive spamming of nearly every page with irrelevant posts (for example, the replies page) is a better reason to switch.

Seems to be unclear, apparently X doesn't do auto-unsubscribes, so you'd still be charged for the subscription. Previously it'd tell you that you can't access subscriber content anymore, but it isn't clear if that's still the case.

> It also eliminates the silly fiction that a block prevented stalkers from stalking their target.

I would have made the opposite move, adding an option for paying customers to be invisible to logged out users.

We will see how it goes, but unless you add a rule to prevent people to screenshot tweets from people who blocked them and sharing that picture to their followers, I don't see how the changes are more improvements than regression.

And to be honest, I'm not sure I really care about this change, the two person I know that were harassed on Twitter aren't using it anymore, so :/

Hopefully the platform improve thanks to this change :D

To me, this is an improvement. I don't care about the thing about preventing people from screenshot-ing tweets, since the barrier was so low it was happening often anyway. But, I've seen many cases of accounts being impersonated and used for scams, where the impersonated user only finds out after the damage has already been done. E.g. you sell commissions for something, impersonator makes an account, blocks you so you can't see him, then tricks potential customers into sending him money. You only piece things together weeks later when those customers start calling you out for running off with their money. Another variation involves someone commissioning something, then blocking when their order is ready as a way to harass the creator.

Ok, i see. It isn't an issue here, i don't think i've ever saw twitter used for real businesses beside crypto and "coaching".

Lots of artists do commissions via DMs.

On twitter? Maybe in the US, but here it's mostly instagram and a book on DeviantArt or ArtStation, or emails for more serious project.

Really mute would be a better word than block, right? I do agree that it seems like muting is a more sensible option than blocking though.

There is already a mute feature, when X mutes Y, X will no longer see Y's posts. Y will still be able to interact, but X won't see any of it.

thank you for the explanation.

> It also eliminates the silly fiction that a block prevented stalkers from stalking their target

It's about adding enough friction to discourage the behavior. Human problems don't always need mathematically-perfect solutions.

Wait, if X blocks Y, I'm confused now, who is Y? (Just joking)

You can still block people, the change just makes it so that the blocked party can still see the blocking party's posts. If your account is public, it has always been possible to look at the posts by using an alt or incognito.

And AFAIK this update is already how other social media platforms like Tumblr function.

I think people enjoyed making others know that they blocked them, for some reason?

Being able to block people from seeing publicly posted content was always stupid.

Blocks should prevent people from engaging with you by replying to your posts or messaging you directly.

The fact that social media decided to utterly change what it means was just making echo chambers worse.

If you want to shout out to people who agree with you already just send it to them directly.

It really isn’t because “out of sight, out of mind” is really a thing and it gives stalkers/ragers time to calm down after they’ve been rejected. I mean you can always use a second account to read it, but I’m sure that many people moved on after being blocked which is huge plus for people being harassed by trolls and even scarier people .

> it gives stalkers/ragers time to calm down after they’ve been rejected

But afaik it's just right click -> open in private window to see the profile as the open internet would see it. Takes a second.

It's the same on reddit. If someone replies to you and immediately blocks you (which is a bit of a funny pattern lately), you'd normally switch to logged out mode to read it.

Mobile takes this into account as well: In RedReader (for reddit), you can just use the three dot menu to view it as a not registered user.

I feel that giving users the ability to play around with this kind of hoops and tricks stirs up emotions instead of calming them down.

In general: I don't know of a single scenario where it would be wise to create a situation where logging in on a platform reduces access to its content.

You can see someone's profile and top-engagement tweets logged out, but if you want to see anything recent or specific you need to be logged in, which means there's the friction of a second Twitter account, at least.

You shouldn’t be able to stand on a soapbox and tell certain people to cover their ears.

Twitter allows you to send messages to your followers specifically, Facebook allows you to send it to your friends etc.

Social media is bad enough already for public discourse and the way blocks work on it just made things worse.

Reddit is arguably even worse, block is basically used to have the last word and the entire chain of comments is deleted only for you as others can continue to comment in it.

The reason why social media did this is because they were lazy and didn’t want to take responsibility for policing their userbase. But this doesn’t make a better product.

Places like Reddit shouldn’t allow you to block users at all other than from directly PMing you.

If you don’t want to participate in a public debate don’t. There shouldn’t be a tool that would allow you to decide who else participates in it.

I really don’t understand why this concept is so confusing to people this days.

The content is public, you don’t need an account to even read it. This does nothing other than create echo chambers.

Anything that don't require a package change don't require an approval.

Because it’s not a big deal and people are looking for something to be mad about.

They changed the rules for public accounts, so that if you block somebody they can still see your posts just not interact with them. That’s no different than somebody being able to create a second account to get past your block anyway.

For reference, X has 611 million active users as of April 2024. So Bluesky is almost 2% as large.

Where is that number from?

Are bots considered "active users" in your statistic?

I see very low engagement and half of my followers are obvious fakes. Although I previously said that Twitter as a product has improved, the content has become horrendous and I wouldn't be surprised if it shuts down after the US elections.

I even subscribed to to premium, but only to use Grok. It's not only alright for most task, its also the only LLM integrated with the current events feed(which is twitter) and its actually very useful to get informed about recent events.

Also, the app still has most of the interesting people but it feels like wandering into the most disgusting part of the town just to go to this cool club and I kind of feel like people wish those people move somewhere else.

I don't know, maybe Elon should just put a pop-ups with the few talking points that he keeps pushing for so I can accept and hide those from my timeline? Something like "I agree that the following people are horrible: ..." then "I agree that only Trump can save us from those" and be done with it. It's just boring, the same BS over and over again just so I can keep up with a few interesting people and current events.

An ML algorithm with a news feed attached seems kind of interesting, like if it was going to try and make predictions about what’s going on and about to happen, it would be able to use the actual events later that day as a cost function, or something like that, haha.

AFAIK its one of its kind, Perplexity doesn't appear to have access to most recent stuff.

The prediction engine is interesting idea.

> the content has become horrendous

Do you attribute this to bots?

I agree that content has gone down hill quite a bit. Though personally I don't think it has anything to do with bots. People I used to follow and respect have devolved into posting memes and engagement bait. When there is discussion it usually ends up as 2 sides taking past eachother. I'm pretty sure it has something to do with social media feeds in general, information overload, and providing means of fast gratification.

It really does feel like social media is making people stupider, myself included. At the same time it's also providing me some sense of interest aligned community aligned that I can't really get elsewhere. I'm sure others feel the same.

It's possible that I'm wrong about social media making us stupid, and very possible that it's just illuminating the stupidity that was always there.

Either way I wish it were reversed and trending towards increase in highlighting smart discussion.

(Side note, I've also tried Mastodon and found that there was equal or greater stupidity in the communities there)

No, I don’t attribute it to bots. IMHO it’s the algorithm that optimizes for the most outrageous stuff and the Elon’s politics.

I’ve also seen that people I follow because I enjoy their stuff also start getting much less views and engagements and I attribute that to not tweeting on the topics the algorithm is pushing for.

It almost feels like the site has an idea on what the content should be and those providing the “correct” content are awarded.

> I even subscribed to to premium, but only to use Grok. It's not only alright for most task, its also the only LLM integrated with the current events feed(which is twitter) and its actually very useful to get informed about recent events.

In April of this year Grok hallucinated a missile attack

https://mashable.com/article/elon-musk-x-twitter-ai-chatbot-...

yes but imagine +1% per week growth, even if 1% per month that is a serious chunk

twitter had the advantage of nothing else like it in the SMS days

and at least half of those 600 million are bots, I don't think anyone disagrees

I'm actually impressed so far how Bluesky works right out of the box, it's like oldschool twitter and I didn't even have to break out any adblock rules or stylus modifications

I think people and outlets just need to start cross-posting and see how the traction goes, there is nothing to lose unless Musk orders automated scans to ban people.

> and at least half of those 600 million are bots, I don't think anyone disagrees

Not that I disagree (or agree) but I would like to know (out of curiosity) how would you (or the source of this information) got the number > 300M bot accounts. Do this include inactive accounts? Does this include people with multiple accounts?

And how would you determine that without access to the database? Is there a tools that can help you derive this number based on some statistical analysis? I would be very interested in the details.

Hint: I am not trying to start a debate around X policies or Musk. I just find that it could be interesting the way we can get into this number if it is supported by any rigorous methodology.

there have been several serious studies over the years trying to determine the bot count but of course the api lockout by Musk now makes it impossible

* https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2018/04/09/bots-in-the-...

* https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/09/x-twitter...

* https://www.google.com/search?q=study+of+bots+on+twitter

but it is clear the signal-to-noise ratio on twitter is now unmanageable especially after tools like blocking are taken away

That's interesting although from a quick skimming it seems that these studies are focused on the activity of the bot accounts. This might give a hint on their relevance but due to the fact that their activity is probably above average it doesn't tell much about their percentage of accounts (in absolute numbers). So I am not sure if there is a studies that shows that something near 50% of accounts would be bots. The number is huge and that's why it is interesting for me to see if it is true and how could we determine that.

But I also don't think that the blocking change here would affect signal to noise ratio. You still cannot engage with accounts who blocked you but can see their public posts which you could do by logging out (before X required account to show tweets) and create alt account for that. Blocking access to the already public posts/tweets didn't make sense anyway. And I don't think this is even restricted to X or any particular website.

What is considered an "active" user? From a lot of people I understand they still have their Xitter account, but aren't engaging much in it anymore, sometimes checking in, but generally on a declining trend.

From my experience, at least 2/3 of them are bots or propaganda accounts, at least the ones in the firehouse stream and the ones that comment under “news” posts

This seems to be an extremely silly upheaval. I don't use twitter, so maybe I didn't understand it correctly, but isn't it what "blocking" used to mean on all platforms ever? And what the word "public" meant in all contexts ever? Like, I'm blocking you so you stop bothering me, but it doesn't mean you will somehow automatically stop seeing my public posts. Of course you'll see them. They are public, goddamit. Even if a platform implements some cheesy sort of shadowbanning to stop showing them to you, you can just log out (delete cookies or whatever), and see them, because literally anybody can see them. They are PUBLIC, what isn't clear about it?

You seem to be under the impression that there is a single, objective, universally agreed upon and understood definition of "public" in the context of social media platforms, as well as for "blocking," which all platforms have hitherto implemented and enforced in the same manner, with the same expectations and behaviors. This is not in fact the case, even if you put it in all caps. What "public" and "blocking" mean are implementation and terms of service dependent, they aren't legally binding terms of art.

While I personally think there is a universally agreed upon idea of public access (as in non-exclusive), I was thinking about how other platforms handle it, and Facebook, AFAIK, seemed to have moved to the "everyone" category at some point.

Not sure about other platforms. With "everyone", you could also think of it as everyone [on the platform], which would be a subset of "public".

> They are PUBLIC, what isn't clear about it?

I like the idea that people are upset because they are dumb and categorically misunderstand the word “public” rather than some users find making a quality of life UX adjustment specifically for blocked users to be weird and off putting.

A novice might ask whose user experience is improved by this change and in what ways, but a wise man knows to ask what intellectual failure has led to the presence of more than one opinion about how a popular website functions

>I like the idea that people are upset because they are dumb and categorically misunderstand the word “public”

because that IS the reason. You can even see it here in the comments that a lot of people misunderstand that blocking never prevented the blocked person from seeing your posts.

> because that IS the reason

Did you read the rest of the sentence that you quoted?

> blocking never prevented the blocked person from seeing your posts

This is fascinating. It only stopped users that didn’t use alts or didn’t bother to open a browser in incognito mode and copy-paste the url to a user’s posts.

Do you think that the Venn diagram of “people that have been blocked by any user for any reason” and “people that use alts, clears out cookies, and/or opens incognito mode windows and copy-pastes URLs into said browser window to get around blocks” is a circle?

If your point is that from the perspective of someone intent on circumventing a block there is no difference between being blocked and not, then you either seem to believe everyone shares that motivation, or you don’t believe that user behavior is ever impacted by mild inconvenience or friction.

If it is the former, “everybody acts like a troll” is more of a personal opinion to reflect on than something useful for discussion, and if it is the latter then you have taken your time to go out of your way to share that you have never once designed anything for user interaction, which again isn’t useful for discussion.

Anyway, in your opinion whose user experience is improved by this change and in what ways?

Bluesky has become really good over the last few months, there's really no reason to support X anymore.

You can't think of any differentiation, pros/cons, that may warrant supporting multiple different approaches?

I think it's pretty clear by now that the owner of X is using it as a political tool, so discussing technical details of the site seems pointless. I did like the new anti-toxicity features on Bluesky though:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/29/24231414/bluesky-anti-tox...

> I did like the new anti-toxicity features on Bluesky though: [The Verge article about a new Bluesky feature that allows cited accounts to remove themselves as a citation in other accounts' posts retroactively.]

But this feature only reduces the usefulness of the quote/citation feature.

In low trust quote scenarios, users would likely revert to sharing screenshots of the referenced post. This maintains control over the referenced content, but reduces authenticity since screenshots can be faked.

Maybe I'm yelling at the clouds here, but I think all content in the post should be controlled by the account making the post - much like the original Twitter RT convention. ...or HN.

Do you have any differentiation or pros/cons that may warrant supporting multiple different approaches that you care to share?

Looks like everybody hates this feature. If Elon wanted to push his tweets on people he blocked, why not implement this only for his account?

I’m guessing he got tired of switching between alts or it was a request from the cat turd/doge design/libs of tiktok cluster of users that he interacts with frequently

Elon probably has moderator perms and thus could probably see people blocking him posts anyway.

He does have at least one alt that we know of

https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-discusses-strange-twitter-alts...

Cause that’d make it too obvious that he really only wants his tweets to be seen by everyone

Haven’t used blue sky much. Do they have a bot problem like Twitter?

It seems a bit unlikely Musk is doing this to Twitter out of stupidity or ideology; I'm sure he has a good measure of both, but I doubt he has them in this quantity.

Could Elon's actual play here be: 1. Radicalize Twitter as the ideal platform for right-wing American voters 2. Use this asset this to gain political leverage during a key election cycle 3. Use this juice to advance some of his long-term objectives

The first reason that occurred to me why Musk did this was to reduce compute costs. Perhaps the previous blocking algo was too resource intensive and he is looking to lower server costs.

Keeping a cache of “users who have blocked me” for every user is probably not that expensive. If Bob blocks Oscar, update Oscar’s row to add Bob to Oscar’s blocked_by list.

In this particular case, I’d suspect it’s just stupidity, tbh. There’ve been a number of changes to Twitter which read as “things that Musk likes, and doesn’t realise that not all users like”; for instance, see the briefly-mandatory dark mode.

Most Twitter users aren't americans.

Musk basically destroyed whatever form of social media Twitter/X largely uniquely represented. Maybe that’s good, maybe not.

But it used to be part of my daily routine. Mostly tech discussion. But so many people I know have dropped or way reduced their X presence and neither Mastodon nor Bluesky really repopulated with my network so it’s now something I glance at increasingly once in a great while.

I've been saying now for a while Bluesky is going to win, and it's easy to predict why. Mastodon has the completely wrong approach, its features are certainly interesting but the whole problem with it is most people are having trouble figuring out how it works and while they've produced a lot of content to help people figure things out they've forgotten it's supposed to be intuitive for most people. Bluesky has the same federated features, but it was smart enough to hide it under an intuitive and by now Familiar UI/UX. It's really not a good sign that there's increasing amounts of educational content explaining how to use Mastadon, it means they don't get the desperate need to simplify it so anyone can use it, ya'll who berated me that Simplicity is it's own form of Genius had a point. I might not like that point but, It's why Bluesky is going to win this fight.

Twitter users really are something else.

Theres outright misinformation spread daily, most discussions are toxic af, and theres no improvement in sight.

But the people keep going back because they need to gossip about dumb shit that is going on. They NEED to be the first one to show everyone the latest happenings.

If you're still there, just accept its only getting worse and you have no spine.

> most discussions are toxic af

look in the mirror.

> look in the mirror.

proceeds to be toxic

Sounds like Hacker News

In contrast to something like OpenAI, Twitter/X does indeed have a moat because the effort to switch to a competitor and lose the social network effects is significant.

Many careers depend on Twitter/X unless there is an actual mass exodus.

From my perspective in tech, there has been an exodus along with a ratcheting down for many others.

What a stupid thing to get mad about. Blocking someone should (and can only) prevent the blocker from seeing the blocked. It cannot prevent the blocked user from seeing the blocker’s posts because the blocked user can log out or worse create a new account.

But that’s right elon bad so x must be doin hate crime.

It's a great example of perception being more important than reality in business. Like the "close elevator door" buttons, whether they *do* anything or not is not the point—is not how you sell elevators.

Who said anyone got mad? They simply prefer another service. Also, while anyone can create a burner account, most people don't. I'm guessing a lot of people didn't even know they were blocked, they just stopped seeing the posts.

> or worse create a new account

Doesn't that make any form of blocking useless anyway. Most people don't go through the trouble.

I think you are underestimating stalkers, psychopaths, people with obsessions and others who are unwell mentally.

I think you're overestimated how many blocked users fall into those categories.

That's not even what block was doing. This is the muting feature in X, which I personally find more useful. Blocking is about stopping the other user from being able to engage with your posts. I never block somebody without muting them, but it is prob good that they have them as separate features, because you can mute somebody without them being able to know it in this way.

Oh, calm down. Twitter broke a feature, people moved to a Twitter-like thing where the feature still works. There is no need to overthink this particular one.

Brazilians will not be pleased that their exclusive Brazilian social media will now have English-speaking users in it.

Jokes aside, I hope the new users understand the risks of federation as they get on board, specially the privacy risks: whom you block, follow, and who follows you is public information in the platform.

wouldn't the work-around for that simply be like reddit where people have two accounts (or more) for work vs personal vs even more anonymous posting?

As far as I know the only platform that really supports that is Tumblr, which lets you create as many secondary blogs as you wish with just one e-mail address (and Youtube if you count it). For every other platform users will be impeded by the fact they have to create a second e-mail to create a second account because they don't know how to use e-mail folders.

You can't even switch accounts on Reddit which means you need to use a browser that supports switching cookie jars somehow.

In summary, I'm willing to bet the average user just posts everything on a single account.

And even if they used separate accounts, that doesn't change the fact that the blocks/follows of their identities isn't private.

This is mostly not a problem on the Fediverse (note: not Bluesky, since that is still pretty centralized). To make an alt for a different topic/identity/community/anything one can just pick another instance.

This is mostly not a problem on the Fediverse because its userbase is completely different.

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