Ask HN: Will Bluesky become more popular than Twitter? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Will Bluesky become more popular than Twitter?

16 pointsamrrs13 comments

Recent exodus of Twitter reminds of when Elon took over. Will that make Bluesky more compelling?

Bluesky is more compelling because of ATProto. The way they architected it means users have choice about what app they use, where they host their data, what algo feeds the sub to, and what moderation services they use. Each can be chosen independently and composed to form your own personal flavor of the social media fabric.

Beyond the Twitter like Bluesky, anyone can develop any social application on the same protocol and infrastructure. It is easy to define custom record types to build other social applications.

The best part is that you, as a user, have a single sqlite database hosting your data for all the apps on ATProto, making it a simple matter to move data hosts or switch your primary application without losing your following.

Fundamentally, the protocol means we can have real competition in the social media space.

https://atproto.com/

This is interesting information but I don't think it has any bearing on the current or future general popularity of the platform. 99.9% of users would have no idea what you're talking about-- they just want to read posts, probably from funny/popular/insightful people. To a lesser extent they probably want to post themselves without getting spammed and abused.

Even if it does, it still doomed to become what Twitter became.

In my opinion, the best years of "social networks" were the early 2000 till early 2010, before Facebook and the likes became globally popular. During these years we had forums and IRC channels. These were off-limit to "common" folks or people looking for engagement, and you could find quality material and interesting discussions over there.

Then the modern social media came, and it ruined everything. Short form content and engagement motivation (like Twitter ad revenue share, where they pay you for "popular" tweets), ruined the place for everyone. You can't have a meaningful discussion with 200, or whatever the limit is, characters. Most people on these platforms try to "game" the algorithm in order to publish a viral tweet. There is zero to no moderation, and in one "scrolling" session you can see a lazy motivational quote, a selfie, an MRR screenshot, a life lesson, and far right/left propaganda, which is kinda insane.

On top of all that, the entire "follow" mechanism is flawed. It creates small echo chambers around big accounts. Take a popular account, find a tweet you disagree with, and look at the comments--it will be filled with "yes men" and people looking for engagement. On forums you could read different opinions in the same discussion, thus widening your world view, rather than narrowing it.

Forums also had moderation, and users had "reputation", even though they were anonymous. I joined bluesky recently, out of curiosity and hype, and it's filled with "Hello this is my first post", pictures of peoples workstations, anime, politics (US based, which I don't care about), etc. It's just too much noise to navigate with little to no value.

The entire modern social media system is broken. We don't need something more popular than Twitter, we need something completely different that will bring value back into online discussions, but I guess it's unachievable. Look at HN, which I consider to be the top 1 "social" platform for myself, yet it's unknown outside the tech/science community. Everything too big is doomed to become average at best.

I wouldn't consider HN a social community. More like a sort-of-aligned rag-tag drive-by commenting site. In a community you know each other personally. Not that it's not valuable or interesting, otherwise I would have quit it long ago.

The value of any site is in its members' (self-selected) convictions, interests and skills and its self-regulatory and adaptive abilities... as vague as that sounds.

But yea, I desire back the calm net too. If not for my sake, then for everybody else's. We're making it up as we go. That said it's a metropolis now, not a village...

Personally I think algorithmic feeds can save Twitter clones.

I see the chronological feed + boosting on Mastodon as basically toxic, particularly when you create an "Explore" feed by showing the most boosted posts from the past 24 hours (or the like.) It privileges hateful image memes and other kinds of echo chamber content.

To stand to use Mastodon I need an extensive list of block terms such as "Trump", "Republican", "Fascist", "Trans.*", etc. With about 15-20 rules my feed is OK.

I did not need to put blocks into Bluesky, there are angry and hateful people just like there are on Mastodon but Bluesky's algorithm puts a headwind to them so: (1) I see less in my feed, (2) people who might repost that kind of thing see less of it to repost, (3) those people get used to playing different games.

My understanding is that Threads does it even more so but inexplicably Meta won't let me make an Instagram/Threads account.

I think that kind of site is great for posting pictures of your cats, a snap of what you just ate, what anime you just watched, a good blog post you read about programming, etc.

That kind of site is terrible for posting about politics because in either 140 or 1400 characters there is no room for nuance, no way to say "I agree with 95% of what you say but I take issue with 5%". No way to find common ground, no way to organize effective activism. Many supporters of the Democrats learned the hard way that you can share Kamala Harris memes 100 million times and it's not any more effective at winning the election that it is for the official campaign to run endless ads on YouTube asking for $5 or $10.

Nothing will ever be as popular as Twitter, which is why it was valued at $44 billion dollars when it was bought. Bitten once, twice shy.

  Edit for response since I'm rate limited:

Twitter didn't make a profit - it would have been overpriced at just $10 billion dollars. The value comes from having a captive userbase where the majority is entirely unwilling to use an alternative. Depending on how hard you intend to manipulate those users, the ROI may or may not be worth it.

wasn't it considered to be over priced which was why Elon tried to backout?

Yup. But now he gets to be first buddy.

It was never valued at $44B by sober people: read any of the coverage at the time and you’ll see puzzled reactions to Musk over-paying so much for what was always far behind Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Weibo, etc. It depends on exactly how you class social networks but Twitter usually isn’t even considered in the top ten globally. Given how he tried to back out of the deal, he must have recognized this as well but only after signing a binding agreement.

Twitter is not even in the top 10 of popular social media.. so many already are more popular then Twitter..

Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok are all more popular then twitter.. Hell, i bet even Orkut was more popular then twitter back in the day..

I don't think Twitter was ever the number 1 social media in popularity..

Also, Twitter was never valued at $44bi by anyone other then Elon, and even he saw the terrible deal he made and tried to back out of it..

And value has only dropped after..

And they are bleeding both money and users.. So the user base is clearly willing to use something else..

It will surprise me if twitter is still a thing by this time next year.. it might still be around but i think it will be small and irrelevant..

Yep

I'd be happy as long as the right-of-center folks stay at the nazi bar microblog place.

Plus, the bsky blocking mechanisms are AMAZING

Custom labellers and moderation choice is a good design choice, beyond what blocking features Bluesky provides in their app.

Note that because the protocol and data are open, blocking is mainly an app view thing (that should be respected by other app views).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com