Mayor Adams' office directs NYC agencies to launch Bluesky accounts amid growth
nydailynews.com
nydailynews.com
Meanwhile us foreigners will have to maintain an account on both platforms to understand what our global overlords have decided for us today ;p
As an aside, my country has banned Twitter... yet everyone in the government, from the prime minister to the junior bureaucrat, uses twitter to issue announcements. They all use VPN. The whole thing is hilarious and sad. And I have to use VPN to find out if the road I'll go out yet is blocked or if we will have electricity today.
Basically, the international market is unlikely to move to BlueSky, then again I could be wrong.
So pretty sure it was an easy for them to move on from X.
What gets highlighted is almost never what is more intellectual, moral, factual, important, or curated. Instead it's whatever is entertaining, angering, scary, validating. It's a machine for capturing people's baser instincts and biases and weaponizing them to make people stupid and reactive.
And it's designed to be addictive. This isn't even just the "big" social media sites. Anything with a "feed" or "endless scroll" is designed to hook you, keep you there, keep you engaging. Cigarettes may not be your drug of choice, but TikTok may be.
Go ahead and quit social media. You know what people almost universally report? They feel calmer. Happier. Healthier. Less scared. They have more free time. It's a weight off their shoulders. Now imagine the opposite of all that, affecting nearly everyone connected to the internet. Imagine what that does over decades.
This machine is eroding society. In the future, we're going to find out that social media was worse than cigarettes. The addictive habit that slowly destroys lives - even nations - over decades.
I'm not the only person who has had friends have nervous breakdowns from social media. This is a pubic health emergency, but we're treating it like its politics. Politics is just a symptom of the greater disease: an epidemic of manipulation machines designed to ruin our health for clicks. The machine doesn't even know it's doing this to us. It's just doing what it was programmed to do. And we lap it up, like so many flies wandering into the fly trap.
Social media, specifically microblogging networks like old Twitter, were uniquely effective at delivering near real-time breaking updates in ways that left older news delivery systems in the dust. I could do without the vapid comments, but this one aspect has real utility and I don't really know of a way to replicate that in other systems. I say this as an outsider that would only occasionally use the site to search for breaking news that hasn't hit other outlets yet.
My question is about where you draw the line on what constitutes a social network as the edges get blurry. Are comment sections social media? Are sites like Reddit and hacker News? Blogs? Blog networks with social features like Tumblr?
That ended with Elon’s acquisition. Not because of anything nefarious, but rather Elon just didn’t understand what he bought. He saw it as a meme and shitposting service. Which it was for a subset of users, I guess. But the changes he brought massively undermined its utility for elite and connected microblogging, and it became far less useful for that purpose. Now that he is incentivizing content creators, it has become a text version of instagram or TikTok—nothing but vapid influencers chasing engagement.
Personally, I was also very picky about who I follow, and also only use “Following” (never “For You”) and the only difference I felt with the Elon acquisition is less censorship — which is both good and bad — and makes it more useful as a news source.
The #1 reason I had to leave Twitter is the degradation of replies. Prioritising blue ticks ruined any productive conversation in the comments. Much like HN is (imho) most valuable for the comments, old twitter was great for the expertise in the replies - where the cream rose to the top. Now it's impossible or takes a lot of scrolling to find useful dialogue.
It's not perfect, but for now Bluesky is scratching that itch of smart commentary immediately after a post. That was enough to get me to completely move to the platform.
Not very egalitarian and I admit to being disgusted by it at the time. In retrospect, it was genius and a net good. Society’s upper class (politicians, CEOs, celebrities, top journalists) spoke freely and frankly on Twitter, and we all got direct real-only access to those feeds. Not a bad setup.
Now their Twitter accounts are managed by their PR team.
2. The new creator incentives have created a ton of people pushing out phony / insincere tweets, rage bait, memes, and stealing content. It has massively decreased signal to noise.
I’m still on Twitter, but mostly out of habit and the few friends I met there that I can’t follow otherwise.
> I don't really know of a way to replicate that in other systems
Usenet, IRC, mailing lists, news websites, web forums, RSS feeds, etc. We had plenty of breaking news sources. It just wasn't as convenient as posting on twitter or looking at an endless trending feed. We've gained convenience, at the cost of our health.
And ironically, what's become easier is the pushing of "breaking news" that isn't actually important, but will sure get eyeballs on screens and enraged replies. "Kayne said WHAT???" Who in the fuck cares? Why are we hearing about this in real time? Why are we allowing ourselves to be deluged in shit?
IRC did it long before some worthless derp even dared to coin the term "social media".
IRC did it on an incredibly small scale, IME.
Yeah, probably. But I hadn’t posted to the IPO garbage site since ~2013-ish. I enjoy my preferred replacement. There are actual dialogues. It’s missing a lot of great content for niche topics, but I consider the intimacy a strength.
True, I’m off all non-tech/science internet at the moment for mental wellbeing (USA citizen and I need less information about our current events, not more). And yes, that’s deliberate and it’s helped my state of mind. I’m reading more books and got back into a game I like.
I just don’t think decentralization is all that bad. Echo chamber? Yes. But who on FB or the shitty bird site hasn’t self-selected for that?
I think celebrity media sites are a trap. More so if you are able to post advertising. Social, itself, isn't necessarily bad. Social that is monetized is almost certainly a race for what makes money, though. Not what makes people social.
It certainly _feels_ categorically different from the algorithmically suggested endless scroll sites
I think one of the few things that has kept it at least a little safe aside from the massive work of Dang is that you need a certain level of “karma” before you can interact with a lot of the functions. Still, if you look at the content and the discussions today they are very different from what they were. I haven’t used my original account for several years because it was associated with my real personality and that became toxic with the increase of Reddit users who would actively stalk you.
It doesn’t have doom scroll, but it does have doom update.
* Exaggerated high-intensity language intended to rant or show indignation
* Low effort posting chasing some form of in-network metacurrency (upvotes, likes, replies, etc.)
* Argumentative conversation threads that devolve because the participants just start shouting at each other.
* Angry rumors that get amplified that have dubious or no basis in reality. The rumors generally prey on some pre-existing anger in the community.
* General misinformation amplification because most folks on social don't have the bandwidth to verify facts.
I've seen these on Usenet, on forums, and all of these things happen on Mastodon despite none of these networks having money tied into them. My feeling is that these behaviors happen on all text-based networks (and many media-based networks, but I think those are different) that humans socialize on. Moderation and filtration is probably the best way to clamp down on this behavior.
Good moderation is vital. And it is not much, but the friction of having to hit next page slows some of the doom scrolling traps.
Reputation style points are probably important in there? Makes it harder to flood with bots.
I will grant that it is not infinite scroll. I think that speaks more to this site having a limited amount of content.
Outside of the journalist and media class, nobody used twitter. 300M+ people are a huge number, but barely scratches the surface in the Social Media world. What can bluesky do different to attract normies?
??? What???
Twitter has basically been the place for artists to share their stuff. It's a huge place for game and tech discussions and sharing knowledge. It lets absolute normies share stuff with thousands of people.
Meanwhile, facebook stories is much more limited in reach. People sharing pictures of their baby and vacations with family who'll click a thumbs up just to show they know you exist but don't care about the content. Instagram, facebook's other child, is for people to pose and post pictures of their lunch in an exotic location and pretend they just casually decided to eat 10000 miles from home because they're rich and spontaneous like that.
Twitter has been huge for creative types, and the content that thrives on Facebook-style platforms struggles there. A lot of them are currently migrating to bluesky due to various problems recently. Tumblr still kind of has a thing going on, but it's for much more niche art/fan fiction type stuff. But they're all for normies to go and see cool shit and not have to stare at endless feeds of "Me and my baby. Did you know I have a baby? I have a baby btw" type stuff.
I don't know the same artists you do then. Agree with the rest, but wether it's sound designer, musician or graphic artist, most of the talented ones I know weren't on Twitter. I know one who is but honestly half her work are memes, and the rest isn't that good. Artstation/deviantArt in the other hand, that's where you can discover _very_ good art (and some bad one).
Artstation and deviantart is where people who make art go to look at other art. Twitter and bsky are places where everyone, including non-artists, goes to find art.
The point does not change. Twitters importance only comes from the fact the people reporting on twitter were obsessed with it.
To avoid the cesspool effect, Bluesky should just charge publishers (anyone who wants to post) a high monthly fee, and make user accounts for reading free. Then governments or companies or anyone else can just use it as their announcement service.
People who want to chat can use Reddit or whatever.
So they should become a subscription-based press release distribution channel? That doesn't sound too different from the "verified" account practice at current Twitter, just more expensive.
Don't. Threads already has that market locked up as it is now about ~300m MAUs.
Bluesky should focus on its current strengths i.e. news, politics, science and less mainstream content.
Between the two it should relegate X to just being a Truth Social competitor.
If you sign up for a new account the majority of the content is either Musk or right-wing political content even if you never asked for it.
Twitter now a great space for anyone to buy influence in the upcoming US administration. But if you want to reach an audience as normie, it is less useful than posting cheap chinese slop promotional compilations on LinkedIn.
People who are not obsessed with politics.
[0] Brock Pierce, crypto lunatic.
Bluesky is built on their open protocol ATProto (https://atproto.com)
One of the core issues of social media and mastodon they aimed to change is account portability. Every user has an sqlite database which is trivial to move. The other part is using DNS for DID
Jack.
Jack got mad that people were making fun of him for being into crypto, left for another decentralized service Nostr, did too many psychedelics and fried his brain, then moved back to Twitter.