'A place of joy': why scientists are joining the rush to Bluesky | Hacker News Reader

'A place of joy': why scientists are joining the rush to Bluesky

nature.com

53 pointsrbanffy44 comments

I’ve noticed the problem on Twitter has gotten a lot worse after Twitter added monetization.

My guess is bots are used to simulate realistic fake users to eventually pump other Twitter posts for the revenue sharing?

I’ve noticed not all bots are pornographic / mean spirited / etc. They just make a lot of low value content that crowds out comment sections.

If bluesky continues to grow, the porn and bots will arrive shortly and presumably it will have less resources to combat them than the much better funded X. Or does something in the design help here?

Regardless, I think this is more the new home effect. When you move into a new house, it is clean and you design it with intention. Over the years, it gets dirty and you start to hate the art you liked (people you followed) years ago.

Interactions on Twitter are like 50-80% bots, it's not a resources problem

Not sure I agree with your numbers but I also never see a single political post and everyone seems to say thats all that exists so it might be specific to how you use it or which feed tab you frequent

i think the most distinctive difference is that filtering of the fire hose

the fire hose is what bluesky calls the totality of the network regardless of who, what or why it exists

the largest threat to the network is a DDOS of the fire hose

compared to the fact that x is intentionally NOT a fire hose, which is widely documented by anyone getting banned that elon personally beefs with

so yeah, the fundamental design is what attracts people and why everything that’s tried to compete with existing networks “mano y mano” has failed— networks today generally boil down to dictatorships.

i’m now wondering if the comment i was responding to was trolling.

is a network that can be bought able to be compared to one that can’t?

Does anyone have any suggestions for how to design a Twitter clone that can prevent this at any cost? it seems like a pervasive issue in every single social network.

Half baked thought; what about a linkedin style connection graph where your feed is only populated by those in your network, and it is trivial to see and disconnect from whoever introduced the bot into your network. Would a community self regulate if bots became actually contagious

Make 'em pay for a user account, even a one-off $5 per account should suffice

What stops political campaign money from funding accounts and bots?

$5 is enough for a human to glance at the feed and mute it if it seems bad. The trouble with $0 is you can create a million bots and no one has time to look at them.

I wouldn't mind something like that. When I joined Whatsapp it cost $1 for life and I thought that was a good system. Sadly it's gone, replaced by free but ad funded.

The bots pay monthly for a blue checkmark so that they're promoted to the top of the replies. A small cost does not appear to have been a meaningful disincentive, especially when scammers can easily make that money back and political operatives can easily bankroll that.

Ah, well… y’see that’s where heavy moderation and bans would come in to play, and uhhh…

Facebook has much less bots/porn. They employ huge numbers of humans to achieve that. Also a real name policy.

significantly less of a problem on bluesky than on twitter. First there is a mass ban which scales well (one can ban entire lists of bots). Two there is no gamed algorithm that bias engagement towards the ideology of the owner of the platform... In other words, you have significantly more control over the content

How does a regular, casual user of Bluesky know what ban lists to use?

How does one know to trust that a ban list is "clean", i.e. hasn't had a bunch of people added just because someone disagreed with them?

Will such ban lists be able to keep up with the rate of bots being created?

(I'm not on any of these social media platforms, but I'm considering Bluesky, at least for reading purposes.)

valid points, time will tell how well this will work. For the ban lists there are directories they are typically updated by people you trust or are in the circles you care about. One can indeed imagine manipulating ban lists, I'm personally not too worried about that because typically accounts that post "reasonable" useful or interesting content are very few, most of the other "organic" accounts are just readers. The readers tend to prefer a good ratio of "signal/noise" and in my experience the noise part of the equation is the problem. Trimming down all the accounts whose purpose it just to insult, flame war, yell or post garbage is the goal.

We looked into that just before the big migration wave, when bsky was ~5M (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3646547.3688407) and there is plenty of growth in terms of the number of labels/feeds, the posts that are labelled, and the popularity of the feeds. So while the default option is likely to matter lots, opening up content recommendation/moderation is having an effect.

This an a similar story a few days ago from Science [1] were both flag killed within an hour of submission, then eventually revived by some mechanism.

I'm curious why that is. I didn't see anything in either of them that should be particularly controversial.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42198278

The recent deluge of positive press BS gets is somewhat suspect. BS seems to be following the same route as pre-X Twitter clones did in that those who either got banned (pre-X Twitter) or decided to abandon (post-Trump election X) Twitter/X are often ideologically driven. Where this means platforms like Gab and Parler took in a large number of guns & god types it means that BS is taking in the pronouns brigade, the perpetually oppressed, victimhood fetishists and more. This has the effect of turning these platforms into echo chambers for the 'right' (Gab etc.) and 'left' (pre-X Twitter and now BS). An echo chamber is a lousy place to discuss science since all you'll hear is yourself, repeated endlessly. Science (the magazine) should know that but it, like Nature and Scientific American [1] has abandoned the principle of keeping its editorial/political bias at a minimum.

[1] https://x.com/michaelshermer/status/1857610335005630769

We've seen political blogspam before with Mastodon and a little Threads.

Bluesky does seem different (it might be a real successor), but HN is at the random monkeys stage. It's just NPCs hating on Twitter as the media tells them to.

Here, only an Imposter scientist chases - 'a place of joy'. Real science is anarchy. A hacker should not be caring what the fakers in academia are saying.

As other comments correctly point out, if Bluesky becomes popular it'll be the same as Twitter anyway, logically it'll be worse... Bluesky has time to pivot but HN isn't mature enough to model how they might be a success.

This whole BlueSky thing feels inorganic.

Feels very organic actually considering it has been around for a while now and people are only now beginning to move to it in droves.

It's definitely snowballing now. Other than chatgpt, it's been years since the last time that's happened?

Call it a tipping point, call it a collective action problem finally being resolved, snowballing, viral liftoff, or belittle it and call it a "herd stampede" if you really want.

But those are all "organic" phenomena. The grandparent comment that called it "inorganic" seems to be mistaken.

There is this cynical (and maybe often warranted) take that any sudden uptake or virality is astro-turfing or I inorganic or shilling.

Not the case here though, I see it myself how basically all my old Twitter communities have migrated and things are really vibrant. Block lists, mute words and starter packs mean I we exactly what I want to see, which adds to the appeal.

It’s been a while since someone has wilfully destroyed a thing that has an obvious replacement. Last one was probably Digg.

I was a highschool senior when Facebook came out, back when you needed an email with a university's domain name to sign up. That one was driven by pure FOMO. Everyone's older friends were on it and going to cool frat parties and you were just stuck on the outside looking in. LiveJournal and Myspace had nothing on that.

I don't know about "inorganic", but something definitely happened.

I only tangentially heard of BlueSky and now suddenly it's everywhere.

I mean ... SiriusXM (hardly a forerunner of fashion) just had one of the DJs mention BlueSky.

Something is definitely up.

Why is it so unbelievable to you that a different platform with seemingly happy users could have a viral moment through word of mouth, right as a whole lot of people are actively seeking alternatives?

Let’s put it this way: if a huge amount of people suddenly find themselves done with twitter, what serious alternatives are there beside Bluesky?

I actually think there are a few, only some have achieved critical mass with smaller subnetworks. BlueSky and Threads both seem to have attracted non-tech networks although Threads downranked political content, so BlueSky seems like the natural next mass appeal product.

Others:

Mastodon: many tech subnetworks (security, data)

Nostr and Warpcast: Crypto

>Something is definitely up.

Well duh - the figurehead of X buddied up with Trump so the dems are leaving.

PG appears to differ [0].

From my pov, this is the best hacker story in recent times. A small group of protocol nerds are overtaking Zuck and Musk, the most powerful people on the planet. This is hacker af. [1]

[0] https://x.com/paulg/status/1858122600934752464

[1] A dev team of 20 people are the #1 app in App and Play Stores, while open source and fully remote. Heck yes. This is an amazing story. It should be front page every day.

It's grown slowly and deliberately. It only broke out because of the election and Elon's antics. Feels about as organic as it can get.

Like 'old Twitter': The scientific community finds a new home on Bluesky

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42198278

Twitter feels like a cage match: you go there to fight. This is how it has always been and will probably never change. I think such a platform is necessary though.

Not sure why you think it's necessary, twitter could disappear tomorrow and nobody would be worse off. It's not even a real fight it's more like yelling past each others without anybody actually getting much out of the experience but rage. Did you manage to breach twitter echo chamber once? convince a single person on twitter of whatever point of view you have? And this is even before all the bots and the hidden agendas of the owner

You have a good point. There have been many situations on hacker news where disagreements in comments have shed new light on topics for myself and allowed me to look at things from different perspectives (and I think I have helped others as well with my own comments). I don't think that has really happened on twitter as the argument style is different.

They want a hug box, not actual discourse.

Communication over a distance has inherited problems, people. Twitter or Bluesky or even these cute scientists won't change that.

people with lots of good things to do in their lives have less time to post.

on platforms like twitter, this means that the posts are disproportionately made by people with unhappy and limited lives, who have too much invested in their status and image on social media, because that's who has time to post. this makes for an unpleasant environment and is also fertile ground for mobs, bullying etc.

after this most recent wave of migration, bluesky feels fairly pleasant, but that's not stable. lots of normal people just moved their accounts over and are still engaging. but they will become less active soon leaving only the "power users" who will make the site unpleasant again.

probably bluesky will once again become just as bad as pre-Elon Twitter was at its worst. however this would still be much better than the current situation on X, where at some point you will be exposed to people advocating rape and people celebrating the Holocaust, or other such horrible things, so I don't think people will move back to X the way they did last year.

Give it some time.

Bluesky will be old and busted, monetized and enshittified.

Then all of the "interesting" people will pioneer some new proprietary platform instead of building their own websites and DMing each other on Signal, though some might try the Fediverse again, only to abandon it because (like Lance Ulanoff) they couldn't find William Shatner there.

I'd love to be wrong about this, but we'll see.

My adblocker didn't detect this.

A quick reminder: If you are on the Fediverse (Mastodon, etc), you can follow people on BlueSky and vice versa using Bridgy Fed (https://fed.brid.gy/).

I personally haven't tried it - if people know any interesting folks to follow who are on Bluesky and not Fediverse, please post their profile!

Also, some people on Mastodon are/were very much against this bridge. I believe the author made some effort to make changes to appease them. So don't be surprised if you see articles from 5 months ago attacking it.

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