Bluesky is on the verge of overtaking Threads in all the ways that matter
mashable.com
mashable.com
It wasn't adopted, it was falsely created.
I'd go even further to say that it isn't a social network, it's an add-on to another social network.
Has there ever been a successful case of bootstrapping a new social media product with an existing userbase? Like not just added features or merging two together.
Google+ was successful from any real metric but it didn’t replace Facebook so it was axed.
Hangouts (now Meet?) was also a product out of Google+ but considering GChat (the xmpp version) existed before, it was kind of a step backwards.
I think Google Local Guide also has some parts of Google+, not sure.
But the community is so minuscule that I'm not sure Google even knew it existed. If it had taken off to the same degree among something closer to critical mass, like today's parasocial celebrity communities or mainstream sports, it might've survived.
IMO most of that TTRPG community migrated to Discord, but the invite requirements make discovery horrible, search is terrible, real-time chat is miserable for discussion, and its "forum" features are just threaded chats. The vibe is way worse, it breeds and feeds drama, and the audience that survives it can correspondingly be either less appealing or require more moderation.
Bluesky doesn't solve the same problems as G+ circles, but between feeds and follow/moderation lists, it has a similar vibe of being able to focus the lens on a topic better than Twitter or Threads, and without the overhead and UX gaps of Fediverse.
Touch of genius really.
I mean that morning when Zuck woke up and decided that a Threads a/c would need an Instagram a/c he must have seen on his daily astronomy calendar "Day of self-sabotage".
But I still think there is a difference with Bluesky and the other big social medias with full customization of how the feed(s) works, third party servers, custom labelers, etc. To me it seems plausible that they actually want to create more of an empowering tool that the users can control.
That will of course not stop users from using ”dumb” feeds. But the users doesn’t have the incitament of Facebook to always produce higher engagement and show more ads.
It is of course also troublesome that we do not know how Bluesky will act down the road to get their ROI.
i wouldn’t say falsely created, but i would say “padded statistics”
threads is beholden to KPIs unlike every other activity pub implementation
their team obviously wants to be successful to continue developing against activity pub
their metrics are akin to a company bragging about how much software they’ve written with the assistance of AI
threads was able to approximate how many instagram users wished they had twitter in the same way intellisense is able to provide auto complete for dot notation; as a magician, i spot the misdirection for investors
While Threads is just forced Instagram users, bsky is a decentralised social network which is not decentralised. Comparing bsky with Threads is anything but a compliment.
They didn't.
Facebook is doing the same with Threads. Sure you don't have a default account, but the pestering works, and it is "tying".
Are they implying that Threads has just ~5 million daily active users? Adam Mosseri shared in the beginning of November that they have 275 million monthly active users. Bluesky meanwhile has 20 million total users. Considering the author hasn't shared a single source for their claim, I find it hard to believe. Realistically he is off by at least an order of magnitude.
Mashable used to be one of my go-to blogs, but I haven't been there in a while. Has it really fallen this far?
The meaningful stats would be number of posts seen, engaged with, and number of posts the user made themselves.
And the ads, I can't skip, I hate those MFers.
> An ad is counted as viewable if at least 50% of its area is visible for at least 1 second for display ads, or at least 2 seconds for video ads.
I've managed to never go there because I'm only on Instagram for the pretty pictures
In this case they want to increase some KPI instead.
What would be a good reason for that, that is not KPI hacking? The extra text is bogger all bandwidth wise.
https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/social-media-news/b...
I am kinda sad that now someone else who isn't me is n1c.bsky but so be it.
If you have `n1c.bsky` and then migrate to `n1c.dev`, Bluesky should set `n1c.bsky` as a redirect to your destination domain by default. If you ever choose to terminate that redirect, `n1c.bsky` can go back in rotation... but it should have an immutable record that you registered the name originally, migrated to `n1c.dev`, maintained a redirect, and released the redirect on <DATE>.
All of us sharing a singular global network was an exceptional and ephemeral circumstance.
The latrinalia of our age if you will.
Usenet was topic based (eg reddit seems closest these days), mail lists were usually topic based, forums were organised around topics etc.
Those mediums do not have algorithms, feeds, followers, profiles, influencers, likes, or any features that many people point to as the toxic aspects of pretty much every commercial social media site of the last decade.
I’d say livejournal was the tipping point where the internet became very self-centered and your value in the platform was measured by how much engagement you were able to get.
Up until that point, in a world before blogs, social sites were mostly centered around shared interests and communities would aggressively police off topic content
Yes, no one was making that comparison.
In a generic sense, yes. People did socialize.
But "social media" today really means: a proprietary platform controlled by a single corporation, where all the user interaction is ultimately just a ploy to keep the participation metrics up so the corporation can profile you better and sell more advertising.
So in that sense, the absolute opposite.
The first camp biases toward sprinkling provocative, highly engaged content in your feed even if it falls outside your network of follows or areas of interest. A sort of “forced discovery”. Elon’s Twitter and YouTube during the 2010s follow this model.
The second camp does the same thing but requires recommended content to track closer to its perception of your interests. TikTok does this exceptionally well, to the point where people often say they feel like their feed is “reading their mind”. Bluesky seems to follow this pattern as well.
The latter is more scalable than the former, but to your point it is an open question how big it scales, and maybe there’s just too many people for either approach to work.
You need to “meet people where they are” and the first type of algorithm just doesn’t do that. It just says “conservatives/liberals really like this, so you’re going to be forced to see this too because you show interest in politics”
To give an example: let’s say I’m a small business owner who voted Trump but has some lingering concerns around how tariffs might impact my business. Am I going to be better informed reading some engagement-bait post from liberals talking about how I’m going to get “deservedly” crushed by tariffs or a post from a conservative economist laying out the cold hard facts (both good and bad)?
It seems some people got on the internet to argue and never learned to enjoy anything. I'm a bit sorry for them, to be honest.
Conversely, it's unclear that a recommendation engine would be able to predict what would be best at "disrupting an echo chamber", and more importantly, when that is desirable, and what "desirable" even means. It's also unclear that the first model is successful at all in disrupting echo chambers, as opposed to exacerbating or amplifying existing positions. I think there's good reasons to think that provocative can be less effective if anything.
The two default feeds are your followed accounts in chronological order, the other is an algorithmic feed. The algorithmic feed is pretty good to be honest. I “disliked” around 20 political posts the first day, and it has seemed to responded fairly quick to that feedback.
In fact I believe that the present day situation boils down to one thing only: the prioritization of engagement at the cost of all else.
That’s what set us down this road. It incentivizes inflammatory posting that eschews nuance and context and twists and exaggerates the subject matter in order to provoke emotional responses — whether they be angry replies, “dunk” quote-posts, reposts, or even spending a couple extra seconds with the post on screen. Anything to steal away more of your attention and mindshare. Over time, this has polarized people to ever further extremes and normalized disrespect and bickering (as opposed to discussion).
It would be an interesting experiment to see the effects of effectively the polar opposite of twitter, where ragebait and other attention-seeking behaviors are actively punished, with the content that’s most readily surfaced instead being that which is thoughtful, candid, and not emotionally charged.
Who would read it? The same people who already avoid twitter - not journalists, and therefore not celebs/politicians.
Presumably, normal people who want to interact with people they already know? interaction with journalists and politicians is valuable in an entirely different manner.
That’s what’s truly interesting about BlueSky. It allows for side A and B to both exist, with people who want to be more isolated in a safe space (so to speak) to do so. That’s a really great property. If I want to engage with content I severely disagree with, I can put it in a feed I check infrequently so that it doesn’t impact my life.
Humans aren’t good at coping with a constant barrage of disagreeable (for one’s personal definition of disagreeable) or inflammatory content.
On “safe spaces”, as you hint at I think many of us don’t want to be shielded entirely from opposing or otherwise differing lines of thought. Speaking personally, I welcome it if there’s actual discussion to be had. Good faith discussions and exchange of perspectives is great, but I have no patience for trolls, circular logic, insults, “debate” that wouldn’t even pass for high school level, etc.
That more free platforms employ spam protection is no excuse.
That said, yes it’s not grounds for a ban. I wouldn’t block over it either unless the person in question is being obnoxious and e.g. following me around between threads and trying to stir up argument about the subject of contention or resorts to personal insults or something like that.
You can have an authority on it that determines something as circular or not. But then you will inevitably end up with dogmatism.
Someone once said that circular reasoning works if the circle is large enough. Knowing the fallacy might help you detect faulty reasoning in your own thoughts. It doesn't allow for much more practical applications.
Reddit is a cluster of independently operated communities that occasionally get signal blasted onto the main feed. The top moderator of a subreddit owns it and sets any standard they like.
With Bluesky there are no defined communities outside of collective engagement with particular topics or hashtags or networks of follows. There is also a "Show me [more/less] of this" button every post, and so far it seems like the platform is pretty solid at respecting your preferences. They also seem to be actively moderating the really open bad behaviour off the platform.
I don't think Bluesky is as good as a well-moderated subreddit for long form discussion, but if you spend a little time curating your feed I think you might enjoy it.
On the other hand, there are way too many people/accounts/bots out there that don't actually want to talk or discuss something, but spread false information and incite rage and anger. Those need to be moderated even harder than they already are, i think.
The issue is that social media sites produce feeds and content matching, forcing alternative views in your face.
Its like, they have decided to push metcalfes law as far as possible, to see when the breaking point is. Like a giant social experiment.
But if everyone is in one place thats still the most desirable network to be on. Just dont push Joe Blo's dumbest political opinions in my face as sponsored content.
Did this happen at all? Social networks have always been balkanized by culture.
I think that if you look at real-life Friend-to-Friend groups, this is what you find: clusters of people with similar values. So it it makes sense that the same applies to F2F groups over the internet. But most social media is not F2F groups.
Most (advertiser-driven) social media (including this site) is based on the idea of what I call "implicit ranking": The idea that a user can influence what another user sees (through "likes", "votes", "reports", "bumps", etc.) without having an explicit consensual relationship with them (such as a "subscription", "following", or "sharing" or "direct message channel").
This "implicit ranking" model is pretty successful because it is better at finding engaging content is and probably the dominant form of social media. In contrast to F2F, implicit ranking networks tend to promote controversial content from outgroups because angry users are engaged. We all love to flamewar sometimes, I'll admit it.
(Whether or not this is good or bad depends on your moral views. But I think it is obvious that "algorithms" are not really to blame.)
I am not a sociologist, just a layman. But I feel that there seems to be two axis of communication. Mass (you don't know who you're talking to) vs targeted (you do know who you're talking to, like friends). Then, professional (you try to be unoffensive) vs casual (you have no such obligation).
Before the Internet, generally communication happened either mass-professional (e.g. TVs, newspapers, magazines) or targeted-casual (e.g. chatting with friends and family). This reduced offense, since mass channels were largely unoffensive as you said, while targeted channels knew how to avoid offense (i.e. you knew how to not offend your friends and family).
However, the Internet enabled a lot of mass-casual communication. And this created a lot of offense, because you didn't know who would read your messages (i.e. Twitter posts), while you didn't have the professional obligation to make sure it was unoffensive and easy to understand. This created a lot of misunderstandings, offense, etc., which leads to cancellations, hate mobs, etc.
Do note that once again I am not a sociologist, and there seems to be holes in this view. What about large group gatherings? Trashy magazines? Clubs? They seem to be examples of mass-casual communication too.
TL;DR: Blaming the algorithm (correct or not) doesn't actually matter in the end, because filter bubbles happen with or without them.
Keep in mind that a lot of Twitter users never wanted political content. They were there for sports, art, science discussions, etc. Some of those communities are clearly migrating.
From my experience Bluesky is way better and has respect for the user’s choice front and center. Lists of users to follow is a first-class citizen feature. Their algorithm is a chronological feed, not boosting engagement bait.
Why does a chronological feed get considered and algo? Do we consider SQL queries with WHERE and ORDER BY clauses an algo now?
Congratulations, you have yourself an algorithm.
> In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm is a finite sequence of mathematically rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation.
Looks good to me.
And did you just question "WHERE" and "ORDER BY" in SQL? I wouldn't do that. There are probably a ton of algorithms and optimizations done there. In my very naive understanding, quick sort is at least worth something.
At the direct cost of making a worse product for users.
I remain hopeful that Bluesky is able to monetise/fund development without succumbing to working against its users.
I’m cautiously optimistic that the open/decentralised nature of these sites can act as a powerful forcing function to keep them in check, keeping their incentives more inline with their users compared to traditional commercial social media sites.
Mastodon’s financial (and so far technical) structure seems more inline with this compared to taking on investment, so we’ll see how it goes.
I just want a network that’s not going to juice engagement to optimise for page views for ad revenue. I want a reverse chronological feed. I want third party clients that might have different UX ideas
It’s free to hope :)
We’ve all had “hockey stick growth!” shouted at us so many times that we’ve internalised it but Bluesky is a team is 20 odd people. They don’t have the kind of footprint Meta has and right now they don’t need it. I hope they stay small and chart a different path to success.
> Bluesky Social is a benefit corporation; as such, it is allowed to use its profits for the public good, and is not obligated to maximize shareholder value or return profits to its shareholders as dividends.
I have no idea but I suspect the investors see monetary value in an open social network not owned and operated by today’s tech giants. There’s a difference between users making money via the social network and the social network making money via the users. But both involve making money.
⸻
1. Whether it’s called a “benefit corporation” or “public benefit corporation” apparently depends on the state, and not all states have laws to allow them to be established.
Yet it was definitely the place to go and get the latest updates.
Sky follower bridge was able to scrape my X blocklist, but could not turn it into a Bluesky block list. No troll problems yet so that's OK for now. I still have to host my videos on titok because some are too long for Bluesky.
My tiktok "for you page" has turned to sludge and my followers are not getting my posts without setting notification options. I wonder if the magical algorithm was sequestered in China to hide it from inquiries. Hopefully a Bluesky presence helps.
I can see how something like SpaceX is overall a net good, but I don't see that upside for X.
Why do the remaining posters keep self-censoring "Blues*y"?
I tried checking out Bluesky the other day. The feed was mainly unhinged political rants of a very particular flavor.
You can have a fruitful exchanges of ideas and information and debates on a foundation of similar values in a way that amounts to more than just repeating ideas back and forth. Using the term as a catch-all for a shared desire for conversations to have certain ground rules or certain community values, or subjects that spark your intellectual curiosity, calling those echo chambers is shallow and is not going to inform you about the real cultural dynamics that drive those kinds of communities.
It's just a lazy way to try absence of critical thought by looking for the wrong thing. If people labeling things as echo chambers cared about the things they said they cared about, they would look at entirely different criteria, such as epistemic closure, the quality of relationships, propensity for trolling, and so on.
Yes, people on X seem very upset that they can be blocked on bluesky. But if I've heard what you have to say and don't want to hear the same thing 1000x, that's not an echo chamber. That's me hearing you, disagreeing, and you having nothing more of value to add.
Discussion requires communication, not simply repeating propaganda over and over and over, which is 99% of the time all that anyone crying "echo chamber" tends to do.
You can’t possibly believe that, can you? Have you not noticed the vast gulf between what Musk says and what Musk does?
And it continues to run, but not well. The nice thing about the kind of site it is, is that if you don’t see a particular message, you can’t tell it’s missing.
lol, you seriously believe that a network fully controlled by the world's richest man, accountable to no one, is a bastion of free speech? I presume you have a bridge to sell me as well?
That's far from the worst I've seen on there either, evidently you can just post about how Hitler was right and it won't affect your visibility at all now, nevermind get you banned.
But this is not true. I always use my "following" feed and not my "for you" feed. Other than sponsored ads the only thing I see are posts from people I follow. I don't understand why people persist with the narrative that Twitter forces people into "the algorithm".
I've been splitting time between Twitter & Bluesky for the last year or so. The only real difference i notice is the set of people I follow as until recently most of my Twitter follows weren't on Bluesky
Pretty wildly obviously critically incorrect statement right there!
It's still early days, but BlueSky is "protocols not platforms." So there's lots of extensibility baked in.
There's already a variety of custom feeds available. Which in short lets us opt in to whatever algorithms we would like. I love my Quiet Posters feed, which emphasizes folks who aren't super active, who I would otherwise miss.
The default view is a timeline, which is so much better than the disgusting engagement farming shallow or demented shit that floods Threads and X. So the default view is much better, much less polluted with awful garbage, and I have the ability to control what I see, what algorithms I would want to opt in to.
There's a variety of different clients available, which is a nice option for power users and those trying to organize the many flows and feeds they want to keep tabs on.
Everyone else is making links harder to engage with or algorithmically de-prioritizng them. BlueSky claims they "love the open web" and don't do any of that gross entrapping.
The "protocols not platforms" ethos here allows new stuff to get built around and on top of Bluesky. Early days, but there's a bunch of projects listed on for example https://github.com/fishttp/awesome-bluesky . Everything else is run top down by awful sterile controlling corporate interests, but BlueSky has that emerging new possibilities potentiation going strong, by appealing to developers, asking them to build stuff. Here's their latest call for projects... You just don't see that sort of stuff anywhere except BlueSky anymore. https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/3049
Soon after Musk took over, I started having accounts wishing me violent deaths, repeatedly commenting on everything I said with graphic details (broken bones, poisoning, dragging my body over the pavement, etc.). That happened occasionally before, but they typically got banned. After the takeover, those were gone (and my account got blocked a couple of times for quoting them).
That hasn’t happened after a year on BlueSky and Threads.
Scams were rampant on large accounts and people looking at cryptocurrencies: more than three-quarters of comments were obvious patterns that I had flagged dozens of times. I noticed those earlier today on Threads; let’s see if they reappear and make up most of the discourse there.
There has been such a consistent attempt at ramming square pegs into round holes online in trying to “both sides” a bunch of these issues.
One trait is immutable and the other is not.
One trait is entirely internally focused and is not defined by a rejection of anyone external to the subject, the other's trait is entirely defined by such an external focus on the rejection of another person's immutable identity.
That was just a single incident, being noticed by far-right weirdos thankfully not being a regular thing for me. But I can imagine it would get old quickly if you were the sort of person who was. Bluesky’s far superior self-moderation is absolutely very useful here.
The fact that you don’t know and people offer dozens of credible guesses should probably tell you the problem is widespread.
I'm not sure there's anything in any of the products that makes one better than the other (except Mastodon is actively obtuse). It's just a matter of who joins and how they interact. People on Bluesky act like people on Twitter used to, but maybe (hopefully) without as much rage-baiting. Though seeing some classic Twitter personalities translating their snarky and meta commentary to Bluesky, I'm finding it doesn't really work... the medium is exactly the same, but the vibe isn't.
Threads feels like a text Instagram, because so many of its users came from there. It can be entertaining, but it feels ephemeral, and the algorithm promotes a kind of low-brow broad content that doesn't make me feel good after consuming it. Somehow it feels like trying to make a social network out of someone else's comment thread... like it's never really meant for us.
X feels pretty shitty, not like Twitter. It's a lot of self-promotion bullshit, and doubling down on rage bait. Using it is also an expression of fealty to someone who in his vanity is actively hurting this nation. Threads isn't an expression of fealty to Zuckerberg... it's all filtered through the capitalistic process that mostly removes direct ideology. It might suck or be great, but it's not a person. X is a person. There's no way to separate the two.
Bluesky feels like what we make of it. There's not a lot of algorithm putting its thumb on the scale.
Bluesky actually does offer some neat features. Starter Packs is such a brilliant feature for onboarding people into specific niches - it's a wonder why it took so long for someone to do this.
'Labellers' is a neat approach to moderation - you can subscribe to a labeller, and it marks accounts according to whatever criteria and then you can chose how you want that to shape your experience - block those posts/accounts outright, hide them behind a disclaimer, or just put a little badge on them. I subscribed to one which marks public figures with which private school they went to which is funny.
Custom algorithms is also another really neat improvement to the overall experience. On my homepage I pinned a "Quiet Posters" feed that surfaces posts from lower-volume people I follow that I might have otherwise missed. This is necessarily a feature of the AT Protocol's open network that really needs the firehose to function.
But the biggest 'new feature' (for now) is that it's non-commercial so Bluesky's incentives are not directly opposed to it's users. Even pre-Musk, Twitter's business goals worked against it's users, driving engagement at all costs to pump up ad views and revenue. A company that doesn't make money from page views, and which is based on an open network, will have more going for it to creative a positive environment for all. It remains to be seen how sustainable this is, which Bluesky taking investment, and whether at open AT Protocol can be an escape valve for Bluesky making the product worse.
Threads had a lot of users sign up when it first launched. Bluesky launched over 18 months ago.
> They don’t seem to offer anything new/different other than moderation, which I’m not convinced is enough to shift momentum from x to bluesky
There are tons of differences. For example, if there are replies in a thread and one of the users blocks the other. Those replies are blocked out for everyone. If you quote post a user you've blocked. That post is blocked out for everyone. There are starter kits that are creating tons of growth in accounts for lots of people so you're not posting to nothing. The engagement is higher, seriously people are posting the same stuff on Twitter and Bluesky and with 10x more on Twitter there getting 2x better engagement on Bluesky. If someone quote posts you and you don't like it, you can remove the post from the quote. You can hide replies in your threads. It has a threaded UI that looks like reddit comment threads.
I think everyone has been waiting for a replacement to emerge and Bluesky has spent a lot of time slowly growing and slowly adding features that it does everything people want from Twitter with more control.
Outside of the tiny number of Threads users who didn't have an Instagram account beforehand, the act of registering to BlueSky is a far more engaged move than Threads ever had imo.
I disagree. Bluesky will grow further and then be like a "Coke or Pepsi" to Twitter. (Albeit, it will stay smaller than Twitter.)
I have 2 threads accounts and never created a single one. That's because I had 2 Instagram accounts.
The difference is people chose to go to Bluesky, Threads accounts were just added on to your Insta account by Meta.
If you want to find your colleauges' posts, if you want to find high quality information, if you want good links to long articles, X is no longer the place to be.
If you want to have click-bait and rage-bait or lots of right-wing politics, X will cater to your needs. But it won't cater to somebody that's trying to get to highly-curated high-signal information networks that Twitter allowed in the past. That's all been actively destroyed, with great intention.
Another social media site asking for my phone number, no thank you.
I read the occasional Twitter/X and probably now Bluesky post, but this offers nothing that would attract me. Twitter/X/Bluesky/Insta/Threads is for people that like celebrities with some interesting stuff in between. But overall that isn't worth it.
So the lowest bar possibly imaginable?
Bluesky started from word of mouth invite only
Does anyone remember now Spoutible? Substack Notes? How about Spill, Hive, or Post? Being even with in anything approximating striking distance of Threads would have been a triumph for any of them.
Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sky-follower-bridge...
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/sky-follower-...
Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated in any way. I just tried it and it worked well.
Unless you’re trying to create a social network to promote human voices and not bots.
With Threads you can already see that Facebook/Instagram is in it's DNA. There's no pure "following" feed. It's instead an algorithmic feed that mixes people you follow with people Threads decides to push. So it's going down the enshittification path from day one.
With Bluesky there's at least some hope that it will not end up as the algorithmic time sinks all other social media has slowly become. I'm all for discoverability, but allow me to decide when and how I discover new people to follow. Never touch my "following" feed, and I'll be happy.
Is this because Threads is fading into obscurity and has fewer daily app users than their peak, and Bluesky has a bit more than they had before in November?
Today are either within an order of magnitude of X?
Looks like no, threads is pretty flat and bluesky is hockey stick-ing
from this graph: https://bsky.app/profile/jburnmurdoch.bsky.social/post/3lbmp...
not sure what x data looks like
Threads has ~300m MAU and will be on track to being larger than X in a year.
In fact X is struggling so much they now provide the option to hide engagement metrics: https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-hides-x-engagement-figure...
Bluesky lets you block reposts and that has been the killer feature for me. Original content from people I choose is the best recipe for my tastes. Also, I spend a lot of time on niche creative feeds and really enjoy the things I see.
I also like the idea of seeing regional and local feeds. That was an interesting part of early Twitter that was obliterated by national political emphasis. No more political hot takes, where is a good Korean BBQ spot?
Twitter burned cash for years and it could because it was new, innovative and growing quickly. Once BlueSky burns through its initial money whats the plan and why would anyone invest in it?
The whole point of the twitter style firehose is to be not be either of those things. Bluesky honestly probably has a decent shot but I think its still attracting some hyper-orthodox, censorious, thinkers. Musk has gone too far with X[0] but I don't think his vision in the abstract is wrong.
[0] Every accusation is a confession - X is now near-directly attached to the US Gov!
It’s difficult to envision any social network staying healthy in the long term without either decent moderation or robust tools to help users manage harassment and the like. There’s just too many bad actors who will take advantage of low-control environments.
I don't get any trolls on either platform. I guess I'm too boring :)
BlueSky just stops, like a normal program. When there's nothing more to show, silence is okay. So I don't need a blocklist there.
It can have AI nobody wants, a bland name nobody will remember, and be quietly sunsetted when nobody uses it.
It was actually okay. Half-surprised they didn’t bring it back when Twitter self-immolated.
For all the talk of leaving Twitter, Twitter has 30x the daily visits of its rivals: https://www.axios.com/2024/11/14/elon-musk-x-attention-war-s...
My personal view is if you're on Twitter, leave it and don't replace it with anything. Find peace and tranquility in your life.
Over the whole world maybe, but perhaps not among the HN crowd.
Tons of posts trying to get me to click on them to read more.
None of the accounts in my feed are ones I follow. It’s basically algorithmically driven slop.
It wants to be a text-centric network that helps release Instagram to be more video-centric to compete with TikTok. And so it wants content that is fun, interesting and light. And of course easily monetisable.
So I know people like having a fight but I see the two sites as being complimentary and both needing to thrive in order to relegate X to the dust bin.
One might think it's only Gen Z/Alpha that is susceptible to the Tiktok dopamine squeeze, but no, works just as well on us old geezers and it's pretty nefarious how well it works.
Why do you say that? Bluesky is a protocol-first non profit. To my knowledge no company set up that way has achieved this level of success before. They don’t have the same motivations to enshittify that other networks do.
I think it's plausible AT protocol allows a new level of interop/portability between services. It's also possible Bluesky burns through Blockchain Capital's money and starts doing crypto air drops like Keybase.
It doesn’t mean that has to be the primary objective, just that at some point it should happen.
Even though I don't like the term "enshittification", I do think that it is inevitable that BlueSky would need to make some unpopular changes in the future to become financially sustainable.
But is this such a bad thing? I used the Fediverse before, which is the "permanent place" that many people claim. But it had many disadvantages, from my point of view. No algorithms, no search, and I didn't like how defederation made it hard to follow anyone I liked.
I hosted a server myself, but it cost money. BlueSky doesn't, until it does. But maybe it is better to basically "exploit" BlueSky's free offers, before it changes?
TLDR: Is it better to jump from free service to free service (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, Reddit), or is it better to permanently stay on a paid or lower-resourced service (e.g. IRC, forums)? I think many people seem to prefer the free version, and jump off when it starts "sinking" (trying to become financially sustainable).
https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/rob-reiner-says-maga-scum-...
People have been trying to make Bluesky happen for years. It won't. I believe moderation is fundamental to any social network, otherwise the bad actors always take over. Meta has been content moderation for years and understands the nuances.
People seek "Political discourse", but they will quickly realize our politics are too much of shit-show to have any kind of intellectual conversation. The rage bait and culture wars have taken over. Important discussions of policy, small vs big govt, taxes have taken the backseat. Our "politics" are no longer politics, and won't be for at least the next 4-8 years.
What makes social media work is the echo effect, you just won't be able to get it on a heavily censored platform like Bluesky and Reddit and a big reason why X is overtaking even mainstream media as much as people who lean left.
Its a huge problem to be imposing political leanings of the moderator on a public square because you end up creating an echo chamber which people inevitably abandon because you just won't reach enough people.
>Its a huge problem to be imposing political leanings of the moderator on a public square because you end up creating an echo chamber which people inevitably abandon because you just won't reach enough people.
This describes the problem that X is facing. It censored heavily, and heavily penalizes politically "incorrect" posts that its owner doesn't like, creating an echo chamber that only fringe weirdos can enjoy. I don't need to see any more low-signal hate posts. Please just auto-delete anybody using copious slurs or with a username like N*iggerSlayer42069, it's not an "echo chamber" to not expose oneself to the lowest of the low discussion levels, it's an echo chamber to let those people dominate conversations while censoring technical terms I use every day in the workplace.. I don't need to go to 4chan to "broaden my horizons" and any platform owner that decides to shove that stuff down my throat will not find me on their platform any more.
* A lot of the popular content on X is political; Threads' decision to downrank or ban political content makes the posts less engaging. It's understandable from a certain perspective — a lot of the political content is just dishonest ragebait (and I learned to unfollow most political X accounts as a result). However, one of the most interesting things about X is that it's where news travels fastest, and it's significantly less-filtered than traditional journalist editorialization. It's hard to compete with X if you don't allow it, or downrank it.
* Obviously Elon's massive political spending will have an impact on the userbase of the product, since the spending is so one-sided. X has become dramatically more right-wing since he took over, and even more so after Trump's campaign, so there was pent-up demand for something else... Especially something else that allows left-wing political content (i.e. not Threads). There are a lot of conspiracy theories about Elon changing the X ranking algorithm to favor right-wing content, but TBH I think it's simpler than that: more left-wing people left the site (or used it less) due to distaste for Elon, and Elon unbanned hordes of right-wing accounts, who are very enthusiastic about supporting it.
* There's also one way in which X is (openly) biased in its ranking: paid accounts have their posts ranked higher than free accounts... And paying for X is public: you have a blue check next to your name if you pay. In right-wing spaces, having a paid bluecheck account is a badge of honor, in part due to it supporting Elon; in left-wing spaces, it's a badge of shame for the same reason. Although from a technical standpoint the ranking change isn't specifically political, in practice it's very political: many more right-wingers are bluechecks, so in practice you see more of their content and less left-wing content. Bluesky doesn't have paid accounts, and even if it did, it wouldn't organically result in right-wing content being prioritized to the same extent, so for left-wing users it's a much friendlier place.
* This is perhaps more of a personal gripe, but Elon Musk's decision to downrank external links has been pretty bad for the quality of X content. I understand the reasoning: he's trying to keep people engaged in-app, and external links make you leave. But plenty of interesting people use X as a promotional channel for their (interesting) content, which I want to see, and which often doesn't suit tweet formats. So by downranking posts with external links, I see less of the things I actually am interested in. I don't think I'm alone in this, and Bluesky doesn't do it — and I've heard (anecdotal) reports of people really enjoying being able to more reliably engage with that kind of stuff again on Bluesky.
Mastodon is too complicated and segmented to take off. But Bluesky isn't, so I can see why it's having a zeitgeist post-Trump's-election, which Elon helped fund. I'm not sure how much Bluesky will manage to retain its current spike in users: Threads at one point had a similar spike, and most users churned back to X. But it makes sense to me that Bluesky is a more natural home for the ex-X diaspora than Threads, given the reasons many of them left X.
I hope if backfires, mostly draws in users from existing speech-unfriendly platforms and then the number of social media platforms will multiply from here onward and a large number of platforms will compete based on who is most permissive with regards to speech.
Most of the highly suggestible masses already moved off X to Threads... So now that Bluesky is being pushed hard, I hope the suggestible people from Threads will switch over and split up their censorship ecosystems.
It makes sense from that perspective. The censored ecosystems should be separated into lots of small platforms because you need a lot of different filter bubbles to maintain the deceptions and impermeable information silos. A large centralized ecosystem will create too many opportunities for exposure to alternative information so it cannot be controlled as well.
In the future, there will be a different platform for every kind of delusion and each one will focus on its own delusion and will make up stories to discredit rival platforms so people always doubt information received outside.
It's a matter of time before large corporations start preventing their employees from using non-approved platforms. They'll probably use cybersecurity safety as an excuse. They might carry out hacking false flags on their own employees to convince them to not use other platforms they won't feel forced.
What good do you see in that? Who wouldn't want to get away from that stupidity?
What actually got worse materially? I hear a lot of gesturing 'Orange man bad', 'Elon help orange man, so Elon bad' but I cannot reach any of these conclusions from first principles looking at Trump's policies while he was President... Aside from the Jan 6 incident... But I don't see consensus there between either side so I do have some doubts and questions about the true nature of that incident. The fact is, nobody on Jan 6 had guns besides police officers. How can that possibly be an insurrection? Please correct me if I'm wrong there.
Sounds like an insurrection to me.
I can see a future where corporations control the entire economy. Startups or parallel economy would be impossible due to regulatory moats and monetary asymmetries and everyone would be forced to lock themselves into a filter bubble in order to get a job... To survive.
Imagine knowing what's happening and not having the power refuse... And by that point, the power would be granted fully artificially out of a money printer, distributed straight into the coffers of select big corporations on the basis of secret mutual agreements between each other. All under the banner of MMT? This is beyond immoral.
More specific to your point, it makes sense why the entities behind the censorship push might still want a single platform, but simply with better 'siloing' capability. It's likely that the same people who want censorship, also want mass surveillance. Mind-bending to think that there exist a conflict between these two dystopian aspects! They really want to have the cake and eat it too.
Already happened with TikTok.
I'd imagine Threads will be successful unless Zuckerberg kills it to focus on other things. It's integrated with Instagram and could potentially be integrated into Facebook and WhatsApp too.
It's a better app than it used to be, overall.
They de-prioritize links, prevent 3rd party apps, closed the API, and blocked access for non-logged-in viewing.
And a smaller meta-point: changed from an iconic name to a simple non-informative letter (Besides Google and maybe Uber, who have added a popular verb to the lexicon?)
I especially feel this sort of enforced community separation is so prevalent among those who are so reticent to build a border wall, but I'm sure psychology has an explanation somewhere.
Citation needed...
Twitter went from a highly useful daily visit for getting news in my field to being a gigantic time suck to even try to avoid the politics and low-quality posts.
>enforced community separation is so prevalent among those who are so reticent to build a border wall
Ah, so you have a certain form of politics, and its beneficial. But Is that "most people" who are on Twitter, were on Twitter, or most people in general? If I want what Twitter is serving me, I can go to any sort of right-wing forum or Fox News article comments (do they still have comments?).
But for those of us that had practical uses for Twitter that weren't partisan politics, its value has been destroyed.
And ad revenue shows that "most people" definitely do not want to be associated with such partisan politics. Twitter's past neutrality allowed all sorts of political views. Now it's become an echo chamber as the owner pushes his own strong partisan politics, and pushes to spread extremist views that may be fine on 4chan, but that 95% of people would rather never expose themselves to.
Yes.. I believe a recent analysis shows that of all social media, Twitter's political composition now best matches America. If one's response to that is to run away, it's that person that is problematic, not the rest of society that is able to co-exist just fine.
I don't say this to debate you, but more to suggest my reaction is not unique among anyone who has been paying attention over these years.
I'd go so far as to say this line of rhetoric has gone past diminishing returns and into net negatives. Do with that what you will.
API access is banned. Third party apps are banned.
A verification badge used to signal trustworthiness, now it can be bought.
All your posts are being used to train an AI model without the ability to opt out.
Every second Tweet is a crypto scam.
How exactly is the experience better than before?
They gave those out to Gawker bloggers. The only think the OG blue checkmark stood for was "someone who was friends with a Twitter insider".
Sure looks like they are.