All of us sharing a singular global network was an exceptional and ephemeral circumstance.
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 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.
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.
Did this happen at all? Social networks have always been balkanized by culture.
(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.
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.