My experience is that fundamentally there's nothing better with Bluesky or Mastodon when compared to Twitter. They're all toxic doom scrolling applications and if one does use them, it will be a good idea to control your usage as if it was cocaine.
It is well known that he is obsessed that things that align with his own views get more visibility while things he doesn't like is suppressed
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/02/report-musk-had-...
I'm happy to abandon BlueSky though as soon as it is revealed to be a shitsocket.
The "my free speech is being taken away; they are just being moderated for the common good" conjugation is something that is in fact shared between both camps. The only stable solution going forward may in fact be the pillarisation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillarisation) that we are already seeing emerge, which will leave both sides in a state of perpetual discontent about having no means to force their message upon unwilling recipients on the other but at least let the like-minded interact with each other consensually.
Also commenting to reiterate that if one spends just a little time (with an open mind) in any of the camps (X/Mastodon/Bluesky, whatever) its just so obvious that while the messages differ, the behaviors are exactly the same.
In most contexts we prefer consensus - its just more energy efficient! Your brain is going to expend more energy critically listening and rewiring thoughts when new evidence is presented. Its hard even for the best of us.
Pillarisation from a modeling perspective is interesting. I wonder if that could be codified at a legal level, and then anyone running for public positions of power would be required to have their own media algorithms curated by the public.
It actually seems more open to me now, only that people who got used to being able to ban people they didn't like so they left. Yes, Musk does things are suspicious, but overall I've found the experience better, as someone who holds moderate views.
I agree. These platforms are best when the communities are smaller. The main tipping point will be when it becomes perceived (just perceived, even) as a viable option for advertising/monetization.
The only real option is to just keep pushing to the next frontier...
But Twitter is filled with much, much more hate and disinformation than its alternatives. I'd say it is definitely worse than the others.
IMHO HN is social media, in fact the ONLY social media where I read the posts and comments, oftimes more informative and interesting than the posts.
I post to X many times daily but that's all I do there, using it as a sort of commonplace book/journal.
I never bother looking at my feed.
I mean, on hacker news it doesn't seem like a person gains any long term advantage from having their posts engaged with and upvoted. That is to say, the focus is on the content and not on the profiles/usernames.
There is no explicit advertising and most content is posted to create interesting discussion about it.
For me, the idea of twitter style micro blogging itself is a turn off. I always thought the arbitrary character limit was inherently a bad idea and "threads" are a terrible solution. Threads force one to split up a message and allow pieces of it to be taken out of context, retweeted and even quoted. Threads are a great propaganda tool because with every follow up "part", engagement decreases. People see the first part of a thread and only look at that, social behavior that can be abused when posting. Even it's main feature set is antithetical to accurately publishing information. It gets much worse when official institutions use it as their official communications channel and a login gate is in place.
I actually don't even think this is malicious but moreso bad design and failure to anticipate what rhe platform could turn into when it was first conceived.
If I could "draw the line", I'd probably start by banning all forms of for-profit social media.
I don't know, I think communication can provide a fertile ground for good exchanges as well as bad. It's just somewhat stifled in the current forms.
What's your source on that? And who defines "hate" or "disinformation"?
Making you mad is as good as making you feel any other thing in terms of engagement.
While Twitter doesn't have downvoting, it is still dealing with "report brigades" - various interest groups will organize via Telegram (or similar) to mass-report tweets they don't like.
I wonder if you could strike a balance by incorporating downvotes as a visual metric, but not using it to rank content, thus allowing the expression of dislike while removing the abuse vector.