Hacker News Reader

| What actual things are you worried about or unhappy

That it is following the same funding model that resulted in the problems we've seen. Bluesky currently doesn't generate any significant revenue. At some point they will have to in order to satisfy investors. If they were concerned about preventing the problems previous social media sites experienced, they would have sought out a different funding model.

| if you have problems with its decentralization posture

I don't. I was working on federated social networking protocols back in 2008. I'm fully aware of the concerns and I know it's not a panacea. Centralization has strong benefits for user safety and experience.

| there stops being concrete actionable complaints

My other comments expand on the biggest issue which is the advertiser-optimized engagement algorithm. A site which does not cater to advertising (using an alternative source of income such as a user-driven subscription model) can instead maintain a time-based feed. This is a much better user experience. It doesn't favor negative engagement, it's less addicting, and it doesn't create artificial virality.

> My other comments expand on the biggest issue which is the advertiser-optimized engagement algorithm. A site which does not cater to advertising (using an alternative source of income such as a user-driven subscription model) can instead maintain a time-based feed. This is a much better user experience. It doesn't favor negative engagement, it's less addicting, and it doesn't create artificial virality.

Thanks I probably should have read the other comments.

I haven't registered for a new Bluesky account in a while now, but when I joined there was no algorithmic feed. The "Discover" feed was added later. The default feed for me at least is still the timeline. I do occasionally glance at the "Discover" feed, but I ended up writing my own feed algorithms for my own uses that I use more often.

Though I will say, even on my purely time-based feed, ragebait always wins. People like ragebait. Today <Jane Johnson> is a nazi. Tomorrow <insert bad customer service story> so corporations are evil. While my examples are colored by the folks I follow, I'll bet this makes up the majority of content online.

I've been trying to work on a feed that removes this kind of ragebait but it's proving real hard especially when the post is sarcastic. I'd love to connect with folks who have worked on algorithmic feeds in the past and know how to crack this problem. Right now Muted Words tend to do the trick when there's a new Villain (not always a person, sometimes an entity) of the Day on my feed, but I'd love to do this automatically.

| ragebait always wins. People like ragebait.

Sure but we don't need to help it along. People are gonna people, we shouldn't create machines that encourage the worst tendencies.

If Bluesky goes the advertising route (likely) they'll find just like everyone else that stoking fires is the best way to ensure engagement, which ensures eyeballs, which benefits advertisers.

My problem with ads is not the ads themselves, it's that the ads become the customer, and the users become the product being sold to the advertisers. This creates a series of perverse economic incentives that significantly shift the way the site is designed and developed.

Last I heard Bluesky was contemplating a paid app with enhanced features and also some rumors about hosted domains. They haven't ruled out ads. I'm not sure where that landed and how far along that process they are. The most I know about the situation is this interview [1] here on TechCrunch.

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/05/bluesky-ceo-jay-graber-is-...

There are increasing numbers of new ways to generate feeds that suit your needs. I use the list functions to segregate people I follow into categories. There are a couple of built-in feeds that help discover new people.

But, the best thing is exemplified by graze.social which gives you a huge amount of ways to filter the firehose feed into whatever you want. Leave out the rage bait? It’s a filter sequence away.

Me? I do not want to avoid the villain a day problem. I want to see and block them myself, to know what’s going on.

Yeah I'm aware of feed generation and as I said I wrote my own feeds to do some of this filtering. I really should use Lists more often, you bring up a good point.

I'm a huge fan of how easy it is to have editorial control of your feed on Bluesky and the concept of a standard Bluesky identity.

I’m hoping they turn into a Wikipedia sort of funding model. Avoid viewpoint discrimination and serve messages to everyone with lots and lots of composable moderation tools.

In what way was Twitter's funding model its demise? What? Because they had advertising, they turned into a negative community? Disagree.

Advertiser-optimized engagement feeds have caused the user experience of all social media to degrade not just Twitter.

Facebook has degraded the most but twitter moved towards favoring rage bait years ago.

> I feel like there's a lot of appealing to prevailing HN sentiment in this post. So much so that there's little substance.

IMO, there was plenty of substance, on things a lot of HNers either don't realize, or disregard.

> that there stops being concrete actionable complaints and more just general anger.

Good point in general (and ironic, since that too is a tired, pervasive condition that somehow still needs pointing out, even if it seems like you're just complaining ineffectually in doing so).

But, since the Bluesky concerns apparently needed to be said, to inform people who appear not to understand, then saying it isn't just complaining.

> At times a cynical portion of me even thinks this sort of posting is just low-key karma farming too, but I know that's too uncharitable a take,

If want to verbalize uncharitable takes on HN, be careful what you start. Your own comment could've been bog-standard damage control astroturfing.

To be clear: I'm not talking about TFA. I'm talking about OP. TFA had substance for sure. But the OP just vaguely talks about taking VC money.

This is distinctive because the AT Protocol exists to specifically prevent the degradation that VC does. So I'm curious what about Bluesky and the AT Protocol are of concern here that VC capture could affect. That's why I linked Christine Lemmer-Webber's post.

> If want to verbalize uncharitable takes on HN, be careful what you start. Your own comment could've been bog-standard damage control astroturfing.

I find that funny that folks think Bluesky has astroturfing around it, but sure you're welcome to think that way. HN is pretty big these days.

what about Bluesky and the AT Protocol are of concern here that VC capture could affect

Is BlueSky linking and federating with other privately run ATProto servers yet, so posts are shared between them and it actually becomes decentralized?

I’m with you. Every same conversation is about judgment and self-aggrandizement rarely about discussing problems, finding solutions or appreciating opportunities.

Bluesky is fine. It’s not perfect. It’s struggling to deal with demands for viewpoint moderation. It’s a public benefit corp so venture capitalists have less to complain about. It has good tools to deal with most things. The people who are working on it seem competent and sincere.

I like the phrase, karma farming.