It’s very difficult to do unless you can have broad consensus. I tend to use Twitter for an industry wide group and while a few individuals have moved, the Bluesky version just doesn’t have the reach or usefulness of the twitter or x version.
From that vantage point it is the conscious decision to stay on the network during an exodus that creates an echo chamber. Something similar happened with facebook. The people who are still on facebook in 2025 are having a pretty different conversation than occurs in some other places.
For the Palisades fire, I'm struggling to make X nearly as useful as it was. There is a lot of random diatribe and speculation but on-the-ground facts just don't appear.
The juice is gone.
Wow delving deep into people's psyche and calling them out on HN, why ?
Saying I'm calling someone out though seems a bit of a reach.
Now I struggle to find regular updates and half the accounts I used to follow are idle. By the time that third party twitter processor I had worked for shut down, the cadence of posts were so scheduled it was obviously driven by bots and not organic reactions. Even major world events would be gamed by bots as fast as real reactions which had significantly decreased on their own.
I haven't found a replacement to be fair, but I definitely see the enshittification of it from an incredibly useful short form broadcast channel to an engagement-gamified advertising megaphone.
what's a -stan? do you mean like kazakhstan?
News flash: X is already an echo chamber!
Maybe the "oh no don't leave for an echo chamber!" assertion is a case of people remembering the pre-X version of twitter, and comparing competitors to that - rather than what X is today. Or maybe it's a case of "boiling a frog," where people on X are actually unaware of what it has become.
Or maybe... it's actually just a bad faith argument by people who like the current X echo chamber.
I won't pretend to speak to the motivations of any HN users, but I've seen some of these conversations play out where someone invokes the concept of an echo chamber only when it means LGBTQIA+ people can just exist without being harassed. That's an undesirable outcome to those folks.
I would like to think HN is better than that, but more frequently in the past few months, I've been disappointed by commentators on this website, so I wouldn't put any money on that bet.
Echo chambers can be dangerous, but misinformation and unchecked bigotry are more dangerous. Whereas the consequences of an echo chamber are abstract, I can measure the consequences of the latter in deaths.
So my go-to question is simply, "What are your priorities?"
Unless you are a sports fan.
How's that? Bluesky, say, has a fair bit of diverse opinion. It's low on the far-right (though there are certainly some; I subscribe to a few blocklists to filter their nonsense out), which has a bit of a personal affinity for Musk, but to an extent, y'know, who needs 'em? Like, it is not the case that there exist two opinions, far-right lunacy and everything else; the non-far-right segment contains multitudes.
It's unfortunate that X still retains a greater reach than its alternatives, but that can change in the medium term.
With X I can control my own feed by using the followers tab.
The reason I only visit FB once a month to check for messages from some people who still use Messenger.
There was a part of the suggestions that I liked! The algorithm was working for me!
Now it’s 100% pure toxic outrage bait.
Yeah but it's a left wing echo chamber and that's good! /s
Incognito window > bsky > discovery feed > every post is about US politics, Trump bad, rich people bad, Musk bad etc. Same shit just different colors
Bsky is not the answer, the only answer is not to use social media at all. And more or less that applies to HN too.
For now it's very much dominated by Twitter ex-pats, and that gives it a pretty predictable slant. Unlike Twitter however this isn't being imposed by the owner, it's organic.
They love the notion of the marketplace of ideas until said marketplace tells them to kick rocks and then it's crocodile tears.
Sigh
Bsky lacks (1) ads, (2) paying posters rewarded with promoted reach, and (3) a default algorithmic feed (Discover is algorithmic and exists, but the default feed unless unpinned is always Following.) It also has shareable feeds, as well as the default pinned feeds.
Each of these individually makes most users experience of Bluesky a lot more seeing what they choose to see than seeing what the site owner has a financial or other interest in everyone seeing, which in a sense makes it more likely to be a personal echo chamber rather than a single echo chamber or the mythical perfectly unbiased online marketplace of ideas.
OTOH, it also got a lot of users specifically in reaction to negative feelings about the central ideological direction perceived at X, which may make it on average more left-wing by comparison, if very much not uniformly left-wing or having any fundamental trait tending toward remaining even relatively left-wing.
Obviously, this is going to be a problem with any site that becomes the town square, just like how Yelp and TripAdvisor eventually became so gamed as to be mostly useless. The question to me is can bluesky rise to the level of being useful w/o succumbing to the pitfalls that come with being ubiquitous.
I think though that Trump truly is worse. If you made this comment in 2008 or 2012 and used Trump or McCain I’d say you are right. But what happens when a person truly is a vile disgusting human being? Then it no longer becomes the same shit. As an extreme example, Kerensky wasn’t as bad as the Bolsheviks. It wasn’t the same shit.
That is the only correct answer. To essentially delete all your social media accounts.
If one wants to stop their alcohol addiction for example (Using Facebook, X), is not done by switching the brand of alcohol (Threads, Bluesky).
It is done by stopping altogether (by deleting all your accounts) and only you can do that.