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Comment by ykonstant | Hacker News Reader

I took the bite and made an account on Bluesky, my first time on such social media. Very disappointing thus far: I have been pestered and followed by bots and no amount of blocking does anything.

I am trying to curate my feeds with mutes, blocks and "I want to see less of this" to cultivate an art/science/nature/programming feed, and the app keeps shoving politics and rage bait down my throat. Custom and Following feeds help, but I want to... "Discover" new people, not lock myself into a pre-prunned garden.

In particular, the above list is ok for avoiding the awful slop, but the devs need to be much more aggressive (if they have the will, of course) about understanding and respecting user choices.

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You need to follow people, not block. Unlike Facebook or X there is no strong algorithm (although feeds are technically custom algorithms, but they're mainly lists of people or posts that contain certain keywords) but once you follow enough people, you pretty much only see their content, more-or-less in order.

If you don't follow enough people, your feed is filled with whatever's trending at that moment. Blocking when you don't follow anyone will not train an algorithm, it will just replace that person's content with something else.

There are also curated "booster packs" with one click following of everyone in a category (type of artist, industry, etc.)

The booster packs, at least the ones I've found, don't help at all. I followed a handful of tech-related booster packs and more than 50% of the posts are merely political at best, rage bait at worst. I'm going to have to find a way to unfolloe everything or just not use the site.

I really don't like them for that reason, but I do sometimes find them useful as a list that I can scroll down to see if there's anyone I recognise that I don't already follow.

I signed up, typed "c++" in the search bar, and the results were... gay porn.

I might reinstall and try again when the Rust lobby chills out.

This is my experience. It seems like an app built for one purpose: to make fun of Trump/ Musk. And some random pictures of space and flowers to throw us off the scent of clearly auto-generated content.

Even engagement with this post is suspicious tbh, and there are many accounts at the ready to counter any naysayers. It seems like an attempt to win favour with those in the tech community.

So no, I don’t need filtered lists of already-generated AI slop.

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