Hacker News Reader

Comment by mirawelner | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I live in a bubble but these are not problems I’ve ever heard expressed until now. Bluesky seems perfectly fine for those who use it?

View on HN

Everyone I actually enjoyed following is on there. Someone once posted that the best part of Bluesky is that you scroll until you reach the end of the new posts from users you follow, then once you reach the end of new content you stop and go do something else for a while. Bluesky not attempting to be a infinite dopamine is a feature in the best interest of the users

Exactly. The best replacement for Twitter/Reddit/etc. isn't any single option, it's your favorite of the new options plus a mindset of being less online, not needing a replacement for how important those used to be.

I’ve been using RSS feed for nearly 20 years now. Why we ever strayed to some endless algorithm is beyond me.

I have a list of chronologically sorted articles from sources I trust. That’s it and that’s all.

I read them until they are read. Then I close the app and do other stuff until tomorrow.

Is it any wonder Google killed off Reader around the same time it tried to launch Google+? Managing our own feeds was never going to peak capitalism.

Maybe it’s fine if you treat Bluesky as a way to follow just a few trusted people. But that could also be an echo chamber. I was surprised, however, by how many vile comments I saw regarding Charlie Kirk’s death. To me as an outsider to its culture, it looks just like Reddit. So “sectarian” feels right.

I had a very different experience - I saw very few gloating comments, and those were vastly outweighed by comments saying we don't know, nobody deserves this, violence isn't the answer, political violence spirals.

About the worst I saw were, in essence, saying this is bad, but those who live by the sword, die by the sword, which is a biblical thing.

Why is Bluesky an echo chamber but X, Rumble, Gab, Gettr are not? I bet there's huge vile "damn leftists" commentary there, even though we don't know who shot Kirk or why. Why isn't that an echo chamber?

> Why is Bluesky an echo chamber but X, Rumble, Gab, Gettr are not? I bet there's huge vile "damn leftists" commentary there, even though we don't know who shot Kirk or why. Why isn't that an echo chamber?

I have not even heard of some of those. So I am not saying that they aren’t echo chambers either. But given the reputation for civil discourse that blue sky has, I was surprised to see a lot of comments that were saying disgusting things in thinly coded ways.

Why is your experience better than mine? I didn't see those things.

I didn’t say it was?

I use blue sky exclusively over Twitter and in my experience the condolences about kirks death out numbered the vile posts at least 10 to 1. In general the worst I saw were posts lamenting his death by violence while also noting his bigotry and love for guns.

I didn't care much for it as it seemed that anything other than a left-leaning anti-american view was complexly absent and unwelcome. I kind of miss the google circles thing... it was much easier to separate technical or career vs personal vs political.

It seems logical that people who like it keep using it, while people who don't like it stop. I've seen several people right here on HN say they stopped using it for various reasons, so I don't suppose he's making it up.

You're in a bubble. Popularity is trending down.

https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats

It's over twice as popular as it was a year ago.

There was an election combined with it being new - now it's trending to be the next Clubhouse. Remember Clubhouse?

Bluesky looks to go up then fall back to about half of it's peak. It has the look of a consistently used platform that slowly rolls off users but maintains a solid base. Clubhouse went to the moon then died over a 6 month period. Bluesky would need to drop another 2/3 of it's active users 6 months ago if you wanted your statement to match your data. Bluesky isn't growing exponentially, and is not falling catastrophically. Not a good comparison.

I see a slight decline of around 15% after the initial surge followed by relatively stable activity. It must be easy to manipulate someone who sees stats through such warped glasses. They are playing you like a fiddle. Or maybe you're just trying to bias other folks.

No, it's down posts year over year, which I wouldn't have believed was possible if it hadn't happened. It's got half as much post traffic as its peak(s), which were on exactly the days that Trump was elected and inaugurated.

It's basically what Truth Social would be if it didn't even have Trump.

-----

edit: it's not the fault of the technology, it's the fault of the awful company. They represent people strongly aligned with the Democratic Party, but with no power in the Democratic Party, and their philosophy has been stated over and over again: if you don't agree with whatever we believe today, we don't even want your support, or want you here, or want you to be employed. A lot of conservatives would add "they also don't want us to be alive."

The worst part is that they're all upper-middle class, and when as the Gini coefficient goes up with the right-wingers they're locking into power by being so repulsive, they'll just get wealthier and wealthier and more self-righteous.

I've been suspecting for years that there's a lot of botted support for the dumbest most out of touch liberals that is paid for by conservatives. I don't meet people like this in real life, and I am very left-wing. The liberals I meet are generally humble and thoughtful (if in love with their television sets.)

I think bsky is a good platform in part because people like you just bounce off lol

Interesting that there roughly 700K daily posters but only 390K followers. I have no idea what other social media numbers are but having ~2x the posters as followers doesn't seem like a sign of health to me.

You are misinterpreting the statistics.

Having more people talk than follow is good thing and probably consistent across social media.

That's just saying the average person posts for 2 days and follows for 1. Which seems very typical if not heavy on the following.

Pointing at more people speaking than sheeping and calling that an ominous statistic seems off, don't you think?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com