Bluesky is not the good place

My own personal work was interesting enough to others that the right people shared it and I ended up with some major executives and founders in tech following my small account just because they found my work interesting. I also got many job offers just through sharing my work and having positive discussions with people.

Now so much of that is destroyed. The algorithm rarely surfaces novel and interesting things from people you don't yet follow, it instead surfaces blue-check accounts trying to be full time influencers. If a large account posts something you can't add insight to the conversation because your comment will be far below blue check accounts responding with arbitrary nonsense for engagement farming.

Many of the most interesting people on the platform have bailed out because there's just so much toxicity and distracting stress tolerated on the platform now, and no way to self-moderate it beyond ineffectually banning individual accounts.

Twitter was imperfect before Musk, but still extremely valuable in my circle. Now I feel Musk views the platform primarily as a way to manipulate social and political outcomes rather than a place that enriches its users.

There doesn't seem to be any attempt there to find merit. Well other than the brief second paragraph, which just notes:

> and I especially enjoy fewer neo-Nazis advocating violence responding to my posts.

There's no looking at how there's a public API, there's no looking at how there are other apps all working on atproto. They don't cite any of the bad experiences where they felt wronged. It's a hit piece.

> Bluesky promotes groupthink. It’s easy to feel an illusory sense of consensus when most everyone seemingly agrees on a surface level on who the villains are. But political thinking cannot be refined without intense interrogation, friction and dissent. Bluesky’s mainstream scene is cocooned, insulated against sustained confrontation from either its left or its right.

And it's just wrong. I love this challenge here, I think this speaks to an amazing virtuous and right stance. But I see it all the time. There is a lot of agreeing about how wild the Supreme Court has been in tearing down hundreds of years of law, how ridiculously off the map the GOP is, how batshit ludicrous this grifter pedophile in the white house is. But that's all true actually? And I do see a lot of debate and engagement and questioning, discussion of topics. Sometimes it is a contest of the loudest typer winning, but overall I find Bluesky really far more interested in good engagement and discussion, better at looking for signal than anywhere else. (And we have Will Stancil posts to debate, lol.)

There's a non-zero chance that Bluesky feels boring because it's actually a somewhat reasonable place, with reasonable people. X wants to be radical and extreme. Rage bait and madness keep people engaged. A lot. It's an advantage for a site to be unreasonable alas. Oh and the new management keeps promoting the nazis & is an incredible dirtbag gutter racist & provoker. Who builds CSAM making AI.

It's not going to have the same "diverse" spirit, Zeeshan Aleem. You go on and on throwing dirt. It's unengaged in that activity, doing malice out of hand without actually building the case. I struggle to consider the article in good faith. This feels like propoganda. It feels manufactured.

Basically they’ll respond to your comment with a falsehood and block you so you can’t respond (and most times won’t even see the response). Comment stays up for rest of the gang to brigade on.

I tried Bluesky ... found the same content and style.

People want and encourage that content and style. I realize that I'm just not into that form of social media, or maybe none of it.

It does get a bit screechy over there but I prefer to view it by its own merits technologically

I explore music intentionally. If I firehosed random music nonstop I’d burn out. Do that with social media randos, with an even lower quality bar? Nope. No one tells people they “shouldn’t curate music, just listen to whatever randomly plays.”

No media/person is owed attention. Blocking and shaping my experience is being rational/intentional, not cowardly. Yours is the same logic behind removing YouTube dislikes and replacing Netflix’s old, user-shaped system with today’s garbage algo. Suffer through piles of trash on the off chance something good appears. Again no. I have limited attention.

I deliberately seek out well-reasoned, articulated opposing views in formats that actually support learning and understanding.

Short-form media is useful for discovering topics, not for POV growth. The format itself doesn’t support meaningful discussion or exposition. It's 'short form'. It gets eyeballs so people try to take advantage of the reach and kinda shoe horn stuff in, but the format sucks for that.

In other words you agree with Musk's reasons for buying Twitter and opening the place up to other voices than just those which fled to places like BS. Good for you to acknowledge this and to realise that just being in the same place - virtual or physical - with others who you happen to disagree with does not 'taint' the place nor does it make it impossible to interact with most of them except for the looney fringes. BS was bound to end up like it did just like e.g. Gab ended up the way it did: it attracted those fringes, the I-support-the-current-thing types, the follow-the-leader factions, the I-am-very-special-and-you-should-venerate-me crowds. Some of them remained on or returned to what is now X where they do their thing but there's not enough of them to set the tone so you can ignore them.

I will think of this when I see your name, and think differently of you. You are quite active, and I'm sad to have seen such a base mena character. You have the right to pick your filters, even if I think that's crass & ridiculous to say "no politics" no advocacy. It's unclear and really shitty IMO to cast such nasty vague aspertions as "worst tranche of Mastodonsters" though. Just saying incredibly nasty things that mean nothing clear & that just cast the worst most ungenerous light. Dude!

Which of the many backed and well thought out points did you find lazy?

> There is nothing stopping you from curating the moderation to your wants or even creating your own moderation entirely

Not sure you read the article, but his point is that there's nothing to curate. It's full of a certain type of person, and not much else. I can attest to this too.

> Many people have this weird nostalgia about a Twitter that never existed anywhere but in their imagination

I have no nostalgia for Twitter, but I do remember what it used to be like (way back when you used to SMS in your tweets!). It was a fun place with random, sometimes interesting, sometimes thoughtful, most times funny and inane posts. That's not nostalgia, that's how it was.

Sadly there's not a huge gamedev community here. So I do venture to the mainstream sites to peruse most gaming news. This is especially the case with the indie community that pretty much stick to the Twitterverse and Discord.

I do follow a bunch of tech news outlets (including many HN bots), and that works. But there is very little engagement, few likes and few comments. I'd like to see more of what others think. My experience on Twitter was that often these comments suck and aren't thoughtful, but there are some gems, some really enriching, and also that it was still useful for networking & finding those other interesting people out there.

Mastodon seems to have gotten most of the devs. But they don't have a ton of tech news either. And honestly there's just so little interesting development of Mastodon / ActivityPub. Where-as there are really neat amazing not hard to do cute apps and experiences happening with atproto / Bluesky. It's a weird bifurcation of not that technical sometimes but also technical about itself & very active about itself.

As I often try to tell my mother, if there are a lot of people who have a problem with you, maybe you should seek out the common denominator.

Often when I wanted to research a niche technical topic I would search for it on Twitter, or tweet about it and see who in my network knew more. Often I would see individuals with niche followings say incredibly insightful or valuable stuff years before other people were saying it. I also had a bunch of professional connections form on Twitter along with many job opportunities I could have pursued.

Now I view X as having destroyed nearly all of that. The system is so setup to reward rage-bait and slop that even if I try to curate my experience for it the meaningful individuals get drowned out. The algorithm and all the actions taken on the website seem more about creating a social manipulation machine for Musk than enriching its users, and as a result many of the most thoughtful and valuable people have scattered away from the platform.

I'm all for diversity of thought, but X under Musk is about non-transparent algorithmic manipulation of speech and manipulating emergent behavior to achieve political goals. It is one thing to unban people, but it's another thing to intentionally break all tools (like ban lists) that enable people to self moderate. Musk's X amplifies certain speech and then disempowers people who try to attain higher quality more productive discourse.