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Comment by ecshafer | Hacker News Reader

Bluesky and Threads both have a fundamental issue in that their entire pitch is "We are like Twitter, but we are not run by Elon Musk, a Republican." Which only energizes the most radical, fringe, terminally online, who happen to be the ones that were most disliked on regular Twitter in the first place. When you whole pitch has zero appeal to 95% of people, its dead.

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Yeah, I agree. It's the inverse of the problem Scott Alexander has observed in the past: when you make an alternative platform based on the premise of "we won't ban people based on having unpopular views", you wind up with a user base of 10 principled free speech activists, and a million people with truly awful views. It turns your platform into an awful place that nobody wants to associate with, even if they agree that it's bad to ban people for having unpopular views.

Musk is not just a republican, he's pushing far-right parties everywhere else in the world (plus, the "roman" thing). He's the textbook definition of why social networks should not have recommendation algorithms other than "chronological view of who you actively chose the follow".

He can say whatever he wants, but buying one of the biggest social network to push his ideology onto billions leaves "freedom of saying whatever one wants" territory to enter "let's buy elections by controlling what enter people's feeds".

yeah im pretty fucking hard left wing, i would still have probably used twitter in this current day if it hadn't just become a total cesspool. i used bluesky because my friends moved there and tbh the custom feeds are a great feature. could not care about the owners political leanings as long as they are not being actively and outwardly malicious... pretty much most of my social media usage went down the hill when they just became outrage/outwardly racist/ai infested cesspits. i neeeeeed something more than my small local groups to keep up with my hobbies so i use reddit. but in 2025 i deleted my account and made a new one from scratch that was highly tailored and streamlined vs my 2011 account that had soooooooooooooooo many shitty subs still subbed.

Not sure what to say about Threads. I mean, if you have an Instagram account they’ll try to give you a Threads account and photos I post to Insta automatically go to Threads so I am probably in the top 5% of Threads posters though I hardly ever log in. I am happy if people see my photos on Insta or Threads or LinkedIn or Nextdoor or wherever.

Thread’s notifications are just plain weird like it is usually clickbait where you can’t tell if they love Trump or hate Trump and if the one sexy cosplayer/alt fashion model I follow because I know her in IRL did something provocative with her friend who has tattoos from head to toe, Threads thinks this is front page news.

lol

Twitter's fundamental issue is that it's entire pitch is "You can say the most outrageous things on the planet, share race-baiting videos, and be a scumbag as long as it doesn't anger Elon. Also, we're down with child pornography"

Which only energizes the most radical, fringe, terminally online, who happen to be the ones who were most disliked on regular Twitter in the first place.

See how that works?

Twitter's first mover advantage meant that it was the first place analogue celebs/politicians/etc went to share content with the general public.

Much of this has eroded over the years because of competitive platforms like Instagram but these initial conditions remain formidable.

I would say the erosion has less to do with Instagram and more to do with a man-child driving the platform into the ground.

calling elon musk "a Republican" is such a wild understatement

Neither Bluesky or Threads actually made that pitch.

Threads was started up because of the business opportunity of Musk fumbling things, but Bluesky seemed almost annoyed by all the new users.

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