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One thing to note:
Engagement will always be better on new platforms, because they a) have no bots and b) haven't been growth hacked to death, since the strategies that work haven't been figured out yet.
These start at 0, then increase. When both of those trends grow strong enough, people start to leave in droves.
I know I did. On X, I used it a lot, then left when the bad algo content era began. On Insta, the engagement bait was bad enough when I joined that it deterred me from ever seriously using it.
I would expect these to become more of a problem over time, though I'm optimistic Bluesky can do better at beating them than other platforms have.
I don't think it's bots. I think it's that Twitter's owners have made it a product goal to pessimize this particular metric, and its engineers have succeeded. That's literally the logic ownership has used when explaining things like "links must be in replies, not standalone messages, or else they're penalized".
A user clicking on a link takes the user away from the platform. If your goal is to maximise time spent on your platform, you'd be incentivised to suppress links as much as you can. That appears to be what's happening on X.
Yes, that's what I'm saying. That "engagement" on Twitter isn't coming back, unless ownership changes the product to allow it. Bsky isn't going to grow out of this. Engagement is going where it's rewarded, and that's all there is to it.
> Bsky isn't going to grow out of this.
It will if it’s a better user experience. Which, like, it _clearly_ is. Twitter may not want users clicking links, but users want links to click.
Twitters owners used to be the current owners of blue sky. How gullible do you have to be to fall for the same trick by the same people twice?
Edit: looks like I'm six months behind on the drama https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/07/j...
Yep, the current CEO strikes me as a different breed form the Dorseys and Musks of this world. Time will tell.
Maybe. But at the time mastodon had a massive influx after the X acquisition and it never felt this alive. threads is massive and I don’t manage to get any engagement there either.
A major difference with Bluesky tho, is that users can choose their own "algorithm". Nobody is forced on Discover (Bluesky's "for you" algorithm).
I wonder if this will play a role.
I was commenting on Twitter the other night just how bad Twitter's recommendations --- now hard to avoid, since everyone's funneled into the official web app --- have become; it's all random US political figures that don't intersect any of my interests.
I likened it to 2003, when people fled Windows for the MacBook over issues like crapware (which: the X algorithm basically is). And: a lot of early MacBook adopters, most especially the ones that had been there for a long time, were insufferable! But we hit a point where one product was clearly better than the other, and you roll the tape forward and see how good the long-term prospects are for the niche product that just does what all its real users actually want it to.
Hard to imagine why someone would go through so much trouble to acquire Twitter just to Ballmer-ize it. You usually have to have started and built up a product yourself to screw it up this badly.
I found that some aggressive gardening of the 'For You' feed on Twitter made it borderline useful (By gardening I mean clicking the 'not interested in this post' option pretty aggressively). Eventually this seems to revert the recommendation algorithm to pre-Musk behavior.
That said, this might be different on phones than on the web app.
To your larger point, I think BlueSky is hobbled right now by the religious committment to decentralization, which the new arrivals don't care about at all. I would compare the situation to a world where people had to flee Windows for Linux—neither alternative is one that just works the way you'd want it to.
What ever they're doing with decentralization isn't really legible to me. As much as I'll say nice things about Bsky, I'm not really rooting for it. As you saw: I left Twitter after Musk bought it and landed in the Fediverse, which I actually quite liked, not out of any religious interest in architecture so much as for the promise I thought (still sort of think) it held for restoring a blogosphere-type organization to the Internet (a world where most people would just sign up for whatever the Blogger.com of Mastodon was).
Not enough people stayed in the Fediverse, and I found early Bsky culture, hm, difficult to mainline day-in day-out, so I went back to Twitter, and I'd be fine, regardless of ownership, if it would just be a good product that everyone wanted to use.
So to me, Bsky just felt like Twitter with different owners; it still sort of does. Which: if you're looking for a less-shitty Twitter, to me, that's Bsky's offering today.
I completely agree with you—the large exodus from Twitter means that both sites have the Twitter feel, so people can choose. My point about decentralization is that it imposes some weird technical limits on Bluesky for reasons that the normal users it is now attracting have zero interest in. For example, the list of who you block is public, and you can't quietly make someone stop following you by quickly blocking and unblocking them.
I'm sure there are additional limitations, too. All of these stem from highly religious architectural choices that are of no interest to 99% of the current user base, who just want pre-Musk Twitter back. The obvious endpoint is what happened to email—there will be one central provider who can set arbitrary policy, and the decentralization part will just linger on as a series of annoying hoops that developers have to jump through to work with the de facto centralized site.
> Engagement will always be better on new platforms
The primary effect is that communities with fewer users have stronger common bonds, the age of the platform isn't super relevant.
That said, the engagement on Twitter has been terrible since almost the very beginning. I'm sure it was super magical for folks who were at SXSW that first year, but the conversion rate has been garbage ever since then. Whereas maybe 50% - 70% of people will open the average cold email, the percentage of people who will click a link on Twitter was maybe 1 in 1,000 even 10+ years ago.
I wonder if smaller, more active and tight-knit communities are healthier and preferable, but the combination of growth-at-all-costs, catering to influencers and fear of "bubbles" keeps those communities from becoming more common.
Community is hard to maintain in the sense it either slowly dies off or experiences bouts of extreme growth even without the growth mentality. Think of a reverse slashdot effect where something posted on the community drives a bunch of users there quickly and either causes a rise in expense or a difficulty in moderation. If there is no growth you slowly lose users to entropy and the community fades.
Feels like there should be ways to mitigate this, like having a waiting list and booting users for inactivity after a certain amount of time. That way the community stays active but doesn't get flooded.
It’s almost like the opposite of the network effect moat that people used to think about social networks. At this point it feels like when these platforms hit a certain size, it’s time to move on to something smaller, without advertisers, less engagement boat, etc.
I believe BlueSky, based on the way it's open source AT protocol works, would make it much harder to implement an AI/algorithmicly driven feed in the same way this happens on other platforms.
And if it did happen, you could simply swap this Feed out for a different one.
There's nothing preventing Bluesky, or someone else, from building an "algorithmic" feed on top of the AT protocol. That's what the Discover feed is, for all intents and purposes.
What is harder is Bluesky forcing users into their flavour of an algorithmic feed, the same way e.g. X doesn't let you remove the Trending section, or how Reddit always shows you comments ordered by "Best". Bluesky users currently can choose the feed they want to use.
You have a point, but custom Feeds are one the main features of BlueSky. I have several Feeds for different interests, Twitter doesn't let you have these types of custom Feeds. I think it's unlikely they'll ever remove it. I can always ignore the Discover feed.
Changing platforms from time to time is beneficial then
Actually, focusing on "engagement" is already showing that the game is lost and that the we're seing another Twitter clone... :-(
Because "engagement" is about "money" and "ad" and "sponsor" and "business"... and not about anything close to "social" or "society" or "human". So, sooner or later (but most probably "sooner"), you'll see clickbait and other usual tricks to grow up "engagement"... and any interesting post will disappear
So I won't even matter to create an account or have a look. I'll wait for the next one, or the next next one... hoping some people will understand that quality content is not measured by some kind of "engagement"
EDITED: if you matter enough to downvote, at least explain WHY you think I'm wrong ;-)
1. Bluesky has stated they have no intention to add ads. Subscriptions are apparently coming soon
2. ATProto makes algorithms pluggable. Anyone can develop on, users can sub to those of their choosing, making switching easy should one become bad. It means there can be real feed competition without needing to move networks or apps. Same for moderation, individual choice and control is central to the design
The problem is not "ads" per se... it's engagement focus
Ads or clickbait posts or filtering/ordering algorithms are just some consequences of engagement focus (also called "attention economy" because what matters is... well... attention... measured by "engagement")
As long as focus is on "engagement" and not on "quality content", you'll have some Twitter/Facebook/Tiktok/... clone.
Subscriptions COULD shift the focus on quality (because if people are convinced that you provide quality content, they might pay for it) but it requires (as shown for a long time) at least : - easy way to discover real quality content (a bit like Wikipedia in a way) - easy way to pay once to subscribe to different providers. That's the same old problem for the newspapers: people dont want to pay a yearly subscription - or even a newspaper issue - to read once a single article. They MAY pay a subscription if they can read any article in any newspaper (in a big bag of newspaper). Then this revenue has to be redistributed among the different newspapers...
Pluggable algorithms, is this being done anywhere else? Dare I call this innovation? Antithesis to everything that is current in social engineering.
Not just pluggable, stackable
https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderati...
Sorry to be cynical, but I think history has demonstrated that a company stating something isn't worth an awful lot.
This one surprised me personally, because we really don't do anything special. We treat posts with links the same as any other kind of post. I would guess there's a kind of high "density" of focus from people right now; the general buzz of the moment. Also I figure our focus on the reverse-chron following feed helps with this.
We're pro open-web, pro people using Bluesky to find other interesting things. We're working on subscriptions right now (not ads) so we've got no incentive to keep people in our app. We'd rather be the lobby to an interesting world.
Also, tbh, every user has a domain name. The web -- and websites -- seems like a really valuable part of the atproto ecosystem. We're going to keep developing in that direction. See this blog comments integration[1] for instance.
Is the plan for subscriptions that people pay a monthly fee to use bluesky? Or that people can subscribe to content creators on bluesky?
Subscriptions for additional features. You can read their general plan at https://bsky.social/about/blog/7-05-2023-business-plan
The former, but the existing featureset will stay free and we won't rank up paying users. We're still nailing down the features, but it'll be things like custom app icons, profile customizations, higher-def video
And the most important feature: paying to keep a good ecosystem running and supporting good software.
Looking forward to paying for software I enjoy!
I’m very optimistic Bluesky is going to be the counter example to the enshitification story.
Mark Cuban posted about another way that Bluesky engagement is better, in terms of on-platform replies
https://bsky.app/profile/mcuban.bsky.social/post/3lbx7p3vdgs...
There is a general vibe of mute/block, don't engage with trolls, in the hopes we don't end up with the same toxicity found on other platforms, or as Kelsey Hightower put it
"What pushed me off X was just watching good people behave badly" [1]
[1] https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/kelsey-hightower-...
I think this is the same vibe that keeps HN going. We all collectively want to have place with high signal-to-noise. Of course moderation plays a part here as well. But I also self-moderate, deleting my own comments a minute after posting them if, seeing them in place, they seem too stupid.
I just don’t know that a place like HN could keep its standards without a place like Reddit; and I’m worried that Bluesky may need the troll haven of Twitter to keep existing, so Bluesky can keep its place for better behaved discourse.
Maybe it’s an eternal question for social media: which September will be the September that never ends?
> But I also self-moderate, deleting my own comments a minute after posting them if, seeing them in place, they seem too stupid.
I thought it was just me doing that.
I need to do it more. :(
Same here! I do appreciate the vibe at HN and I want to keep it.
> I just don’t know that a place like HN could keep its standards without a place like Reddit
Yeah. A year or two after the first version of Ubuntu was released, someone on a Debian mailing list complained that Ubuntu didn't deserve the attention it was getting. A long-time Debian user or developer replied and said Ubuntu was the best thing to happen to Debian in years because Ubuntu was Debian's idiot filter. I didn't fully realize how true that was until I watched the Arch Linux community receive a huge influx of Ubuntu refugees who seemed to be switching to Arch solely to participate in the Arch subreddit's meme culture.
Mute/Block works fine for me on X. I happen to like variety, not an echo chamber. I block the ignorant tails on either side.
Which sides are you referring to?
Ok thats nice and all, but 'a general vibe' doesn't survive actual incentives.
Who's to say incentives cannot change?
People are leaving other platforms because of toxicity, their incentive is to find a place without it and keep it that way.
The moderation design means it will be easier to widely block trolls, meaning the effort can be collective instead of repeated by every user
The fresh start means this is not a sisyphean task
Every single social media platform of note charges accounts for “reach”. Your post gets seen by 1-15% of your followers unless you “promote” it with a marketing spend.
Bluesky has no mechanism for artificially limiting the reach of legitimate messaging, and no business impulse to build one. It really is something new under the sun.
That's just Facebook. Threads doesn't have ads yet. Twitter just blocks anything the owner thinks competes with them or was mean to him.
You are misunderstanding what I am saying: all major accounts, monetized accounts, or business oriented accounts have their reach artificially limited. All. All platforms. Twitter was an exemplar of this well before it was converted into a campaign operation.
I don't believe Twitter does this even now. Their for you algorithm is actually open source (supposedly) so you could check.
But algorithmic reach existing in the first place was only a Facebook thing for a long time; other people started doing it because of TikTok. eg there's no way to limit an account's reach on Tumblr, it's just nobody would ever reblog a corporate Tumblr post.
Twitter absolutely did sell reach, if not by that name. And they currently sell reach boosts via premium subscriptions.
On twitter, photos, text, video get more reach compared to links. This makes sense, as Elon wants people to pay for traffic.
Those are explicitly tagged as “Sponsored” and “Promoted”, right? Because it’s a hard skip when I see those.
No. Those are different types of campaigns that are also paid.
Gergely Orosz polled about editors people use and got more responses on Bluesky vs. X even with one tenth of the follower count
https://bsky.app/profile/gergely.pragmaticengineer.com/post/...
I've been thinking about this the last few days after someone pointed out he gets a lot more engagement on Bluesky.
One thing I still think not all people account for is that as far as I can see:
- followers on "older" accounts on Twitter probably includes a lot of accounts that will not create activity, either because they have been outright abandoned or because they are used read only (this last effect is probably amplified because twitter now demand people to be logged in to see replies).
- I'll also suggest that it is reasonable to think that the most enthusiastic part of the userbase will be the first ones to join a new platform
Right, that's the point, follower counts on Twitter aren't meaningful anymore because it's a deprecated old platform with all the cruft of a long history of abandoned accounts, forgotten bots, spam accounts, etc.
Wouldn't the Twitter account be likely much older, and therefore have many stale/dead followers?
The reason is pretty much irrelevant, either engagement on Twitter is artificially lower because of algorithm shenanigans, or because it's becoming a ghost town of abandoned accounts and spam bots. Neither option is a compelling reason to stay on Twitter
I wonder what's the motivation for a normal person to leave replies on Twitter anymore. The top replies will be porn spam and other blue check self promotion bullshit. In hindsight it makes sense the people left on Twitter would continue to post into the void but not engage.
That pay-for-attention reply prioritisation thing really was the most bizarre product decision. Like, everyone already knew it didn’t work; dating apps have been dealing with the problems with pay for attention for about 25 years now.
It's fresh and there's quite a ideological push against Musk to somehow take Twitter/X down a notch.
Considering how Threads is doing (from Meta, with their billions of cash to prop it up and 2 biggest social media sites) we'll need to wait a bit and see, usually in social media it looks like the pioneer takes the cake.
I don't think much of this is ideological at all. Paul Graham has been saying the same things on his Twitter TL. Twitter reoriented itself away from implicit partnerships with existing media, and it shows. Maybe that's a good strategy, but like all strategies it involved a tradeoff.
Most Twitter users don't really care much about who owns Twitter; instead, the people who do (pro- or anti-) have outsized voices in the conversation.
Personally, it has nothing to do with Musk. My Twitter feed is all things I haven't followed, constantly block similar posts, and am completely uninterested in.
My bsky feed is _explicitly_, 100%, only posts I've asked to see.
> My Twitter feed is all things I haven't followed
So use the "Following" tab? It's right there, for that exact purpose.
I do, it constantly shows ads and posts I do not follow. Hell it had a half-page Trump ad on election day and I'm not even American. It also periodically resets back to the For You tab.
Additionally, reply threads in Twitter make no sense. I'll be following a discussion about sports, and there would be a random (bot? ad?) off-topic post every 4th or 5th reply.
I can't help but see people who design social media algorithms to be complete sociopaths: they want to control people's communications and butt in with "recommendations" completely unwelcome, instead of just letting the participants drive the discussion themselves.
> usually in social media it looks like the pioneer takes the cake.
LiveJournal, Friendster, and Myspace are the reason Twitter and Facebook barely have market share?
Problem with Threads is it being very-PG. No porn and no insulting jokes result in sterile system, which is hardly attractive.
Regardless of whether they've added them yet, the target audience of Threads is advertisers. They're trying to offer a sanitized version of Twitter that is ultimately boring and soulless just like Facebook
[flagged]
> usually in social media it looks like the pioneer takes the cake.
… Hrm, not sure about that. See Friendster, Livejournal, MySpace, Digg, etc.
Of course engagement is better when posts have less competition for attention.
Bluesky has an order of magnitude fewer users than X, at least on paper.
The vast majority of accounts that followed me on Twitter over the last year are obvious bots.
That doesn’t matter. The content each user sees is multiple orders of magnitude less.
This tracks with my personal experience. On twitter I had about 20k followers and was getting 20-30 new followers per day and tens to hundreds of likes per post. This dropped to pretty much zero once Musk started fucking with the algo and pushing blue checks.
I’ve been on Bluesky for about 18 months without much engagement, but in the last few weeks it’s exploded almost to the levels where Twitter was before it got enmuskified.
They are all fake, but Bluesky hasn't figured out how to control them yet.
I'm all for the Twitter schadenfreude. Frankly, it couldn't happen to a more deserving person. But we should bear two things in mind:
1. A low-volume competitor will always seem better because the bad actors haven't moved in yet. Growth engineering will kick in and do the same awful thing you see on any newcomer that approaches or surpasses whatever it aims to replace. Put another way: the quality will only ever go down; and
2. We're going to stay in this cycle as long as we back venture-backed companies that will be incentivized to do all the growth engineering mentioned above.
The most successful and enduring and longest-lasting structure for user-generated content is Wikipedia ie the Wikimedia Foundation. The platform needs to be owned to the community or we are doomed to repeat the rise-and-fall cycles we have now.
> I'm all for the Twitter schadenfreude. Frankly, it couldn't happen to a more deserving person.
This is a very uncharitable and hatingly-blinded take.
Oh, no, are people being _uncharitable_ to the billionaire?
Like, there are limits. There’s only so much assuming of good intentions that it is reasonable to do.
I can't fathom how salty one can be over someone's wealth to have this level of hate for them but if it makes the pain/inequality hurt less then so be it I suppose.
Nah, I've no particular issue with him being rich; there are plenty of fairly inoffensive billionaires. I have issues with him being a bloody arsehole. I have noticed, however, that some people on here seem very keen to extend the benefit of the doubt to Musk and other rich people more than they would otherwise do.
Saying he deserves it is stupendously salty and hateful?
Absolutely. And explicitly calling out wealthy people for being wealthy just reeks of jealousy.
The original OP didn’t say anything about wealth, just that “it couldn't happen to a more deserving person.” It’s possible he wished failure on Elon for reasons other than his wealth (there are so many).
So? It's OK to hate some people, for the right reasons, that is.
Its true that the current honeymoon period will not be forever. But what comes afterwards will be even better.
People have been conditioned to think that the social media experience cannot but be enshittifed. (Its even the word of the year 2024 in Australia). But this is no law of nature, this the result of very specific business models.
While everything in the bluesky/atproto niche is now rather centralized and offers little more than a twitter UX, the possibilities are endless if people build an actual ecosystem around it. One can have alternative "views", different user functionalities that completely transform what users experience. Once you start thinking of users as people and not product, an untapped universe of possibilities is opening up.
The concept of diverse interoperating platforms swimming in a pool of message passing is more advanced in the activitypub space. From wordpress plugins, to goodreads and reddit alternatives and an entire zoo of specialized platforms. The severe underfunding keeps all those things away from prime time but they are proving something important:
The old social media order is dead. Mastodon and the fediverse proved that first but it was too niche for most people to notice. Now bluesky does it more forcefully and in the mainstream. The news can no longer be suppressed.
Is bluesky safe to invest in? Do we have long-term guarantees regarding the protocol etc?
I'm thinking about it if I were a developer making their own clients and ecosystems to interface with bluestky/atproto
Not 100% safe. Two issues I am aware of are the scheme for controlling user identity (if you setup something standalone and want to interoperate) and the future governance of the protocol. But I know about these because the team is quite upfront about them and there is intense scrutiny of all claims, especially by the activitypub community they effectively compete with for developer mindshare. Basically if bluesky does not deliver an open protocol the fallback is clear.
I do expect frictions to arise if others jump in and build good stuff, especially if these compete directly with whatever monetization bluesky manages to secure. The closest recent incident would be the wordpress.com vs wp engine episode.
But all these issues are a far cry from the status quo. A different page.
I signed up today and chose Tech and Software Development as interests and this was the first thing that showed up in my feed:
https://bsky.app/profile/austmitchtavlander.bsky.social/post...
No kidding. the vast majority of those 50 million of twitter followers are going to be bots. This is true of all those big old famous accounts such as Obama, Taylor Swift and so on. What about actual traffic? How much clickthroughs does a Twitter link produce vs. Blue Sky? It says 3x Threads, but obviously threads is much smaller than X.
> What about actual traffic? How much clickthroughs does a Twitter link produce vs. Blue Sky?
It literally says this right at the top.
lol you could have just written the answer in the time it took you to reply that
I tried it but I got tired of political fights like twitter is for nazis here we can save the world. I just want to read about tech, nature and science not politics im tired of that shit. In the end i just uninstalled and went to play super mario world
Suprise suprise, normal people use a platform more when they're not exposed to toxic content that they wernt specifically seeking out.
I started posting but my algorithm sucks, any clue on how to improve it? I want to read about developer story!
1. Use a service like Bluesky Follower Bridge to map over your followings from Twitter to Bluesky (it's not perfect so you need to check each follow to make sure it didn't grab the wrong person)
2. Seed your account with "Starter Packs" that bulk follow users with specific niches. You can search for these on bsky. Like there's one for C++ developers, a bunch for artists, some for journalists for specific niches, etc.
3. Customise the bluesky moderation service labeller.
4. Subscribe to some additional labellers.
- A major one is https://bsky.app/profile/skywatch.blue. The account also has a number of moderation lists you can use to auto-hide or auto-block problematic accounts.
- If you care about US politics this labeller is useful: https://bsky.app/profile/us-gov-funding.bsky.social
5. Adjust your moderation and threading settings. Try out the new threaded replies mode. Try changing the reply ordering settings.
6. When you use the "Discover" tab, click the triple dots (...) on a post and click "Show more like this" and "Show less like this" to tune the algorithm for the discover tab. It starts out really bland/boring/random but it tunes in pretty quickly if you work with it.
7. Browse the Feeds tab to find custom feeds you like for specific niches. Add those to your home page so you can switch to them easily. These feeds will be generally a lot more focused than your main feeds but they are super useful for only seeing specific content you care about.
Here is a directory of starter packs to find people to follow.
https://blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs/all
Also look into custom labellers to filter out content you don't want (furries, trolls, etc)
Starter packs! They're a great community managed way to find (and share) a bunch of feeds of common interest. You can browse them from within bsky.
On Firefox, all the examples they give show up as "Post not found, it may have been deleted"
I'm on the latest Firefox myself and they all worked fine.
The fact that you can pay to have your replies higher (plus the suppression of posts with links) on X are part of this. The other reality is that for me and my community / friends who used to be active on Twitter.. they're just not participating anymore.
It's become like Facebook became a decade or so ago. Total ghost-town with only some eccentric folks still posting. In the case of X, everything I see seems to be connected with some kind of ecosystem around Elon, Trump and right-wing influencers. Time to move on.
It is very close to the “if the poor can’t have fun, then your city is boring” idea (ok, I might have made it up, but apologies if I stole it from someone and forgot). Applies to social media as well.
smart people moved on as soon as a fucking billionaire bought it…
Comment was deleted :(
The engagement quality is better too since replies are ranked based on merit, like how Twitter used to be, rather than whether or not the poster gave Elon Musk $5.
edit: correction, replies on X are now ranked by how much money they give Elon Musk, with $16/month subs getting ranked above $8/month subs, which are ranked above $3/month subs, which are ranked above the plebs.
Replies aren't necessarily ranked based on merit btw. They are ranked by whatever ordering you choose in your settings. The options are:
- Hot Replies first
- Oldest Replies first
- Newest Replies first
- Most-liked Replies first
- Random (aka "Poster's Roulette")
I believe "Hot Replies" first is the default but I may be mistaken.
And hot replies was only added two days ago, and is simply giving newer comments a temporary boost so they don't end up unnoticed in long threads. Choice is nice!
It'd be nice if they were just ordered by when they were posted, oldest first. That's how it is on Pleroma.
Seems you can make it chronological, as mentioned by the sibling reply.
Comment was deleted :(
What order replies are shown in is a user profile option.
This is not true afik. All blue accounts are sorted randomly but above non-blue ones. I don't think $16 ones get better ranking
https://x.com/i/premium_sign_up
Basic: Small reply boost
Premium: Larger reply boost
Premium+: Largest reply boost
The simple fact of the matter, IMO, is simply that my feed is mine. It's 100% only posts from OSS developers right now, with no garbage mixed in.
I'm not American. I do not care about American elections. I blocked every lunatic right-wing post that showed up on my Twitter feed from people I don't follow, and yet still almost every post in my feed is about American politics or a half-page Trump ad on election day.
So, almost every post that ends up on my bsky timeline is something I am _explicitly_ interested in, without having to ignore the feed and search for specific users or projects. Of course my engagement is going to be higher! It's basically an RSS feed with an article length limit.
You keep saying that. Just stop using the "For you" tab and stick to the "Following" tab. And if you don't want ads, pay up $15 or so a month and they stop, just like on Youtube. On the "For You", block the idiots - it works.
Algorithmic feeds are useful. Algorithmic feeds that promote primarily people who pay the platform, downrank links, and are likely manipulated for political reasons are far less desirable. On X it meant that I was discovering far less quality content because many intelligent and interesting people didn't want to pay for the platform, often due to Musks's behavior.
BlueSky's algorithmic feeds are less good so far, but they're far more neutral and there's more transparency into how they work. Over time people have the ability to create new types of algorithmic feeds.
Or, you know, go to the other platform that doesn't require you to do this?
I saw a recent CNN report which claimed that political orientation on X is roughly even now, compared to pre Musk version (which was about 70 left, 30 right). That might appear right wing twitter for people used to the left wing bias (unknowingly).
Not sure what the ratio is on BS, but it appears worse than old twitter. That would distort comparisons with X.
I couldn't care less about American politics or left/right for that matter. I don't wanna see it, or dickheads and bad faith discussions, and X makes it hard to not see it, Bluesky very easy.
I am seriously surprised at the naivety of people who can't see that Bluesky is also destined for enshittification.
I mean, it probably is. But probably not as bad as Twitter. Twitter was, well, not good (there’s a reason that we affectionately called it the Hellsite) but borderline acceptable pre-Musk. The Musk thing was contingent, not an inevitability.
For now. It's just started growing. Let's wait a while for the enshittification to really kick in.
It will probably still be fine. It's like that old joke about two guys walking through the woods who encounter a hostile bear. One of them starts looking for something to use to defend himself. The other tightens the laces on his shoes and is getting ready to run.
The first one says "Are you crazy? You can't outrun a bear!".
The second guy says "I don't have to outrun the bear. I only have to outrun you!" and takes off.
A large fraction of the people leaving X for Bluesky were OK with staying on Twitter when it was at the level of shit it was in 2021. All Bluesky needs to do is limit its shit level to that and it should do fine.
Hah! Fair analogy and applicable to much in business (and government). I still hope that it keeps it low instead of slowly getting bad while the established platforms get even worse than they are.
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Yeah, but it's funnier seeing people get bodied by community notes on X
Imagine spending time in a community that was created to hate Elon Musk
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Yes, which is why notoriously left-leaning propaganda outlets like “Sony PlayStation” and “major league sports” are setting up camp there.
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Surely a site that banned ElonJet can't with a straight face be called a beacon of free speech?
(Edit: I would be very interested in an attempt to justify that based on free speech principles though.)
X is absolutely everything except anything freedom of speech related! too funny!
I see no speech there, there are no ideas being censored. It's just stalking.
Who gets to decide that? I feel like the point could be made that its ban limits the spread of the idea that some people emit disproportionately more CO2 than the average person.
Doxxing is a crime, which is not protected by free speech.
No, just because the data is public does not justify aggregating it and presenting it to the public. Pretty much everyone's address is public information.
(or at least, it should be a crime. Its exact legislative status is murky and much weaker than it should be in the US, but it is almost universally banned by online services, for good reason.)
Then what has changed to make X more of a beacon of free speech than Twitter was?
Just don't post "cisgender", where Elon's plane is, or the real name of a creator of a neo-nazi comic.
Not if it comes in the form of a link, or if you don't want a hundred bluechecks to reply calling you slurs you've never even heard of.
Mute and block are your friends.
That's not effective against a group raid. As far as I know mass blocking tools don't work since they took the API away.
I don't want to read that shit in the first place, though.
THIS is it. the funniest HN post I read in 2024… :)
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Mmm, that’s good satire!
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Honestly, posting something definitionally false like that example serves only to start flame wars. There are fewer stronger signals for what sort of user should get banned than those who troll to start flame wars.
It's not "definitionally false", you just have sexist views that have become so internalized and integral to your world view that you can't even see it.
I would say “factually false and fairly trivially obviously so”, rather than “definitionally false”, since it logically could be true even though it isn’t, but otherwise...
You'll have to walk me through how it's sexist.
As for being definitionally false, it is. A claim of precisely two genders, or even of precisely two sexes, is medically incorrect.
It is definitionally false that there are only two genders, and thus comments stating so should be blocked? Just want to be clear about your stance here.
"There are fewer stronger signals for what sort of user should get banned than those who troll to start flame wars."
What this really is is an ideological purity test. Demand fealty to an absurd belief. Ban anyone who doesn't comply. What's left over are ideological conformists.
And yes, echo chambers are one way to avoid flame wars, but they don't shape social discourse in a healthy direction.
There's a class of conservative troll who asserts that despite gender having a well understood definition, they have their own dialect where sex and gender have the same definition and everyone else who doesn't share that is wrong. They stick their heads in the sand and assert that theirs is the only truth, just as in the example you posted. There isn't a "both sides" thing here, words have specific definitions and "gender" is one that people decided to make a political statement of by aggressively pretending to be ignorant of it.
Having a problem with the above is frequently conflated with being a purity test or having some sort of ideological bend, but it's really some anti-social people trying to start fights about definitions. The people posting these things know exactly what they are doing, and the rest of the world has zero obligation to tolerate them doing so in public.
These people have no motive or contribution beyond attempting to tear down community and start fights, and therefore should be removed from places that want to have communities and not fights.
A very conventional definition of gender is as a synonym for sex, for example in Merriam Webster's dictionary, where it's given as one of its definitions:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gender
Even if one didn't accept gender being defined as a synonym of sex, one could very reasonably claim that there are only two genders. It's completely subjective and there's no biological or otherwise physical grounding in judging these things, and no single authority in the English language on whether any genders, beyond male and female, exist.
So you claiming that gender is definitively not synonymous with sex, and that the idea that there are only two genders is "definitionally wrong", is an intellectually dishonest characterization of the situation, and shows why censorship on the basis of the claims self-annointed judges of truth, like you, is so dangerous.
"These people have no motive or contribution beyond attempting to tear down community and start fights, and therefore should be removed from places that want to have communities and not fights."
You think the way to stop fights is to censor everyone who disagrees with you, by falsely claiming that they are "definitionally wrong".
These are just attempts to rationalize creating a censored echo chamber where ideological dogmas that don't conform to reality can propagate. Truth doesn't fear debate.
The Merriam-Webster link you provided has an extensive discussion on the difference between sex and gender. The link you originally provided asserted no other definitions existed than the one they had anointed. The intellectually dishonest characterization lies not where you say it does, though I understand why you claim otherwise. It's a strategy that's proven to work well!
If I can't assert with authority that genders beyond male and female exist, with what authority do you assert those two exist?
You're once again mischaracterizing what has been provided. The discussion talks about one line of development of one of the definitions of gender. It also provides the "gender as synonym for sex" as one of the primary definitions of gender, and yet you think that your viewpoint that it not synonymous is so unassailable that any viewpoint in contravention of it should be banned from being expressed.
Bluesky would not ban someone if they said there are 10 genders, but they will ban someone if they say there are two genders, and you see nothing wrong with that. You're engaging in mental gymnastics to justify this, and trying to equate my expression and my opinion on gender with your preference for censorship of views in contravention of yours.
You're doing an excellent job of intentionally selectively misreading what I write to twist into something you can more easily argue against.
You're creating a linguistic purity test where someone must be able to declare that your preferred definition is the only valid interpretation, thus creating linguistic "biological facts".
Anyone pointing out that multiple definitions exist and that biological realities are more broad is mocked and fought with. These people create nothing positive for their communities and it is appropriate for the communities to ban them, despite their screeches about how they're being censored and should be allowed tobprovoke whomever they like without consequence.
BlueSky and Twitter aren't public squares, they're a business more like a cafe, and are allowed to remove disruptive clients.
What you're stating is exactly the opposite of what's happening. I am the one who's saying that people should be free to express any opinion they want on this issue. You're the one who's saying that if you state your opinion that there are two genders, you should be banned from the platform. And now you're projecting your own characteristics, which is that of a censorious person, onto me to justify your censorship.
You say that these people create nothing positive for the forum, but that's just because they disagree with you. You're perfectly fine disagreeing with them, and you wouldn't want your voice to be banned from a platform for that. So it's really just a total lack of any kind of integrity in how you conduct yourself vis-a-vis those you disagree with.
And yes, both of these platforms are or strive to be public squares where a large cross-section of people can interact to create a global discourse.
It's not projection when I describe to you what you are doing, it's simply a description of what you've described. Do you not read your own words? Perhaps read your own comments the same way you read mine.
As for the rest, you're deliberately missing the point. It has nothing to do with opinion disagreements, and everything to do with starting fights deliberately.
And finally, clearly these places are not trying to be public squares. If they were, they wouldn't ban people.
100% projection when you accuse me of being closed-minded and dogmatic, when I'm the one arguing for free speech for anyone to express their opinion, and you're the one arguing for an entire viewpoint that billions of people hold to be banned from being expressed on a major forum that is presumably ideologically agnositic. And like I said, you claiming that you're just trying to stop fights by banning people you disagree with is intellectually dishonest and displays nothing but a lack of integrity in your conduct towards anyone outside of your ideological camp.
You can in fact see the same mechanism I discussed at work right here in this very thread on HN.
The original comment was flagged enough to be dead, hidden from the rest of the community to protect it from the fights it intended to start. It's not exactly the same as banning your account but it accomplishes about the same purpose at a more granular level.
So HN is no less of the "echo chamber" you describe, yet you appear to find value in posting here anyway. Similarly, when BlueSky bans such users, little to nothing of value is lost.
It's one thing for a technically focused forum like this to bar political debate altogether, and it's another for a public square like Twitter or Blue Sky to allow political discussion but bar an entire viewpoint from being expressed, through purity tests constructed by an ideological movement.
Traffic to left-leaning news sites better from a social media app that lefty people are embracing, compared to from the social media app now a favorite of right-wingers...
News at 11. Fake news at 11:30, on the other channel!
I haven't noticed a quality response from the bsky, rather the opposite
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