Bluesky is not the good place

https://www.ms.now/opinion/bluesky-elon-musk-twitter-replacement

by cf100clunk • 7 months ago

63 70 7 months ago

PaulHoule8• 7 months ago

It's a good place for me for posting photos and links but I have an absolute policy against following anyone who says anything about politics, gender, chronic diseases, disability, or anything negative in their profile. I'd be doing engagement farming and probably have 15k followers now if it didn't raise my blood pressure to look at random profiles.

I feel Mastodon is a nicer place these days because the worst tranche of Mastodonsters seemed to have migrated to Bluesky.

jauntywundrkind3• 7 months ago

Wow Paul. That's a pretty mean spirited viewpoint.

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!

PaulHoule8• 7 months ago

Right now I am sure there are millions of posts about whatever happened in Venezeula last night. None of these people have any actual information, it doesn't have any value as "news" -- I'll get more out of reading about it in The Economist next week if not other papers. Sure it is a signification that other people are angry and I can't blame them for being angry but if I get angry it doesn't accomplish anything. It's like you're in an airplane at 40k feet that just sprung a leak and you need to put the oxygen mask on yourself before you can take care of the people around you.

I'm going to argue that those feelings of anger are self-destructive and don't lead to effective activism or positive change in the world. Emotions are contagious

People can post all the politics they like and some of it is going to get in my feed but there are a lot of people who post 20 angry things about Trump a day and nothing good is going to come out of following people like that. I am interested in activism on the issues of: (1) Gen Z's social disconnectedness, (2) an "othering" style of activism on the left that helps the right win, (3) subverting the "trauma theory" that encourages people to build identities around marginalization (e.g. "diss abled" people), (4) recognition of the common (5-10%) condition of schizotypy which is now misdiagnosed as ADHD, autism and other fashionable conditions, and (5) getting our economy and technology aligned with our environment.

Getting mad doesn't help with any of these.

hackeraccount• 7 months ago

I literally can't tell if this is sarcasm.

squigz2• 7 months ago

Politics I can understand, but what's wrong with, say, a deaf or blind user putting that in their bio?

PaulHoule8• 7 months ago

It is one thing to be disabled, it is another thing to be "diss abled" and be continuously angry about it. Same thing about people who have fibromyalgia, chronic lyme, etc. I mean, my wife has a good friend who has fibro and she is cool but the people I find online who first and foremost want to talk about their health challenges seem to build an identity and find meaning around it.

For instance you find a lot of people on Mastodon who complain that people don't put ALT text on images but I work really hard to write good ALT text for my photos and people aren't thankful for that.

I don't see the mentioned categories of inherently offensive but on platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon I see them as associated with emotional negativity.

internet2000• 7 months ago

Bluesky is miserable. Great post about what makes it what it is: https://www.natesilver.net/p/what-is-blueskyism

moron4hire• 7 months ago

The stuff Nate Silver is concerned about has nothing to do with being an active, good-faith, contributing member of a social network and everything to do with being a writer trying to sell his writing and expecting to sit in a privileged position of respect above the hoi paloi simply because he founded a glorified popular blog. He's salty about Bluesky because he couldn't figure out how to engagement farm there like he did on Twitter, so when people got upset at his click bait tactics he table-flipped and called the whole endeavor doomed.

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.

johnnyanmac9• 7 months ago

The engagement farming isnt difficult if you focus on it. It simply requires you to... Actively participate in discussions and topics. Harder to automate than spamming blog links, and that's great.

Also, a common saying for your 2nd paragraph: "If everywhere you go smells like shit, maybe it’s time to check your shoes"

eli• 7 months ago

I think if you’re going to complain about how mean and unfair the progressives are to you then you should have to include a few examples of the posts that provoked their ire.

Like any social media site there are people on bluesky I find annoying, but I just block them. It’s even got official support for blocklists maintained by others if you are into that.

yen223• 7 months ago

My Bluesky feed is wonderfully free of politics (except for today because of ... recent events). It's mostly tech and AI discourse

johnnyanmac9• 7 months ago

Its gonna be a long 2026 if today is any indicator. Wish you the best of luck.

davidw• 7 months ago

"Groupthink"... Uh, you're free to form your own groups and say what you want. There are a few old-school conservatives I follow on Blue Sky. They're clearly not the mainstream there, but they do exist.

It sure beats the other site where a billionaire leans on the algorithm to give a big voice to all kinds of wretched stuff.

Krasnol• 7 months ago

So the author focuses their whole article on politics but complains that it misses the “little bit of everything”?

I don't get it.

There is more on bsky then politics. It might be less in amount because it's smaller but it surely is less toxic too.

I guess this is how you end up after being too long on xwitter: missing politics everywhere...

Dig1t2• 7 months ago

the prevailing political culture is defined by an extremely narrow range of ideological viewpoints.

For all its problems, X is undisputedly the place with the most diverse range of viewpoints and interesting people.

It seems that this author wants more diversity of thought but also starts the article out decrying X for unbanning accounts that he disagrees with.

Kind of difficult to have diversity of thought if you ban diversity of thought.

kettlecorn3• 7 months ago

My X / Twitter account is 17 years old. I made it 2 years after the website was founded, and for a long time I thought Twitter was the most personally positive and professionally valuable social media website I participated in.

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.

Dig1t2• 7 months ago

The watershed event that caused Musk to buy Twitter was when Twitter banned the Babylon Bee for making a joke about Katlyn Jenner.

Most left leaning people were blind to the increasingly censorious management of old Twitter. It had been ramping up pretty aggressively though up to that point.

Personally I haven’t noticed the algorithm disrupt my usage of X. I follow interesting makers and tech type people, and my feed is mostly stuff aligned with my interests. I didn't have the same network/professional usage you’re describing so maybe that’s the main difference for me.

As a way of staying informed and entertained it is better to me than old Twitter. But perhaps you are right as a way of networking or collaborating maybe it’s different now, idk because I never used it like that.

basilikum• 7 months ago

those ideas are all circulated among people who already agree with each other. That’s not activism; it’s venting.

I want to quote this. It describes so much of activism so well.

johnnyanmac9• 7 months ago

Venting is important too. Especially on topics you might feel alienated on by your physical community. Kids have less places to go than ever and adults are lonlier than ever, so they will find other means to fill that social void.

Traubenfuchs• 7 months ago

I do not use twitter/x, I do not use bluesky and I feel like I am dodging a lot of non anonymous people with uwarranted self importance.

I guarantee you that you will be happier if you avoid nom anonymous people with unwarranted self importance im general and online discussion connected to emotional topics specifically.

Anything technically interesting will appear on hacker news and other worldy news I can get by a quick daily check of my favorite news pages.

johnnyanmac9• 7 months ago

Anything technically interesting will appear on hacker news

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.

int32_64• 7 months ago

In the mid/late 2000s when the big social media sites were rising people posted harmless inane status updates about nothing, just testing out the potential of the technology. This eventually evolved into tried and true methods of earning engagement from the platform in the most cynical and exploitative ways possible, leading to things like the entire Buzzfeed clickbait journalism transformation.

You can't recreate how social media used to be because people know how to exploit it now, there's no going back. You couldn't recreate Google at the turn of the millennium with the PageRank algorithm because of how SEO was gamed, so it's obvious why these twitter clones keep stumbling reimplementing the same tech.

everdrive2• 7 months ago

The social media site that many sought as an alternative to X fosters groupthink and pointless activism.

I'm not sure what else someone would expect from modern social media. People keep thinking that the problem with the internet is that people are falling into the "wrong" crowd, or getting the "wrong" ideas. This is very old fashioned thinking and relies on real-world intuition. (imagine a good kid who fell into a bad group of friends and fell to a life of crime. This is effectively what a lot of people seem to think happens with online extremism.) The problem with extremism online is the methods of communication themselves.

Modern social media works by grouping and virally spreading ideas. This is similar in some ways to how communication has historically worked, except the pace and the reach does weird things to people. I'd argue that when you can share and like and there's an algorithmic feed, you're _always_ going to see moves towards extremism, group think, virality, outrage, etc. It's inherent to how these technologies work. In real-world communities, these effects are at play, but they are tempered by other factors. For example, just try going on a political rant against the person at who's home you're eating dinner. You wouldn't do it, you wouldn't want to be rude, to be a bad guest. But blurting out something outrageous or extreme online carries no such feedback. Combine that with a format that puts a LOT of people in contact with each other and then surfaces anything that is "engaging" and you're going to get the same sort of thing you have on Twitter / X.

The saddest part of the Twitter exodus post-Musk is that a lot of people seem to think that Twitter was a great place until Musk ruined it. It had a lot of the same sort of problems and evils, but perhaps for different targets and topics.

kettlecorn3• 7 months ago

Twitter was extremely valuable to me pre-Musk. I followed a lot of creative and technical people doing work I felt was great or valuable, and often it gave me insight into trends well before they occurred. It also made accessible brief discussions with people who normally were difficult to reach.

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.

dzhiurgis3• 7 months ago

But people who destroyed it are your buddies who left.

Also peacemakers who posted offending content to break moderation. And once it worked - “look, they are the bad guys!!”

everdrive2• 7 months ago

I also got many job offers

This was during the same era that you had many people losing their jobs or reputations because of outrage mobs on the platform. I wouldn't claim that Twitter had no positive aspects at all, but that the negatives far outweighed the positive. (and yes, the outrage mobs are at least just as bad, potentially worse, but just pointed at different targets.)

The toxicity that you're decrying was also there before, maybe just not in your circles or aimed at you.

jauntywundrkind3• 7 months ago

I have a harm time taking the submission at face value. It's wild to me to see MSNBC / MS NOW casting such stones.

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.

buddylw• 7 months ago

Bluesky is far from perfect, but I think you need a realistic comparison to other social media networks. Twitter is far more toxic if you are unable to curate your feed. Mastodon has a nice community, especially for tech, but lacks breadth.

There is a core group at Bluesky of people that left Twitter and they have an obvious slant, but I really don’t see this issue making the network worse than any other and only requires you to curate your feed like you have to do on every network.

suppers• 7 months ago

I really tried to like Bluesky. Even wrote a minimal PDS to help gain a technical understanding of the platform.

In the end though I found the social aspect was a similar experience to what the author of this piece describes. Boring, repetitive, and full of a particular type of person I have no desire to interact with.

So I went back to X, which for all its flaws at least has interesting content and, perhaps most importantly, has no equivalent to Bluesky's "nuclear block", so you can follow, and even participate in, divisive discussions where someone has been blocked.

alex1138• 7 months ago

I want to separate the site itself away from the audience, really

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

hagbard_c3• 7 months ago

So I went back to X, which for all its flaws at least has interesting content and, perhaps most importantly, has no equivalent to Bluesky's "nuclear block", so you can follow, and even participate in, divisive discussions where someone has been blocked.

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.

johnnyanmac9• 7 months ago

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

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Nazi_bar

Unfortunately, my line of work attracts the Looney fringes. So I withdrew from most mainstream stuff as I saw the above metaphor happen in real time over the span of a decade. Good for you if you are in a more tame profession/hobby (or perhaps, you're a part of it. In that case, condolences).

dzhiurgis3• 7 months ago

Blocking is basically abuse nowadays in form of “coward block”. Very common in reddit, around topics about EVs (interestingly many of their usernames follow same pattern which makes me think these are malicious bots).

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.

johnnyanmac9• 7 months ago

That was Reddit's choice. Blocking used to be a mute function. Then in 2021 or so they changed it to "you can't participate in a conservation I'm having at any point in the chain." Everyone said it was a bad idea and one post even demonstrated how easy it'd be to abuse such a function:https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/sdcsx3/test...

Awful idea.

All that said: Twitter stule threads are much more ephemeral. So a block isn't as impactful there.

_DeadFred_• 7 months ago

Bluesky is less about dopamine hits and pointless online debate. X is TikTok'ified dopamine hit 'discussion'.

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.

duxup2• 7 months ago

I didn't like twitter because of the content and style.

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.

eleventen• 7 months ago

I don't understand why people expected Bluesky to be different.

Even if it's possible for individuals to curate a positive experience for themselves, at a population level, it's still a corrosive, addictive, reductive medium. The incentives are the same. You can't outrun McLuhan.

Bluesky, Mastodon, Truth Social, Threads, etc. only work as long as users feel like they're surrounded by safe ideas and allies. None of it scales. It only works in echo-chamber mode.

Venn1• 7 months ago

I stick with tech news and the creator space on social media, and while I could very well be doing something fantastically wrong, it is hard for me to find on Bluesky when compared to Mastodon and X.

All these years later, and nothing has replicated what Google Plus accidentally pulled off.

jauntywundrkind3• 7 months ago

I really enjoy Bluesky a lot, but I agree that there's not enough tech news for my taste.

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.

wsatb2• 7 months ago

This and the many other opinions on Bluesky are just lazy. There is nothing stopping you from curating the moderation to your wants or even creating your own moderation entirely. There’s nothing stopping you from helping build the community you desire. You just want the work done for you. Stop complaining about it and make it happen.

The tools are there to make it what you want, it is light years ahead of the other platform. Many people have this weird nostalgia about a Twitter that never existed anywhere but in their imagination.

ghusto• 7 months ago

This and the many other opinions on Bluesky are just lazy

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.

wsatb2• 7 months ago

It takes time to build a community. Twitter was not what it was over night, it took time. Before that, it was just "a certain type of person." Mostly pointless crap. You're looking for a specific community but not willing to put in the work to help build it. The point is the tools are there to help build the community but everyone just expects it to happen for them.

That's why it's "lazy". You just want the benefits of the community but not actually build it. At the time Twitter became popular, there was novelty to it to keep it going through the early days. Bluesky doesn't have that advantage, the novelty of this type of platform is gone, it's just expected to be a replacement right away.

And I say this because I've seen other people with actual pull, like Mark Cuban, have similar sentiments. You can drown out all the noise you don't like and help move your followers onto it. It simply needs a larger community. More people means the current majority becomes a minority.

xenospn• 7 months ago

This is basically like trying to move from Tinder to Bumble and complaining that it still sucks.

It’s the same people! What did you expect?

archagon• 7 months ago

“You know, playing this doesn’t make you cool like a real rock band.”

https://xkcd.com/359/

skybrian2• 7 months ago

I have accounts on Twitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky. I can get an okayish experience on any of them by being selective about who I follow, but they vary in how much I have to fight the software.

On Twitter, I have to fight it the most. It’s possible to get a reverse-chronological feed via search, using the realtwitter redirect. Also, once you get past the the actual replies to a post, it adds random crap, so you have to look for that and stop reading there. I expect it to get worse due to the people running it having terrible taste. (For example, Grok integration.) But there are still some accounts I like reading, so I put up with it.

I couldn’t figure out which Mastodon server to join and ended up on mastodon.social on the third try. I follow a few people I like. It’s pretty chill. I don’t put much effort into it anymore.

I like where they’re going with the Bluesky software and sometimes the people who run it are funny. I sometimes think about writing software that builds on it. Yes, the political activists are annoying, but I don’t find them all that hard to avoid. The replies to popular accounts used to be pretty bad, but they shipped an update that helped. It’s still hard to find new people worth following, but I’m slowly finding a few. There is a new “For You” feed that some guy runs on his gamer machine that is okayish, at least for the top few posts.

TiredOfLife• 7 months ago

There is a big Following tab on top of twitter. Click on that and it shows reverse-chronological feed of everybody you follow.

skybrian2• 7 months ago

Good point. But I compared the two and they’re not quite the same. The regular “Following” tab includes reposts and the one based on a search doesn’t.

I guess it depends on whether the people you follow have good taste in reposts.

dzhiurgis3• 7 months ago

Kinda impressive they managed to attract people more insufferable than reddit.

mcphage• 7 months ago

There is also little possibility for political persuasion on Bluesky, which has a user base that’s a fraction of the size of X’s, and has far fewer news influencers.

Well, yeah—that’s a big part of why I’m there instead of on Twitter. But that’s a feature, not a bug.

Zigurd• 7 months ago

Subjective kvetching about a social media platform that is totally open to analysis, without providing any numbers at all seems like a singular failure of journalism. A news site like MS Now has the resources to do that, but evidently not the editorial decision-making.

duxup2• 7 months ago

Was there a magic time in social media when you couldn't make blanket statements about "groupthink"?

Granted I'm also skeptical of that term and others. I find people will put it on anything they see that they don't like in order to discount it, such as "those people only think that because of groupthink" but you don't know those people...

Bluesky is not the good place

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