I was never a huge Twitter fan, but I think part of the reason I’m on Bluesky is an ideal of something more distributed. I do wish they’d figure out a way to make the platform more compelling for more people; it would probably be better for me too, I kind of want more of an echo chamber where I can have moderate views from the left and right and avoid the extreme ones, but it does feel like a lot of those extreme views edge into my feed.
The other thing about Blueskyism though, as Nate Silver mentions, is I suspect it gets people engagement. I notice MattYglesias often engages with the most poorly intentioned users, and it’s certainly on purpose. Though there are degrees I’m sure (as Nate Silver mentions, it’s probably uncomfortable being the main character) if I had to guess part of Blue Sky’s challenge is that moderates who give it a shot intentionally or unintentionally increase the types of engagement that lead to blueskyism.
I had to create a long list of block rules (like I don't care if you car blew its "transmission" or if you came from "transnistria") [1] to be able to stand Mastodon, I even blocked sci-fi writer Charlie Stross [2] because he kept saying mainstream politicians who hear "the call of the mild" like Keir Starmer were fascist. My impression is that Mastodon is getting better lately, I dunno if the obnoxious people are in despair, moved to Bluesky, came to the conclusion that it was their fault Harris lost, or if I finally blocked the last one, or if my tribe found me or if I just don't care anymore.
I share 5 photos a day and about the same number of articles similar to what I post to HN on both Mastodon and Bluesky. My feed is full of other people's photos and similar sorts of articles. I use the tools available to suppress angry people and it works -- I get mostly good engagement, maybe one hysterical angry person a month. I'm not there to pick fights the way the people who Neil lionizes do. It's their business, it's how they drive traffic to their blogs.
Where I do see the negative people is when I play the followback game where I pay attention to two variables (but don't take rigorous notes) One of them is negativity, if their bio says "#BlueCrew", anything about politics or that somebody is "diss abled" or blames their problems on somebody else I won't follow them. In sets that I look at it is typical to have somewhere between 20-60% negative people. I am noticing really poor follow-back performance from the academic science sorts of people and first thought these people were just stuck up but then noticed a lot of them posted last 1-2 months ago. So it could be they are getting too much bad engagement or not enough good engagement, it fits with the story of decline that we keep hearing about though.
I keep thinking about automating my followback spamming and that would require developing a classifier for negative people and if I did that I'd be getting good stats but between taking photos, developing photos and posting photos and Arknights I haven't gotten around to it.
[1] I don't care if it's a good thing or a bad thing, it's that people are angry about whether they are for or against it and anger is contagious.
[2] If only he kept writing books like Iron Sunrise and Singularity Sky but he broke bad the way Niven and Heinlein did in the 1970s.
You can tell a lot about any software/system by looking at which features are the most developed ones, and Bluesky has blacklisting functionality blown to almost ridiculous dimensions and seems to be proud about it. That would correspond to a very censorious user base prone to quick judgments and moral posturing.
If the distilled essence of the prior "trials by Twitter" moved to Bluesky, the atmosphere must be pretty stuffy there.
billy99k•5mo ago
When you search the same topic on Bluesky, you only get hard-left and sometimes crazy/conspiracy-based ones. This is a mix of the Demographic of people using it and the censorship of the platform.
I think most people are a bit tired of the echo chambers online and the stats show it.
techpineapple•5mo ago
Are they? The article suggests overall Twitter usage is down, what suggests a change in behavior away from echo chambers? I thought most of the evidence suggests people want more echo chambers (like Marc Andreesen opting for a Silicon Valley signal group over Twitter even)
billy99k•5mo ago
We could also mention Parler, but it was shutdown illegally by left-wing activists at Amazon.
techpineapple•5mo ago
So I wouldn’t say, “people are tired of echo chambers” I would say, “people are interested in echo chambers, but not as many as first thought”.
But of course, none of these are true echo chambers, and this is in response to Nate Silver saying that he was glad that the far left is gone from Twitter, so everyone has a different definition of their sort of spectrum of “this is a different opinion” and “this is spam”. Is “I don’t want to be in the nazi bar” and “I don’t want bad faith leftists in my social media” a substantively different argument?
But also, I dunno, I’m on blue sky and not Twitter because I don’t tend to enjoy being in the “place where it’s happening”. It’s not an echo chamber to me, just smaller, I hate obnoxious leftists too.