I am fast to follow but also fast to unfollow if a person turns out to be a dud. An example of a dud is a person who is a cybersecurity expert but almost all their posts were about their travel: which hotels treated them well, complaints about flights, etc.
Bluesky also has a notion of lists, which folks seem to use. For example someone curates a list of people active in local politics and it’s a quick way for me to plug into what local activists and politicians are talking about. Again, I found it via one person I found interesting.
The capital-A Academia that's devolved into political tribal membership signaling and decamped to Bluesky has made itself irrelevant as an engine of knowledge production or an authority on knowledge legitimacy.
The sort of person who refuses to use a social network that permits others to say things that offend him is the sort of person who's too closed minded to discover anything new.
The difference is there's no algorithmic feed pushing stuff at you and it's easy to filter or block things you personally find offensive.
So you can totally have an audience of people who like what you say, but you have no right to annoy an audience who dislikes it.
If you like being outraged all the time, then fine. Many people don't want that experience.
There is no point in creating an account there, even the Elon Haters have gone back, they keep the BSky account as a backup.
Sad, but if you want to feel the global pulse (however weak) X/Twitter is still the place.
Also X/Twitter is an insane name.
My Mastodon timeline full of interesting people says otherwise. I think you're overgeneralising some experience.
It’s still an entertaining place to find memes etc, but any use as real signal for public sentiment is long gone.
Having control over your timeline/algorithm, and the absence of engagement bait, makes it worthwhile for me to be on such a platform for the first time.
Telling Bluesky that I'm not interested in "this type of content" didn't help remove the problem. Blocking/Reporting the accounts is futile, as they are so numerous. Moderation lists for LGBT/furry content seem to be nonexistent or unlisted from public modlist sites (maybe they are considered to be "homophobic"?)
Anyway, Bluesky does't seem to be safe-for-work, so it's hardly a proper replacement for Twitter. If this is fixed, then that would be good.
My discover feed is pretty much all Scottish politics and tech.
These are non-problems for people who don’t allow them to be
I appealed but my appeal has seemingly gone into a black hole somewhere.
Can't really see a future for Bluesky outside of the niche communities that are already established there.
I'm not a Bluesky user. Twitter has exactly the same problem. I've got the NSFW setting turned off. And I've reported a lot of accounts posting unflagged NSFW content, mostly videos. And every time I get this slop reply email from them after a few minutes:
Thanks for reporting <account_name> and for using your voice to make X better for everyone. After review, we want to let you know <account_name> hasn't broken our sensitive media rule.
We allow sensitive content — like consensually produced adult content, graphic imagery and violence — in posts as long as it doesn't break our sensitive media policy.
I suspect they let these accounts slide because they value the user (or bot) engagement these accounts generate over safety/moderation.
But on Bluesky, I'm new, and I want to get a feel for what's out there, so the Discover feature has been interesting for that purpose. But using it will quickly lead to the types of content that I mentioned, and I don't think users should have to tolerate this until they find interesting accounts to follow and move on to more controlled feeds.
With that said, from the limited experience I've had with Twitter/X's algorithmic feeds, they haven't been that explicit at all. But that's my anecdote.
But of course this is a slow way to grow my network. But I like the slow linearity of the timeline this way.
Would be nice if others would report them too, because there are kids on BlueSky and they don't need to see their uncles/aunts or neighbors sticking their butt into a camera.
I'm not into comics or manga, but surely they're art?
And I mean this quite aside from the annoyance of seeing them when you don't want to. I'm not saying you should have to see them. It just doesn't seem right to imply that you shouldn't have to see them because they're not art.
Is twitter SFW? I constantly hear about "mechahitler" and all sorts of terrible bigotry, language, and dog whistles. I may be ignorant because I refuse to even go on there.
I'd rate twitter about as safe-for-work as 4chan.
my feed is made up of rust stuff, databases, system designs, tech meetups, a few founders, OSS stuff, and some companies. even the other day, i came across a post from a dev at planetscale, ben dickens, who said he's going to livestream at a scheduled time to talk about some of the database concepts he recently read in the book DDIA. i watched it, and it was fantastic.
bottom line, i would say what everyone has to say about X, based on their personal experience, are all completely correct, because it becomes (or can become) the environment you want it to be.
Mechahitler thing we a brief controversy that was turned off a while ago and the people I follow aren't getting spammed dumb questions to grok (although I find grok to be very good these days).
The attention seeking right wing accounts are annoyingly prevalent but it's entirely possibly to not see their content. Just like on old twitter which was full of radical politics. Curate your follow list.
Having a sexually provocative furry show up is not protected by the first amendment, since it appeals to prurient interest, someone passing by could argue they feel sexually harassed or find it hostile and have a much better chance at causing problems for your employer.
Maybe I've worked for some weird employers but if I was caught on twitter posting Nazi salutes I would expect raised eye-brows, but for the stated reasons, if I was caught with a furry picture on display where someone else could see it I'd expect to be immediately terminated.
Have you considered that it might not be worth it using social media at all?
"Yeah, those academics are all in a bubble together on bsky". Yes, that sounds "professionally useful", to be in a bubble with the people who work in the same field.
The paper failed both to identify the overall number of scientists using X or the cases where multiple platforms are used (most common scenario). Therefore the paper only seems biased on its best scenario or downright propaganda at its worst.
NOSTR and Mastodon should never be left out of any serious research.
But its published by Oxford, so it must be perfect.
/s
Those who are in control of Bluesky do not like free speech that is not the favorite speech of the ruling aristocracy.
Well, because they are someone else.
don't go on the rival platform and legitimize it further, IMO
High-profile brands are somewhat stuck because departing would cause a negative news cycle. Quite a few have shrunk their organic social media teams and put more resources into paid social media, which has a more directly measurable ROI.
I guess that many high-profile people are too busy with their regular work to be mindful of politics/ethics and thus they can't be bothered to switch. But maybe there are other reasons as well?
Best to just cut down the social media usage. Twitter-style social media isn't a good place to have deep and meaningful discussions of anything.
Shame though, way back before Trump/Brexit and the era of extreme tribalism, Twitter was full of interesting creative and technical stuff :(
The following feed is purely content by people you follow.
There are also other feeds like "for you" which only shows you posts liked by the people who liked the posts you liked. If you mainly interact with niche/technical/creative content and avoid politics, those feeds will trend towards avoiding politics as well.
Good riddance, I say. My Bluesky and Mastodon feeds are much nicer these days without pseudo-celebrities Pontificating About Important Things.
changes to Twitter have made the social media platform no longer professionally useful or pleasant
I think we need to be honest that - while there is some truth there - this is the view from elements of the left who were instrumental in suppressing conservative voices and generally making it an unpleasant environment for people who did not subscribe to modish cultural takes under the previous management.
The alternative view is of course that for good or ill, freedom of speech is a much higher priority now - which you would think is more in tune with scientific and rational enquiry.
None of that is mentioned in the abstract which immediately suggests caution should be taken when evaluating this study.
You're entitled to your opinion of course but it's little more than an anecdote and doesn't offer any meaningful counterpoint except, ironically, an admonition for us to 'be honest'.
When conservatives started whining that they were being silenced, what they meant was that they weren't enjoying the same sort of promotion that they get everywhere else, and that the increasingly radical (anti-immigration, anti-trans, openly racist and openly misogynist) viewpoints that began rising into acceptance in the conservative movement were (properly) shunned by society.
Bluesky has recapitulated or even surpassed peak sci twitter. The signal:noise is excellent. However, it requires some work because there is no algorithm. Aggressively unfollow people with low signal:noise, use the custom feeds that disable reposts and enable replies, use the Quiet Posters feed, and use sill.social. This has created a science feed that for me surpasses even the peak of Twitter, let alone X today which is unusable for scientific discussion.
Finally, the thing that drives me crazy is that Bluesky is literally a popular open-source, nonprofit, Ad-less, algorithm-less, truly free and partially decentralized social media network. It's what we all dreamed about in the 2010s! It's Mastodon but actually popular! But half the tech community have convinced themselves it's a "liberal bubble" (that anyone can join....) and that the website that apparently isn't a bubble is the, err, website run by a billionaire with an algorithm designed to promote certain political content that agrees with that billionaire. Absolutely bizarre situation.
I created a new account. Since I'm not following anybody, I see a random-ish feed of things.
It's kinda jarring going from a feed of tech science music to misinformation getrichquick scams and reposted viral content. Like woah.
At this point someone being a big Twitter user would be a deal breaker for joining their company.
jppope•15h ago