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A multi media push for Bluesky is happening today.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=Bluesky&iar=news&ia=news
Currently listening to BBC radio news with guests talking about "is X over?" To their credit the host is offering some criticism of the move and the possible motives.
Is X over? Is this push organic, or coordinated? Are journalists helping contribute to a more positive platform, or are they running away to a hugbox in an effort to punish Elon Musk for supporting Donald Trump?
I don't have much to say but I thought this was worth a post given these platforms' centrality to the internet culture war and its synergies with journalism. For my part I've always thought Twitter was shit, is shit, and will remain shit, and the same goes for any copycats adopting the same format. I lament the drop off of RSS, which suffered from terrible branding/awareness. I didn't understand the value of RSS until it was already in decline, dismissing it as just more icon clutter below a standard format blogpost next to Facebook, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us and send-to-email share links.
Twitter's rise began with journalists hailing it as the beginning of "citizen journalism", plateaued with it becoming a journalism circlejerk of mutual citationogenics they could profitably mine for clickbait from the comfort of their pillows with no need to undertake difficult tasks like research and real world reportage, and is now being abandoned as those same citizen journalists have increasingly turned against the professional journalist class who lauded them. Reap what you sow, Frankenstein's monster, the student has become the master, etc...
Is it a coincidence this is happening on a Friday night? Sunday night is the typical slot for setting a news agenda for the week, but something like Bluesky might be more suited to a weekend when people would be settling down to a relaxing night of shitposting.
This, AOC and others testing the waters for dropping trans issues, and the sale of InfoWars to Jeff Lawson and Ben Collin's Global Tetrahedron makes me think James Carville is back in the seat and the 2026 DNC playbook has dropped.
The Onion is playing up the sabotage of a (sort of) right-wing cultural institution to pacify the base, but really what they're after is the subscriber database which is filled with the contact info for an ethnically diverse group of men without college degrees demonstrably susceptible to tenuously plausible messaging.
I expect once the sale is completed there will be a hardcore attempt to astroturf a whole new podcast market, probably sometime next year, likely officially divorced from any current media stakeholders. I honestly don't know what hay if any they'll be able to make from it unless Trump's term is tangibly a shitshow for men. I think about the centrist and right-wing dissident podcast circuit and I can't currently conceive how they could both appeal to working class men (specifically Latino and whites) and also lead them to vote blue in 2026. Neo-Bernie bro? Blue Mike Rowe? Pro-establishment Jimmy Dore? Maybe all they can do is try to spread FUD about Trump and try to keep them home in 2026.
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Personally I consider this to be a good thing. I'd say X is still balanced more towards the left than the right and these people leaving are the most extreme examples and basically incorrigible. They have twisted themselves into becoming beings that are not capable of producing more light than heat and so are a negative to have around. To use one of the left's own phrases: "the trash is taking itself out".
I disagree, the whole reason they need an echo chamber is because their level of twisting is unsustainable otherwise. Pretty sure if they couldn't retreat, they'd have to become more reasonable.
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If bluesky becomes an explicitly liberal place then they might have pulled the biggest self own ever even though they don't know it yet. Because it will become a race to the bottom of the political discourse like nobody has ever seen. I've never used bluesky but going to the bsky.app homepage over 1/3 of the posts are anti-trump posts.
Of course the big sites like Twitter, Reddit, Insta, etc. all have their own political lean, but being the biggest and "default" destination for new people to check out means there will be enough "normal" content to keep the place going. But "Twitter except for Trump haters" is going to get about as much adoption as truth social. That's not to say that Twitter can't be supplanted, but it's not going to be by an app that's basically the same with a few tweaks.
I'm definitely thinking about this classic banger. Of course, before he goes into the dynamics of how leaving has a good chance of going poorly, he basically makes a case that conservatives were probably right that "mainstream" "neutral" institutions actually were biased against them. This leads me to wonder, as someone who does not have a Twitter account, what is the steelman of the liberal claim that Twitter has now become actually biased against them?
The only case I can see is a relative one - people opposed to liberal views aren't banned as much anymore, and that's a disadvantage compared to what they have. Also, since Musk sided with the Red Tribe, he regularly makes politically inconvenient news / memes go viral, which didn't use to happen when he was more neutral. I have seen no claim that blues are getting banned or throttled more than reds. The only possible exception would be stuff that targets Elon directly - there was some guy tracking the movement of his private jet that got banned, but I think it got resolved due to the controversy it caused.
"When one is accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression."
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I haven't noticed an algorithmic bias against liberals in Musk's Twitter, but the suspects themselves seem more upset not about Musk restricting them, but about lack of such restriction on the vendors of "hate speech" and "misinformation"
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It certainly reminds me of far right influencers self deporting from YouTube to Bitchute. Except for the far righties it was jumping before they were pushed. For the far lefties, its just seeking out an echo chamber because (in my opinion) many of their views can't survive in an open marketplace of ideas.
The election was a wakeup call of the importance of new media in shaping political discourse for the masses. This migration seems to be 'just build your own banking system' in effect. We'll see if it works out or if it ends up awkward like Trump being the only one posting on Truth Social.
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Hm, if it is coordinated, that's close to what I foresaw as the best Twitter-killing strategy two years ago:
But I don't think that's exactly what's going on here, nor do I think it would work so well at this point. For one, I doubt there's such an overt use of some Social Pressure Power Word as I was saying then ("AI" has negative valence but nowhere near the power of "racist.") For two, doing so in the aftermath of a lost election is making this push from a position of weakness rather than strength: the ability to dictate What's Popular has clearly had its limits shown a week ago. For three-
-That sort of social-pressure campaign (if I dare sound this optimistic) may be running out of juice, compared to before. In fact, looking at the election turnout, at how the shift from 2020 wasn't so much Trump gaining voters as the Democrats losing voters, I'd even say this sort of "appeal to shunning/banning" is past the point of diminishing returns.
The point of these exclusionary tactics - claims that it's just individuals "looking out for their own mental health" aside - is to get dissidents to conform by threatening their social lives/family ties/career prospects/etc. unless they do conform. After all, what's the worth of this one little issue [whatever it is that's at hand] compared to your relationship? But - one - if you make your first ultimatum, you're not offering the tradeoff you think you are: the choice isn't between their relationship with you versus the one little issue, it's their relationship with you versus the one little issue plus everything else an ultimatum-giver may threaten in the future. (Perhaps the hope is that they'll just give in every time due to sunk-cost thinking.) And - two - the more you actually shun people, the smaller you make your circle of friends and the larger you make your circle of enemies. Cutting off family members or banning social media posters doesn't actually stop them from voting; out of sight is not out of existence.
In short, I think that shunning is a tactic poorly-suited to building a bigger coalition or increasing turnout, which is what the Democrats seem to need. I could always be wrong, but oh boy I sure don't want to be this time.
Indeed, which is why I expect that some of these people, when they realize it doesn't stop people who disagree with them from voting, to start looking for mechanisms that will.
Hmm. I can believe (indeed, expect) random wackos to look to murdery solutions, as random wackos are wont to do, and I can believe that The Left as a whole may move in favor of things that The Right will call voter suppression, but I don't see the product of severity times popularity getting very high. I don't see it from here, at least.
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As a relatively long-term user of Substack and Substack's Notes platform, it seems like the better X refugee camp from what's available, at least as far as vibrant public square goes. There has certainly been an uptick in doofuses and bad takes but, in my experience, it's easy to ignore them (Mute) or blast them out of your feed (Block). It serves my needs and I like it in conjunction with The Motte for general information and sense-making.
My knowledge of Bluesky is that's where all the anti-comicsgate (I think that's the side of the lefties/femenists) people ended up after everyone kept bashing their rotten takes, doxing and general whisper-network activity. They are definitely hidden behind a firewall now, but I can't tell if that made them more or less powerful. Whatever they did to Ed Piskor seems to have been coordinated there and it was enough to drive the man to suicide. Anyway, take a look at Heather Antos, Gail Simone, Mark Waid and Alex Di Campi and let me know what you see. If it's not true and these folks are monsters organizing industry hits on people, that would be good information to know.
That's because Substack is an actual improvement, whereas Bluesky is just a straight up re-implementation. And straight re-implementations are big fat losers in the marketplace of platforms; ask any gun Breadtuber, Matrix fan, Mastodon user, or 4chan splinter group about that.
Something big has to happen for other platforms to rise- Pawoo and Gab are the largest Mastodon (Twitter reimplementation) instances simply because they host stuff you couldn't post on Twitter. And the thing about "decentralization" is that it's just another word for "make sure Apple/Google can't ban the clients off of the phones, since that's where 99% of our userbase is browsing from at any given time".
The only exception to that rule is Reddit, where Digg had it all then blew it up with a redesign and other bullshit- but that was also 15 years ago and before the rise of the smartphone and corresponding App Store-beholden lock-in.
Did any of the guntube alternatives survive? I figured if any alt platform had a draw, "watch machine guns shooting and learn how to finish 80% lowers" would be an easy sell. Maybe people are just that lazy.
Aside from perhaps BitchUte and this most recent attempt they have not survived.
The problem is that the restrictions on YouTube still aren't onerous enough to drive channels off it completely. I like the latter because it's an easy Patreon-replacement bundle (and the only two gun channels that aren't "blow up teh watermelon"-tier that post regularly, that being ForgottenWeapons and 9-Hole Reviews, live there; Paul Harrell used to be that way too before he died of what was clearly YouTube comment-related cancer), and there's only so much magdumping MG footage you can watch before it just becomes uninteresting (and 80% guns are also pretty easy to do just by following the instructions).
I think the problem is that the people who are actually doing interesting/envelope-pushing things with guns tend to be off the beaten path and to a large extent would like to keep it that way.
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I'd been noticing some high profile Twitter account deletions the past few days, but I hadn't thought of it as coordinated. Your note about what you heard on the BBC makes me think that there could be a coordinated push, and it all reminds me of the mainstream narrative about a week or two after Harris won the nomination, when we were deluged with talk about how everything suddenly felt different and hopeful, that there was a real sense of on-the-ground excitement about her candidacy, along with a sense of solidarity among all the Democrats falling in line now that their candidate was decided. It was a pretty transparent attempt at bootstrapping electoral momentum and excitement, and it fizzled out as expected within a few weeks, and the election, of course, proved beyond any doubt that it was completely made up.
There have been many pushes to get off of Twitter before, even before Musk's purchase of it, and this looks like just the latest. To be fair, I do think the Twitter boycotts have been more serious post-Musk, but following this election which proved that a majority of American voters preferred Trump over Harris, manufacturing some sort of popular notion that people are fed up with the disinformation and rightwing hate or whatever on Twitter, or that they just dislike Musk, isn't likely to gain much traction.
I do worry that this push will push a few more leftist figures to more echo chambers, but at the same time, this creates an opportunity for the less extreme leftist figures to use Twitter to engage and build something sane that can appeal to the mainstream crowd that uses Twitter.
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They tried this when Musk first bought Twitter with Facebook-backed Threads. It didn't work out, mostly because the people just weren't there. Network effects are very powerful. I haven't heard anything from it since.
Truth Social, Gab, Mastodon and the like are also-rans. I suspect Blue Sky will be the same.
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I joined Bluesky yesterday out of curiosity. I haven’t stopped using Twitter, nor am I planning to at this time, but I’ll be posting on Bluesky, whereas I pretty much exclusively lurk on Twitter. Bluesky seems to be trying to optimize for a more amiable, relaxed experience, and hopefully the lack of chuds brigading people’s posts to call them Jewish faggots will contribute to that goal.
I have become acutely aware of my own radicalization as of late, and honestly I think it would be beneficial for me - both socially and intellectually - to reacclimate myself with intelligent libs, and to attempt honest and mutually-open-minded dialogue with them. I can do that here on The Motte, but the extreme selection effects and barriers to entry here mean that I’m not getting a lot of exposure to what actually-existing normie liberals and left-centrists are saying amongst themselves. I’ve already followed some arts- and gaming-related content creators on Bluesky, and my hope is that it will not just turn into a rebirth of pre-Elon Twitter where all of my favorite celebrities churn out 24/7 liberal outrage-posting.
That being said, on my very first day on Bluesky, some random rotund they/them woman apparently found my inaugural post briefly explaining why I voted for Trump, and the following exchange occurred:
So yes, some libs are very obviously planning for Bluesky to be a progressive hugbox where the left gets to regain complete ironclad control of the discourse, including leftists just being able to straight-up fedpost at people, in a way they’d never want RWers to get away with.
That said, I’m going to try and stick it out and see what I can contribute to conversations. If this exhange had happened on Twitter, as soon as she made her comment about “we can carry as well” I would have just made a mean-spirited joke about how I feel bad for the poor schmucks who have to try and carry her. I’m trying to be on my best behavior on Bluesky, though, and to use it as though Twitter had Motte-level expectations of charity and genteel discourse. Basically trying to recreate the vibe of in-person SSC/rationalist meet-ups back when I used to attend them, but with the added wrinkle that at least some moderately important content creators and companies are also there.
The way they often jump to "eradicating my existence" always makes me feel like "woke mind virus" is more than just a metaphor. I always want to say "but I don't want to kill anyone", and then I realize that it's not the host speaking but the virus. Of course the virus is scared of herd immunity.
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Do you know what happens when you go on /pol/ and make a sincere and relatively novel argument in favour of the Holocaust being real? (That it is absolutely not difficult for a Germany that killed 20 million armed Soviets and conquered Europe to wipe out a few million mostly unarmed Jews, that even poorly organized states like Pakistan or the Ottoman Empire can pull off genocide, plus Nazi Germany certainly had the motivation and will to do it). I can tell you.
People accuse you of being a bad-faith actor because everyone knows that /pol/ is a 'It didn't happen but it should've' board. Few are interested in debate. It's a partisan environment. And there are many paid employees pushing various angles. Bluesky is the same. Reddit is, for the most part, the same.
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Your interlocutor really has a hilarious profile and photo, truly beyond parody. I sometimes wonder how people that seem to perfectly conform to every aspect of a certain stereotype mentally cope with it. "Disabled", they/them, "brat", asexual panromantic, Jewish, cat lady that enjoys "riding on public transit"
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Given the Venn diagram between the most progressive and most pro-Hamas is almost a circle, you'll get this on Bluesky, except it will be people calling you Zionist cishets.
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If you wish to avoid radicalization, wouldn't it be best to stay away from social media entirely? Or you can think for yourself like I do (this will likely put you out of sync with most people, but you will have a sane view on things)
By the way, that person clearly had nothing of value to offer you. She's some brand of mentally unwell (I'd say stupid, but she seems lucid and I don't notice any typos). There may be people worth interacting with on that site, but I think it's a bit cruel to yourself to interact with somebody that you know will waste your time and treat you badly, and giving them the benefit of doubt.
I've only seen Bluesky on Japanese Twitter so far, so I thought it was Japanese, in which case it would be somewhat safe from a political takeover. But now that I Google it, it seems like it's American. I'd recommend you don't get too attached to the site (in other words, mentally tag your account as throwaway so that leaving or getting banned won't affect you too badly in the future)
I mean my radicalization has already taken place, and my goal is to try and wrench myself a bit back in the direction of being able to intellectually interface with the normal, left-of-center people in my immediate social scene.
Although many of my specific beliefs and policy positions are very right-wing (for at least some value of what that term means) I’m still dispositionally an effete urban lib-brained aesthete. My natural coalition is other city-dwelling academic types, who want to live in clean and orderly and fairly sterile large cities; I’m not going to reinvent myself as a salt-of-the-earth red-blooded American who Works With His Hands™️.
My current strategy of just keeping my mouth shut about politics and letting people assume I’m a standard-issue lib is only tenable as long as I commit to a sort of detached insincerity; I’d prefer to return to a time when I could just be honest and intimate with close friends, even about controversial subjects. Part of that might be aided by a general “vibe shift” in the culture which will pull those people away from some of their more extreme stances, but I’m not holding my breath for that. In the meantime I want to try and find ways to present my own ideas to people in a way that doesn’t just immediately trigger their enemy detection alarms. Maybe posting on Bluesky, which has an old-school Twitter-style character limit, will help me succinctly defend my views in a way that doesn’t require massive amounts of careful elaboration.
So, yes, it’s very obvious that I have nothing to gain from this person, and that I can run circles around her intellectually. However, that interaction did provide me with an opportunity to occupy the role of “reasonable person reacting with bemused concern at the extreme rhetoric of my interlocutor” - a position which I’m normally on the reverse end of in lib-majority spaces. My hope is that the vibe shift can be helped along by people like me showing up in such spaces, proving we don’t have horns, and making a common-sense case against the more radically stupid positions that the “smart center” might be ready to jettison. Having such an easy and clearly-delusional foil in this scenario was helpful for me!
Believe me, anything I post under the “Hoffmeister25” brand is inherently disposable; I’m prepared to have my social media accounts nuked from on high at any time, and Bluesky is certainly no exception.
How sane is bluesky? Because I imagine interacting with far-out people wouldn't be great for depolarization. I'd think the best place would be moderate lefties, perhaps?
I’m still getting a feel for it, but to be honest early observations are very concerning. A lot of academics just spouting extremely simplistic leftist takes. I’m trying to see how my pushback is received. I’m sure I’ll have more observations later.
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I see. I personally wouldn't hang out with a crowd that I could identify by their political leaning. I'm personally extremely high in openness and pro-freedom, but against degeneracy and weakmindedness, so I don't fit on any political spectrum in existence.
But I think you can find more agreement on up-stream issues than on particular issues. I remember telling somebody that sending money to troubled migrants living in their own country is way more cost-effective than helping them in our country. This position is both "anti-immigration" and "pro-helping poor people far away". You can usually spin your own opinion in a way which favors both sides or the person you're talking to.
I think not talking about politics is good for the most part (it tends to be far-away issues), but some issues will affect you personally, and it's your right to comment on that, or to make jokes and such. The facts shouldn't be controversial, for instance "Food is getting expensive lately". I don't think you necessarily need to say the reasons and solutions out loud.
I interact with about 10% of people, and sort away 90%. This still leaves enough people that I don't isolate myself. I'm not sure what balance you're comfortable with personally?
"He who fights with monsters..." Be careful that you don't attempt to change something, only to have it change you instead. Dumb and unreasonable people are innumerable, I genuinely don't think fighting evil is viable. I also think that being pro(good thing) is better than being anti(bad thing), because of how negation works psychologically (the mathematical negation is mechanically different). Also, fighting something legitimizes it in a sense, and makes it more popular. Ignoring things, and rejecting them is likely more effective. For an example of rejecting, I mean that the statement "I hate my boss" legitimizes your bosses position, whereas "Who made him the boss?" attacks it. If we hate "the elite", then we collectively agree that they're elites, which is precisely what makes them elites (as reality is largely based on agreement). I should probably make a post on this some time.
I see! That's likely easier on the psyche
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I just... don't have high hopes for this. Maybe some people on Bluesky would be shifted by it. But I think it's far more likely you'll just end up banned, or ostracized, or ignored.
I'd come away from such a discussion feeling terrible, like I'd poked some bear or strange
manwoman. Not because I think these people have any concrete way to harm me, but simply because I find debating things with mean-spirited people to be upsetting, a net-negative for me even if I were to be anointed by God as angels sing and get a call from the President of the United States congratulating me on my great debating skills while everybody claps. If it strengthens you, that's great. I guess it's just a personality difference.To be clear, I don’t have particularly high hopes either! I’m nowhere near as bullish on this supposed “vibe shift” as many people are, and I obviously have no hope of reaching people like my unfortunate-looking interlocutor in that thread. I highly doubt I’m going to be banned, though; I’ve managed to avoid ever catching a ban of any sort here, where the expectations for conduct are substantially higher than those on Bluesky from what I can tell. Bluesky does have a very robust blocking mechanic, though, including large blocklists, so I won’t be surprised to be comprehensively shut out by a large number of accounts. I’m starting small and keeping my ambitions limited.
If these were people I actually knew in real life, I would feel the same way. During those heady years between 2016 and 2020 when the progs were fully activated and on the ascendancy, the sorts of arguments I had on Facebook - and this is long before my views became as extreme as they are now - and the subsequent hemorrhaging of real-life friendships that were important to me, were extremely hurtful and dispiriting.
When it’s just some dumb bull-dyke with a shitty hat and a parody-level bio, though, I come out of it feeling smug and victorious. I’m not on Bluesky to “trigger the libs” or “guzzle liberal tears” or anything like that - I’m hoping to try and cultivate at least a few positive relationships - but I also have zero concern about having weird losers like that woman say powerlessly aggressive things to me.
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I don’t think that you actually can get away from social media entirely. But more to the point, I think beyond a certain level, interactions with media in general is probably not good for you simply because you’re interacting with news and opinions of other people all the time and thus imbibing the thoughts and opinions and agendas of other people all the time.
For most purposes, I think getting your news once a day in less than half an hour is really the maximum I’d recommend. And as far as social media, again, doing less is better. The thing is, that back in the dinosaur ages before 24 hour news cycles and social media, people didn’t obsess about politics. Sure if you wanted you could listen to Rush Limbaugh in your car for an hour a day. And because of that politics wasn’t seen as a major part of anyone’s life and thus it didn’t “trigger” people. There was no wailing and gnashing of teeth when Reagan won in 1980. Hell, I don’t think most people cared all that much about Nixon. Watergate was seen as a bad thing, but people hadn’t yet turned politics into a lifestyle so Nixon was important, sure, but people were more interested in watching MASH or sports or playing with the kids or whatever else was going on.
I personally think even politics themselves would vastly improve if people weren’t interested in it. Compromise and doing the job aren’t sexy parts of politics, but they’re why things actually get done. It can’t happen when everyone is watching all the time and commenting and so on. The best way for almost any government to run is in semi darkness where backroom dealing and horse trading can happen, and where people can make decisions for the good of the country without the proles interfering. Name any issue and I guarantee that it’s possible to come to a solution that would work, but that the general public would see as betrayal.
You probably can't escape social media easily, but you can escape politics. Which, by the way, feels fantastic and like being back in the past.
I think that news and media is psychologically unhealthy. If anything is important enough, you will hear of it anyway. If you really want to watch news, I suppose there's these "neutral, all-sides, unbiased" news sites, but I trust them about as much as I trust "debunkers" and "fact-checkers", which are 1984 ministry of truth levels of insanity to me. I cannot take authorities on truth seriously, it's a dumb concept in a way which one cannot help but notice if they think about it a little.
And I agree, it's like taking something too seriously hinders ones ability to think about it clearly.
I think it’s possible to curtail must social media, unless you are in some way using it for business. And I’m not really saying “get rid of it, don’t use it” about any news outlet or social media platform. I’m suggesting as far as any media goes, try to keep it between the parameters of what would have been possible before the era of phones in the pocket. Which would have been something like a half hour to an hour of news a day (or one daily newspaper). And for social media, unless you’re self employed and using social media for business (and in that case, then stick to talking about business) then, again, an hour or two a day is plenty to know enough of what’s happening in that sphere to keep you mostly caught up. Beyond that, there’s really no need.
Neutral news is impossible. Every news source has at least some bias. On the other hand, if you stick to a source or two you know well. It should be a known bias that you can adjust for. USA Today leans liberal. We know this. So you can adjust for it. Daily Wire is conservative, and again, you can adjust to it. But the alternative of connecting directly to a firehouse for information is just going to take the news and blow it out of proportion to its actual importance. Trump is picking a cabinet right now. It’s not that important to most people. Spending four hours a day reading about it obsessively even though the6 might not even get confirmed is not helping anyone.
I see. I suppose that's just my own view, then. Sure, you can reduce your media consumption to what it was in the past, such that you get what used to be a healthy and even useful level of information. However, I do not believe that a low amount is healthy nor useful anymore. Media is not trustworthy anymore, it's not honest, it does not cover issues that I consider to be important, it does not transmit information in a useful manner. I think it has gotten so bad that it's literally worse than nothing. What you say about being able to adjust for bias, is true. But any work we consume will rub off on us, it will change how we think, how we use language, what we focus on, and how we view the world. Social movements are nonsense (their success is only possible when they're not needed. Feminism can only succeed in socities which discriminate against men. If a movement gets public support, then the public cannot also be against that movement, it's a contradition) This is true for countless of issues. How are people not noticing that nothing makes any sense? Have you never read an old book written by somebody actually intelligent, and felt yourself slowly waking up and regaining the ability to think? So that once you return to the garbage you consumed previously, you immediately see through everything wrong with it? We're tricked into entertaining wrong questions, and focusing on issues which don't exist. We try to win arguments, but don't even notice that the very definitions and oppositions are flawed.
Neutral news is only impossible for us, the consumers. It's not that they couldn't just report facts if they wanted to, for them it would be easy. But it's not where the money is, and it seems like everything just flows in the direction of money now, and that individual people have very little control over anything. Like money is a force of nature. It also feels like "quality" is losing to "quantity" more and more in ROI. Something kept this at bay in the past, probably taste and high standards
The first question is how trustworthy it ever was. I’m not convinced it’s worse now than it was, in fact the sheer diversity of sources available does a pretty good job of keeping the press honest because if the majority of the news slants left, it’s now trivially easy to start one that corrects the bias. And once you add in press from other countries to the mix, we probably have news at least as accurate as any other point in history.
But second, the point is to consume less news, and perhaps be more choosy about it. Because at the end of the day, outside of very prominent elites, our actual influence over events is minimal and more than likely counterproductive. It’s not necessary to follow news to the point of insanity (there have already been two murders attributed to the victory of Donald Trump and his effect on liberals’ minds) if the best you can hope for is to maybe sometimes getting a jolt of dopamine because some conservative stuck it to a liberal (or vice versa). The juice isn’t worth the squeeze, especially as it gets harder and harder to tell the difference between outright propaganda designed to make you hate an out group and news that just so happens to make the ourgroup look bad. Why is it necessary to be reading hours of news? Does it help you live better? From r my money, I just scan the headlines of Google News, and while I’m sure I’m not super informed, I’m not missing anything much. I’m also in a much more sane headspace than the people drinking from the information firehouse and placing more importance on a given news story than it actually deserves.
I’ll make exceptions if the issue n question affects me, someone I actually care about, or is a cause I’m involved in. But 99% of the news isn’t that at all. It’s international news that doesn’t affect me and that I can’t do anything about. It’s court intrigues that are entertaining but not important. Or sometimes it’s important stuff. The important stuff you’ll definitely hear about one way or another. People will talk about it,
I generally agree with everything you wrote, but I wouldn't limit myself to just trustworthiness. I think there's a sort of "brainrot" quality to modern news which is independent of truthfulness. A lot of articles are "watch this silly video" or "guy does whacky thing". That's news exploiting other psychological needs, which is a bad direction to go in, because you end up with people optimizing only for the thing which triggers rewards in the brain, without the substance. Instead of news which are also interesting, we're getting interesting things which aren't news. This is like selling lootboxes without the videogames, or sugar without the food, or fanservice without the story.
By the way, I seem to remember journalists being people who put their lives on the line in order to fight against corruption (that it was almost an admirable job to have). It seems like the news are now owned by those who are corrupt, though, causing a disconnect with the average viewer. One of the causes is that the scope (size/range) of news media is too big. Decentralized news for every local area is superior to everyone reading the exact same set of global news. And to large companies, we're just numbers on a spreadsheet, so the human element is lost. This is a another kind of disconnect, and honest news alone cannot make up for it (objectivity and empathy are different after all) Anyway, a small sphere of concern is essential to psychological health, most of the mental health problems lately can be attributed to people who worry about far-away things while neglecting what's near to them (like themselves and their family, factors which are actually within their ability to influence or control).
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Your description of this poster makes her fed posting sound more humorous than threatening.
Oh absolutely, I found it hilarious.
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That back-and-forth is exactly what I would expect from Bluesky. I've know about Bluesky for a bit because it's where the comic-book whisper network went after they were infiltrated on Facebook. As I understand it, the reason people like Bluesky is they can protect their groups and conversations from the public and it's a hard-left space.
As for the death of X, yes and it couldn't have happened to a nicer social-media platform. I've been using Substack for years now and the Notes app fully satisfies all of my social media needs. I have an impression it's pretty mixed as many of the biggest accounts are leftists (Robert Reich, Michael Moore, Heather Cox Richardson) but the majority of what I see seems to be centrist/right-leaning. It's full to the brim of renegade journalists, for instance everyone from the Intercept is there (though Glenn Greenwald already broke for Locals), Taibbi, Scott, FdB, etc. My experience is the debate is much more robust and diverse than anything I saw on X, Reddit, Facebook, etc. and the radicals simply get filtered out because they don't offer any insight.
It's possible it is just as easy to fall into an ideological well as anywhere else but even the crap (ahem, Michael Moore) is better written and more thoughtful than most places. I think it must be better than I imagine Bluesky to be, but I wouldn't even consider Bluesky unless I was specifically trying to own libs with their bad takes.
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Trying to encourage the wider internet to apply SSC-style charity and moderation is an impossible battle, but maybe you can cultivate a little garden there.
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One of the reasons given is that X's new terms of service kick in today. There was already a minor media dust up about this a couple weeks ago.
That's not to say that the exodus is actually primarily due to concerns about AI scraping or that it isn't coordinated, just that's likely why you're hearing a lot about it today.
What's the difference to old? What do they mean in practise?
Here is X's summary of the changes
In addition to the court change that IGI-111 mentioned, the other concern is in regards to rights to content posted on X (section 3).
Yesterday's TOS
Today's TOS
The section I am seeing the most complaints about, bolding is mine:
Once again, stated reasons. A lot of the folks I'm seeing talking exodus now have also talked exodus 2 or 3 other times, so clearly they have other reasons in addition to the TOS changes, but the TOS changes are the reason that this is specifically happening today as opposed to yesterday or tomorrow.
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The main one I've seen complaints about is that disputes are to be adjudicated in Texan rather than Californian courts.
The implications to political actors should be obvious.
It doesn’t seem that relevant because Texas courts don’t smile on political-y lawsuits. We’re not at California-level weaponization of the justice system.
The issue isn't Texas state courts, it is specific federal judges in the Northern District of Texas, plus the fact that the Northern District of Texas makes it possible for plaintiffs to choose their judge depending on which courthouse in the district they file in.
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Hopefully the real implication is that Elon knows there will be an offensive launched against CA-based social media companies under Pruneyard
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Which one has more normie fun shit? I'm not even sure I know what normie fun shit is any more, but I'm thinking along the lines of TikTok and Reels. My impression is that Twitter will feed some level of that type of content up. Does or will Bluesky ? Or is Bluesky just going to be leftie culture war text and memes? How about softcore porn?
With the ubiquity of leftism among journalists doesn't seem like there's probably much separation.
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It's coordinated. Chances of turning into echo chamber > 90%. Normies there - maybe.
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Yes, it's coordinated. I don't know if "hugbox" is necessarily what they're aiming for, but they want algorithmic control over information.
Earlier today I mentioned that the election knocked the wind out of the Blues, and this is actually one of the things I had in mind, counter-intuitive as it may sound. I think that until now they were holding out hope that with their people in the admin, they can crack down on Elon and take back control over Twitter. A retreat to Bluesky feels more like a form of resignation, they can't punish Elon, so they have to start from scratch.
Is X over? Rumble, Parler, Locals, and 7 zillion SocMed alternatives will tell you it's an uphill battle to get people off a platform that everyone else is using. Of course Bluesky has the advantage of benefiting from these kind of coordinated pushes to get all major and minor celebrities off it, but I don't know if this will accomplish more than something like the Great Sort, because I don't see a good reason to follow them in the first place. Hollywood / the music industry / AAA gamedev are all dead. What will I be missing out on if they switch over to Bluesky?
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