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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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