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Sick of the bots and echo chamber that X has become, I decided to visit Bluesky. Nothing serious- just a hope that the algorithm would be more curated toward centrism in a way that would prove refreshing compared to the assault on reality that X has become.
Agree with Hanania on the topic of not giving up on existing institutions, and that it is increasingly impossible to deny that X is deleterious to being anchored to earth, and wondering if perhaps Bluesky would be better?
Think again, motherfucker! For, immediately, on the front page (no account) you are assaulted with the culture war and the assumption that you've not just picked a side, but you've picked the woke side. Instead of re-anchoring and toning it down, the social media justice warriors are still out in force.
Within 10 posts, I counted 3 about trans issues, 2 about billionaires, one about gaetz, and another about hegseth. (Gabbard remains unimpeachable, it seems)
It took a bit of scrolling before actual breaks, like discussion of Disney soundtracks, or nasa space pictures, started to appear. If bluesky is to be the twitter alternative, then retreating entirely from internet social spaces is the likely path forward for those that don't wish to be swept up in the torrent.
In conclusion, for the moderates and centrists: Your signal is jammed, and only extremism will be boosted on either twitter or bluesky.
Musk is pretty much the platonic idea of a centrist, no ?
The Indians are annoying, but to me the bots are just noise. I tune it out. Big accounts are pointless, but .. echo chamber? Go somewhere outside of your immediate circle and you find entirely different people.
After carefully curating my feed and lists I pretty much never see any content I find completely distasteful and I also get a smattering of opposing views that aren't stark raving mad.
I kind of hate the site as a general rule, but it's less bad than virtually all the competing options. Facebook is boomers and slop, LinkedIn is strivers, grifters, and awkward corporate copy, Instagram is distilled narcissism. Reddit is... reddit. Twitter is, I think, the closest to the ideal of the public square where large scale discourse actually happens.
Pick your poison.
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You asserted that X is an echo chamber. What is your evidence for that?
Also why would you assume blue sky wouldn’t be an echo chamber given that the media types specifically left X in reaction to losing an election.
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How does that actually compare to Twitter at this point in time? There's no "front page (no account)" on Twitter anymore, you have to log in to do just about anything and once you're logged in, it's your personalized feed.
And I think this question goes a bit deeper than it might look. Bluesky does try to show you a representative slice of the overall community there. Sure it's probably tuned or curated or whatever, but it's clearly designed to look like it's representative. Twitter, on the other hand, takes effort to not let you know what the userbase in general is like. And it was one of the first things implemented after Elon took over.
It sure can be different. My feed is something like 90% German right now /s
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Now that Twitter is 50/50 left and right, and the left isn't allowed free hand to censor, it's an "echo chamber".
Seems like there's something being missed.
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Best case outcome = Bluesky becomes a Tumblr replacement rather a twitter replacement.
Erstwhile twitter was louder, but boring. Tumblr was where the real stuff was cooked. Autistic wokes have been homeless since Tumblr collapsed, Twitter got taken over, Reels are brain-rotten (it's great) and tiktok has normiefied.
Worst case outcome = It's turns into a threads style bot-o-calypse.
I created an account to verify what you said. Damn it's bad. I avoided politics as a point of interest. I followed we mens wear guy. Still, it was all vacuous nonsense. /r/politics tier. As of now, it's surely headed towards bot-o-calypse.
Where did all the funny liberals go? There were plenty of them on pre-Trump Reddit. Say what you want, but 4chan autistic trans degenerates were funny as fuck too. Tumblr was good shit. Surely all these furries, twinks, trans girls etc. must be around somewhere. Hell, just the wierd porn artists (very left-tumblr coded) created enough engagement for 1 social platform just on their own.
Wonder if they all just grew up, and the woke-censorship era destroyed the pipeline for new degenerates to replace them. Maybe they're deep on Tiktok somewhere.
They're on discord, if my hobby servers are anything to go by.
This. Discord is their domain.
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Turns out more than one side has the "7 zillion witches" problem.
Back when SocMeds were only taking off, and some blue-tribers of the FOSS variety were getting creeped out by the potential power megacorps could wield with control of recommendation algorithms, someone came up with the idea of letting each user customize their algorithm on each platform. Technically speaking it wouldn't be that much of a problem to implement it, but the SocMeds have no incentive to do so, so it would require government regulation. Sadly it turned out that stopping Trump / the anti-woke backlash became a higher priority than controlling corporate power. Such a shame. The "it's a private company, they can do whatever they want" crowd can now enjoy the world they created.
This is me, unironically. And yes I am enjoying the world. Though I don't take credit for creating it.
The secrets to enjoyment:
Everyone went on a weird social media bender for a few years, but I think a lot of people are waking up from the haze. The companies got to do what they wanted with their product, and they gave us the drugs so good and hard that now a bunch of us get sick at just seeing the drugs again. This is personally how I prefer to deal with additctions. I like to burn them out of my system hard and fast.
To be honest I think it’s the way most social media is set up. Unless you set up pretty hard limits on minimal content quality, you’ll quickly find that everyone is going pretty low hanging fruit of one liners and hard core factionalism. Nuance just doesn’t work in an environment where the currency is engagements. Long from content is not viral in the same way that a one line dig at outside enemies can be. Memes, gross images, crass wording, and anger are the things that nature has somehow engineered our brains to notice and spread. A long form nuanced article that steel mans the other side and treats the issue fairly is only plausible in environments where such content is a minimal expectation.
I do go on Twitter for the lols, but not much else. It’s kinda funny to snark and mock the pious Palestine-free stuff simply because I find it naive and uncritical of its own side. People who under other circumstances would oppose rape, murder, and terrorism are taking the side of people who do exactly that and celebrate it happening. The Israelis, particularly the settlers, are not completely innocent here, but after months of hearing about how this is one sided and anyone who isn’t actively opposed is evil, some part of my brain gets excited about posting a guy eating a hamburger under a tweet about McDonald’s supporting Israel. Downside being that Twitter thinks I’m Jewish or something.
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...Bluesky has exactly that: https://docs.bsky.app/docs/starter-templates/custom-feeds
Sweet! Shame they ban / remove content they don't like. It's even harder to justify all the censorship if you can make your own feed algorithm.
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When was this, specifically? Do you have any links or something to evidence this?
The idea for letting individual users customize their algorithms? It was ages ago. Early 2010's, or even late aughties. I read it on some blog. I can try to look for traces of it, but the blog might be long gone, and search engines have gotten terrible so I hope you understand this is a tall order.
On the flip side, are you actually saying this is something strange for blue-tribers of that era to recommend? What are you basing your opinion on? This was standard politics of the Stallman-Torvalds techie faction.
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