I think a more important stat is what percentage of new users in Week n has logged in again after Week n + 56 days.
Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week
101–110 of 185 posts
Re: Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is true that Elon pushed right-wing accounts algorithmically (and is one of the reasons for the exodus to Bluesky), but "no politics ever" as a neutral content moderation stance to counter that factor makes it impossible for a social network to show what's happening now in the world and will make people go elsewhere for the information gap.
No political content ever is a community growth stance and business strategy. It is the right call, by frikking far. There are a 3-4 horsemen of the apocalypse for online communities. The first two are most definitely politics and religion. If these two topics are allowed on your forum, you are pretty much done. Flame wars, harassment, brigades etc. are going to be the highest you can expect. This is going to force y…
I'd argue that the apparent toxic nature of online politics is due to the design of the platforms hosting it (including the susceptibility of those platforms to manipulation by foreign govts and billionaires). There are a few different discussion platforms (e.g., vTaiwan) which are explicitly designed to help users converge on shared solutions rather than polarize them--we could simply encourage people to use those instead.
Re: Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess I didn't define what I think the problems with Twitter are, and now I don't have time for a long message. But, in short, I think that format encourages echo chambers, shortens attention spans, and rewards bad behaviors like bullying, cheap shots, ungenerous reading, etc. None of those are directly related to bots (though maybe bots are a symptom of the same issues). Nor did they emerge with Musk. That Elon Mu…
what you need is blogs or essays. But the audience has become too small so there are fewer writers
It's not the audience, it's the monetization. Why are so many things that ought to be a blog post now a YouTube video? Because YouTube has video ads, which pay better.
And it's not just from the perspective of the creator. Lots of people would write blog posts for free, if people would read them. But then Google dumps them out of the search results in favor of YouTube videos that take ten times as long to tell you the same info, and then the bloggers stop writing because nobody is reading.
What we need is a search engine that goes back to giving people what they're looking for instead of showing what pays the search engine company more.
Re: Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never thought twitter was a failure until Musk introduced $8 “pump you to the top” blue check accounts, then that’s when the bots -really- moved in because they knew they could pump propaganda for a small fee and get far more traction than they every could by setting up bot armies that were easy to detct. Bsky will be fine as long as they try to control the bots.
Twitter had such a strong home team of people trying to monitor the network health. And they seemed committed to giving researchers and academics lots of access to understand and share how the network was working, look for disinformation & "foreign influence" campaigns. Now there's no one at the helm and all the researchers and civic interests have been given the boot. They are being threatened by ExTwitter to the tu…
You can blame the AI stuff for that. There were so many people scraping the site to do AI training that providing a free firehose API was a request for a denial of service attack.
Re: Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I hate about this statement is that "truth" has been wrapped in political ideology. The idea that carving a section of memespace out for a worldview now means that worldview owns the "truth" is batshit insane. Truth doesn't care about progressive or conservative. Truth doesn't care about left or right. Truth doesn't care . Truth just is. The problem is when people don't care to seek the truth, and instead they s…
Truth is less straightforward than might appear. More often than not, if you try to establish truth on some divisive question from first principles—honestly, without any hidden agenda of your own—you arrive at the unknown (no consensus in the field) and/or philosophical matter (out of scope of natural science) before you can blink. (Of course, that’s in addition to the fact that all science is inherently flawed and b…
> In short, not only no one “owns” the truth, but anyone who claims to actually “know” it is being delusional or misleading;
To quote a favourite song, Tim Minchin's Storm: "So I resist the urge to ask Storm whether knowledge is so loose-weave of a morning when deciding whether to leave her apartment by the front door Or the window on her second floor"
To put it another way, some truths are easier to realise than others. But most quarrels are not about truth, more about what solution we want to use for an issue.
> the solution to alienating political divisiveness is not obtaining unobtainable objective truth but finding common ground.
My concern with this is that all parties need to be finding, rather than barracking for their side. Wilful ignorance deserves no mercy in my book.
Re: Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Threads has become worse over time due to a series of anti-user policy decisions (no news/politics) and a very weird Discover algorithm that strongly incentivizes clickbait (and said feed is the default on the app and cannot be changed)
> no news/politics I kinda like the IDEA there, but no idea how you separate things like “I’m concerned about my individual rights” from politics? And usually when people say “no politics” they mean “no politics I don’t like “. Still in sympathize with the idea, I want to hear from people about what they’re doing and so forth, not a rehash of the news.
> how you separate things like “I’m concerned about my individual rights” from politics?
It's worse than that. You end up with lesbians posting about their girlfriends or small business owners posting a meme about a regulation they have to comply with and then getting blocked for politics if their tribe is the outgroup.
What you really need is for people to not be so intolerant of the other tribe being the other tribe.
Re: Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is true that Elon pushed right-wing accounts algorithmically (and is one of the reasons for the exodus to Bluesky), but "no politics ever" as a neutral content moderation stance to counter that factor makes it impossible for a social network to show what's happening now in the world and will make people go elsewhere for the information gap.
No political content ever is a community growth stance and business strategy. It is the right call, by frikking far. There are a 3-4 horsemen of the apocalypse for online communities. The first two are most definitely politics and religion. If these two topics are allowed on your forum, you are pretty much done. Flame wars, harassment, brigades etc. are going to be the highest you can expect. This is going to force y…
> Getting rid of politics, is just simply better for the product.
What you need to do is distinguish between politics and partisanship. Political discussion is not only fine but important, as long as it's civil. Partisan signaling, on the other hand, is poison, because it's flamebait and does not lead to reasoned discussion.
Re: Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess I didn't define what I think the problems with Twitter are, and now I don't have time for a long message. But, in short, I think that format encourages echo chambers, shortens attention spans, and rewards bad behaviors like bullying, cheap shots, ungenerous reading, etc. None of those are directly related to bots (though maybe bots are a symptom of the same issues). Nor did they emerge with Musk. That Elon Mu…
what you need is blogs or essays. But the audience has become too small so there are fewer writers
Substack, maybe?
Re: Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week
#109Re: Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ehhh, at this point people have been predicting the downfall of X/Twitter for so long such predictions feel a bit meaningless. Twitter was always terrible and I was hopeful Elon’s mismanagement would finally destroy it, but I think its clear that its never going anywhere.
Fidelity who invested in X have said it's worth 20% since Musk took over. So it definitely is dying. It will just take another year or two.
Musk overpaid for Twitter. That doesn't mean it's dying any faster than incumbent social media platforms do in general.
Someday Twitter will be AOL, but so will TikTok and Facebook and all the rest of them, because nothing lasts forever.
People who think it's going to die immediately are just hoping that it will, but that's generally not how it works. They die when something else replaces them, and even once the thing arrives the replacement takes quite a long time.