Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 185 posts

Re: Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week

#111

Post by bradgessler »

A few things I like about BlueSky:

1. Your username can be your domain name. I’m @bradgessler.com, which means I can build more “equity” in my domain than I can on other platforms. It’s also really great for brands or open source projects that have their own website.

2. Lots of technical folks have come over from Twitter and the signal to noise ratio is much better. There’s less weird random videos, less people screaming past each other, less porn bots.

3. When I share a link on Bluesky, it doesn’t get penalized.

4. It’s a global namespace so I don’t have to worry about what server people are on that I want to follow. I struggled with this on Mastodon.

5. The UI is as good as Twitter. There’s been a few times now where I forget what network I’m using by just looking at the app.

6. Starter packs are handy to bring folks from your communities over. I created one for Ruby devs at https://go.bsky.app/HXB2cPh and one for companies built on Ruby at https://go.bsky.app/JQyXa2u

I fully expect Bluesky to become completely enshitified over time, but I think it’s going to have a pretty good run for a while. They’re doing a lot of things right and it has fun early Twitter vibes, but without the fail whale.

Re: Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week

#112

Post by esperent »

threeseed wrote: post #57
forgotoldacc wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Threads only fed me straight up celebrity posts, despite having absolutely zero interest in that, when I signed up back when it was new. I can't imagine how much worse it is now.

So by default it will show you popular accounts which is unsurprisingly celebrities. But you just need to not engage with them and follow the people and topics you are interested in. Once you do the algorithm is TikTok style in its sensitivity i.e. very.

I strongly disagree that if I, a European living in Asia, make a new social networking account it should assume that the things I'm interested in are American celebrities. Which is what happened on Threads. That's a dumb design decision that made me bounce out immediately.

A simple, privacy preserving solution: ask me! When I sign up, offer broad categories like art, tech, sports, celebrities etc. don't put everyone into one "probably likes celebrity gossip" box on signup.

But it's even worse than that. I already have an Instagram account! They know there that I like art, tech, webcomics, music. I know that's all shared with Threads even if I'd rather it wasn't. But my feed is still filled with celeb trash.

Re: Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week

#113

Post by threeseed »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #110
threeseed wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thin…

Fidelity has downgraded X by 80% in 2.5 years.

And X has competitors in Bluesky and Threads both of which have seen record user numbers and growth. For example, Threads has grown to 275m MAU in 1.5 years.

There is no reality in which X should be remotely compared to any of the other major social media platforms. It is failing at an unprecedented rate and based on user growth in Bluesky/Threads is continuing to rapidly decline.

Re: Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week

#114

Post by cloverich »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #106
duxup wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 trib…

But what do you do when intolerance is the thing you're being asked to be tolerant of?

Re: Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week

#115

Post by the_third_wave »

With so many disgruntled "democrat" supporters moving from X to BS the question is what will keep BS from ending up like the same echo chamber Twitter was before it was forcibly opened up to the deplorables, garbage, irredeemables and other *-phobes and *-ists. Does the platform have a way to keep the window of allowed discourse open to all or will this simply end up recreating Twitter, warts and all?

Re: Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week

#116

Post by sofixa »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #103
android521 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> 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.

I disagree with this take. I hate learning by video unless it's for physical stuff where seeing it is useful (e.g. how to wire something), and thus I always prefer text content when searching for information (due to the higher flexibility in moving at my own pace instead of the narrator's).

I've never had issues with Google pushing videos too much in search results. You have an initial "videos" results block I just scroll past by, and that's that.

The much bigger issue is the narrowing attention span of people. Thanks to social media, like Twitter, but also Stories, Shorts, Snaps, Reels, TikTok, etc. people's attention span is going down. Many people would prefer watching 10 tiktoks instead of spending 10 minutes reading a blog post.

Re: Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week

#117

Post by pixxel »

shubhamjain wrote: post #14

It's beyond words how much Elon Musk has wrecked Twitter. But, I am not ready join another echo chamber that mirrors the same flaws from the other side of the spectrum. My initial impression of BlueSky is just that. Twitter's greatest flaw—no, I won’t call it "X"—is its obsession with engagement to promote tweets. This creates the worst feed you can think of: - People ask the dumbest questions, just to bait responses…

[flagged]

Re: Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week

#118

Post by 112233 »

owlninja wrote: post #6
adzm wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, it's a really fun community. I hope it lasts

The only thing keeping me around as someone who never comments or tweets, is that there are some great local accounts (to me) like weather, police, news, concerts, etc... Any chance these move over? I'm not looking for some great community, I just enjoy timely posts I guess.

Please share once you find out! In $EUROPEAN_CAPITAL here it seems local govt. runs on twitter and facebook. Since I got banned from twitter for following those during covid (with no posts or likes made) I kinda wish there was a rss feed or mailing list for information posted by official institutions.

bsky would do.

Re: Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week

#120

Post by sph »

cloverich wrote: post #114
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 trib…

But what do you do when intolerance is the thing you're being asked to be tolerant of?

Tolerance indeed means tolerating the intolerant as well, otherwise it's just another name for intolerance. It's clear we completely forgot that in our polarised world.
Post reply on HN