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Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week

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Re: Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week

#121

Post by sph »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #95
Nimitz14 wrote: post #9

How does it compare to threads?

The problem with Threads is, in my opinion, lack of funny people. it won’t be able to attract those users because what they usually post is questionable at best. And without it, it will always feel too sterile. From what I can see, bsky mostly consists of rebels. And since users flock where everyone else is, it will be an uphill battle for them to get Twitter’s userbase.

There are two types of social media sites: the niche one nobody uses, and the ones @dril posts on.

Re: Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week

#122

Post by numpad0 »

RiverCrochet wrote: post #51
forgotoldacc wrote: post #43

Bluesky is pretty decent so far. I get about as many responses to my art as I do with twitter, despite having 1/5th the followers on the new platform. The problem is I don't see much interesting on Bluesky. It's endless people saying "Hello, bluesky! I'm new here!" or "Hello, new bluesky users! Follow me!" Feels like there's less focus on content and more on the individuals themselves. It's further exemplified with w…

> Bluesky is pretty decent so far. It is in pre-enshittification phase. > The problem is I don't see much interesting on Bluesky. You have to search for things, follow a few people, and give the "Discover" facility something to work with I think. Also use the Feeds tab - search may bring up some feeds which are also super helpful.

> It is in pre-enshittification phase.

Totally agreed on this part, and, this lead me to a weird thought: maybe we're witnessing human adaptation of "[the users] are the product" phenomenon. Twitter the product was sold to a rich kid way over valuation and in form it can't be used commercially, like a consumer branded prepackaged food that are too blatant to serve at a restaurant.

IOW, it was sold at profit, with no opportunities left on the table. And a new instance of the product is being manufactured.

What I'm trying to say is, I think there is a chance that that's just how enshittification, social media, freemium-minus-mium model, etc works from this point on, as if it's junk food made of DAU.

Re: Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week

#123

Post by mike_hearn »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #97
EasyMark wrote: post #77

Earlier 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…

Not really. I visited Twitter 1.0 HQ some years ago to give them a talk on spam fighting. Actually I went for lunch, and then discovered that a QA session had been volunteered on my behalf by the friend I was visiting.

Twitter's bot fighting teams back then had basically ceased to exist. They had existed once, but at some point the management decided that the biggest abuse problem on the platform wasn't bots or even misinformation but just people being mean to each other. So everyone working in that department had switched to what was basically semi-automated tone policing. By the time I talked to them they were years behind the state of the art in detecting automation.

As for academics and researchers, Twitter 1.0 didn't have the sort of rosy relationship with them you paint here. Researchers had access to the global feed if they paid for it like many other parties did, and Musk started charging much more for that access, but the feed wasn't really useful for finding misbehavior. In fact Twitter 1.0 was pissed off with academia long before Musk arrived on the scene. Academic research into social networks, disinformation and hypothetical foreign influence campaigns is nearly 100% pseudo-scientific garbage pushed for ideological reasons. In 2020 Twitter execs went public with their frustration [1] in a blog post where they pointed out that academics were using an "an extremely limited approach" that was full of useless signals, like:

• Usernames with long strings of digits (the default username generation pattern)

• Lacking info in the bio (even Twitter employees often don't fill it out)

• Posting many times per day (lots of real users do that)

Twitter 1.0: "the threat has evolved and the narrative on what’s actually going on is increasingly behind the curve". Given that there are tens of thousands of such papers coming out of universities, all of them justified by claiming they're ahead of the curve, being constantly behind it is a damning assessment. And that was from people ideologically aligned with academia!

Booting these people off the system was certainly a good move both for Twitter/X's business and frankly, for academia itself. They certainly weren't trying to help.

[1] https://blog.x.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/bot-or-not

Re: Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week

#124

Post by caskstrength »

karaterobot wrote: post #70

My hypothesis is still that the problem isn't Twitter per se, but that Twitter-like failure modes are built in to that structure. A communications platform that has certain qualities will tend to become Twitter-like: Many-to-many, short messages, reposting, etc. These are mechanics that will just create certain kinds of behaviors. So, that would predict Bluesky having many of the same problems as Twitter sooner or la…

> These are mechanics that will just create certain kinds of behaviors.

Yes, but if platform API allows using customizable third-party clients it is not really a problem for me (e.g. I can just enable chronological timeline, filter out all the ads and noise).

Re: Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week

#125

Post by mike_hearn »

dawnerd wrote: post #74
infotainment wrote: post #39

Earlier 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.

it was never going to die overnight though. It's had a steady decline since the takeover.

Musk is claiming that it recently reached record usage highs, as measured by "user seconds". It's a bit unclear whether he is counting X as a different platform to Twitter though, and "user seconds" is pushed upwards by video content that takes longer to consume. But usage hasn't obviously declined since the takeover either.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1854777813464662307

Re: Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week

#126

Post by sitzkrieg »

antupis wrote: post #94
toomuchtodo wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feels like there is a need for a message broker platform, where these local accounts can sign up and push messages out to whomever wants them via socials, SMS, RSS, whatevs. Buffer meets Svix for social/messaging PubSub or something similar vs Yet Another Platform.

Mastodon would be perfect for these but there is no critical mass at least yet.

mastodon is a fediverse client

Re: Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week

#127

Post by maxerickson »

karaterobot wrote: post #87
EasyMark wrote: post #77

Earlier 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.

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…

Twitter was trying to boost engagement before Musk bought it, and several of the changes they have made since then supercharged it.

Bluesky isn't yet aggressively working to boost engagement. There's the discover tab, and feeds, but those are more opt in types of things. Blocks also work differently, perhaps increasing the echo chamber effect, but also tamping down on squabbling.

Re: Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week

#128

Post by npteljes »

mongol wrote: post #75

I deleted my Twitter account a few days ago. I am so disappointed in what became of Musk as he teamed up with Trump and I don't want to support him any more. Of course it does not make a dent in his life, but for mine it does. The time I save I can do more useful things with. I aim to consume less and produce more. or consume more long-form media, like books, or actual newspapers. It will be better for my mood I thin…

That's a wholesome change, I feel. I also disconnect from social and news from time to time. The quickly refreshing content on the internet is very tempting, but it's more toxic than not, beginning with its very nature of being quickly refreshed. The churn is too high to engage in quality, and so if quality is desired, focus on the real and immediate environment is what pays off more, even if much less engaging.

Re: Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week

#129

Post by drivingmenuts »

forgotoldacc wrote: post #43

Bluesky is pretty decent so far. I get about as many responses to my art as I do with twitter, despite having 1/5th the followers on the new platform. The problem is I don't see much interesting on Bluesky. It's endless people saying "Hello, bluesky! I'm new here!" or "Hello, new bluesky users! Follow me!" Feels like there's less focus on content and more on the individuals themselves. It's further exemplified with w…

All of that more or less describes the early days of Twitter, before it became Xitter.

Re: Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week

#130

Post by krapp »

adzm wrote: post #4
bhouston wrote: post #2

I can attest that BlueSky is really nice right now. Feels less combative than Twitter. I started to use it 25 days ago and got 400 or so follows pretty quickly. I am here: https://bsky.app/profile/benhouston3d.bsky.social I used this tool to find accounts that match on both platforms: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sky-follower-bridge...

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

Unfortunately, Bluesky being the "popular" alternative just means it's going to turn to shit faster.

I have an account there because so many people seem to be moving from Twitter to Bluesky instead of Mastodon, for understandable reasons, but I expect Bluesky to be be awash in bots, AI and Nazis within a year. That's just the way things go now.

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