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The Bluesky Bubble: This is a relapse, not a fix

theatlantic.com

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Re: The Bluesky Bubble: This is a relapse, not a fix

#41

Post by thinkingemote »

hattmall wrote: post #30
McBainiel wrote: post #16

Has a clone of a social media site ever replaced an original? The closest I can think of is Tiktok being kinda similar to Vine but that feels like a stretch. I don't think Bluesky will succeed unless it offers something different to the basic Twitter experience. It's hard to picture enough people giving up Twitter (or using both) for it to reach the critical mass required to sustain it.

I can't really understand why people use Twitter at all, since it's inception. It's never felt like a compelling platform and everyone I know has an account, like myself, but made it years ago for some reason and never used it.

a tweet originally was called a "status", twitter used to be a place where you would publish your instant messenger status. Early adopters used it to unify their multiple messenger platforms statuses into one.

If you changed your status on the old messengers e.g. "making a cup of tea" then it had some utility at any rate, a status was a kind of temporary notice, to be replaced by another status at another time. In an IM application you would see your online and offline contacts and see their status underneath their name. People had a few different unconnected IM applications. You could use the API to set your status in twitter and it would be set in AIM (or was it both ways?)

You could SMS in a status/tweet from a phone, many people loved that.

After that it became a way to record or broadcast other temporary notices, and then to a kind of realtime status. The concepts of a conversation happened then, talking about a topic but without direct refering other people and then with mentions @handle threads on twitter happened afterwards.

The twitter tech folks were considering making the metadata around a tweet as more important than the inside content. (e.g. RDF, foaf, geo, links, wikipedia uuids, subject topics, etc etc)

And then the masses joined in a few years after with Oprah and it was all about the message.

After that the push to VC eternal growth and the algorithm powered feed was what encouraged bad behaviour and a range of un-satisfactory responses to that behaviour which continues to this day.

Re: The Bluesky Bubble: This is a relapse, not a fix

#42

Post by ang_cire »

makk wrote: post #8
tqi wrote: post #6

> I have written before in The Atlantic about a problem that I see as superordinate to all of these others: People just aren’t meant to talk with one another this much The irony of publishing an article intended for a mass audience about how people shouldn't talk to each other. Obviously journalists are the only ones who can be trusted with such power...

publishing != talking

If your point is that it's written word, then neither is social media talking.

Both of them are people putting/ publishing text out to a mass audience, in a public way.

Re: The Bluesky Bubble: This is a relapse, not a fix

#43

Post by mcintyre1994 »

Fishkins wrote: post #35
mcintyre1994 wrote: post #26

I'm not familiar with the other similar sites, but Bluesky seems much more interesting as a product than Twitter/X ever did. I think the way they encourage users to build/share custom feeds, and especially how they can be independent of your follow graph, is really interesting. The problem with these sites has always been having a single algorithmic feed controlled by someone else IMO. Some interesting feeds I've see…

Custom feeds and starter packs seem to be promoted much more on Bluesky than lists were on Twitter, but how different are the actual capabilities from Twitter lists? I never looked at my algorithmic feed. Instead I make a "list" of accounts I followed and pinned that list to my home view. That way I only got exactly their posts in chronological order (with no ads). I saw that recommended by some HN user long ago, but…

I thought Twitter lists could only be used for a list of accounts, so you'd see everything posted by everyone in the list. Whereas Bluesky feeds can only show posts with certain tags/content etc, and can be based on things like your following/likes without you maintaining the list of those. I might be wrong though about the limitations of lists because I never used them much.

Re: The Bluesky Bubble: This is a relapse, not a fix

#44

Post by bubaumba »

childintime wrote: post #18
mvelbaum wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I just proved your point down below. You don't like voting, do you? Also, it's advertisers that stay away, and it's X challenging them in court over it. The world is getting weirder by the day. Do you have an uncle that can't stop ranting and calling people names? People just leave his presence. That behavior is just the worst and we're not born to suffer it, passively. That's the whole point of the free speech falla…

> Also, it's advertisers that stay away,

They are coming back and line up

Re: The Bluesky Bubble: This is a relapse, not a fix

#45

Post by ang_cire »

raesene9 wrote: post #31
McBainiel wrote: post #16

Has a clone of a social media site ever replaced an original? The closest I can think of is Tiktok being kinda similar to Vine but that feels like a stretch. I don't think Bluesky will succeed unless it offers something different to the basic Twitter experience. It's hard to picture enough people giving up Twitter (or using both) for it to reach the critical mass required to sustain it.

reddit used to be the smaller, less popular version of digg :)

I would have said it was a Something Awful replacement.

Re: The Bluesky Bubble: This is a relapse, not a fix

#46

Post by ang_cire »

mcphage wrote: post #37
dingnuts wrote: post #21

isn't it obvious to everyone that the X/Twitter exodus is just a forum split? haven't all of us of a certain age participated in a forum that eventually devolved into drama, and then everyone picks sides, and someone makes a new forum, and half the group leaves? That's all that's happening on X. Now we have a bunch of twitters: X, Bluesky, Truth, Fediverse. They're all twitters and the X exodus is just a twitter spli…

Is it a forum split, or is it Digg->Reddit or MySpace->Facebook?

I think that will depend on whether Must decides to keep running it at a loss.

He has the resources to keep it going for years as a forum for his groupies, but if anyone else were in charge it would be a die-off for sure.

Re: The Bluesky Bubble: This is a relapse, not a fix

#47

Post by jimmydoe »

marban wrote: post #10

Unless Bluesky or Threads tap into the Zeitgeist, Twitter isn't going anywhere. As much as whatever political side would love to see it falter, those invested in its downfall might have to temper their expectations. Twitter is a mirror of the human fabric — messy, contradictory, brutal. For all its flaws, it's the only service that reflects society's pulse in real-time.

> For all its flaws, it's the only service that reflects society's pulse in real-time.

Assume it’s true for a min, why does a society need a website reflect its pulse? It is useful for company and govt to harvest the data, but I failed to see any meanful way common individuals will benefit much from it.

Re: The Bluesky Bubble: This is a relapse, not a fix

#48

Post by mgraybosch »

Somebody at my day job tried to sell me on Bluesky by saying it was run by a public benefit corporation and thus was less likely to abuse its users.

I wasn't persuaded, because I remember ello.co [0] (which shut down in July 2023). It too was run by a public benefit corporation, but it couldn't sustain itself because t-shirt sales and affliate links weren't bringing in enough revenue, and they never got their freemium model off the ground.

No great loss, which is what I'll say when Bluesky starts to rot because its operators need to provide ROI to the VCs backing them [1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ello_(social_network)

[1]: https://decrypt.co/288157/bluesky-raises-15-million-no-crypt...

Re: The Bluesky Bubble: This is a relapse, not a fix

#49

Post by SoftTalker »

thinkingemote wrote: post #41
hattmall wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't really understand why people use Twitter at all, since it's inception. It's never felt like a compelling platform and everyone I know has an account, like myself, but made it years ago for some reason and never used it.

a tweet originally was called a "status", twitter used to be a place where you would publish your instant messenger status. Early adopters used it to unify their multiple messenger platforms statuses into one. If you changed your status on the old messengers e.g. "making a cup of tea" then it had some utility at any rate, a status was a kind of temporary notice, to be replaced by another status at another time. In an…

So finger and ~/.plan was the original twitter then?
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