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Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

chrisholdgraf.com

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Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#431

Post by fossislife »

notyourwork wrote: post #276
dheerajvs wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Genuinely don't know why anyone would use it when you have perplexity, gemini, chatGPT search, etc. at your disposal. And what did they get trained on in the first place?

Which is funny because if Wikipedia dies, who will continue providing updated training data to these models? It's a weird self-fulfilling prophecy that consolidates without financial replacement.

The same sources Wikipedia gets its information from. You can not even contribute to Wikipedia without providing outside sources, I think, which are usually websites or books

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#432

Post by Zambyte »

maelito wrote: post #59
glimshe wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Openness",as far as for-profit businesses are concerned, is a marketing strategy. Once enough users are locked in, there is no reason to offer a valuable feature for free.

> there is no reason to offer a valuable feature for free. Well that's of course OK with me : Bluesky should make their users pay. 10 % of users paying 1€/month, 1 % paying 10 €/month, for instance. That's ok, we're paying a service. But the API access and federation should remain free.

It's interesting to me that you consider servicing API requests to not be a service.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#433

Post by Yizahi »

andreilys wrote: post #272
emseetech wrote: post #7

When Bluesky announced they were taking on large amounts of capital to handle the growth that's when I knew their days were numbered. Capital requires returns, and a lot of the degradation of the user experience in the past few years is due to catering to investors and advertisers (who are the actual customers). Decentralization as is promised is one way to mitigate this, but there's no economic incentive to go throu…

I can't remember the last time I visited Wikipedia. Genuinely don't know why anyone would use it when you have perplexity, gemini, chatGPT search, etc. at your disposal.

I sometimes use neural nets for obscure compound questions (with a so so efficiency), but I can't imagine using NN in place of Wikipedia. I go to Wikipedia to find factual information (by factual I don't mean guaranteed, I mean hard data - years, names, models etc.). How can anyone rely on a random text generator to get factual data?

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#434

Post by akvadrako »

mozarella wrote: post #340

Related : Corey Doctrow's article (again) about how he doesn't trust Bluesky enough to move there from mastodon. Especially Bluesky's promise to allow users to migrate to another host in the fediverse. https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-11-02... Older article : https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/06/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get...

What does he mean there is only one "Bluesky server" ?

You can already run your own Personal data server (for your data), Relay (to aggregate all feeds), AppView (that holds a view of the data), or client (that talks to the AppView).

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#435

Post by Yizahi »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #380
doshaa wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You see it as a problem, i see it as a benefit, Main reason i dislike twitter/X is the amount of pointless grift that goes around, some for monetary reasons, Either behave like a human or leave, "I posted some dog whistle and got banned for it" is actually a great ad for Bluesky.

I've never been able to find it again, but there was a really interesting discussion on [ATP]( https://atp.fm/ ) a long while back where John Siracusa was floating the idea of a 'less free' social network and I've really, really wanted one ever since. Honestly, Hacker News is pretty close to that in the sense that low-value content is unceremoniously removed, which must contribute to the overall better quality here.

The problem I see today, is that we, humans, can't find a balance in that for some reason. Less free basically translates to the moderated, and it is universally seen as a good mechanism in general. But today it is often either free for all lack of moderation, or a full scale ban frenzy, with zero warnings, and zero timed bans, always permanent ones. Sometimes due to the platform architecture permabans even prevent from reading posts. And out of the few places with warning systems, several have no control over report abuse. There are almost no middle ground popular platforms left.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#436

Post by bondarchuk »

epolanski wrote: post #378

Open question, why do people keep caring about socials that much? Especially educated people should stay away from that toxicity. Boards like HN and occasionally Reddit, where it's mostly about discussing and being anonymous are the only places worth contributing on the internet other than personal blogs.

All social media is bad, except for the ones you personally use? If it's about discussing pseudo/anonymously, you can do that on other plaforms too, right?

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#437

Post by hobs »

glenstein wrote: post #389
mozarella wrote: post #340

Related : Corey Doctrow's article (again) about how he doesn't trust Bluesky enough to move there from mastodon. Especially Bluesky's promise to allow users to migrate to another host in the fediverse. https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-11-02... Older article : https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/06/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get...

Thanks for the links! I think this perfectly captures my frustration here. It's like people have learned nothing and are, once again, making an aesthetic choice.

When you actually look at what people do instead of what they say, it often shows that that's really the only choice people want.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#438

Post by insin »

meowster wrote: post #169
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You'll be surprised how many people think they can just use first.lastname@gmail.com and have email magically appear in their account. Since I like surprises, do tell ... how many people think that?

At least 6 with my not-that-common (maybe somewhere in the middle) first and last name combination. Maybe more, but at least six of the emails meant for others that I've received, implied they live at those six unique locations. I know one of them likes to get the vegetarian meal option when traveling internationally by plane. (Companies should really validate email address OWNERSHIP before spamming innocent people.)

> (Companies should really validate email address OWNERSHIP before spamming innocent people.)

I don't understand why this isn't part of the normal flow for implementing Verify Your Email emails.

Someone used my firstname.lastname Gmail address on trip dot com a couple of days ago to book flights, and their Verify Your Email email actually had a Not My Email-type link in it... which apparently does nothing, as I shouldn't know that if you phone trip dot com about changing your flights, they send you an email with a Change Flight link.

I just got off a chat with their support, so hopefully my fat-fingered doppelganger doesn't miss their flights from Atlanta to Sydney tomorrow.

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#439

Post by _djo_ »

Amezarak wrote: post #422
_djo_ wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're misunderstanding why it gets mocked. Twitter launched a paid tier, Twitter Blue, before the Musk takeover. It was a sensible move, offering additional features such as edit functionality for power users, but not harming the experience for those who chose not to buy into it. Most importantly, it was entirely separate to the use of blue ticks to denote verified and authentic accounts. In fact, there was as far a…

> Most importantly, it was entirely separate to the use of blue ticks to denote verified and authentic accounts Blue ticks had nothing to do with being "verified" or "authentic." They were handed out randomly to some celebrities. bigcorps, and friends of Twitter employees. As far as I know a bluecheck was never handed out to anyone who wasn't who they said they were (although you could get them under pseudonyms too),…

That’s false. The programme was explicitly launched to highlight accounts that Twitter the company had verified as actually representing the person. [0]

It was launched after the company was sued by a sports star who was impersonated. Until Musk took over it could always be relied on as proof of an account’s authenticity.

What you’re complaining about isn’t that it represented something else, but that as with any large scale verification process it doesn’t scale well and the process was opaque.

Twitter cycled through various approaches to solve the problem. At first they merely reached out to people, based on the popularity of accounts representing them, their level of fame, and their risk of impersonation (or evidence of prior impersonation) and as and when the team had capacity. Therefore celebrities, politicians, and journalists were prioritised. However, this was a flawed process that was too US-centric and too US West Coast-centric on top of that.

They later opened up public applications but closed it down when they were overwhelmed with requests and couldn’t process them all. They ran into all the usual verification challenges, including language differences and the difficulty of verifying across countries. So they reverted back to the previous model while working on a way to use external factors to allow for a scaled up verification process in the future. That process stopped when Musk bought them.

The claim that it was only handed out to people for social cachet doesn’t hold water. For one, Republican politicians, Fox News and other conservative publication journalists, and sufficiently notable right-leaning celebrities all had blue ticks. The company even verified Jason Kessler, though that stirred up a public controversy that forced it to pause the programme for a bit. [1]

It wasn’t a perfect programme of course, but it did what it said it would: If you saw that an account had a blue tick you could trust it meant it was an authentic account that Twitter had verified. That aspect of the system never failed.

[0] https://mashable.com/archive/twitter-verified-accounts-2 [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/09/technology/jason-kessler-...

Re: Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

#440

Post by dingnuts »

khafra wrote: post #414
epolanski wrote: post #378

Open question, why do people keep caring about socials that much? Especially educated people should stay away from that toxicity. Boards like HN and occasionally Reddit, where it's mostly about discussing and being anonymous are the only places worth contributing on the internet other than personal blogs.

On Twitter I get to see interactions between the people that built games I played as a kid, famous actors, Nobel prize winners, heads of state, and authors I had assumed died decades ago. If I write something insightful and relevant enough, I might get a gesture of appreciation from a FAANG research director, a prominent philosopher, or just someone who writes the funniest aphorisms I've ever seen. It's toxic in some…

sounds like an interactive tabloid.

who gives a shit about famous people? authors I assumed died decades ago? Literally I do not give a single shit what Stephen King or JK Rowling thinks

have fun with that, but you just explained why it never appealed to me. Weird idolatry. Reddit has the same problem.

Interesting people talk about ideas, not other people

> something insightful enough

you mean if you play the game and are sufficiently blessed by the algorithm your demigod may offer you a blessing. The algorithm doesn't reward insight, lol.

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