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

When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

jazco.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 315 posts

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#131

Post by tshaddox »

ARandumGuy wrote: post #109
tshaddox wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just enforce a maximum number of followed accounts.

No matter how high you set a maximum limit for interactions on social media (followers, friends, posts, etc), someone will reach the limit and complain about it. I can see why Bluesky would prefer a "soft limit", where going above the limit will degrade the experience. It gives more flexibility to adjust things later, and prevents obnoxious complaints from power users with outsized influence.

I’m skeptical that the people who would complain about that wouldn’t find something else to complain about if you resolved the first complaint. I’d recommend implementing product features that you think are reasonable and accepting the fact that you will get complaints from people who disagree.

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#132

Post by vidarh »

SteveNuts wrote: post #114
nightpool wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 2019 study of 5 European airports in 2019 had no-show rates of 14.4%: https://www.ozion-airport.com/product/comparative-analysis-n... However, my understanding is that airlines have much more sophisticated per-flight and per-passenger models that calculate the predicted no-show factor based on the historical rates for that particular route (e.g. you're more likely to get more no-shows in business class flying from…

That blows my mind, I would expect maybe 1 or 2 passengers per plane at most. I'm trying to think of what factors would cause that many no-shows, it has to be mostly missed connections? I can't imagine spending hundreds of dollars and just not showing up.

Keep in mind they sell a lot of tickets where one of the features that allows for a premium price is that they allow late cancellations or changes to other flights. Holiday travelers are pretty "reliable", but business travelers might have changed needs at the drop of a hat (say you meet another prospective client on a business trip and decide to stay another day to fit in a face-to-face meeting).

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#133

Post by sarchertech »

Retr0id wrote: post #67
ruined wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you want to scrape all the content, that's what the firehose is for, and it's allowed. the only reason to mass-follow is for spam purposes.

This does assume that scrapers are smart, and often they're really not. They have infrastructure for scraping HTML from webpages at scale and that is the hammer they use for all nails. (e.g. Wikipedia has to fight off scraper traffic despite full archives being available as torrents, etc.) In this case I agree though, they're all spammers and/or "clout farmers", or trying to make an account seem more authentic for fu…

100%. I ran a job board where we provided a nice machine readable XML feed of all of our jobs, but we had bots that insisted on using the standard search box. Searching by city using an alphabetized list.

Geographic search to was the most expensive thing they could have done and no matter what we did we couldn’t get them to use the XML feed.

I even tried returning a link to the feed when we detected a bot. No dice. They just kept working around the bot detection.

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#134

Post by gamedever »

PaulHoule wrote: post #85

An airline reservation system has to be perfect (no slack in today's skies), a hotel reservation can be 98% perfect so long as there is some slack and you don't mind putting somebody up in a better room than they paid for from time to time. A social media system doesn't need to be perfect at all. It was clear to me from the beginning that Bluesky's feeds aren't very fast, not like they are crazy slow, but if it saves…

Miscommunication leads to bad outcomes. One missed message out of order could easily lead to a fight, a lawsuit, a flash mob, threats of violence - that then need to be taken seriously, swatting, DOXxing, etc...

Msg 1: I hate ___insert_controversal_person_category_here___

Msg 2: Is the kind of statement that really sets me off

Msg 1 has a very different meaning if you don't see Msg 2.

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#135

Post by ChuckMcM »

an_ko wrote: post #83
culi wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What became of Blekko?

> It was acquired by IBM in March 2015, and the service was discontinued. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blekko Perhaps GP has a more interesting answer though.

That's the correct answer, IBM wanted the crawler mostly to feed Watson. Building a full search engine (crawler, indexer, ranker, API, web application) for the English language was a hell of an accomplishment but by the time Blekko was acquired Google was paying out tens of billions of dollars to people to send them and only them their search queries. For a service that nominally has to live on advertising revenue getting humans to use it was the only way to be net profitable, and you can't spend billions buying traffic and hope to make it back on advertising as the #3 search engine in the English speaking markets.

There are other ways to monetize search (look at Kagi for example) than advertising. Blekko missed that window though. (too early, Google needed to get a crappy as it is today to make the value of a spam free search engine desirable)

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#136

Post by plagiarist »

culi wrote: post #76
zoul wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be so much more interested in Bluesky if it were technically impossible for a random super rich guy to buy and bend it to his whims.

Isn't that the whole point of bs? Empowering users to take their data where they want. It's completely open-sourced and well-documented. If someone buys bluesky you can move all your data to a different service that follows the same protocol

Can I move my followers/following graph as well? Moving the actual content is barely a consolation prize if you lose your entire audience in the process.

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#137

Post by gs17 »

glerk wrote: post #78
ddejohn wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a lazy, uninformed take that people just love to repeat. 1) the left on Bluesky is full of in-fighting because neolib left are convinced that Harris lost because of racism/sexism and the progressive left spend a lot of their time trying to educate (and dunk on) them for their braindead takes, and 2) any social media platform will become an echo chamber if you only choose to follow people that echo your s…

> the left on Bluesky is full of in-fighting yes, the right is full of infighting too as shown by the recent H1B debate, that doesn't contradict my point. > any social media platform will become an echo chamber if you only choose to follow people that echo your sentiments bluesky is almost 100% political and almost 100% left-wing. There is literally no one else to follow, at least for now. X still has non-political c…

> bluesky is almost 100% political and almost 100% left-wing.

A big contributor to this feeling is their default "Discover" feed being very mediocre. "Less of this" and "more of this" do not seem to impact what it gives you, neither do what you like, respond to, follow, or who you block. Some days it's entirely cat pictures, other days it's entirely politics (my suggested accounts to follow are 100% of the time in this category). Finding the good content is very difficult, and the handful of accounts I follow are largely accounts I had to manually search for or was given a direct link to somewhere else, which would never have come up naturally. And to try to fix it, I took the advice to use the block feature, er, liberally, and I think it made the problem worse.

I even wouldn't mind the politics being in the feed if it didn't show me the exact same things repeated again and again. I get that determining if two posts are too similar is difficult, but it could at least not show me the same image again and again and again...

I've found https://bsky.app/profile/skyfeed.xyz/feed/discover to be a slightly better version of the Discover feed, but it's a lot less dynamic.

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#138

Post by half-kh-hacker »

verdverm wrote: post #48
nightpool wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AppView is a specific term of art within the Bluesky federation architecture: https://atproto.com/guides/glossary#app-view , you were incorrect in identifying the public frontend repo as the AppView.

A frontend is (can be) part of an App View. It is quite literally the app you view the network through. There can also be headless app views and app views which have no backend

this is not correct

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#139

Post by NoGravitas »

The funny thing is that all of the centralization in Bluesky is defended as being necessary to provide things like global search and all replies in a thread, things that Mastodon simply punts on in the name of decentralization. But then ultimately, Bluesky has to relax those goals after all.

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#140

Post by arcastroe »

I found it odd to base the loss-factor on the number of people you follow, rather than a truer indication of timeline-update-frequency. What if I follow 4k accounts, but each of those accounts only posts once a decade? My timeline would be become unnecessarily lossy.
Post reply on HN