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Bluesky is on the verge of overtaking Threads in all the ways that matter

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Re: Bluesky is on the verge of overtaking Threads in all the ways that matter

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> It's inevitable… > Yes and no. Yes and yes. The right and the left don't even speak the same language. I'm not a native English speaker and half the time I don't even understand what the left are even saying. Examples: > regress into an id-dominated state of hyper-reality > what can be, unburdened by what has been What does that even mean? People keep calling the right stupid, but at least everybody can understand…

People keep calling the right stupid, but at least everybody can understand what they're talking about. This isn't the enlightened take you think it is. Lack of education led us here. Fuming at intellectuals when they attempt to address complex issues reminds me of our evolutionary ancestors fuming at the creation of civilization.

> Lack of education led us here.

No. Belittling people for their lack of education led us here. People don't follow those who consistently treat them as barely-human tally marks that we (their betters) tolerate as long as they vote the right way. Eventually they get sick of being treated as less-than, and eventually someone comes along that makes those people feel important.

There are only really two reasonable ways out of Trump's populism at this point: learn from him and recognize the importance of the less-educated, or reduce the franchise and prevent people from voting unless they pass a certain educational bar (which not is not actually an option for so many reasons).

Any other approach will either take generations or is doomed to failure.

Re: Bluesky is on the verge of overtaking Threads in all the ways that matter

#112

It's inevitable that social media will split up into separate and distinct networks of people who can no longer stand or even undertand the other sociopolitical tribes. All of us sharing a singular global network was an exceptional and ephemeral circumstance.

> All of us sharing a singular global network was an exceptional and ephemeral circumstance.

Did this happen at all? Social networks have always been balkanized by culture.

Re: Bluesky is on the verge of overtaking Threads in all the ways that matter

#113
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s inevitable at all. In fact I believe that the present day situation boils down to one thing only: the prioritization of engagement at the cost of all else. That’s what set us down this road. It incentivizes inflammatory posting that eschews nuance and context and twists and exaggerates the subject matter in order to provoke emotional responses — whether they be angry replies, “dunk” quote-posts, re…

> It would be an interesting experiment to see the effects of effectively the polar opposite of twitter, where ragebait and other attention-seeking behaviors are actively punished, with the content that’s most readily surfaced instead being that which is thoughtful, candid, and not emotionally charged. Who would read it? The same people who already avoid twitter - not journalists, and therefore not celebs/politicians…

> Who would read it?

Presumably, normal people who want to interact with people they already know? interaction with journalists and politicians is valuable in an entirely different manner.

Re: Bluesky is on the verge of overtaking Threads in all the ways that matter

#114
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree somewhat. Social media apps are powered by feed algorithms that fall into two camps: The first camp biases toward sprinkling provocative, highly engaged content in your feed even if it falls outside your network of follows or areas of interest. A sort of “forced discovery”. Elon’s Twitter and YouTube during the 2010s follow this model. The second camp does the same thing but requires recommended content to…

The second camp is just artificially creating echo chambers, a virtual "separate and distinct network" for the parts that matter.

That makes a lot of assumptions about the nature of the content provided by the recommendation algorithms, as well as human nature. A good recommendation engine, for example, would recognize when someone either likes a broad range of sources politically speaking, or likes a neutral region.

Conversely, it's unclear that a recommendation engine would be able to predict what would be best at "disrupting an echo chamber", and more importantly, when that is desirable, and what "desirable" even means. It's also unclear that the first model is successful at all in disrupting echo chambers, as opposed to exacerbating or amplifying existing positions. I think there's good reasons to think that provocative can be less effective if anything.

Re: Bluesky is on the verge of overtaking Threads in all the ways that matter

#115
I'm moderately active on X, and helped build an early version of what became Threads (on which I am almost entirely inactive these days). I'm not surprised Bluesky's been more successful than Threads as the X-alternative:

* A lot of the popular content on X is political; Threads' decision to downrank or ban political content makes the posts less engaging. It's understandable from a certain perspective — a lot of the political content is just dishonest ragebait (and I learned to unfollow most political X accounts as a result). However, one of the most interesting things about X is that it's where news travels fastest, and it's significantly less-filtered than traditional journalist editorialization. It's hard to compete with X if you don't allow it, or downrank it.

* Obviously Elon's massive political spending will have an impact on the userbase of the product, since the spending is so one-sided. X has become dramatically more right-wing since he took over, and even more so after Trump's campaign, so there was pent-up demand for something else... Especially something else that allows left-wing political content (i.e. not Threads). There are a lot of conspiracy theories about Elon changing the X ranking algorithm to favor right-wing content, but TBH I think it's simpler than that: more left-wing people left the site (or used it less) due to distaste for Elon, and Elon unbanned hordes of right-wing accounts, who are very enthusiastic about supporting it.

* There's also one way in which X is (openly) biased in its ranking: paid accounts have their posts ranked higher than free accounts... And paying for X is public: you have a blue check next to your name if you pay. In right-wing spaces, having a paid bluecheck account is a badge of honor, in part due to it supporting Elon; in left-wing spaces, it's a badge of shame for the same reason. Although from a technical standpoint the ranking change isn't specifically political, in practice it's very political: many more right-wingers are bluechecks, so in practice you see more of their content and less left-wing content. Bluesky doesn't have paid accounts, and even if it did, it wouldn't organically result in right-wing content being prioritized to the same extent, so for left-wing users it's a much friendlier place.

* This is perhaps more of a personal gripe, but Elon Musk's decision to downrank external links has been pretty bad for the quality of X content. I understand the reasoning: he's trying to keep people engaged in-app, and external links make you leave. But plenty of interesting people use X as a promotional channel for their (interesting) content, which I want to see, and which often doesn't suit tweet formats. So by downranking posts with external links, I see less of the things I actually am interested in. I don't think I'm alone in this, and Bluesky doesn't do it — and I've heard (anecdotal) reports of people really enjoying being able to more reliably engage with that kind of stuff again on Bluesky.

Mastodon is too complicated and segmented to take off. But Bluesky isn't, so I can see why it's having a zeitgeist post-Trump's-election, which Elon helped fund. I'm not sure how much Bluesky will manage to retain its current spike in users: Threads at one point had a similar spike, and most users churned back to X. But it makes sense to me that Bluesky is a more natural home for the ex-X diaspora than Threads, given the reasons many of them left X.

Re: Bluesky is on the verge of overtaking Threads in all the ways that matter

#116
post #82

> but now the Bluesky app has exploded to 3.5 million daily active users, putting it just 1.5 times behind Meta’s Threads Are they implying that Threads has just ~5 million daily active users? Adam Mosseri shared in the beginning of November that they have 275 million monthly active users. Bluesky meanwhile has 20 million total users. Considering the author hasn't shared a single source for their claim, I find it har…

I’d bet Meta is counting all the random Instagram users that accidentally interact with the forced threads clickbait posts in their feed.

Re: Bluesky is on the verge of overtaking Threads in all the ways that matter

#117

It's inevitable that social media will split up into separate and distinct networks of people who can no longer stand or even undertand the other sociopolitical tribes. All of us sharing a singular global network was an exceptional and ephemeral circumstance.

I don’t think it’s inevitable at all. In fact I believe that the present day situation boils down to one thing only: the prioritization of engagement at the cost of all else. That’s what set us down this road. It incentivizes inflammatory posting that eschews nuance and context and twists and exaggerates the subject matter in order to provoke emotional responses — whether they be angry replies, “dunk” quote-posts, re…

Added to that is user choice over moderation and algorithms.

That’s what’s truly interesting about BlueSky. It allows for side A and B to both exist, with people who want to be more isolated in a safe space (so to speak) to do so. That’s a really great property. If I want to engage with content I severely disagree with, I can put it in a feed I check infrequently so that it doesn’t impact my life.

Humans aren’t good at coping with a constant barrage of disagreeable (for one’s personal definition of disagreeable) or inflammatory content.

Re: Bluesky is on the verge of overtaking Threads in all the ways that matter

#118
post #82

> but now the Bluesky app has exploded to 3.5 million daily active users, putting it just 1.5 times behind Meta’s Threads Are they implying that Threads has just ~5 million daily active users? Adam Mosseri shared in the beginning of November that they have 275 million monthly active users. Bluesky meanwhile has 20 million total users. Considering the author hasn't shared a single source for their claim, I find it har…

This seems to be where they are getting the data from (as they get their data from FinancialTimes who get it from SimilarWeb)

https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/social-media-news/b...

Re: Bluesky is on the verge of overtaking Threads in all the ways that matter

#119
post #69
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty easy to get that kind of vitriol if you say that you want people like you to continue existing.

And you say this to people you label not like you. You probably have more in common than you think. You both agree to label the other and you decided to fight a proxy battle from the agreed among identities. Do you want the other side not to exist as well? If yes let them know.

People defending themselves from bigotry, and bigots themselves, are not equivalent. Black people not wanting racists to exist, and racists not wanting black people to exist, do you see a distinction?

There has been such a consistent attempt at ramming square pegs into round holes online in trying to “both sides” a bunch of these issues.

One trait is immutable and the other is not.

One trait is entirely internally focused and is not defined by a rejection of anyone external to the subject, the other's trait is entirely defined by such an external focus on the rejection of another person's immutable identity.

Re: Bluesky is on the verge of overtaking Threads in all the ways that matter

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one example of hyperreality(1) would be a person seeing a phrase that they don’t immediately understand and deciding “this is how ‘the left’, a real and cohesive/consistent group, talks” 1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality

[flagged]

The real world is a complicated place. You want simple answers when reality is complicated and nuanced.

The fact is that there are—and have always been—people for which these things are not the same. You might want to wish it away, but that doesn't change reality.

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