121–130 of 355 posts
It wasn't adopted, it was falsely created.
I'd go even further to say that it isn't a social network, it's an add-on to another social network.
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…
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…
On “safe spaces”, as you hint at I think many of us don’t want to be shielded entirely from opposing or otherwise differing lines of thought. Speaking personally, I welcome it if there’s actual discussion to be had. Good faith discussions and exchange of perspectives is great, but I have no patience for trolls, circular logic, insults, “debate” that wouldn’t even pass for high school level, etc.
Low quality article aside, Threads also had a major spike in usage that quickly dropped off. I could be wrong, but I’m going to guess Bluesky will be the same. They don’t seem to offer anything new/different other than moderation, which I’m not convinced is enough to shift momentum from x to bluesky
I disagree. Bluesky will grow further and then be like a "Coke or Pepsi" to Twitter. (Albeit, it will stay smaller than Twitter.)
I have 2 threads accounts and never created a single one. That's because I had 2 Instagram accounts.
The difference is people chose to go to Bluesky, Threads accounts were just added on to your Insta account by Meta.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[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.
>You might want to wish it away, but that doesn't change reality.
My post was 4 sentences long and you skipped 2. Why even bother replying?
I still feel that an enormous amount of why threads shows up in data analytics is because Instagram just added it on and made an account for everyone. It wasn't adopted, it was falsely created. I'd go even further to say that it isn't a social network, it's an add-on to another social network.
I think the factor which will determine which networks survive is the ability to handle bots driven by modern AI agents. I’m not sure how even the best moderation features can detect and mitigate these.
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 think that if you look at real-life Friend-to-Friend groups, this is what you find: clusters of people with similar values. So it it makes sense that the same applies to F2F groups over the internet. But most social media is not F2F groups.
Most (advertiser-driven) social media (including this site) is based on the idea of what I call "implicit ranking": The idea that a user can influence what another user sees (through "likes", "votes", "reports", "bumps", etc.) without having an explicit consensual relationship with them (such as a "subscription", "following", or "sharing" or "direct message channel").
This "implicit ranking" model is pretty successful because it is better at finding engaging content is and probably the dominant form of social media. In contrast to F2F, implicit ranking networks tend to promote controversial content from outgroups because angry users are engaged. We all love to flamewar sometimes, I'll admit it.
With Threads you can already see that Facebook/Instagram is in it's DNA. There's no pure "following" feed. It's instead an algorithmic feed that mixes people you follow with people Threads decides to push. So it's going down the enshittification path from day one.
With Bluesky there's at least some hope that it will not end up as the algorithmic time sinks all other social media has slowly become. I'm all for discoverability, but allow me to decide when and how I discover new people to follow. Never touch my "following" feed, and I'll be happy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know I'm falling for the bait, but saying X is some last bastion of free speech is baffling, considering it's actual actions. Why do the remaining posters keep self-censoring "Blues*y"?
I don’t know what you are referring to. I’ve never seen someone self-censor Bluesky. I see people talking about it on X all the time. Mainly to highlight some of the worst content they find there but that’s another subject… I tried checking out Bluesky the other day. The feed was mainly unhinged political rants of a very particular flavor.