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Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place

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Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place

#211

Post by therealmccoyboy »

tptacek wrote: post #171
raincole wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand how Bluesky is going going to continue to exist past 2026, based on the sharply declining usage, their headcount, and the amount of funding they've taken. Are you an insider? Where are the numbers? how_long_can_bluesky_exists = f(usage, headcount, funding) Three parameters and you supplied zero of them. It does sound like you just randomly picked a number 2026 and proceeded to rant on how little…

You can just Google these things. Nate Silver posted (grim looking) usage numbers --- followers and posters --- just a couple weeks ago. They very publicly raised a $15MM (priced) A round a year ago, after raising what I understood to be a comparable amount of seed funding. There was talk early this year of them raising again at a $700MM valuation, but I don't see a subsequent announcement that that happened. You can…

In other words you gave no idea how much runway they have as a company but are spouting off.

Also ignoring that Bluesky isn’t dependent on any company in the long term.

Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place

#213

Post by seadan83 »

SanjayMehta wrote: post #122
hdlothia wrote: post #6

It would be nice if scientists started being just scientists again instead of activists. Hopefully being cloistered on bluesky will bring the old vibes back

They can be scientists on both platforms. Bluesky is just the ideological opposite of whatever X is today, but with more blocking and censorship than even what Twitter had under Dorsey.

I think you're assuming that dichotomy. There was an observation that Trump supporters derided liberals for loving biden. The observation pointed out a false equivalence, "the other side is doing the same thing", we love Trump, so they must love their leader too.

Or, do you some sort of systematic evidence that evaluates the politics across all of bluesky in comparison to X? I don't think there is such evidence to know that bluesy is the polar opposite of Twitter.

Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place

#214

Post by firefax »

nomdep wrote: post #172
firefax wrote: post #151

Most of my hard science contacts (physics, biology etc) from my days in student government have moved to Bluesky. Newer academics seem to be starting out there and skipping Twitter entirely. If you have heard of Metcalfe's Law, you'll understand why this is not good for Twitter long term. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe's_law

So Bluesky for academia and X for tech and everyone else. I don’t think X is in trouble. Scientist tend to form their own closed communities anyway.

>Scientist tend to form their own closed communities anyway.

Do you have a source for that?

Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place

#215

Post by mrbombastic »

packetlost wrote: post #162
jghn wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I've found is that most of the people I really want to follow are exclusively on bsky. BUT most of the people I'd prefer to casually follow either exclusively or mostly only posts on Twitter. And the 2nd group is a much larger pool than the first group. I really dislike Mastodon so gave that up a while back. I know there are a few people I'd like to follow who only post there, but such is life.

I've found Bluesky does a really bad job at not showing me stuff I don't want to see. Furry p*rn on the "cute internet cats" feed? Yup. Heaps and heaps of political rage bait on the main discover feed? Yup. I wanted to like BlueSky, but it's such a bizarre echo chamber of people who left Twitter for ideological reasons that it basically filters for people that I actively don't want to engage with. Those types of peop…

They do really need to do something about this, I am not on regularly anymore but there was a period where i kept getting weird sexual posts of dudes in diapers, no matter how much i blocked or asked not to see that.

Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place

#216

Post by tptacek »

Larrikin wrote: post #199
tptacek wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think what you needed to do here is zoom out. That's a sharply declining chart. I understand that as a Bluesky user the peak and dropoff doesn't hurt the experience. But investors are going to put money in with the expectation of a return and what they're going to look at are the derivatives of the adoption curve: how quickly is it gaining users, and is adoption accelerating?

Why does anyone need to invest at all? Why can't Jack Dorsey just run it instead of needing it be a hockey stick start up?

See, that's a good question, but it has an answer: first, they took a priced round, and those investors will need to see a return, and second, when the funding runs out, someone is going to have to put more money in --- substantially more money --- to keep the lights on.

What's probably true is that if they found a stable source of revenue they wouldn't have to answer these kinds of questions. But this is just back to my original point, of "I don't see how this is going to work", because I don't see how they're going to do that.

I'd be happy if someone jumped in and set me straight with a clear and plausible plan. To me, though, from the information I've seen, it looks like the premise here is that they're going to raise again, and to do that they're going to need to demonstrate accelerating growth, which they starkly do not have right now.

Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place

#217

Post by jsbisviewtiful »

Pamar wrote: post #210

What about Cara, Vero and MeWe? This are just the last three Social Media I subscribed in the past and range from Stagnant to Pretty Much Dead. I suppose that the problem is that if you already have 1000+ followers on, say, Twitter or IG you try posting the same stuff in parallel on both... after 1 month of doubled effort you notice that your followers on the new platform is an order of magnitude smaller... you want…

IMO even Bluesky borders on “dead”. Not from an activity standpoint, but from the standpoint of “what the hell are people posting here”.

Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place

#218

Post by tptacek »

sumeno wrote: post #197
tptacek wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it matter how much "juice" he has on Bluesky? The numbers are the numbers.

His numbers may be bad because people on the website don't like him, not because of something inherent about bsky (other than better taste) Plenty of big accounts have anecdotally said they have much better engagement on bsky than twitter

They're not his numbers. He's just pointing to them!

Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place

#219

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #111

I don't understand how Bluesky is going to continue to exist past 2026, based on the sharply declining usage, their headcount, and the amount of funding they've taken. It has apparent value propositions past the social network, but none of those use cases are visibly taking off and none of them appear to be monetizable. The social network itself is what will be evaluated when they go out for more funding. And I don't…

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