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Biggest difference is that one can read thread on Bluesky without account while X has login-wall (like most corporate 'social' media).
xcancel.com gets around Twitter's login-wall.
Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place
251–260 of 357 posts
Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place
#252In my experience, the change has been positive. I rarely see feuds on Bluesky and when they happen I find them especially embarrassing because it’s so unusual. I stopped posting on Twitter around the acquisition but kept my account. When I do randomly check my timeline I’m genuinely disturbed by the disinformation and pseudo-science, especially in machine learning.
In general that's true, but it's because on Bluesky, blocking causes the blocked person's replies to be hidden from everyone who views the original post. It's much easier to block than to engage with a contradictory reply (especially if the reply is correct and you're wrong), so disagreement tends to result in a block. This behavior is common enough that it creates a chilling effect for anyone who disagrees. Why take…
> so disagreement tends to result in a block
And the issue is bigger than it looks since blocking is public, so blocking gets you on lists of users to block so you'll be blocked by people you never interacted with for blocking/disagreeing with someone.
I don't know that I really want to interact with anyone who uses a block list like that, but it definitely would make echo chambers worse.
Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place
#253Earlier 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?
I zoomed out. It looks like this: "Usage has absolutely declined from peak switching periods where inevitibly some users won't stick around, but that's to be expected" That just isn't a "sharp decline" no matter how much you seem to want to repeat those words.
After the spike rose and fell, it continues to decline fairly quickly. I have no horse in this race but it looks sharp to me!
Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
Last year in November they had around 2.7MM likers. Today it's 1.2MM. Last year in November they had around 1.3MM posters. Today, 0.65MM. Followers: 3MM, to 0.4MM today.
Those are Jaz’s daily unique action counts (flows) from the Bluesky firehose; they’re anchored to the Nov ’24 spike, so the ‘decline’ is post-surge reversion. Meanwhile the user stock kept rising (~39M). A presidential election spike is the baseline for tracking growth in a social media platform??
> Meanwhile the user stock kept rising (~39M).
What’s “user stock”? Is that the number of registered accounts? Isn’t it basically impossible for that to do anything but go up? It’s the number of people actively using the network that’s the important figure, not the total number of people who ever used it.
Are these the figures you are reporting?
> We made a new Bluesky stats page to see how the platform is growing. Unfortunately it is currently shrinking.
> Last week the total number of users registered hit 36M, but actually only 13M of those showed any activity in the last 90 days.
> Bluesky User Stats/Growth: https://bluefacts.app/bluesky-user-growth
— https://www.reddit.com/r/BlueskySocial/comments/1kxib89/blue...
Right now that shows 5.6M MAUs.
> The number of active users (posting, liking or following) is down by 6.3% compared to 12 weeks ago.
> The number of unique accounts posting at least once a day is down by 5.6% compared to 12 weeks ago.
> The number of posts created each day is down by 4.3% compared to 12 weeks ago.
> The number of likes given each day is up by 0.3% compared to 12 weeks ago.
> The number of users liking posts each day is down by 6.1% compared to 12 weeks ago.
> The number of new follows each day is down by 19.3% compared to 12 weeks ago.
Also check the account age stats:
https://bluefacts.app/bluesky-account-age
> 32.1K New accounts per day since the beginning
> 23.7K New accounts per day in the last 30 days
> 14K New accounts per day in the last 7 days
New accounts per day appears to be getting much worse over time.
Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
The freedom to not have to fear death when going to school comes to mind. You know, like everywhere else in the western world.
Well, in Europe you get stabbed. Or hit deliberately by a car. Or just thrown before an incoming train. Shit happens everywhere... what's the difference? And we also have school shootings in Europe. Less than USA, granted! But they exist.
Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
Last year in November they had around 2.7MM likers. Today it's 1.2MM. Last year in November they had around 1.3MM posters. Today, 0.65MM. Followers: 3MM, to 0.4MM today.
Last year in August they had 200k likers. Today it's 1.2MM. Last year in August they had 150k posters. Today they have 650k. Followers: 50k to 400k today
Right, so the basic story you're telling investors there is that between August and September of 2024 they experienced a sharp spike, and then basically they stayed that way for over a year. That's not a dying platform, but it's not a growth story you take to investors either.
Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
You didn't point to his numbers so that wasn't clear, but either way, Silver has beef with bsky because he isn't popular there and he likes to whine about it. The usage numbers I've seen are down from their peak last November but have mostly stabilized at this point. The devs say they have multiple years of runway, and each time there is an exodus from twitter the numbers have a sharp increase and then decline to a s…
> You didn't point to his numbers They were linked in the thread by the person complaining about them in an ancestor of your comment. > if there's one thing you can count on it's Elon doing something stupid to piss off users and cause another user exodus. That one will cause another peak and slow decline but if it's like every other one he's caused the end result will be higher numbers for bsky than before. Only seei…
> Only seeing growth when Musk does something stupid, and most of the new users not sticking around are strong signals it doesn’t have long-term value. Bluesky is the rebound social network.
One thing that often gets overlooked is that Twitter itself was on pretty shaky financial ground (and likely still is, though being private now makes that harder to know). Even if Bluesky managed to absorb the entirety of Twitter’s user base, it’s still unclear whether that translates into a strong business model.
Yes: Plenty of criticism has been aimed at how Twitter was run, and maybe Bluesky is managed more effectively right now, but there's no evidence to suggest Bluesky would be run significantly better at that scale.
Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
In what sense?
Social media is bad for you. Though I'm not sure that social media enjoyed a "social media is good for you" phase. There are certainly studies I'm sure that are out there, but the general consensus seems to be negative.
Scientists aren't all health practitioners.
Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
We’re talking about the average user. They’re not going to be particularly passionate about federation. The point, to them, is to have a functioning Twitter-like social network.
The average user starts caring about censorship, AFAIK. And Bluesky has done very nasty ToS changes that only federation would have helped fight against. But this is off-topic, because the ToS changes are mostly about porn, while this HN submission is about the professional use of Bluesky.
The only thing that would help with running sadly illegal in increasing parts of the world (including US) adult content servers would be not having a corporate entity.
It's difficult to fund rapid development at the scale needed, with that hobble.
Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. Who in good conscience would use a site where the owner regularly posts hateful, trivially-debunked BS? https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1970336290148434391 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1969087195798475263 https://x.com/Rightanglenews/status/1971546061169987846
Everyone who reads a Rubert Murdoch tabloid. I am constantly surprised by the amount of people who enjoy drivel, but this has always been like this. Only we used to also have printed media that held itself to higher ideals than tabloids and worked as a counter weight to them. What is different atm is that for a long time there haven't been social media that shoot for higher ideals. Maybe bsky is that? The market for…
> people who enjoy drivel, but this has always been like this.
It's much more visible now, though. In the past it was quite easy to ignore the entire existence of someone like Rupert Murdoch but now the entire world knows what Musk is. He just appeared in last week at a rally of 100,000 people encouraging them to violently overthrowing the government. He appeared in the oval office giving speeches. Murdoch usually kept to himself.