291–300 of 357 posts
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
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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…
None of these are related to what the OP is about, scientists communicating with other scientists.
The incentive structure is the same as larger discussions. If anything, a smaller community makes it easier to create echo chambers, as you need to block fewer people before reaching epistemic closure.
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
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Why would anyone with half a brain stay to experience that?
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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?
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You've got three tools, mutes, blocks, and lists. Yeah, there's no centralized algorithm that does it for you, it'll take a couple days of actual effort, but it's extremely easy to prune your main feed into looking how you want it to look. Which is pretty much like how it was to use Twitter a few years ago before everything got algorithmed.
> it'll take a couple days of actual effort, but it's extremely easy If it takes a couple of days of actual effort, then it’s not extremely easy, especially for the average user who can just go to Threads with their existing Instagram account and not be bombarded with furry and diaper porn.
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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…
Unlike X, blue sky defaults to simply showing you a feed of the people you follow, in chronological order.
This is the best way to use the app
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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?
What investors? It isn't a public company, and it's registered as a benefit corporation. Anybody who gives them money should have a clue that its priority is not shareholder returns.
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> it'll take a couple days of actual effort, but it's extremely easy If it takes a couple of days of actual effort, then it’s not extremely easy, especially for the average user who can just go to Threads with their existing Instagram account and not be bombarded with furry and diaper porn.
It actually takes effort to see furry and diaper porn. I'm pretty sure Adult Content is disabled by default and needs to be enabled.
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Nate Silver is an ideologue who deeply wants BlueSky to be failing.
I think you’re going to need to back that up in order for me to take your claim seriously. I’ve always found Nate Silver to be opinionated, sure, but with opinions based on data. (To be clear, I’m not disputing that Silver thinks BlueSky is failing—I’ll take your word for that—I’m disputing that he’s doing so because he had an axe to grind rather than data backing him up.)