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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

#331

Most likely this is due to political bias of the group that was surveyed [1]. Liberals in general dislike X because of the owner. It's the same reason that the average Hacker News reader favors Bluesky over X. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01382-3

From the abstract of that link, with emphasis added:

> Scientists in the United States are more politically liberal than the general population. This fact has fed charges of political bias. To learn more about scientists’ political behavior, we analyze publicly available Federal Election Commission data. We find that scientists who donate to federal candidates and parties are far more likely to support Democrats than Republicans, with less than 10 percent of donations going to Republicans in recent years. The same pattern holds true for employees of the academic sector generally, and for scientists employed in the energy sector. This was not always the case: Before 2000, political contributions were more evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. We argue that these observed changes are more readily explained by changes in Republican Party attitudes toward science than by changes in American scientists. We reason that greater public involvement by centrist and conservative scientists could help increase trust in science among Republicans.

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

#332

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…

> I've been dual-wielding Twitter and Bluesky for about a year (after a year off Twitter where I was mostly Mastodon), and, anecdatally, we've hit a point where the engagement and volume of stuff I see in Bluesky is lower than what I was getting even on Mastodon.

What do you count as "engagement"? Views/likes? Those can be produced. Interesting conversations that aren't obviously LLM can't. That's the metric I use for anecdotally seeing Bluesky (and Mastodon) as immensely more engaging in a signal/noise ratio.

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

#333
post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New users follow zero people on Bluesky.

Yes. And I seeded my feed with people I already knew. Just like I did with Twitter back in 2008. And just like Twitter all those years ago, from seeing what they repost, I expanded my network. People who are incapable of finding content without a "discovery" or "for you" feed get what they deserve.

> People who are incapable of finding content without a "discovery" or "for you" feed get what they deserve.

If this is a typical attitude to the new user experience, no wonder Bluesky isn’t succeeding.

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

#334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For what it's worth, I've never seen anything like this either.

Just to solidify, I just went and created a new account to ensure I was right, and I was. You need to go to your settings, go to moderation, and enable adult content. I scrolled continuously for 5 minutes straight and saw no adult content on a default account. And on top of this, as far as I can google, Bluesky has never had adult content enabled by default, so if you are seeing it, you enabled it.

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

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The reason why I chose those examples is because they were already brought up in the thread here:

> 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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45397250

> i kept getting weird sexual posts of dudes in diapers, no matter how much i blocked or asked not to see that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45397733

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

#336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The reason why I chose those examples is because they were already brought up in the thread here: > 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. — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45397250 > i kept getting weird sexual posts of dudes in diapers, no matter how much i blocked or asked not to see that. — https://news.ycombinat…

By default bluesky blocks adult content, once you enable it you can dial in what kind of adult content you wish to see. I know this is all anecdotal, like the links you posted... But I started a new account to see what it's like. I can scroll the default algorithm for 5 minutes and not see anything questionable, and my actual account exists with adult content turned on and I never see it. After signing up the new account, I can search for furry or diaper content, but it appears that none of it is like "nsfw" (mostly just people in furry costumes or diapers but no sexual content or nudity).

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

#338
post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. And I seeded my feed with people I already knew. Just like I did with Twitter back in 2008. And just like Twitter all those years ago, from seeing what they repost, I expanded my network. People who are incapable of finding content without a "discovery" or "for you" feed get what they deserve.

> People who are incapable of finding content without a "discovery" or "for you" feed get what they deserve. If this is a typical attitude to the new user experience, no wonder Bluesky isn’t succeeding.

Why would anyone want a "discovery" type of feed on any site? On sites that insist on showing me content from things I don't follow I just block it.

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

#339
post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I googled: $23m raised (8 seed, 15 A in Oct 24). Also, linkedin says 53 people, though crazies like to say they're employed places. It does say 29 in the US so that's more likely real. Assuming that skews eng a bit, that's probably (225 fully loaded eng, 150 fully loaded the rest) $6m in payroll alone. Not to mention server expenses. That's tough. The case for more funding: 1 - yolo; 2 - non-economic investments; 3 -…

Yeah, this is basically where I'm coming from. There are ideologues and stans arguing both ways whether Bluesky is a moribund platform. I don't think it's intrinsically moribund. But I think that's the wrong question. The more important question is: is it succeeding to the point where it will attract another round of investment? That case is I think pretty hard to make based on the available public evidence --- but t…

I think the case can be made that twitter itself is unsustainable, and that the goal to create a new business model or social media system is part of the idea behind Bsky.

Admittedly- this does not sound like the investment thesis that raises 700mn usd. But! the larger goal of Bsky is to not be twitter, and to be a different type of social media. In general, its not going to be as good.

Whether there is a business model at the intersection of not-twitter and new social media, is to be discovered.

Taking a stab at it - I suppose the question is whether this can be converted into any sort of cheap subscription based model, which is efficient to run on long time horizons and so breaks even, long enough to keep attracting users, and offloading moderation tasks to user groups.

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

#340
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science was defunded by politics, and sometimes is political due to existing interests. Why shouldn't scientists talk about politics?

Lack of self control or awareness. People make the mistake of thinking that because they are informed on one topic that happens to be political that their opinions on other political topics are relevant. I’m fine seeing scientists arguing for the importance of science on social media. I don’t want to hear rants about LGBTQ+ people from geologists.

Why should a LGBTQ+ geologist not talk about LGBTQ+ stuff. That makes no sense. Scientists are human, they have the same attributes as other humans, sex and politics among them.
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