51–60 of 355 posts
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 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.
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
There is more momentum against Musk now than when threads launched. Not sure it is enough to overcome the network effect - but there is a lot of illwill towards his projects. I can see how something like SpaceX is overall a net good, but I don't see that upside for X.
> overtaking Threads So the lowest bar possibly imaginable?
Is it all the ways that matter? The author mentions one way, DAU. Sure, that is important but I can think of other things that matter. The number of “creator” accounts matters just as much as the number of lurkers. From my experience Bluesky is way better and has respect for the user’s choice front and center. Lists of users to follow is a first-class citizen feature. Their algorithm is a chronological feed, not boos…
wouldn't things like creator-lurker ratio be captured within DAU? as in, poor ratio leads to poor DAU?
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
The difference in moderation is night and day. Soon after Musk took over, I started having accounts wishing me violent deaths, repeatedly commenting on everything I said with graphic details (broken bones, poisoning, dragging my body over the pavement, etc.). That happened occasionally before, but they typically got banned. After the takeover, those were gone (and my account got blocked a couple of times for quoting…
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.
The first camp biases toward sprinkling provocative, highly engaged content in your feed even if it falls outside your network of follows or areas of interest. A sort of “forced discovery”. Elon’s Twitter and YouTube during the 2010s follow this model.
The second camp does the same thing but requires recommended content to track closer to its perception of your interests. TikTok does this exceptionally well, to the point where people often say they feel like their feed is “reading their mind”. Bluesky seems to follow this pattern as well.
The latter is more scalable than the former, but to your point it is an open question how big it scales, and maybe there’s just too many people for either approach to work.
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'm not sure there's anything in any of the products that makes one better than the other (except Mastodon is actively obtuse). It's just a matter of who joins and how they interact. People on Bluesky act like people on Twitter used to, but maybe (hopefully) without as much rage-baiting. Though seeing some classic Twitter personalities translating their snarky and meta commentary to Bluesky, I'm finding it doesn't really work... the medium is exactly the same, but the vibe isn't.
Threads feels like a text Instagram, because so many of its users came from there. It can be entertaining, but it feels ephemeral, and the algorithm promotes a kind of low-brow broad content that doesn't make me feel good after consuming it. Somehow it feels like trying to make a social network out of someone else's comment thread... like it's never really meant for us.
X feels pretty shitty, not like Twitter. It's a lot of self-promotion bullshit, and doubling down on rage bait. Using it is also an expression of fealty to someone who in his vanity is actively hurting this nation. Threads isn't an expression of fealty to Zuckerberg... it's all filtered through the capitalistic process that mostly removes direct ideology. It might suck or be great, but it's not a person. X is a person. There's no way to separate the two.
Bluesky feels like what we make of it. There's not a lot of algorithm putting its thumb on the scale.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference in moderation is night and day. Soon after Musk took over, I started having accounts wishing me violent deaths, repeatedly commenting on everything I said with graphic details (broken bones, poisoning, dragging my body over the pavement, etc.). That happened occasionally before, but they typically got banned. After the takeover, those were gone (and my account got blocked a couple of times for quoting…
What the hell are you doing or saying to warrant that kind of negative attention?
Twitter does not need a replacement. There seem to be a popular opinion that it does, but it's not something people are willing to act on. It's a better app than it used to be, overall.
They de-prioritize links, prevent 3rd party apps, closed the API, and blocked access for non-logged-in viewing.
And a smaller meta-point: changed from an iconic name to a simple non-informative letter (Besides Google and maybe Uber, who have added a popular verb to the lexicon?)