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When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

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Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#61

Post by psionides »

knallfrosch wrote: post #38

Anyone following hundreds of thousands of users is obviously a bot account scraping content. I'd ban them and call it a day. However, I do love reading about the technical challenge. I think Twitter has a special architecture for celebrities with millions of followers. Given Bluesky is a quasi-clone, I wonder why they did not follow in these footsteps.

You don't need to follow anyone (or even have an account) to scrape content… Someone following a huge amount of accounts usually wants to get a lot of followers quickly this way through follow-backs.

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#62

Post by impossiblefork »

gkoberger wrote: post #31
autobodie wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. The profit motive is the root of most evil. It is a shame that so many are trained to believe it is the only motive available.

I completely agree with this... but without profit, people can't get paid, and they'll stop building. I do hate this incredibly need for growth, of course, but financial growth is necessary to pay people and give them raises and allow them to have upward mobility at the company. I hope Bluesky is able to find a model that works for them AND for consumers. (I do know it's an open protocol, so it'll live on without Blu…

Yes, but there is a path, and it's simplicity.

Lichess, is it bad? It basically solves the whole problem. If well-designed distributed social media site could be something like that. Donations are enough to support one guy at least.

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#63

Post by ruined »

knallfrosch wrote: post #38

Anyone following hundreds of thousands of users is obviously a bot account scraping content. I'd ban them and call it a day. However, I do love reading about the technical challenge. I think Twitter has a special architecture for celebrities with millions of followers. Given Bluesky is a quasi-clone, I wonder why they did not follow in these footsteps.

if you want to scrape all the content, that's what the firehose is for, and it's allowed.

the only reason to mass-follow is for spam purposes.

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#65

Post by bbor »

gkoberger wrote: post #31
autobodie wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. The profit motive is the root of most evil. It is a shame that so many are trained to believe it is the only motive available.

I completely agree with this... but without profit, people can't get paid, and they'll stop building. I do hate this incredibly need for growth, of course, but financial growth is necessary to pay people and give them raises and allow them to have upward mobility at the company. I hope Bluesky is able to find a model that works for them AND for consumers. (I do know it's an open protocol, so it'll live on without Blu…

I totally get/relate to your perspective, but to be the annoying leftie in your ear:

A) Sustainable revenue is a requirement for any company, yes, but the unlimited (above-inflation) growth demanded by most large corporations is absolutely not. Lots and lots of companies operate for a long time without expecting massive growth, raises n' all. MBAs pejoratively call such companies "lifestyle businesses"--as in "just pays for people to live"--but I'd call them "normal, healthy companies".

B) More fundamentally: the idea that a social media network can only be built by a single corporation owned by investors is an omnipresent, yet extremely toxic, assumption. Mastodon represents another extreme end of the capitallabor spectrum where anyone can contribute to the network at any time with their own instance, but I think Bluesky is a hint of a less-pure--and therefor more feasible--future.

To use the language of my favorite dream, Chomskian Anarcho-Syndicalism: imagine a social media network organized by a democratic non-profit entity akin to the Python or Linux Foundations, that then contracts out work to a hierarchy of smaller, purpose-built teams ("syndicates"), each of which may in turn contract w/ other teams. Each team would have to attract talent and negotiate enough income to pay them sufficiently still, of course, but there would be no team leader to make a surplus profit from the system -- any "surplus" would stay at the non-profit level, and thus necessarily be reinvested back into the product.

In the current system, the reason Bluesky didn't do this off the bat is obvious: no one would loan them startup funds, as ownership investment is the de facto universal way to start up an unproven venture. But we can dream bigger and better, IMHO; both on a smaller scale by building upon already-proven open protocols like AT Proto, and on a larger scale by structuring the state & economy to support this kind of model equally, if not primarily.

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#66

Post by ChuckMcM »

As a systems enthusiast I enjoy articles like this. It is really easy to get into the mindset of "this must be perfect".

In the Blekko search engine back end we built an index that was 'eventually consistent' which allowed updates to the index to be propagated to the user facing index more quickly, at the expense that two users doing the exact same query would get slightly different results. If they kept doing those same queries they would eventually get the exact same results.

Systems like this bring in a lot of control systems theory because they have the potential to oscillate if there is positive feedback (and in search engines that positive feedback comes from the ranker which is looking at which link you clicked and giving it a higher weight) and it is important that they not go crazy. Some of the most interesting, and most subtle, algorithm work was done keeping that system "critically damped" so that it would converge quickly.

Reading this description of how user's timelines are sharded and the same sorts of feedback loops (in this case 'likes' or 'reposts') sounds like a pretty interesting problem space to explore.

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#67

Post by Retr0id »

ruined wrote: post #63
knallfrosch wrote: post #38

Anyone following hundreds of thousands of users is obviously a bot account scraping content. I'd ban them and call it a day. However, I do love reading about the technical challenge. I think Twitter has a special architecture for celebrities with millions of followers. Given Bluesky is a quasi-clone, I wonder why they did not follow in these footsteps.

if you want to scrape all the content, that's what the firehose is for, and it's allowed. the only reason to mass-follow is for spam purposes.

This does assume that scrapers are smart, and often they're really not. They have infrastructure for scraping HTML from webpages at scale and that is the hammer they use for all nails. (e.g. Wikipedia has to fight off scraper traffic despite full archives being available as torrents, etc.)

In this case I agree though, they're all spammers and/or "clout farmers", or trying to make an account seem more authentic for future scams. They want to generate follow notifications in the hope that some will follow them back (and if they don't, they unfollow again after some interval).

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#68

Post by bbor »

cyberax wrote: post #60
gkoberger wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree with this... but without profit, people can't get paid, and they'll stop building. I do hate this incredibly need for growth, of course, but financial growth is necessary to pay people and give them raises and allow them to have upward mobility at the company. I hope Bluesky is able to find a model that works for them AND for consumers. (I do know it's an open protocol, so it'll live on without Blu…

On the other hand, running something like BlueSky is not terribly expensive. A foundation with a reasonable endowment can do that indefinitely. Initially, it can be funded by selling tools that do analytics or by donations (like Wikipedia).

Yes! If the venture capitalists that are already involved stick to their stated principles and don't demand eternal growth (which... fingers crossed?), I think bsky has an extremely feasible, promising future.

They've intentionally kept a low footprint to keep expenses down, and while income via donation is out of the picture (unless AT Proto grows into a full ecosystem, I suppose?), cosmetics are a tried-and-true model for supporting something that most users use for free, but that some power users spend all day on and want shiny stuff for. They'll probably end up exploring Discord-esque paywalled features for power users as well, which isn't necessarily ideal but is leagues better than getting on the currently-dying vicious cycle of Display Ads, IMO.

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#69

Post by sphars »

When I go directly to a user's profile and see all their posts, sometimes one of their posts isn't in my timeline where it should be. I follow less than 100 users on Bluesky, but I guess this explains why I occasionally don't see a user's post in my timeline.

Lossy indeed.

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