Bluesky's Decline Stems From Never Hearing From the Other Side (washingtonpost.com)
- Reference: 0178000413
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/06/10/2013239/blueskys-decline-stems-from-never-hearing-from-the-other-side
- Source link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/06/08/blue-sky-twitter-liberals/
> The people who have migrated to Bluesky tend to be those who feel the most visceral disgust for Musk and Trump, plus a smattering of those who are merely curious and another smattering who are tired of the AI slop and unregenerate racism that increasingly pollutes their X feeds. Because the Musk and Trump haters are the largest and most passionate group, the result is something of an echo chamber where it's hard to get positive engagement unless you're saying things progressives want to hear -- and where the negative engagement on things they don't want to hear can be intense. That's true even for content that isn't obviously political: Ethan Mollick, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School who studies AI, recently announced that he'll be limiting his Bluesky posting because AI discussions on the platform are too "fraught."
>
> All this is pretty off-putting for folks who aren't already rather progressive, and that creates a threefold problem for the ones who dream of getting the old band back together. Most obviously, it makes it hard for the platform to build a large enough userbase for the company to become financially self-sustaining, or for liberals to amass the influence they wielded on old Twitter. There, they accumulated power by shaping the contours of a conversation that included a lot of non-progressives. On Bluesky, they're mostly talking among themselves.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/06/08/blue-sky-twitter-liberals/
Decline? (Score:2)
Their user base has been growing constantly. McArdle is a fucking hack.
Re: Decline? (Score:2, Insightful)
Accounts that aren't used or don't interact might as well not exist. You're making the same mistake judging as slashdot by it's highest UID would be.
Re: (Score:2)
I admit I don't interact much but I do read regularly.
Does that mean I might as well not exist?
* laughs in dialog * (Score:2)
* laughs in dialog *
It's True, Don't Come! (Score:2)
Listen to Jeff Bezos' Washington Post and Trump's Wharton School.
If you're a right-winger, it's a terrible place to be. Don't come!
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
It's actually pretty good for ring-wingers. Sure, there's a lot of progressive content (lame for right-wingers) but Bluesky also has some of the best coverage for Trump's various court cases which have stemmed from his illegal and anti-American orders. Indeed, I've found Bluesky to be rather anti-Trump, and that's a position that Democrats, conservatives, and the majority of liberals all agree on (with the obvious exception, MAGA).
Re: (Score:1)
Court cases? Have any of the dozens of injunctions against the Trump administration been significantly affirmed? I can’t find any, and I’ve searched hard.
They’ve all essentially petered out so far, at least in terms of impact. The tariffs were just reinstated, for example, and it seems likely they’ll stay in place. Deportations continue at a brisk pace. The border remains effectively closed to “asylum seekers” - down at least 97% this year.
New Flash (Score:2)
In other late-breaking news today, it was revealed that the Pope considers himself to be Catholic...
Re: New Flash (Score:1, Troll)
I also have it on good authority that water is wet, fire is hot, and waving a Mexican flag while throwing fireworks at American law enforcement enforcing American laws on American soil is, in fact, rebellion and/or insurrection.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
> I also have it on good authority that water is wet, fire is hot, and waving a Mexican flag while throwing fireworks at American law enforcement enforcing American laws on American soil is, in fact, rebellion and/or insurrection.
How about when you beat a police officer with an American flag while that officer is enforcing American laws in America's capitol - is that rebellion and/or insurrection?
Eco Chamber vs Conflict (Score:3)
Echo chambers are comfortable, but conflict drives engagement.
" Someone on the internet is WRONG, I must do something about it! "
Re: (Score:2)
I think that is correct. I have now stopped arguing with liars, but I was sucked into that entertainment for years. MAGAs will simply believe any lie that Trump tells them, and when you give them a quote or a statistic, they do personal attacks. It is like discussing things with a child. It is time to stop talking. Courts and voting are the last resort it seems.
Re: Eco Chamber vs Conflict (Score:2)
Ha-Ha, my favorite XKCD comic: [1]https://xkcd.com/386/ [xkcd.com]
[1] https://xkcd.com/386/
Re: (Score:2)
That's the one I was thinking of! Thank you
Re: (Score:2)
There is a tipping point where people leave. I left Twitter because it's just such a hellscape now.
Outrage Fatigue is also a factor (Score:5, Insightful)
FB is bad enough for those who dislike the current US government to be constantly seeing things shared.
BlueSky is that times a thousand. While there are other topics discussed, the political posts overwhelm the feeds, and 'bleed' into the other topics you might have tried to make special feeds for. Disney, National Parks, Muppets, Science, Star Trek - everything has a political angle that somebody is going to bring up.
So I quit (or rather, stopped visiting). I can't live with outrage-generation 24-7, but BlueSky has turned into that (and Threads is pretty full, too).
Re: (Score:2)
Yep I login to some of these sites and I see 3-4 tangentally-related things that are clearly algorithm rage-bait, designed to drive user interaction. I'm so tired of this. I login for 10-15 minutes a handful of times a week to check in on friends and family for updates, and then promptly uninstall the app.
Re: (Score:2)
Just block keywords you don't want to hear about. It really cuts out the US Government-related news. Or make use of someone else's "mute list". [1]https://lifehacker.com/tech/ho... [lifehacker.com] [2]https://boringstorybook.com/bl... [boringstorybook.com]
[1] https://lifehacker.com/tech/how-to-mute-words-and-phrases-on-your-bluesky-feed
[2] https://boringstorybook.com/bluesky-mute-lists-for-beginners/
Re:Outrage Fatigue is also a factor (Score:4, Interesting)
Sorry to be blunt, but this is just laziness. I hit the political fatigue wall a few months ago, so I made a new feed that only includes accounts that are focused on specific non-political topics - dogs, games, etc. Took me all of 5 minutes and that's my default feed now. The "following" feed is still there when I want to dip my toes into the wider garbage-sphere, and liberal use of easy to find block lists keeps the trolls away. The difference is that I don't spend all day scrolling because I actually run out of stuff to look at on Blue Sky and shut the browser tab when I'm done. It's delightful!
I don't know if their business model is sustainable, but it would be a real shame to lose it, because personally this bubble is exactly what I'm looking for from social media right now. I have zero regerts over not hearing the toxic bullshit and slop that's taken over the other platforms because I'm not a drama-addicted shell of a human that needs to "engage" with random strangers that have nothing but stupidity to contribute.
I can have meaningful conversations about topics with people of different viewpoints by engaging with my extended friend group and a curated list of news sites and subreddits.
Re: (Score:3)
The other thing I find a problem is the bar for outrage keeps getting lower as well. Now you can simply say 'Your rights end where mine begins' which for equality and everyone treated fairly makes complete sense, but then they get mad at that, the truth turns out a lot of people think they should have more rights than others for and love to manipulate the heck out of it to make their justifications.
BSky works for me as Twitter replacement (Score:4, Interesting)
Twitter used to be good for news, and the same is now true for BSky. Plenty of lists that supply me with news on Ukraine, science, technology and other topics that I am interested in.
My engagement there has not declined nor do I perceive a slowdown in posts.
Re: BSky works for me as Twitter replacement (Score:2)
Content creators I follow post regular updates. I keep up with projects, life updates, events. I'm actually pretty happy not having everything turn into politics. I see too much of that content elsewhere already. And I don't have algorithmic feeds, so I open the app up once a day, catch up and close. No infinite scroll engineered to get me angry.
Re: (Score:2)
The main issue I've had on BlueSky is that the people who I followed on Twitter and who also have BlueSky accounts do not update their BlueSky feeds as regularly. But it does seem like that situation is slowly improving.
Nonsense (Score:2)
A few from "the other side" came over just to troll, then quit when they were blocked rather than getting rewarded with engagement.
Thankfully Bluesky isn't a private social media company that just wants to juice its engagement, which only leads to a gradual enshitification of the product (and society's discourse in the process).
Re: (Score:3)
> A few from "the other side" came over just to troll, then quit when they were blocked rather than getting rewarded with engagement.
... That's exactly what the Post article means by "echo chamber".
Re: (Score:3)
> Thankfully Bluesky isn't a private social media company that just wants to juice its engagement, which only leads to a gradual enshitification of the product (and society's discourse in the process).
...yet.
1) Why do social media companies want to juice their engagement?
2) What are the inherent human traits and economic forces driving enshittification?
3) Which software/media businesses reach the scale of having >10 million unique users per day, and continue not-being-evil for the next 10 years?
4) Considering the examples you come up with for #3, what do you believe makes those businesses immune to the natural-selection pressures of #1 and #2?
5) What are the profitability trends for the examples in #3
But isn't it great? (Score:1)
Right wing activists will have X, left wing activists will have BlueSky, and their flame wars hopefully wouldn't spill over the all other people.
Internet should be more fragmented and harder to use.
Re: (Score:1)
I think the problem stems from the fact that "I just want to afford a home, be compensated fairly for the skills and efforts I developed, have a reasonable income, and not be responsible to give all my labor to people who believe they deserve for some reason, even tho I never met them and did nothing to them" puts me into some sort of activists on one of the sides.
I just want those things and my family to be safe. I'm not talking about medical care for people who are injured or have illness either, it's goo
I have a BlueSky account (Score:2)
The app sucks, no third party apps, and no browsers can access it on android or iphone, I quit commenting because too many snowflakes melt when they encounter an opposing opinion so I just use BlueSky like a news aggregator & news reader
Re: (Score:1)
You sound like one of the misinformation spigots that are cheesed you can't get traction on Bluesky.
I access Bluesky on the Firefox browser on my Android-based phone.
Re: (Score:2)
I have not tried using a browser in a few months, looks like it is time to try again because it it did not work for me in the past
Re: (Score:1)
> I quit commenting because too many snowflakes melt when they encounter [me]
So you think that strangers are going to be willing to tolerate your presence and include you in a group when you're intentionally behaving in a way that would "melt" them? That they want to have to tough it out to be with you? LOL So stupid.
And such a predictably weak tough-guy cry-baby act.
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is that, in a world where anybody can get offended by anything, it's impossible to say anything.
It's slightly obfuscated but it has the same... (Score:2)
It's slightly obfuscated but it has the same catastrophic social engineering flaw that all other free social media platforms have. If users aren't the ones paying the bills, then they aren't the customer.
Companies shape platforms according to their customers' needs but we're not the customer so the platform isn't being shaped in our image. It's still just a marketing and data mining platform.
Any platform that isn't user-supported will fail. They have to. There's no other way for that story to end.
Re: (Score:3)
You've just made an excellent argument for publicly funded news media like BBC, CBC and such. They might not be perfect, but at least they aren't complete whores.
You keep using that word... (Score:2)
and I don't think it means what you think it means. Progressive? We're seeing the progress around the world, if that's what you're calling it. Also somehow since it's not better it's always someone elses fault, Maybe progress towards slavery where the elites dominate the working class because they think it's their turn or something?
Comment voting must be valid (Score:2)
If it is possible on a site to vote comments up or down and the result of that vote means something ( I think it is largely irrelevant here ), then it must be possible to vet that voting to ensure that it is based on valid criteria and not simply based on disagreeing with the points expressed.
If there was a site like that, where my arguments counted and the woke or Maga mobs could not vote them away, I would try it.
Re: (Score:3)
You want a site to read people's minds?
Not even a juror has to explain their vote.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't want to read minds, I want moderators' decisions to be public so we can hold them accountable for actions that do not help raise the level of discourse.
A juror is not a valid comparison. Their decisions must be kept secret for good reasons and they only make them very occasionally.
progressive groups (Score:1)
This label needs changing. Making up random stuff is not progress.
Re: progressive groups (Score:2)
As a random slashdot reader I am deeply hurt and offended by your randomist remarks.
It's a bit incompetent (Score:2)
I use Bluesky, and I have been kicked off of Twitter for saying not so nice but also true things about Elon Musk (no fact checking to speak of, just got the boot) so I can't compare them now. But some things don't work right. Their algorithm shows me a lot of kinds of stuff I never interact with, though it always is showing me new accounts. I guess by "we don't have an algorithm" they meant it was very primitive. When I try to post images they come up as all black in the correct dimensions. It worked for a
Re: (Score:2)
> Your Following feed is a chronological feed of the people you follow, unless you choose an algorithm for it to use. Discover has a default algorithm.
Yes, I'm talking about Discover, which is the default when you go to bsky.app. If it's totally untargeted that explains why it sucks.
2 sets of facts (Score:2)
I have found that MAGAs and the so called "Liberals" operate off of two sets of "facts". I think MAGAs operate off of made up or propaganda "facts", and liberals operate off of facts derived from statistics, logic, and science. MAGAs are "having their day" right now firing scientists, and lying about almost everything. I have also found that it is a waste of time to talk to MAGA's now, so I have stopped talking to any MAGA, and I don't post on any right wing site like X. Let them have their day, make
Re: (Score:1)
Here are some Biden era “facts” straight from your “scientific” fact checkers!
- The border is secure. Tightening border controls requires a change in the law.
- Biden is perfectly mentally competent.
- The laptop is a Russian plant.
- The lab leak theory is impossible.
- Musk is a moron that stole the tech for Tesla and SpaceX! (After acquiring Twitter). Musk is a genius! (Before acquiring Twitter)
- There’s no inflation. The economy is great. Printing gobs of money won’t caus
Longtime conservative likes Nazi bar, film at 11 (Score:2)
McMegan is a clown. A wannabe Maureen Dowd without the turn of phrase or hint of self-awareness.
I'm totally fine with people like that trashing Bluesky. By all means, enjoy Musk's blog.
And Xitter is exactly that. [1]Open forums don't look like this. [bsky.app]
People who are enjoying a party don't sit around trying to convince themselves that some other party sucks more.
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/realtime-mike.bsky.social/post/3lmwmo3qgqs2w
"A Washington Post columnist" (Score:2)
Right. So a completely impartial, disinterested source /sarcasm, not even an actual journalist, but a columnist , writing a predictably clunking opinion piece, for a newspaper whose reputation has not exactly been enhanced since the events leading up to last November, and then beyond.
I had a Twitter account for 17 years, joining in May 2007. I say had , because last autumn, after not posting, and using it read only for over a year, I finally deleted it. Why? Because it was a bin fire, a horrible swirling shit
Among the least surprising outcome possible... (Score:1)
> Most obviously, it makes it hard for the platform to build a large enough userbase for the company to become financially self-sustaining, or for liberals to amass the influence they wielded on old Twitter. There, they accumulated power by shaping the contours of a conversation that included a lot of non-progressives. On Bluesky, they're mostly talking among themselves.
Twitter was a battleground for both sides, and people enjoyed the back-and-forth. When Musk bought Twitter and renamed it X, half the users up and left X for the BlueSky sanctuary - no one on the right even contemplated making the move.
There is literally nothing bluesky can do to attract conservatives, and with an ecosystem that is almost exclusively of one mind, they are little more than echo chamber.
Re: (Score:2)
We seem to be at the point of a Civil War at this point. MAGAs are in their "Echo Chamber", and some reasonable people try to reason with them. The reasonable people get personally attacked, and called unreasonable names, and they react instead of act. It is time for reasonable to simply act.
The internet is full of rage bait (Score:2)
Because rage bait drives engagement. If you have a online platform that discourages rage bait it's going to get less engagement by design.
Unfortunately since engagement is the currency of the Internet it's hard to avoid flooding a website with it. I have been trying lately to remove the useless political channels that don't have any useful information from my feed and they keep cropping up. Garbage like The Young Turks or Vaush. And absolutely nothing I do gets the right wing stuff out of my feed becaus
Re: (Score:2)
+1, insightful and informative.
In a nutshell... (Score:2)
So, basically, Bluesky is Slashdot v2.0
You can not have any kind of discussion on Bluesky (Score:2)
The moment you offer a different viewpoint on a thread on Bluesky, you will get selectively blocked. I am not sure how many levels of blocking they have, but it makes for a very disjointed experience.
Echo chambers rarely live long, after some time every one will have heard and said whatever they want to hear and say.
Re: (Score:2)
Right wing looks for enemies outside.
Left wing looks for enemies inside. They purge whoever does not align with their new "point of view of the day" until only those who always comply to every twist and turn remain.
The left is a Bose-Einstein condensate.
It's not just a political platform (Score:2, Troll)
We're treating Bluesky like it's only a political platform/battleground. I want to hear about my hobbies, etc so I don't know who the 'other side' would be in that context. Trump is destroying the entire world's opinion of the US and destroying the constitution. The best day will be the day we never have to hear his name again.
Re: (Score:2)
I know the word Hitler and NAZI is thrown around a lot, so it almost is meaningless, however, yes, I do believe that right now Trump is America's Hitler, and MAGA's, the NAZI's. and... yes.. I would like to just talk about hobbies and interests, however, I just get overwhelmed by MAGA trolls (on other websites).
Echo chambers do not work (Score:2)
I think it was Facebook back then that made a study on this. But I might be mistaken.
"Rage" content brings more engagement. And the natural way to do this is bringing both sides together. (There are also "unnatural" ones like russian troll farms, but let's ignore that for a moment). That is why platforms where people on the boundary interact with each other tend to grow more. And echo chamber deteriorate over time.
Blu Sky?
They are an extreme echo chamber. Even if you have 99% agreement with their views, a s
Opening a Bluesky/Mastodon/Whatever account... (Score:2)
...while keeping the Twitter account will never work.
If you do not like Twitter close your damn account and never look back, it's the only way.
The Ronald McDonald effect (Score:2)
The people who have migrated to Bluesky tend to be those who feel the most visceral disgust for Musk and Trump
Do I have to have a personal relationship with Ronald McDonald in order to enjoy a burger :o
Is it a problem? (Score:1)
I'm happy there is another X-like alternative for political stuff etc. Maybe some had too much expectations of its potential for more. BlueSky can have its purpose, depending on the use case.
Re: (Score:2)
> Z liesky wasn't populated by people who were angry they were being censored. It was by people who were angry they couldn't censorYOU.
Accurate.
It's not a decline... (Score:3, Insightful)
if you get rid of the toxic trash accounts that were making Former Twitter a cesspool of bots and flame wars.
Re: (Score:1)
Please explain what you mean by "toxic trash accounts".
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
[1]https://x.com/elonmusk [x.com]
[1] https://x.com/elonmusk
Re: (Score:2)
Musk on X kind of reminds me of ye olde days when you'd have these overbearing BBS SysOps who were absolutely in love with the sound of their own speech. I'm fairly certain that falls under some sort of god complex.
Granted, you can technically still block Musk on X, but you really can't escape his influence over the platform.
Re: It's not a decline... (Score:2)
How does a clever guy like him fall for some nonsense right wing story, boost it, apologise, then do it again and again ?
Re: (Score:2)
Power reveals what you always were. You just could not afford to do so back then.
Re: It's not a decline... (Score:2)
Beat me to it
Re: It's not a decline... (Score:2)
"Toxic" or "trash" doesn't have a meaning per se associated with it... just a diffuse feeling of doubleplusungood .
The specific details are for the reader (i.e. you) to fill out, or your opponent in a disagreement.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
One thing I noticed is that it is overrun with people posting other people's photographs without attribution, and AI images pretending to be photographs.
Reporting them does nothing, and their algorithm is incapable of realizing that a user doesn't want to spend their time looking at that stuff.
My main hobby interest is photography, there are lots of photographers using the site, and yet, it is unpleasant to try to use for that. And it's a hobby that fits the general format really well.
Complete trash.
The oth
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
> If you don't know all that...
I am not on Bluesky (or X), but even if I were it is unlikely that I would have the same definition of toxic trash accounts. So it is very reasonable question to ask that in no way warrants you attacking me. So perhaps you are part of such toxicity?
Re: (Score:2)
Are you talking about Twitter? I'm on BlueSky and only ever see the original creators posting photos, and very rarely anything AI generated. That's one of the things that makes it better than Twitter, there is less viral meme crap and AI slop.
Maybe it's the accounts I follow, but most of them were brought over from Twitter with a tool that finds matching accounts, so I'd say it's more likely whatever algorithm they use.
Overall BlueSky is less engaging than Twitter, but in a good way. It's not so full of rag
Re: (Score:1)
Libtards
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
Indeed. I'm actually getting a lot of coherent and intelligent (if still deeply propagandized) left wing accounts now in my feed.
It used to be the tumblr/bluesky madness instead for the left.
I hope bluesky lives long and prospers, for it makes for a great dump of the left wing activists. Where they can fellate one another into ever deeper levels of madness, quarantined there for posterity.
Re:It's not a decline... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think people expect commercial social media networks to be something they can't be -- a kind of commons where you are exposed to the range of views that exist in your community. But that's not what makes social networks money, what makes them money is engagement, and consuming a variety of opinions is tiresome for users and bad for profits. When did you ever see social media trying to engage you with opinions you don't agree with or inform you about the breadth of opinion out there? It has never done that.
The old management of Twitter had a strategy of making it a big tent, comfortable for centrist views and centrist-adjacent views. This enabled it to function as a kind of limited town common for people who either weren't interested in politics, like authors or celebrities promoting their work, or who wanted to reach a large number of mainly apolitical people. This meant drawing lines on both sides of the political spectrum, and naturally people near the line on either side were continually furious with them.
It was an unnatural and unstable situation. As soon as Musk tried to broaden one side of the tent, polarization was inevitable. This means neither X nor Bluesky can be what Twitter was for advertisers and public figures looking for a broad audience.
At present I'm using Mastodon. For users of old Twitter, it must seem like an empty wasteland, but it's a non-commercial network, it has no business imperative to suck up every last free moment of my attention. I follow major news organizations who dutifully post major stories. I follow some interest groups which are active to a modest degree, some local groups who post on local issues, and a few celebrities like George Takei. *Everybody's* not on it, but that's OK; I don't want to spend more than a few minutes a day on the thing so I don't have time to follow everyone I might be interested in. Oh, and moderation is on a per-server basis, so you can choose a server where the admins have a policy you're OK with.
Re: (Score:3)
> The old management of Twitter had a strategy of making it a big tent, comfortable for centrist views and centrist-adjacent views. This meant drawing lines on both sides of the political spectrum, and naturally people near the line on either side were continually furious with them.
Can you provide one example of a line drawn on the left? What was too far left on old Twitter that would get you banned?
Re: It's not a decline... (Score:2)
You understand there is a vast difference between far left and far right? Far right consists of racists, nazis, sexist views that most people abhor.
Re: (Score:2)
Far left holds all those views. It hates whites, private property, and men, so it's racist, communist and sexist.
So?
Re: (Score:2)
Let me guess, you're a white man that owns a 500sqft condo in Nashville. The Magat victim complex. On the positive side of things, you're a great example of the decline of western civilization.
Re: (Score:2)
Calling for the assassination of billionaires maybe? Luigi was a hero for a while and posts glorifying what he did were removed.
Re: (Score:2)
Mastodon is basically "that place where people banned on bluesky for being too far to the left congregate" nowadays. Everything from pedophiles to rioters and arsonists is there. And they tend to rapidly drive anyone who isn't batshit insane out pretty quick.
Takei is a great example here, as his hatred of everything normal drove him to spam such extreme takes that he basically ended up having no one agreeing with him on X, and most people disagreeing with him even on bluesky, so he kept looking for a place
Re: (Score:3)
Huh? Takei is quite popular on Bluesky.
Also, this whole article is nonsense. Basically - like all sites - every time there is an event that triggers lots of signups, you get a mix of people who don't stick around, and people who do. So you get a curve that - without further events - steadily tapers down to something like 1/2 to 1/3rd of its peak. Except that you keep getting further events. When you [1]plot out the long-term trends [bsky.app] of Bluesky's userbase, they've been very much upwards, but it's come in the
[1] https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:jmhscbbqqnynpki3zvnvginp/bafkreiexo7uiizeepnt642wsywsfypztmhum7ij2avfskg6ojjcmu3be6y@jpeg
Re: It's not a decline... (Score:1)
I like BlueSky and think it's getting better. Does McMegan consider that the presidential election was driving a lot of the conversation back then?
I ask because her analysis almost always comes off as the laziest way to connect her phobias and enthusiasms with current events. BlueSky has it's faults, but McCardle's lack of traction there can't fairly be attributed to them.
Re: (Score:2)
I think a lot of folks who didnt really get bluesky miss how its central mechanic works with the multiple feeds. Its a bit like mastodon in that yeah, theres a decided lack of folks screaming at you about how evil black people that sadly seems to be the main form of communication on twitter now. Rather what you CAN do, and this is where I see a similarity with mastodon, is find a specific feed on a topic and just have that topic. So for instance I have a strong interest in Astronomy (my hobby) and Climate S
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know where this notion that Bluesky is an echo chamber comes from.
Example: Go into a pro-AI thread from a popular user right as it's posted and write "AI is a con. It's blatant planet-destroying theft from actual creative people to create a stochastic parrot that bullshits what you want to hear. You're watching a ventriloquist doll and believing that it's actually alive."
Then go into an anti-AI thread from a popular user right as it's posted and write "AI is clearly Fair Use under the Google Books s
Re: (Score:2)
[1]They need to put the word "decline" in sarcasm quotation marks. [bsky.app]
[1] https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:jmhscbbqqnynpki3zvnvginp/bafkreiexo7uiizeepnt642wsywsfypztmhum7ij2avfskg6ojjcmu3be6y@jpeg
Re: (Score:2)
"toxic trash accounts" == any opinion I disagree with
Re: (Score:2)
> "toxic trash accounts" == any opinion I disagree with"
I don't "do" social media, but I do follow Slashdot and several forums. To me, toxic accounts are those people who:
1) Make political comments in a forum where the topic it is not about politics. To them, everything is an excuse to post their views about politics or blame something on whatever administration. Slashdot has users that do this a LOT, unfortunately. And it is quite irritating.
2) Make personal attack posts. Instead of being silent, or
Re: (Score:2)
> To me, toxic accounts are those people who:
> 1) Make political comments in a forum where the topic it is not about politics. To them, everything is an excuse to post their views about politics or blame something on whatever administration. Slashdot has users that do this a LOT, unfortunately. And it is quite irritating.
coughcough rsilvergun coughcough
Re: It's not a decline... (Score:2)
What's with all these dormant accounts popping up with obviously fake profiles. This sock puppets last post was March 30th, 2023.
Re: It's not a decline... (Score:2)
Also, these old fake dormant accounts which popup and rip on rsilvergun. I think we found out psychopath stalker.
Re: (Score:3)
> if you get rid of the toxic trash accounts that were making Former Twitter a cesspool of bots and flame wars.
My theory has always been that all microblogging services inherently devolve into cesspits. The post character limit and abysmal handling of threaded replies makes it so that every discussion inevitably turns into people yelling insults at each other. Seriously. You're not fitting that five paragraph essay about why vaccines are actually a good thing into a tweet, so you may as well tell the anti-vaxxer that their mom is a hoe instead.
My continuance of this line of thought is that perhaps some people are
Re:It's not a decline... (Score:4, Informative)
> My theory has always been that all microblogging services inherently devolve into cesspits.
That's strongly argued in "Social Media Upheaval" by Glenn Reynolds. It's only 68 pages long, deliberately written so it could be read on a typical airline flight. Highly recommend.
Re: (Score:2)
See, the problem is that the "toxic trash" is just other people having a different opinion and experiences. When you create a situation where the "toxic trash" is isolated for being "toxic trash", what do you think it's going to happen? that they realize they are wrong and join you?
Nope. that's not how humans work. All you have done is to ensure that the "toxic trash" now forms its own group with no contradicting voice, and goes underground, which actually reinforces the problem rather than mitigate it.
Besi