HN Reader

Freelance journalists, adjunct professors, and anonymous posters are not a unique threat. They are one of many threats. Nearly every person on Earth has their own tailored infinite black mirror. The mechanisms of the medium encourage it. The idea that social media was ever not sectarian is silly.

Network effects have a certain amount of unpredictability. A highly political group split off from X to BSky, and, imo, gave the network an extra amount of escape velocity. We're seeing a receding, but it did show X's network effect wasn't almighty. BSky will be better prepared for a next wave, wherever that may come from.

I don't think any of us can predict how this will play out, but it certainly is interesting to watch the user growth/receding and watch the waves.

Twitter's original idea and format (short attention-grabbing posts) is antithetical to quality and nuance. I prefer Reddit's format: posts are links to blogs on other sites, and the comments are a common area for discussion.

Sure, link-curation sites can also be low-quality, toxic echo chambers. Reddit is roughly a link-curation analogue of BlueSky, and even HN has some low-effort content, toxicity and groupthink (though it's not nearly as bad). And there are high-quality posters on Twitter, and high-quality invite-only Mastodon instances (at least in theory, I'd love to find some).

But high-quality posts are hindered by Twitter's format. High-quality posts don't fit in 150 words, hence the "thread 1/N", "thread 2/N" workaround. High-quality discussion is hard with a handful of random reply-chains as opposed to a comment tree. Specifically on Twitter, high-quality posts get limited reach because it's non-public with a (mostly) non-customizable algorithm, to the extent I mainly find said posts via links on link-curation sites.

Meanwhile, link-curation sites encourage high-quality content by encouraging (if not requiring) posts to be links. Instead of posting a "hot take", you link to an article, paper, or at least self-hosted blog*. Or when possible, you link to the primary source, and maybe post your opinion in the comments, where it's presented almost exactly like opposite opinions (just with the "OP" indicator). Comments are also better, because every reply to every reply is shown and you can collapse reply trees to view others; and because there's no word limit, so even comments can be substantive (although there's no encouraging mechanism to comment with a link to your blog post or related/contrasting primary source, which in theory could lead to especially high-quality discussions and insight, but I suspect in practice would almost never be used).

* Self-hosted blogs tend to be higher-quality due to an expected minimum length and the effort required to set it up and get attention. Although unfortunately, I've seen some links to no-name blog articles that were especially short and low quality. As mentioned, link-curation doesn't guarantee high quality like Twitter-style doesn't guarantee low quality, they facilitate high/low quality respectively.

Social Media as we know it is non-viable in a world of troll armies, AI slop and spam, and professional propaganda. I give it less than 10 years to live.

The future is private enclaves like Discord, Slack, private networks, private forums, and chat apps. The open Internet is a dark forest.

Bluesky is just Twitter 1.0 - it's a good metaphor for american politics; both sides are virtually identical, one is openly racist and hateful, one likes to pretend it's above such things but inhabits virtually the same platform and eyes enviously the attention they get for being dumb and heinous in public.

Meanwhile actual platform change is considered "unrealistic" but is actually a ton of fun and perfectly fine if you like connecting with other people more than stroking your ego with numbers obtained by sucking up to the system/algorithm and/or consumerism

Couple sectarian social media, with higher levels of social isolation, and ready access to guns, you get what we had yesterday. Partisans whip themselves into a frenzy in the comments section of hand wringing post amplifying another hand wringing post.

Honestly X has the biggest mix of partisan viewpoints. Many subreddits, bluesky, have become mentally unhealthy places to spend your time if you’re left leaning.

There are plenty of people that seem to celebrate what happened yesterday on these places. It’s the worse I’ve seen and it disgusts me.

This is not surprising. In my circles, the people that most enthusiastically migrated away from X to Bluesky did so specifically because of their distaste for Elon Musk. They are largely centered about the West Coast of the US. And because X is so much bigger, it's capable of being more diverse.

Furthermore, I already had a lot of mute words and blocks set up on X to keep it palatable. I don't see any politics over there and it's entirely focused on creative work. If I did this on Bluesky I imagine I'd significantly cull my feed down to it seeming dead.

At this point is Nate silver just a professional rage baiter?

Maybe I live in a bubble but these are not problems I’ve ever heard expressed until now. Bluesky seems perfectly fine for those who use it?

How many popular conservatives can you name on BlueSky, at the top of your head?

None?

Congratulations, it's de-facto a bubble. It's just math, half the electorate isn't on the table.

  It’s impossible to generalize about the entire population of the site—many of Bluesky’s users do not post in English and do not engage with American politics—yet it has developed an identity as a haven for liberals in the aftermath of Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and Donald Trump’s reëlection as President.

Apparently the diaeresis in reëlection is correct but ideosyncratic to The New Yorker. As a former student of Hebrew I approve of niqqud in English.