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.
In fact I believe that the present day situation boils down to one thing only: the prioritization of engagement at the cost of all else.
That’s what set us down this road. It incentivizes inflammatory posting that eschews nuance and context and twists and exaggerates the subject matter in order to provoke emotional responses — whether they be angry replies, “dunk” quote-posts, reposts, or even spending a couple extra seconds with the post on screen. Anything to steal away more of your attention and mindshare.
It would be an interesting experiment to see the effects of effectively the polar opposite of twitter, where ragebait and other attention-seeking behaviors are actively punished, with the content that’s most readily surfaced instead being that which is thoughtful, candid, and not emotionally charged.
It shouldn't be any surprise: it's not like the internet's userbase of 1990 represented a broad cross-section of American society, let alone western or global societies. It was mainly a bunch of academics and college students and government users. It's just gotten more and more fragmented as more people have been added.
In most ways they were far more social than modern social media, in that they were about socializing. The distinguishing characteristic that sets modern social media apart from the old school stuff is the performative aspect of it—where everyone is now encouraged to behave as a content producer optimizing for engagement—which is hardly social.
I disagree somewhat. Social media apps are powered by feed algorithms that fall into two camps:
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.
The "echo chamber" argument really doesn't speak to me because all I want is a place where I can get timely updates about: people in my research field, pictures of cute dogs, and municipal government activities. The more a website stays laser-focused on my interests, the better.
I disagree with this: if the only thing you allow to pierce the veil is selected based on engagement metrics you just walk away with a shallow view of your opposition. If anything this may entrench your existing views and give you a false sense of intellectual and/or moral superiority.
You need to “meet people where they are” and the first type of algorithm just doesn’t do that. It just says “conservatives/liberals really like this, so you’re going to be forced to see this too because you show interest in politics”
To give an example: let’s say I’m a small business owner who voted Trump but has some lingering concerns around how tariffs might impact my business. Am I going to be better informed reading some engagement-bait post from liberals talking about how I’m going to get “deservedly” crushed by tariffs or a post from a conservative economist laying out the cold hard facts (both good and bad)?
Your argument is in support of mine. Separate networks are an interesting legal and software engineering detail, but from the POV of the user, as long as they see what they want to see, they will stay with the network.
I don't know, the entire point of the "algorithmic bubble" was to keep the tribes separate but happy, no? And the value of the network still increases with more people on it. Maybe some future social media will figure out how to keep everyone happy at the same time. For example, I think everyone but a couple of hardcore FOSS advocates and the far-right are still using Youtube.
It does seem natural to happen. But there are loads of "neutral" accounts: gov agencies, businesses, etc that use social media for announcements and simple broadcast communication. Most are on Twitter now. I think I big question is will they add bluesky, or move (probably not, because of inertia), or something else.
Yes and no. While the Right in the USA has been pushing further and further over the last ~50y[0], things only became this unhinged when a certain political candidate wiped their ass with everything that was once considered cordiality in politics and let their followers regress into an id-dominated state of hyper-reality where the most ludicrous claims are believed without investigation. When conspiracy theories are tearing families apart[1], expect social networks to follow.
Yes and yes. The right and the left don't even speak the same language. I'm not a native English speaker and half the time I don't even understand what the left are even saying. Examples:
> regress into an id-dominated state of hyper-reality
> what can be, unburdened by what has been
What does that even mean? People keep calling the right stupid, but at least everybody can understand what they're talking about.
I think one example of hyperreality(1) would be a person seeing a phrase that they don’t immediately understand and deciding “this is how ‘the left’, a real and cohesive/consistent group, talks”
Poe's law strikes again: I'm genuinely unsure if you're intentionally being ironic in perfectly illustrating OP's point, or if you legitimately think that "the Right" is single-handedly responsible for creating the sociopolitical tribes that can't stand or even understand one another.
If you're being ironic there's not much to add, so on the assumption that you meant what you said: Trump's ascendancy is evidence of what OP is saying, not the cause. The coastal elite has been completely incapable of understanding Trump's voters for decades, long before they were Trump voters. Trump hijacked the Republican party and won the presidency (twice now!) because he managed to make these long-neglected voters finally feel understood. We're not going to solve the problem of Trumpism by doubling down on treating these voters like idiots.
I made a Bluesky account long ago and started cross-posting my tiktoks, often on the popular and titillating topic of project management. For a long time it was sleepy as I would have expected. I got a sudden uptick recently, which prompted me to figure out how to port my follows from X, which I did with "sky follower bridge." Bluesky has been a lively, friendly place.
Sky follower bridge was able to scrape my X blocklist, but could not turn it into a Bluesky block list. No troll problems yet so that's OK for now. I still have to host my videos on titok because some are too long for Bluesky.
My tiktok "for you page" has turned to sludge and my followers are not getting my posts without setting notification options. I wonder if the magical algorithm was sequestered in China to hide it from inquiries. Hopefully a Bluesky presence helps.
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 boosting engagement bait.
Here's one metric that matters – revenue per user. Bluesky's is, I assume, zero, and soon that will have to change. Threads meanwhile has the largest social media ads and monetization platform in the world behind it ready to make the dollars flow at the push of a button.
Not necessarily. There could be different types of content that requires different types of creators, like imagine professional video producers vs your friends posting about their day.
There could also be a different algorithm/network that allows for a few creators to feed a large number of consumers.
It absolutely is. Sure it's the default, but it's the default to measure against and beat. It's like comparing ML algos against the average prediction, or forecasts against the previous known value.
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
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 them).
That hasn’t happened after a year on BlueSky and Threads.
Scams were rampant on large accounts and people looking at cryptocurrencies: more than three-quarters of comments were obvious patterns that I had flagged dozens of times. I noticed those earlier today on Threads; let’s see if they reappear and make up most of the discourse there.
And you say this to people you label not like you. You probably have more in common than you think. You both agree to label the other and you decided to fight a proxy battle from the agreed among identities. Do you want the other side not to exist as well? If yes let them know.
Never had or seen a death threat.
Ever wonder if you might be drawing all of that negative attention yourself. It's hard to admit that you might be the problem.
What do I think someone could say over different platforms over a long time period of time that would get multiple death threats? I have no idea but would love for original poster to share more details.
> Never had or seen a death threat. Ever wonder if you might be drawing all of that negative attention yourself. It's hard to admit that you might be the problem.
This is victim blaming. It’s wrong and it has no place here or anywhere.
First you need to identify a victim before you can come to their rescue. Is the parent poster a victim? Are the people he taunts into death threats his victims? Am I a victim of your verbal attack. Are you a victim because you read something and reacted?
Bluesky actually does offer some neat features. Starter Packs is such a brilliant feature for onboarding people into specific niches - it's a wonder why it took so long for someone to do this.
'Labellers' is a neat approach to moderation - you can subscribe to a labeller, and it marks accounts according to whatever criteria and then you can chose how you want that to shape your experience - block those posts/accounts outright, hide them behind a disclaimer, or just put a little badge on them. I subscribed to one which marks public figures with which private school they went to which is funny.
Custom algorithms is also another really neat improvement to the overall experience. On my homepage I pinned a "Quiet Posters" feed that surfaces posts from lower-volume people I follow that I might have otherwise missed. This is necessarily a feature of the AT Protocol's open network that really needs the firehose to function.
But the biggest 'new feature' (for now) is that it's non-commercial so Bluesky's incentives are not directly opposed to it's users. Even pre-Musk, Twitter's business goals worked against it's users, driving engagement at all costs to pump up ad views and revenue. A company that doesn't make money from page views, and which is based on an open network, will have more going for it to creative a positive environment for all. It remains to be seen how sustainable this is, which Bluesky taking investment, and whether at open AT Protocol can be an escape valve for Bluesky making the product worse.
As someone (who likes to think) is pretty unbiased politically, I can say I’ll go wherever the people I’m interested post. I have been somewhat surprised that pretty non political accounts have moved to Bluesky which I have interpreted as both political and motivated by the loads of political bs that are posted on x that normal people simply get tired of. I think Bluesky will gain more traction than threads but will end up being a more successful mastodon. A place where people with massive followings who simply don’t like x will post and there will be two competing apps.
It's not just that X/Twitter shows you politics whether you want it or not, it's that it's flavor of politics is increasingly resembling that of 4chan. I just skimmed though the auto-play videos on my account and the algorithm decided to show me this for some reason: https://x.com/AlaskanTom/status/1860339990992925170
YMMV on your own account, but I'm pretty confident the old algorithm wouldn't have surfaced Nazi symbolism to anyone. Scrolling the feed a bit more it decided to promote this charming account: https://x.com/TheRoyalSerf/status/1860466475510956253
You get the idea. There's politics, and then there's /pol/itics, and X is turning into the latter.
> It's not just that X/Twitter shows you politics whether you want it or not
But this is not true. I always use my "following" feed and not my "for you" feed. Other than sponsored ads the only thing I see are posts from people I follow. I don't understand why people persist with the narrative that Twitter forces people into "the algorithm".
I've been splitting time between Twitter & Bluesky for the last year or so. The only real difference i notice is the set of people I follow as until recently most of my Twitter follows weren't on Bluesky
I also only use the following feed, but a fairly recent change to the video player means it now immediately cuts to the next video in the auto-play queue (or an ad) when it finishes, and that's always algorithmically driven regardless of which feed you were using.
Fair. I almost always refuse to click on videos in twitter-like sites, so wouldn't have noticed this. I (usually) hate video content, especially the massive shift towards video content in our media sources.
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.
Free speech is the upside of X. People leaving to join the echo chambers of Bluesky or Threads, only serves to turn X into the echo chamber they claim it is.
> 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.
Threads had a lot of users sign up when it first launched. Bluesky launched over 18 months ago.
> 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 are tons of differences. For example, if there are replies in a thread and one of the users blocks the other. Those replies are blocked out for everyone. If you quote post a user you've blocked. That post is blocked out for everyone. There are starter kits that are creating tons of growth in accounts for lots of people so you're not posting to nothing. The engagement is higher, seriously people are posting the same stuff on Twitter and Bluesky and with 10x more on Twitter there getting 2x better engagement on Bluesky. If someone quote posts you and you don't like it, you can remove the post from the quote. You can hide replies in your threads. It has a threaded UI that looks like reddit comment threads.
I think everyone has been waiting for a replacement to emerge and Bluesky has spent a lot of time slowly growing and slowly adding features that it does everything people want from Twitter with more control.
I have given Threads a good try, and recently when Bluesky activity started up I restarted using Bluesky (it didn't stick for me the first time). The technology doesn't really matter that much, as long as it's basically competent. It's only the social network itself.
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.
It would be the worst thing for Bluesky if the eternal September came over from Twitter. I think that population is too passive to make the move and will put up with any level of advertising etc.
> They don’t seem to offer anything new/different other than moderation
Pretty wildly obviously critically incorrect statement right there!
It's still early days, but BlueSky is "protocols not platforms." So there's lots of extensibility baked in.
There's already a variety of custom feeds available. Which in short lets us opt in to whatever algorithms we would like. I love my Quiet Posters feed, which emphasizes folks who aren't super active, who I would otherwise miss.
The default view is a timeline, which is so much better than the disgusting engagement farming shallow or demented shit that floods Threads and X. So the default view is much better, much less polluted with awful garbage, and I have the ability to control what I see, what algorithms I would want to opt in to.
There's a variety of different clients available, which is a nice option for power users and those trying to organize the many flows and feeds they want to keep tabs on.
Everyone else is making links harder to engage with or algorithmically de-prioritizng them. BlueSky claims they "love the open web" and don't do any of that gross entrapping.
The "protocols not platforms" ethos here allows new stuff to get built around and on top of Bluesky. Early days, but there's a bunch of projects listed on for example https://github.com/fishttp/awesome-bluesky . Everything else is run top down by awful sterile controlling corporate interests, but BlueSky has that emerging new possibilities potentiation going strong, by appealing to developers, asking them to build stuff. Here's their latest call for projects... You just don't see that sort of stuff anywhere except BlueSky anymore. https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/3049
I've fallen for the Threads-links shown in Instagram. Obviously the instagram connection is what gave them a great start at a user-base. But, everytime I try to use Threads, something seems off (mainly see lame, boring, engagement-bait). Bluesky seems different and better. Also a much better story in-terms of open data, open protocol, etc.
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.
> Meta-owned Threads started November with 5 times the daily app users of Bluesky. That number is now down to just 1.5.
Is this because Threads is fading into obscurity and has fewer daily app users than their peak, and Bluesky has a bit more than they had before in November?
Today are either within an order of magnitude of X?
> Is this because Threads is fading into obscurity and has fewer daily app users than their peak, and Bluesky has a bit more than they had before in November?
Looks like no, threads is pretty flat and bluesky is hockey stick-ing
Certain groups are trying to will bluesky into being successful. From my personal experience, X/Twitter is still killing it.
I'd imagine Threads will be successful unless Zuckerberg kills it to focus on other things. It's integrated with Instagram and could potentially be integrated into Facebook and WhatsApp too.
Threads has a massive problem in that it recruits its users from Instagram (there are others but primarily its still a branch of Instagram) which is the domain of AI generated slop and people I actually know in real life.
The whole point of the twitter style firehose is to be not be either of those things. Bluesky honestly probably has a decent shot but I think its still attracting some hyper-orthodox, censorious, thinkers. Musk has gone too far with X[0] but I don't think his vision in the abstract is wrong.
[0] Every accusation is a confession - X is now near-directly attached to the US Gov!
I think the Bluesky crowd will probably chill out with time, but right now if you don’t readily use the block feature there you’re going to have your feed and notifications peppered with the same trolls that are currently making X inhospitable. The majority of users getting blocked aren’t interested in actual discourse, they’re just there to get a rise out of people.
It’s difficult to envision any social network staying healthy in the long term without either decent moderation or robust tools to help users manage harassment and the like. There’s just too many bad actors who will take advantage of low-control environments.
threads federates with mastodon, what stops threads getting on the AT protocol? is it just their assumed desire to not share data? they could be a mastodon / AT bridge
People keep missing the point of Threads. It isn't designed to be a pure Twitter clone and doesn't want to become the public square for news, politics etc.
It wants to be a text-centric network that helps release Instagram to be more video-centric to compete with TikTok. And so it wants content that is fun, interesting and light. And of course easily monetisable.
So I know people like having a fight but I see the two sites as being complimentary and both needing to thrive in order to relegate X to the dust bin.
How is Threads? I keep getting ads to push me to join it on Instagram, but whatever they recommend me via those ads is usually vapid Linkedin-type drivel. And I can’t see it on phone without the app.
I have gotten lured by engage-bait from Instagram. IMHO there is something off about Threads. It surely depends on who you follow and how you use it, but I find it totally engaging. Bluesky recently, seems better.
I open it up once in a while but it mainly seems to be ranked by predicted CTR/engagement. For example, out of the first 20 posts in my feed I got a ton of travel/finance guru garbage and multiple posts with some variant of “Do not buy a Tesla, plenty of better EV choices.” And random memes stolen from other sites.
Tons of posts trying to get me to click on them to read more.
None of the accounts in my feed are ones I follow. It’s basically algorithmically driven slop.
Threads is a good product. My twitter feed is dumpster fire of right wing politics and rage baity post. Threads has been much more balance. Open the app and have a good time.
People have been trying to make Bluesky happen for years. It won't. I believe moderation is fundamental to any social network, otherwise the bad actors always take over. Meta has been content moderation for years and understands the nuances.
People seek "Political discourse", but they will quickly realize our politics are too much of shit-show to have any kind of intellectual conversation. The rage bait and culture wars have taken over. Important discussions of policy, small vs big govt, taxes have taken the backseat. Our "politics" are no longer politics, and won't be for at least the next 4-8 years.
I've tried both Threads and Bluesky and I like Bluesky much better, I mean both UI & UX.
One issue I have with Threads is that I stumble upon many users that came from Instagram automatically that are not used to post in this format. So the content is mostly a mirror of IG which makes it pointless. In Bluesky I feel like the posts come from people that fleed X and it's just more interesting somehow.
All politics aside (not a minor point for many), Twitter has been made much worse IMHO in the Musk era.
They de-prioritize links, prevent 3rd party apps, closed the API, blocked access for non-logged-in viewing, and I'll say changed from an iconic name to a simple letter. (Besides maybe Google and Uber, who have added popular verb to the lexicon?)
I feel this is a downside only to a particular bunch. For most people, Twitter is doing better than ever. Community notes are amazing and innovative and should be adopted by every social media platform. X feels legitimately more fun than most other apps. Plus, at this point, I think a solid portion of people have been banned from social media apps. You can't exile your way towards whatever ideal society you want. The barbarians are always at the gates.
I especially feel this sort of enforced community separation is so prevalent among those who are so reticent to build a border wall, but I'm sure psychology has an explanation somewhere.
All of us sharing a singular global network was an exceptional and ephemeral circumstance.
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