Engagement will always be better on new platforms, because they a) have no bots and b) haven't been growth hacked to death, since the strategies that work haven't been figured out yet.
These start at 0, then increase. When both of those trends grow strong enough, people start to leave in droves.
I know I did. On X, I used it a lot, then left when the bad algo content era began. On Insta, the engagement bait was bad enough when I joined that it deterred me from ever seriously using it.
I would expect these to become more of a problem over time, though I'm optimistic Bluesky can do better at beating them than other platforms have.
I don't think it's bots. I think it's that Twitter's owners have made it a product goal to pessimize this particular metric, and its engineers have succeeded. That's literally the logic ownership has used when explaining things like "links must be in replies, not standalone messages, or else they're penalized".
A user clicking on a link takes the user away from the platform. If your goal is to maximise time spent on your platform, you'd be incentivised to suppress links as much as you can. That appears to be what's happening on X.
Yes, that's what I'm saying. That "engagement" on Twitter isn't coming back, unless ownership changes the product to allow it. Bsky isn't going to grow out of this. Engagement is going where it's rewarded, and that's all there is to it.
Maybe. But at the time mastodon had a massive influx after the X acquisition and it never felt this alive. threads is massive and I don’t manage to get any engagement there either.
I was commenting on Twitter the other night just how bad Twitter's recommendations --- now hard to avoid, since everyone's funneled into the official web app --- have become; it's all random US political figures that don't intersect any of my interests.
I likened it to 2003, when people fled Windows for the MacBook over issues like crapware (which: the X algorithm basically is). And: a lot of early MacBook adopters, most especially the ones that had been there for a long time, were insufferable! But we hit a point where one product was clearly better than the other, and you roll the tape forward and see how good the long-term prospects are for the niche product that just does what all its real users actually want it to.
Hard to imagine why someone would go through so much trouble to acquire Twitter just to Ballmer-ize it. You usually have to have started and built up a product yourself to screw it up this badly.
I found that some aggressive gardening of the 'For You' feed on Twitter made it borderline useful (By gardening I mean clicking the 'not interested in this post' option pretty aggressively). Eventually this seems to revert the recommendation algorithm to pre-Musk behavior.
That said, this might be different on phones than on the web app.
To your larger point, I think BlueSky is hobbled right now by the religious committment to decentralization, which the new arrivals don't care about at all. I would compare the situation to a world where people had to flee Windows for Linux—neither alternative is one that just works the way you'd want it to.
What ever they're doing with decentralization isn't really legible to me. As much as I'll say nice things about Bsky, I'm not really rooting for it. As you saw: I left Twitter after Musk bought it and landed in the Fediverse, which I actually quite liked, not out of any religious interest in architecture so much as for the promise I thought (still sort of think) it held for restoring a blogosphere-type organization to the Internet (a world where most people would just sign up for whatever the Blogger.com of Mastodon was).
Not enough people stayed in the Fediverse, and I found early Bsky culture, hm, difficult to mainline day-in day-out, so I went back to Twitter, and I'd be fine, regardless of ownership, if it would just be a good product that everyone wanted to use.
So to me, Bsky just felt like Twitter with different owners; it still sort of does. Which: if you're looking for a less-shitty Twitter, to me, that's Bsky's offering today.
> Engagement will always be better on new platforms
The primary effect is that communities with fewer users have stronger common bonds, the age of the platform isn't super relevant.
That said, the engagement on Twitter has been terrible since almost the very beginning. I'm sure it was super magical for folks who were at SXSW that first year, but the conversion rate has been garbage ever since then. Whereas maybe 50% - 70% of people will open the average cold email, the percentage of people who will click a link on Twitter was maybe 1 in 1,000 even 10+ years ago.
I wonder if smaller, more active and tight-knit communities are healthier and preferable, but the combination of growth-at-all-costs, catering to influencers and fear of "bubbles" keeps those communities from becoming more common.
Community is hard to maintain in the sense it either slowly dies off or experiences bouts of extreme growth even without the growth mentality. Think of a reverse slashdot effect where something posted on the community drives a bunch of users there quickly and either causes a rise in expense or a difficulty in moderation. If there is no growth you slowly lose users to entropy and the community fades.
It’s almost like the opposite of the network effect moat that people used to think about social networks. At this point it feels like when these platforms hit a certain size, it’s time to move on to something smaller, without advertisers, less engagement boat, etc.
I believe BlueSky, based on the way it's open source AT protocol works, would make it much harder to implement an AI/algorithmicly driven feed in the same way this happens on other platforms.
And if it did happen, you could simply swap this Feed out for a different one.
There's nothing preventing Bluesky, or someone else, from building an "algorithmic" feed on top of the AT protocol. That's what the Discover feed is, for all intents and purposes.
What is harder is Bluesky forcing users into their flavour of an algorithmic feed, the same way e.g. X doesn't let you remove the Trending section, or how Reddit always shows you comments ordered by "Best". Bluesky users currently can choose the feed they want to use.
Actually, focusing on "engagement" is already showing that the game is lost and that the we're seing another Twitter clone... :-(
Because "engagement" is about "money" and "ad" and "sponsor" and "business"... and not about anything close to "social" or "society" or "human". So, sooner or later (but most probably "sooner"), you'll see clickbait and other usual tricks to grow up "engagement"... and any interesting post will disappear
So I won't even matter to create an account or have a look. I'll wait for the next one, or the next next one... hoping some people will understand that quality content is not measured by some kind of "engagement"
EDITED: if you matter enough to downvote, at least explain WHY you think I'm wrong ;-)
1. Bluesky has stated they have no intention to add ads. Subscriptions are apparently coming soon
2. ATProto makes algorithms pluggable. Anyone can develop on, users can sub to those of their choosing, making switching easy should one become bad. It means there can be real feed competition without needing to move networks or apps. Same for moderation, individual choice and control is central to the design
The problem is not "ads" per se... it's engagement focus
Ads or clickbait posts or filtering/ordering algorithms are just some consequences of engagement focus (also called "attention economy" because what matters is... well... attention... measured by "engagement")
As long as focus is on "engagement" and not on "quality content", you'll have some Twitter/Facebook/Tiktok/... clone.
Subscriptions COULD shift the focus on quality (because if people are convinced that you provide quality content, they might pay for it) but it requires (as shown for a long time) at least :
- easy way to discover real quality content (a bit like Wikipedia in a way)
- easy way to pay once to subscribe to different providers. That's the same old problem for the newspapers: people dont want to pay a yearly subscription - or even a newspaper issue - to read once a single article. They MAY pay a subscription if they can read any article in any newspaper (in a big bag of newspaper). Then this revenue has to be redistributed among the different newspapers...
This one surprised me personally, because we really don't do anything special. We treat posts with links the same as any other kind of post. I would guess there's a kind of high "density" of focus from people right now; the general buzz of the moment. Also I figure our focus on the reverse-chron following feed helps with this.
We're pro open-web, pro people using Bluesky to find other interesting things. We're working on subscriptions right now (not ads) so we've got no incentive to keep people in our app. We'd rather be the lobby to an interesting world.
Also, tbh, every user has a domain name. The web -- and websites -- seems like a really valuable part of the atproto ecosystem. We're going to keep developing in that direction. See this blog comments integration[1] for instance.
The former, but the existing featureset will stay free and we won't rank up paying users. We're still nailing down the features, but it'll be things like custom app icons, profile customizations, higher-def video
There is a general vibe of mute/block, don't engage with trolls, in the hopes we don't end up with the same toxicity found on other platforms, or as Kelsey Hightower put it
"What pushed me off X was just watching good people behave badly" [1]
I think this is the same vibe that keeps HN going. We all collectively want to have place with high signal-to-noise. Of course moderation plays a part here as well. But I also self-moderate, deleting my own comments a minute after posting them if, seeing them in place, they seem too stupid.
I just don’t know that a place like HN could keep its standards without a place like Reddit; and I’m worried that Bluesky may need the troll haven of Twitter to keep existing, so Bluesky can keep its place for better behaved discourse.
Maybe it’s an eternal question for social media: which September will be the September that never ends?
Every single social media platform of note charges accounts for “reach”. Your post gets seen by 1-15% of your followers unless you “promote” it with a marketing spend.
Bluesky has no mechanism for artificially limiting the reach of legitimate messaging, and no business impulse to build one. It really is something new under the sun.
You are misunderstanding what I am saying: all major accounts, monetized accounts, or business oriented accounts have their reach artificially limited. All. All platforms. Twitter was an exemplar of this well before it was converted into a campaign operation.
I don't believe Twitter does this even now. Their for you algorithm is actually open source (supposedly) so you could check.
But algorithmic reach existing in the first place was only a Facebook thing for a long time; other people started doing it because of TikTok. eg there's no way to limit an account's reach on Tumblr, it's just nobody would ever reblog a corporate Tumblr post.
I've been thinking about this the last few days after someone pointed out he gets a lot more engagement on Bluesky.
One thing I still think not all people account for is that as far as I can see:
- followers on "older" accounts on Twitter probably includes a lot of accounts that will not create activity, either because they have been outright abandoned or because they are used read only (this last effect is probably amplified because twitter now demand people to be logged in to see replies).
- I'll also suggest that it is reasonable to think that the most enthusiastic part of the userbase will be the first ones to join a new platform
Right, that's the point, follower counts on Twitter aren't meaningful anymore because it's a deprecated old platform with all the cruft of a long history of abandoned accounts, forgotten bots, spam accounts, etc.
The reason is pretty much irrelevant, either engagement on Twitter is artificially lower because of algorithm shenanigans, or because it's becoming a ghost town of abandoned accounts and spam bots. Neither option is a compelling reason to stay on Twitter
I wonder what's the motivation for a normal person to leave replies on Twitter anymore. The top replies will be porn spam and other blue check self promotion bullshit. In hindsight it makes sense the people left on Twitter would continue to post into the void but not engage.
That pay-for-attention reply prioritisation thing really was the most bizarre product decision. Like, everyone already knew it didn’t work; dating apps have been dealing with the problems with pay for attention for about 25 years now.
It's fresh and there's quite a ideological push against Musk to somehow take Twitter/X down a notch.
Considering how Threads is doing (from Meta, with their billions of cash to prop it up and 2 biggest social media sites) we'll need to wait a bit and see, usually in social media it looks like the pioneer takes the cake.
I don't think much of this is ideological at all. Paul Graham has been saying the same things on his Twitter TL. Twitter reoriented itself away from implicit partnerships with existing media, and it shows. Maybe that's a good strategy, but like all strategies it involved a tradeoff.
Most Twitter users don't really care much about who owns Twitter; instead, the people who do (pro- or anti-) have outsized voices in the conversation.
Personally, it has nothing to do with Musk. My Twitter feed is all things I haven't followed, constantly block similar posts, and am completely uninterested in.
My bsky feed is _explicitly_, 100%, only posts I've asked to see.
I do, it constantly shows ads and posts I do not follow. Hell it had a half-page Trump ad on election day and I'm not even American. It also periodically resets back to the For You tab.
Regardless of whether they've added them yet, the target audience of Threads is advertisers. They're trying to offer a sanitized version of Twitter that is ultimately boring and soulless just like Facebook
This tracks with my personal experience. On twitter I had about 20k followers and was getting 20-30 new followers per day and tens to hundreds of likes per post. This dropped to pretty much zero once Musk started fucking with the algo and pushing blue checks.
I’ve been on Bluesky for about 18 months without much engagement, but in the last few weeks it’s exploded almost to the levels where Twitter was before it got enmuskified.
Its true that the current honeymoon period will not be forever. But what comes afterwards will be even better.
People have been conditioned to think that the social media experience cannot but be enshittifed. (Its even the word of the year 2024 in Australia). But this is no law of nature, this the result of very specific business models.
While everything in the bluesky/atproto niche is now rather centralized and offers little more than a twitter UX, the possibilities are endless if people build an actual ecosystem around it. One can have alternative "views", different user functionalities that completely transform what users experience. Once you start thinking of users as people and not product, an untapped universe of possibilities is opening up.
The concept of diverse interoperating platforms swimming in a pool of message passing is more advanced in the activitypub space. From wordpress plugins, to goodreads and reddit alternatives and an entire zoo of specialized platforms. The severe underfunding keeps all those things away from prime time but they are proving something important:
The old social media order is dead. Mastodon and the fediverse proved that first but it was too niche for most people to notice. Now bluesky does it more forcefully and in the mainstream. The news can no longer be suppressed.
I tried it but I got tired of political fights like twitter is for nazis here we can save the world. I just want to read about tech, nature and science not politics im tired of that shit. In the end i just uninstalled and went to play super mario world
1. Use a service like Bluesky Follower Bridge to map over your followings from Twitter to Bluesky (it's not perfect so you need to check each follow to make sure it didn't grab the wrong person)
2. Seed your account with "Starter Packs" that bulk follow users with specific niches. You can search for these on bsky. Like there's one for C++ developers, a bunch for artists, some for journalists for specific niches, etc.
3. Customise the bluesky moderation service labeller.
4. Subscribe to some additional labellers.
- A major one is https://bsky.app/profile/skywatch.blue. The account also has a number of moderation lists you can use to auto-hide or auto-block problematic accounts.
5. Adjust your moderation and threading settings. Try out the new threaded replies mode. Try changing the reply ordering settings.
6. When you use the "Discover" tab, click the triple dots (...) on a post and click "Show more like this" and "Show less like this" to tune the algorithm for the discover tab. It starts out really bland/boring/random but it tunes in pretty quickly if you work with it.
7. Browse the Feeds tab to find custom feeds you like for specific niches. Add those to your home page so you can switch to them easily. These feeds will be generally a lot more focused than your main feeds but they are super useful for only seeing specific content you care about.
The fact that you can pay to have your replies higher (plus the suppression of posts with links) on X are part of this. The other reality is that for me and my community / friends who used to be active on Twitter.. they're just not participating anymore.
It's become like Facebook became a decade or so ago. Total ghost-town with only some eccentric folks still posting. In the case of X, everything I see seems to be connected with some kind of ecosystem around Elon, Trump and right-wing influencers. Time to move on.
It is very close to the “if the poor can’t have fun, then your city is boring” idea (ok, I might have made it up, but apologies if I stole it from someone and forgot). Applies to social media as well.
The engagement quality is better too since replies are ranked based on merit, like how Twitter used to be, rather than whether or not the poster gave Elon Musk $5.
edit: correction, replies on X are now ranked by how much money they give Elon Musk, with $16/month subs getting ranked above $8/month subs, which are ranked above $3/month subs, which are ranked above the plebs.
And hot replies was only added two days ago, and is simply giving newer comments a temporary boost so they don't end up unnoticed in long threads. Choice is nice!
I mean, it probably is. But probably not as bad as Twitter. Twitter was, well, not good (there’s a reason that we affectionately called it the Hellsite) but borderline acceptable pre-Musk. The Musk thing was contingent, not an inevitability.
Doxxing is a crime, which is not protected by free speech.
No, just because the data is public does not justify aggregating it and presenting it to the public. Pretty much everyone's address is public information.
(or at least, it should be a crime. Its exact legislative status is murky and much weaker than it should be in the US, but it is almost universally banned by online services, for good reason.)
No kidding. the vast majority of those 50 million of twitter followers are going to be bots. This is true of all those big old famous accounts such as Obama, Taylor Swift and so on. What about actual traffic? How much clickthroughs does a Twitter link produce vs. Blue Sky? It says 3x Threads, but obviously threads is much smaller than X.
It will probably still be fine. It's like that old joke about two guys walking through the woods who encounter a hostile bear. One of them starts looking for something to use to defend himself. The other tightens the laces on his shoes and is getting ready to run.
The first one says "Are you crazy? You can't outrun a bear!".
The second guy says "I don't have to outrun the bear. I only have to outrun you!" and takes off.
A large fraction of the people leaving X for Bluesky were OK with staying on Twitter when it was at the level of shit it was in 2021. All Bluesky needs to do is limit its shit level to that and it should do fine.
The simple fact of the matter, IMO, is simply that my feed is mine. It's 100% only posts from OSS developers right now, with no garbage mixed in.
I'm not American. I do not care about American elections. I blocked every lunatic right-wing post that showed up on my Twitter feed from people I don't follow, and yet still almost every post in my feed is about American politics or a half-page Trump ad on election day.
So, almost every post that ends up on my bsky timeline is something I am _explicitly_ interested in, without having to ignore the feed and search for specific users or projects. Of course my engagement is going to be higher! It's basically an RSS feed with an article length limit.
You keep saying that. Just stop using the "For you" tab and stick to the "Following" tab. And if you don't want ads, pay up $15 or so a month and they stop, just like on Youtube. On the "For You", block the idiots - it works.
I saw a recent CNN report which claimed that political orientation on X is roughly even now, compared to pre Musk version (which was about 70 left, 30 right).
That might appear right wing twitter for people used to the left wing bias (unknowingly).
Not sure what the ratio is on BS, but it appears worse than old twitter. That would distort comparisons with X.
I'm all for the Twitter schadenfreude. Frankly, it couldn't happen to a more deserving person. But we should bear two things in mind:
1. A low-volume competitor will always seem better because the bad actors haven't moved in yet. Growth engineering will kick in and do the same awful thing you see on any newcomer that approaches or surpasses whatever it aims to replace. Put another way: the quality will only ever go down; and
2. We're going to stay in this cycle as long as we back venture-backed companies that will be incentivized to do all the growth engineering mentioned above.
The most successful and enduring and longest-lasting structure for user-generated content is Wikipedia ie the Wikimedia Foundation. The platform needs to be owned to the community or we are doomed to repeat the rise-and-fall cycles we have now.
Traffic to left-leaning news sites better from a social media app that lefty people are embracing, compared to from the social media app now a favorite of right-wingers...
News at 11. Fake news at 11:30, on the other channel!
Engagement will always be better on new platforms, because they a) have no bots and b) haven't been growth hacked to death, since the strategies that work haven't been figured out yet.
These start at 0, then increase. When both of those trends grow strong enough, people start to leave in droves.
I know I did. On X, I used it a lot, then left when the bad algo content era began. On Insta, the engagement bait was bad enough when I joined that it deterred me from ever seriously using it.
I would expect these to become more of a problem over time, though I'm optimistic Bluesky can do better at beating them than other platforms have.
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