Whenever something big happens I keep getting x.com links from friends. Is it just my friends?

There are a few old FinTwit people who have migrated over. Mark Dow, IvanTheK. It works for me.

And Mastodon works too, once I had customised my feed. There are a lot of makers on it, and Cory Doctorow. I did have to filter out the "activists", but twitter has the same activist problem.

Believe me, you can live without Twitter.

A lot of writers and creatives who could not stomach X.com anymore (and were then likely burned by Mastodon's geekiness).

> Is it just my friends?

If your friends are in the right-wing sphere (e.g. Joe Rogan listeners, etc), then yeah, likely.

It was incredibly toxic, but of course the "left-wing sphere" thinks they are the purveyors of universal "good", thus their toxicity is fine.

You can detach your posts if you get quote-reposted, you can limit who can reply to posts (to followers, people who follow you, people you've mentioned, or only to yourself), blocking someone also means that 3rd parties can't even view the threads (and so can't jump into drama that one side has attempted to disengage from), you can hide replies to your posts, blocklists let you immediately prevent large lists of users from seeing or interacting with you, and there's a culture among many users to immediately block people who are thought to be potential agitators (a very proactive culture of "don't feed the trolls").

If your experience was toxic, you probably just didn't use the tools available to you to avoid that toxicity.

site features can only go so far when there is a broader cultural ethos

There is an extremely toxic component to Bluesky’s user base, unfortunately, with the many attacks on the CEO for not banning Jesse Singal being testament to that. But for what it’s worth in the circles I’ve cultivated there I now see very little of those toxic people, and I don’t see any support for their behaviour. So I hope in time a more open culture will win out.

Deciding what political party to vote for is entirely a matter of picking a team, which is entirely dependent on who is on that team. Of course it's "everyone else's fault" whose team you decide to pick. That is literally the game. People are picking representatives. Deciding what representatives to pick is 100% a case of who those representatives are, how they act, and what they believe.

If one team antagonizes you and attempts to harm you, and you therefore decide to vote for the other team, not only is that so reasonable as to be completely unsurprising, but it's also quite justifiable to say, "This is their fault."

Somehow people have forgotten that politics is about garnering willing votes, not smugly browbeating and shaming people about our superior morals and ethics.

Kind of takes the agency away from full-grown adults, doesn't it?

How about people have principles and don't change them to chase audience/money/fame, eh?

> How about people have principles and don't change them to chase audience/money/fame, eh?

You assume that "having principles" means having your principles, and that for someone to disagree must mean they are unprincipled and simply chasing money/audience/fame. This kind of attitude comes across as incredibly arrogant and un-self-aware, and people/voters en masse want nothing to do with it.

The reality is that many millions of people are principled, and they simply have different principles.

For example, "opposing views should be aired and discussed" is a principle widely held by many millions of voters that the left has had an incredibly hard time understanding, respecting, and digesting.

Look at JK Rowling. Stood her ground, if it wasn't for her books allowing her advocacy, she'd have disappeared. Instead she has to endure being among the most hated millionaires for a good bunch of the left.

Say Rogan sticks to his guns. He would face similar, never-ending attacks, no left-leaning figure could attend his podcast without becoming guilty by association, so he'd end up interviewing basically the same people as he does now, only he wouldn't cater to some people that, given somewhat recent events, would most probably celebrate him getting murdered.

I reckon we shouldn't take away the agency away from the adults who made purity testing a common practice, given the utter disaster we are experiencing as a consequence.

This framing is laying on the narrative a little bit thick don't you think? It makes it seem like she's hated for being wealthy, when it is actually because she has been funding hate groups and calling for trans people to be physically attacked.

The "standing up for women" rhetoric is a little bit hollow in the face of her non-existent feminism when the subject isn't physically attacking trans women, she didn't make a single comment during the recent uptick in abortion debates taking place in the UK for example.

Can you provide any source for her "calling for trans people to be physically attacked"? Because you seem fixated on it, and I've just spent the last 15 minutes looking for one, and I can't find it.

What I can find is her spending so much goddamned money on philanthropy that she stops being a billionaire, while not dodging a dime of taxes precisely because she considers it her obligation. A fortune amassed in what is probably the most ethic way possible, through exploitation of nobody, writing books.

Related to this I can find the foundation of the Volant Charitable Trust, "a grant-making trust to support charitable causes in Scotland, helping vulnerable groups with an emphasis on women, children and young people."

I can also find a comment of "every trans person’s right to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them".

And that's the point. You want to paint her as some lunatic who would like to hunt trans people down for sport, when it's crystal clear that she has the "radical" (standard 2018 radical leftist) notion that trans women are not the same thing as biological women and that the definition of women shouldn't be changed to appease to them.

But again. It's not worth it to engage, because we both know I can spend 20+ minutes working on this reply and you are not going to change your stance. An apostate is worse than a heathen, which is why people complain about Rowling rather than anyone who is actually right wing. Because you are scared that if you defended her, you would face the same judgement. Making the world a worse place through and through.

That was my bad, I knew that she had done something abhorrent and indefensible but it was 5 months ago and I'd forgotten which kind of hatred she had been producing specifically. I'll cite the source first next time.

1: https://www.instagram.com/p/DLPG5DlIFIz/ -- I don't have a twitter account to forward the original, but there are news stories about this from the time if you're unsatisfied with that link.

She has done neither of these things you claim. Please refrain from spreading misinformation.

I reckon there's more of a correlation between this type of statement and being a Bluesky user than being right-wing and using X.

I mean X userbase is enormous compared to that of Bluesky, you can't be serious.

Where I live, X has completely exited polite conversation.

Everyone I know. I routinely see only bluesky links. Yes, if X/Grok is promoting Nazi content, then yeah, I'll hear about it. But beyond that, nothing important that happens isn't showing up on Bluesky.

> Whenever something big happens I keep getting x.com links from friends. Is it just my friends?

I think it's safe to say that if people are sending links to a certain site, they are using that site. But assuming that everyone is using that same site is silly. It doesn't take any amount of effort to realize that other people are using other sites.

I would Press X to Doubt (perhaps ironically, for this X...). Searching around, it seems like Bluesky has about a tenth as many total users as X has active users, but it's definitely growing at a faster rate, and X might be declining in active users.

Anecdotally, lots of people I noticed leaving for Bluesky very loudly and publicly quietly returned to posting on X after a while.

https://bsky.app/search?q=%22induced+operator+norm%22 https://x.com/search?q=%22induced%20operator%20norm%22&src=t...

https://old.reddit.com/domain/bsky.app/

Those might not matter to you, but neither did the early cohorts that drove growth on early Twitter matter to most people. Enough large mainstream cohorts set up a base there after the election spike that it's still growing toward the peak after dropping to a little less than half.

There was a sweet-spot, subjectively speaking, for Twitter mid-2022.

https://social.overheid.nl/@RWSverkeersinfo is for traffic conditions

https://social.overheid.nl/@knmi is the royal national weather service

Some services have shut down their Mastodon presence because their social media team found too little interaction and they don't want to use simple forward bots that nobody responds to, unfortunately.

What people obsess over and see on X is literal propaganda

If something matters so much to your life that you can't wait the hour or so it takes to filter through normal channels, you will not need X to tell you it is happening, and knowing an hour early will not help you

Instead, X will tell you that the USA is loading nukes onto planes getting ready to fly to China (that the video shows is not nukes, not going to china, and from a marketing video several years back)

X will tell you to invest in <Scam>

X will tell you some right wing propaganda like Seattle being on fire.

People who still insist that X has good, reliable, and timely news are saying they have really bad FOMO. If you validated everything that came from X attempting to tease out the signal from the noise, that validation takes longer than just waiting for actual news to filter out. So instead, people who get their "news" from X just don't validate.

X is worse than the tabloids at the checkout line, and those tabloids have on occasion broken world news. But if you bought one every single day because of that, you would be a moron.

About 1/3 of the people in the USA use Twitter. Which means 2/3rds of us do not. Reddit's audience is larger, at about 1/2 of Americans. Mainstream media's is 2/3rds. And the true information flow happens when people talk IRL after consuming some or all of the above.

So while yes, Twitter has a significant audience, they are not holding a monopoly on live information in any form.

(And this isn't even getting into whether or not people trust each of these information platforms. People often consume media but don't trust what they hear. Which is probably a good thing.)

Bluesky does actually have an algorithmic feed ("Discover"), but it isn't the default.

BlueSky's definitely gotten a lot of the technical side of things right (as compared to the fediverse, the complexity of which blocks mainstream adoption). Unfortunately, it's also now an incredibly unpleasant place to be unless you want to swim in constant political ragebait. Twitter also has a mountain of awful shit, but for whatever reason I've been able to curate my feed enough that I don't usually see it.

They're both mostly unpleasant, and we'd all probably be better off not using either, but I still find myself going back to Twitter because there's nothing better. Same way I feel about Reddit, honestly.

I check the mainstream headlines once a day, kind of like checking the weather. There may be something I need to know. But then I move on.

Getting worked up about politics is like shaking your fist at the rain clouds, completely pointless.

The problem with that attitude is that eventually democracy itself suffers, when people don't care no more. The word "democracy" itself points that out - "demos" means "the people".

I agree, but I'm not sure arguing with people on social media is an effective way of defending democracy.

I don't have any problem with people having and voicing thoughts on politics. Everyone should strive to be well-informed and be capable of having reasonable conversations about politics, especially with people with whom they disagree. (Obviously, that's a charitable description of what's happening on social media, but that's a different topic.)

I guess ultimately the problem is that I want to follow topics, not people, and there isn't a great way to do that. Reddit provides an alternative but is comparatively low-volume, and voting represents a fundamental design problem because it by definition creates an echo chamber. And that's not even taking into account how over-moderated the site is at this point.

The "Following" tab is literally that - chronologically ordered posts and replies from accounts you follow. The "Discover" and "Popular with Friends" tabs give you algorithm-sourced stuff that is somewhat connected to who you follow.

When I click on the tab for the Game Dev feed, I see nothing but posts about game dev. When I click on the Astronomy feed, I only see telescopes and pictures taken with telescopes.

I like John Green a lot, including his vlogs that are just him speaking about stuff he doesn't know for half an hour, but I still do not go read what he posts on Bluesky, because it's as low quality, low signal, low intent, and low effort as comments here on HN.

It's just not useful. It's not a good use of my time to read random tweets from people.

When I first got a twitter account in like 2010, I very very instantly recognized it was not for me. If something is important, someone will take the effort to make an actual piece of real content about it, like a blog or video or essay or book. Hell, even a thorough reddit post is better than microblogging.

If it's not worth going through that effort to get the message out to people, why should I consider that a valuable message?

It's emblematic of the past 20 years of social development in my opinion. If the only thing stopping you from getting the word about something super duper important is that writing a page essay is too hard, nobody really needs to care about that, because writing an essay is so easy we make children do it

It's all noise. The signal doesn't go on twitter, it goes on real platforms where you might make money from good signal, or like, a freaking scientific paper, or the front page of a news org.

Personally, I'm pessimistic that there are many remaining sources of substantial discourse and discussion at all. I just pirate a lot more university-press books from Anna's Archive.

That's just what it's meant for, low effort swipes, shitposting, retweets out of context etc.

It is notable that in order to actually accomplish their "We want a platform where a celebrity says something and you instantly get that something", Twitter had to do a lot of work and pain curating who "celebrities" are. The alternative is everyone getting a waterfall of shit, because the vast majority of people do not have PR agencies between them and their tweet button, and do not have anything important or meaningful to say that is better said fast and short than long and naunced. The entire point of microblogging is to eschew nuance.

That's absurd full stop.

Why would you ever want to know whatever low effort comment sparked thanksgiving dinner arguments at other people's thanksgivings?

> I love her videos, but her Bluesky posts have less subtlety than I would expect from someone of her intelligence and scientific training.

Please tell me which of "Water fluoridation is a well understood treatment, and people who are telling you it's bad for you are just lying", "<Knitting trivia>" or "Target is doing poorly as a business right now" or "ICE doing gestapo things" is "unsubtle", or why any of that should be "subtle", which is a strange choice of word.

Really depends on who you're following

IMO, Reddit/HN-esque sites are better for following topics, and Bluesky/X/Mastodon are better for following people. Maybe hashtags are a good middleground but I don't have enough experience using those sites to say.

(Disclaimer: I don't use any social media except for HN.)

Why is this a problem? I don't mean to be confrontational here, but by this I mean: is it about them being "crazy", or us not being able to hold complexity and ambiguity? Politics has to emerge somewhere, and it's not like we have third spaces for these rants in our modern world (save for a few die-hards at your local town-hall meeting).

Also, I think cartoon politics is something that tends to emerge out of somebody's experience. Often it is armor. I think if you learn to not take them at face value, then it can really give you a quick insight (not always accurate) about what makes somebody tick.

I personally think that people try too hard to avoid politics and shame those who "make things political" – especially in tech. We live in an inherently political world, and our industry is increasingly political as it's co-opted by political figures and even dictators across the world. Trying to avoid talking about it is like stuffing our fingers in our ears and pretending reality isn't real, imo.

The danger that this creates an echo chamber has to be weighed against allowing trolls to run unchecked, or worse be like Twitter where these people get promoted to the top because ragebait generates big engagement numbers.

Ultimately, the entire social media world needs to admit that maximizing engagement is a bad idea. They have to somehow convince the advertisers that having their product next to content designed entirely to enrage the reader is not good.

I don't even want to think how dim the situation would be without him having taken over.

If that confuses you, look up the definition. It really is defining to Freedom of Speech that people that don't like specific speech still support it!

But you can also follow people and read only what they write, reply to them, and write yourself.

Oh, and the owner's account.

This might be because, absent other information, the algorithm defaults to the "average" user's preferences.

Or it might be evidence of intentional bias in the algorithm.

The next piece of data we need is, if we take a new account, and only interact with non-Nazi accounts and content (e.g. EFF, Cory Doctorow, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, AOC/Obama/Clinton etc), does the feed become filled with non-racist content, or is it still pushed?

... of people actively using Twitter, yes. Which is precisely the point.

"It's gone to hell"

"No, it just reflects your tastes"

"That's objectively false: create a new account and see what happens."

"..."

Even ignoring musk's takeover, I think it's a better model that reduces doomscrolling, ragebait and generally low quality interactions.

If I visit a buffet looking for a healthy snack, but 90% of the dishes are fast food, then I'll probably spend a lot of time looking through the fast food, and may even eat some as the best worst option.

Similarly, I have found the overall content pool to have significantly worsened since Musk's takeover. The algorithm keeps serving me trash. It doesn't mean I want trash.

I went to the home page and "for you" was populated about 80% from known right accounts and angry right-flavored screeds from people I didn't recognize.

The other 20% was just a smattering of random, normal stuff. None of it about pets.

The resulting shift in attention data naturally propagates to weight the input to the algorithm away from “what does an average user pay attention to” and more towards “what does a paying user pay attention to.”

Setting morality aside, this is a self-consistent, if IMO short-sighted, business goal. What it is not is a way to create a fair and impartial “mirror” as you have described.

Here's what I do:

I follow people who are consistently interesting and don't post too much.

Then I only use "Following". "For You" is an algorithmic attention vortex for the proles.