I would try again, but not use discover, and aggressively mute/block.

Yep. I ruthlessly anyone who induces the slightest negative emotion in me, be it annoyance, fear, anger etc. You are what you consume.

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.

> 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".

"The problem with that attitude is that eventually democracy itself suffers".

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

I think what's disappointing is that so many people that I've followed for years now routinely engage in daily political slapfights, or at least retweet ragebait. In the blogging era, it would have been really weird for a software engineer to sit down and write several paragraphs about their political views, but the friction of hitting "repost" is so comparatively low that everyone does it. Myself included, honestly, although I've been trying not to.

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.

To follow topics on Bluesky, add feeds for those topics.

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.

The reality is that microblogging, whether it be on X or bluesky or mastadon or even facebook posts, will ALWAYS be lower signal, lower value than real, curated or effort filled content.

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.

Earlier, I would have agreed that microblogging pales next to long-form blogging. But then so much long-form blogging moved to Substack that has an overall culture as full of pathologies as microblogging: post regularly even if you don't have anything new to say, hustle a brand that can be monetized, accept a comments section with a broken UI full of people shamelessly trying to hustle their own brand. People doing long-form video content will often speak openly about how they feel forced to change their content in order to avoid being punished by the YouTube algorithm.

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.

I noticed the same thing with Angela Collier. I love her videos, but her Bluesky posts have less subtlety than I would expect from someone of her intelligence and scientific training.

It's because it's a microblogging platform.

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.

Interesting, BlueSky's non-algorithmic feed makes it really easy to avoid political ragebait and focus on tech accounts imo

Really depends on who you're following

I'd love to give it another try and be proven wrong. At the beginning it felt like "old Twitter", before it became mainstream, because it was almost entirely software engineers who had left Twitter. After Trump took office it felt like a constant deluge of hand-wringing and people shaking their fists at clouds, and it was tough to immerse myself in it.

Make sure you stick to your "Following" feed and not "Discover" or even the feed dedicated to what your friends are into

The problem (if you want to call it that) with following a person on sites like Bluesky or X is that people aren't machines and won't stay "on topic" regarding the reason you followed them in the first place. You might follow them for software dev, biking, birding, or whatever, but one day they could suddenly start ranting about their own political opinions or crazy beliefs.

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.)

> but one day they could suddenly start ranting about their own political opinions or crazy beliefs.

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 don't think you're being confrontational, and I don't think it's a problem either to be honest. My point was more that, try as one might, you can't build the ultimate curated list of non-political follows because somebody will eventually write something that you consider political. It can't be avoided, which I think is what you're saying too.

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.

If someone is feeding you ragebait on Bluesky you should just unsubscribe. The feed is what you make it. Twitter can be kind of like this too, but the trolls haunt the replies on there whereas people can shut trolls out of their replies on Bluesky. That's the big difference, is someone comes into a thread just to stir shit the original poster can shut them down.

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.