Comment by nkohari
3 days ago
There was a real attempt earlier this year to move to BlueSky, but it's become even worse than Twitter for different reasons.
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.
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
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.
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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
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.
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".
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.
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