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Comment by eek2121

3 days ago

Is he on bluesky or another platform? There is a ton of folks, including myself, who won't use "X" at all, some political, some due to other reasons. For me? All of the above and plus they demand that I install an app on my phone, something I am not willing to do, especially since most of the folks I've followed went to Bluesky, AND I've found way more awesome folks there than I ever did on X. I'm not shilling Bluesky, it is just the biggest/most widely accepted platform in this social area if you exclude meta/facebook.

It's not just the user hostile website that forces their app down your throat. It's also the algorithm that decides what you get to see (and thus, what you think). We know it's biased. The creator doesn't exactly keep the fact secret that it's being manipulated to agree with a certain agenda.

  • Can you substantiate the claims about the supposedly biased algorithm and what exactly the "creator" said about it?

    In my experience it isn't noticeably worse than other platforms, and I'm not aware of concrete complaints such as the incidents with Grok's system prompt, which is a different product.

    • The more obvious bias is towards Premium subscribers over us freeloaders. The reply-ranking algorithm was a nightmare for a while; they strictly adhered to the rules of gold check > blue check > normal account. It's still not great, but eventually they added enough slack to let normal accounts with good quips outrank 30 paying users saying "lol", and tweaked some things so it's no longer so easy to shill tshirts/whatever by tagging Grok for the gold check double-boost.

      But they're still reticent to ban any Premium account without a reason good enough to give up the $8/month. I have some sympathy for trying to moderate in the era of LLMs that can generate perfectly on-topic replies that even take images into context. But I think they need a more targeted approach against OnlyFans bots replying to popular tweets with a standard formula of some sexual reference and an insane claim. Sometimes they're less sexual and more straight up horrifying [0]:

      > i breed mantises for fun and once tried grafting two ooths together just to see what hatched. got a whole clutch of nymphs that all just twitched in circles and died by day two. butterfly chimera energy hits different when it's your own disaster.

      The other bot replies to the same OP are the more typical sexualized sort; they tend to reply in swarms.

      [0] https://x.com/ariexsha/status/2110924715103514871

    • My "For You" twitter feed is literally 100% pro-Trump bot posts. The site is entirely unusable unless you just follow specific people and use "Following" rather than "For You". I'd guess that less than 10% of the site traffic is human.

      The algorithm will also basically ignore you unless you pay for a blue checkmark premium account (what used to be verified). It's like being shadow banned - you can post, but most people will not see you.

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Oh man, I wish everyone just moved somewhere else, specially if they are aiming to make something public. You can choose any server on bluesky nowadays. Scientists in Europe, please check out https://mu.social which is hosted by an european open foundation

Bluesky from John Gruber, say is nothing like X, and i don't doubt it one bit. You are def shilling it.

  • Bluesky is closer to Truth Social, but for Blue MAGA, though has non-political communities as well.

    I left Bluesky because they hid their VC funding from the community for almost a year and now a partner from the VC is running the show as CEO. Their CTO has also attacked me personally here on HN because I wrote criticism of the new, weak, permissioned data proposal. These are not the folks to bring us better social media. I expect it to linger on like Mastodon, never moving beyond a few million people.

  • How is it not "like X"? It's practically a knock-off outside of the userbase.

However, Bsky people really hate AI last I checked.

  • That was my experience as well. I can't believe I went all the way from Mastodon, to Bluesky, and back to X and finding that X somehow now had friendlier people and less hate than Bluesky.

    There is a small group of AI people on Bluesky, some are nice, but some are... quite behind the curve.

    If Bluesky was a nicer place, I'd prefer to be there because of the ability to make third party clients, and atproto. But all the info is on X, and they do a surprisingly good job with the For You feed now.

    • Also just curating your feed (i.e. judiciously using blocking and muting) and instead viewing just "Following" removes something like 99.9% of all common complaints re: Twitter, while still giving you access to a much less-biased (or easier to equally-bias through curation: e.g. you can't get an accurate view of RW ideology following only BlueSky posters) and far larger public square than anything else.

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    • Yeah unfortunately bluesky turning out that way was always inevitable. It was created because of-- and filled with people motivated by-- a deep emotional reaction to X.

      Gonna sound total boomer here but I've never used any of it and feel like I haven't missed anything. Or maybe I'd be flying spaceships by now if I scrolled through X every day, who knows

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  • eh, there are plenty of AI researchers on there. Also a handy "AI haters" labeler you can subscribe to to filter out people who just want to yell.

    The labeler thing is cool; I really like ATproto because you can do interesting things with it. If I'm honest, though, I mainly like Bluesky because I don't get called slurs on there.

Not sure what you're talking about. I strictly use the X website and it works great.

  • The website is so bad that, before xcancel was hit with a C&D, it was faster to stop an x.com page load, edit the URL to xcancel.com even with my phone's on-screen keyboard, and load that, than to wait for the real x.com version.