people get mad at me when I say this but it's a Serious Problem for bluesky's long-term viability that the userbase actively tries to bully people they don't like off here
Reposted from
Cooper Lund
The problem is that Bluesky is still a niche platform at 1.3 Mil active users per day globally. Getting your boss to say yes to making an account and dedicating the time and effort to maintaining it means they need to see positives for that investment. A middle finger isn’t a good return.
Comments
Looks like the second spike might be the inauguration.
I don't disagree with you that bullying is a problem. But could that loss of users also be a necessary correction?
To be sustainable long-term, we need a publishing model that rejects advertising
Like Adobe. Everyone piled on them because they're an awful company with horrible monetization and it keeps pushing AI.
Corporate personhood is the core legal and moral failing of our age.
1 - the other place and
2 - it been an overwhelmingly positive, dickhead free, experience on here
Especially without corporate accounts and attention seekers
If you are a company catering to a specific group and venture into a place where this group dwells, you should maybe look at how that group currently talks about you.
They should just try running a better company.
I get told to kill myself at least 3x as often here than I do on twitter: for the same content
https://youtu.be/EECpq9SxMNg?si=b_dPSIDS2FKXX0tn
1) how is 'likers' a proxy for DAU?
2) there's no way people are using twitter over bluesky because they got bullied off bluesky. that seems totally delusional.
i don't get the bullying thing, i didn't understand why people hate Stancil (i find him mostly disinteresting so i don't follow him and never see him)
sorry people abuse you. if it makes you feel down, walks and meditation works
(I'm feeling hated by the world cos of minority status right now. i'm trying to take a walk to 'recalibrate' ).
I curated my own timeline here, it has been so peaceful 💙💙💙
IME has been the web becoming more mean and psycho each year, noticeably with web 2.0 era (2005-ish). It just keeps on getting worse.
Think 4chan being limited to basement dwellers to Facebook being used by everyone including grandmas.
Like you’re not under any obligation to let any old random have space in your mentions, right?
Do people not interact with the people they follow? Why follow them if they don't make content you like? Do people not want to have discussions if they don't agree with others? 1/2
Also the discover tab is trash. Get rid of it. Nothing on that tab is a choice.
substack is not a good place
I'm still cautiously bullish.
It is pretty boring people dont like to treat real things that affect people's lives as just another debate for nerds.
On insta i had to go private because people started threatening my kids, on X it was a lot of slurs
If you've got a following, fellow left wingers will get angry at you if you aren't doing what they feel you should be doing.
Over on X most of the abuse came from people so far away from you ideologically it became hard to care.
People don’t care about the people around them anymore.
That said, I will absolutely dunk on/block/tell someone to fuck all the way off on this site, as I have on every other site I’ve ever used. I’m not obligated to listen to stupid takes.
Also, Adobe sucks ass.
At least bluesky still has porn (for now)
who you follow and why has a way bigger impact here than any other major platform because bluesky isn't randomly feeding you other shit you MIGHT like
i got here during the closed beta and fell in with a cluster pretty quickly
i curate who i follow based on what they repost and how much original posting they do, so i mostly see what i want to
having a post hit "discover" is wild though
The NBA just joined here. There is zero "bullying". The problem is engagement: does the site have tools to enable it? Are there enough users?
Nah. Rethink this position.
But then they got a lot of backlash from people going "I dont wanna see that kinda stuff" they mostly moved back to twitter..
And some of the bullying culture is positive. When truly reprehensible people show up, people fight back and refuse to cede space. That's stopped nazis from getting a foothold.
2 changes that I think would draw new folks:
Group chat spaces
Private accounts
No wait, that one is actually worse.
https://backlinko.com/bluesky-statistics
Bsky has a lot of tools to get the feed you want but you have to dig and troubleshoot a bit to get there. Many won't bother
Most of the bullying I have seen on here has been in response to behaviour I'd regard as not acceptable.
it's only good because we are able to believe people off of here.
if you don't like it there are lots of great tools that help keep it less toxic than the other place.
I suggest you try them out
Antisemitism-wise Liberal Jews see Bsky as no different than Twitter
#StandUpToJewishHate
You’ll get death threats for days.
It’s a problem, especially for the “my entire identity is my far left politics and it’s your problem” types
Bluesky is still in its infancy and coming down from an artificial high after the election.
Just because something isn't experiencing constant, exponential growth doesn't mean.....
It's still over the long term growing. And it will like any other platform have growth spurts and slow periods.
There's Misskey, Pleroma, Rebased, Friendica, Hubzilla, and so on. You can check https://fedidb.org
Think of it as wordpress_org vs blogger_com vs tumbr vs medium.
Every time I see "UM, we don't do that here on Bluesky, SWEETIE" I want to scream.
Everyone hurts.
I will say that the policy differences might be minor but the attitudes toward life couldn't be further apart.
I don't think for a minute that Musk (or Putin) wouldn't try to disrupt independent platforms.
That's what's good about Bluesky, it will be harder to corrupt
wild take.
Bullying>>>Nazis
Bullying is bad or good in its own right, but it doesn't seem to diminish the userbase.
It stratifies it, perhaps.
They may be public goods but they are run by companies trying to make a profit.
nothing wrong with taking the self-appointed “thought leaders” down a peg.
Bsky operates on the AT Protocol and you can literally run a personal Bluesky PDS yourself
Decentralized social media like this is not like Twitter and there are lots of ways to keep it up
but by the time that happens there will be a nice heavenbanned site ready for you where you can’t tell who’s real and who’s a bot and no one will ever ever disagree with you
Not in extremist nobodies.
& u cry about them not liking that? get to fuck
I don't "like" everything I read. I read far more posts than I like, and repost often.
X-Twitter is all about engagement farming and getting followers. Here, we still have something like rational arguments.
Sometimes.
That question I have to ponder, as I have never seen one.
So, how does Bluesky pay for itself?
You offer some interesting questions, but I would not go back to Twitter. The science is available here, and the truth is not casually discarded here.
More interesting questions than answers today.
I'm always amused by this because it's actually muting your own account into non-existence.
You all haven't fooled anyone that you give two shits about Palestine. It's just a handy shank to jab at your white whales.
They have not, but they certainly have license to start doing that under this administration, thanks in part to you idjits' depressing the vote by spreading that bullshit canard that, once again, the Internet told you to.
But Bsky doesn’t have that, moderation is just “you can get abundant shit from people and it’s your responsibility to deal with it” which just isn’t tenable long term or as a mass market product
Like try not posting politics 24/7 and maybe your experience will improve 🤷🤷🤷
That will require accounts being on here that you personally dislike, however
That's how an open forum works
Don't solicit opinions if you don't want to hear them 🤷🏻♂️
they feel entitled to the very best pro software for free
(Listening to users is a good way to remain a favorite.)
My partner has given Adobe thousands over the years. They are now looking into alternatives.
Make money somehow, but you cannot use your profile like an ad stream and expect people to not complain. (Capitalism is complicated.)
I sincerely hope Adobe goes under permanently and becomes a distant bad memory.
This is the only logic I'll use to accept this take.
have you used one of their products in the last few years? it’s all shoehorning in AI slop
not even embracing compromise for the sake of personal gain, a fetishization of compromise for the sake of compromise alone
the belief that while sure conservatives are -basically- right on all matters of substance socially and most economically, it is better for social cohesion if we pretend not to agree with them that black people have a bone in their brain that makes them bad at math
Are you Adobe? You have to tell us if you're Adobe.
Jesus Christ, what do we need to do to bully dipshits like you off here?
Dipshits like this are protected and encouraged by the Devs.
If companies want to be welcomed by users on a platform, perhaps they should try being less obviously exploitative.
Though some have a much lower bar of a "this guy thinks Pepsi is better than coca cola" sort.
I think people are a bit too broad about what constitutes "Nazis" unfortunately. And if a dedicated group wants to bully someone the rest of the user base can't really do anything (or know it's happening!)
The chances of this being people running bot accounts off of the platform as well as troll farm pages is pretty high.
Without an algorithm to feed you whatever propaganda an oligarch is pumping the feed is more natural.
It’s not some $5/mo VPS run as a passion project with a few dedicated mods going through BBS posts.
This what the internet activists don't understand.
I don’t believe this is the primary hurdle
It’s bluesky not having feature parity and not having a strategy to combat an existing network effect
Beyond that, if it weren’t, they would need to be working directly w the many large accounts that hate Elon but are still there to understand why they aren’t coming over and try to lobby them to do some in bulk / art the same time
we need edit so badly
For me personally Twitter stopped being fun sometime in abt 2015, but I hung on for a long time
That said a site that’s not already huge where the vibes go bad has a bigger problem
I would love to be able to scour a gardening feed & filter out (for instance) politics.
But if I deliberately go to my politics feed, those filtered words/topics will be there.
Science feeds, nature feeds, education, sports. All of them are at any random point in the day sharing ICE videos of abductions, articles re: Musk, Trump snippets.
To make matters worse, given the heightened state of emotions re: certain topics, people are forcing others to take a side and if they don't agree or it's nuanced, they attack.
The problem is American-centrism. There are too few people outside of the US, and it needs another Brazil wave to fix.
Whether some Americans bully other Americans is irrelevant provincial fuckery.
It’s an assault on objective reality over groupthink party line.
Go to gab or twitter or truthsocial or rumble or youtube or...
Japan, India & Indonesia have sizeable Twitter users. If BlueSky needs to go big, they need appealing to countries like that.
(I actually do plan to write about my experience with this here some day but yeah you’re right 💯)
#Bluesky is turning into a very specific sort of echo chamber pretty fast.
For all the best reasons, perhaps, but I’m also starting to think the outcome is becoming pretty obvious by now.
It remains my only personal social platform. But for business I think it’s dead in the water.
Racists and bigots can GTFO, but people on Bluesky will bully and block people who *overwhelmingly* agree with them on most issues over a single reply.
It makes me nervous to even try to talk civilly about some stuff. Not worth the bad vibes
we can't have it both ways, I'm afraid. your choice is hugboxes, or having to put up with purity testing.
I'm always amused by this because it's actually muting your own account into non-existence.
i want to talk about elections, lgbtq issues, minority issues, womens rights and politics as a whole. i dont want to be in your starter pack. follow people who know more than me lol.
It’s wild how many bad faith block lists are out there.
Some do not like that very much.
Twitters/Fbs early growth was definitely similar in that large events drove people on platform and they'd drop off slowly and establish a new base. Then another event, etc.
It's the only big problem I see with bsky, that it's an ideological echo chamber
But the cesspit was sometimes silly and funny.
And all the block lists I’m on were started by the same ill-informed, reactionary idiot so clearly I made a friend
Circular firing squad for the stupidest stuff
Otherwise it's like looking at a product as if it was the only one saying "this is bad"and effectively leading people to use a worse alternative never mentioned
I couldn’t put my finger on it here but that’s a big part of it
We are a nation of bullies
Name one platform where there are no outrageous, off beat comments constantly in the comments section?
Tsk Tsk Liberals?
Really?
Should we try to be nicer so more maga fascists feel comfortable coming around so they can call me some racial/sexist profanity?
If the platform allows bigots to remain on the site I will eventually just stop using it too.
https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3lf6h3xpe2c2v
Getting bombarded w/ posts about: random subjects
- airliners and airports
- anime & cartoons
- soccer
- Gaza spam
- Cats and dogs
- Sunrise photos
Sunrises are nice but they can be seen from a window. There is little to discuss or share.