I hate the way articles about BSky keep framing choice to move here in terms of left/right and echo chambers. Fundamentally, the bigger issues for me are wanting to see links/current news, wanting to see posts that aren't rage-baiting/content farming, and wanting actually diverse conversations. - ThreadSky

maggiek.bsky.social • 90 days ago

I hate the way articles about BSky keep framing choice to move here in terms of left/right and echo chambers. Fundamentally, the bigger issues for me are wanting to see links/current news, wanting to see posts that aren't rage-baiting/content farming, and wanting actually diverse conversations.

Reposted from Matt Karolian

Traffic from Bluesky to @bostonglobe.com is already 3x that of Threads, and we are seeing 4.5x the conversions to paying digital subscribers.

Comments

jerc.bsky.social•89 days ago

Facebook blocks news posts (almost) entirely in Canada. It drives me crazy but has the benefit of me using Facebook less as a result. 😆🤷‍♂️

ianmisner.com•89 days ago

wanting to see links to blogs is political for some reason

kishorehari.com•90 days ago

It feels more like a large, ever-growing friendly Discord server right now. Way more emphasis on community, learning, with a dash of weird tossed in. Just how I like my IRL communities.

blikethecheese.bsky.social•90 days ago

It’s about credibility, not politics. And the people framing it as an echo chamber issue know that too, the insufferably disingenuous weasels.

lemurdreamer87.bsky.social•89 days ago

Yeah, the people being "excluded" are doing the kinds of things that would get them kicked out of almost any physical venue for being a nuisance at best. I don't see the media whining about "echo chambers" when some dickhead gets ejected from a bar for getting trashed and going on loud racist rants.

nimrodg.bsky.social•89 days ago

The only thing is that while I understand that people wants to customize their feed, I hope they won't use moderation list for bullying or blocking any opinion that doesn't align with their own opinion. There are some great tools for dealing with trolls here, but also to actually talk to one another

wyotriumphrider.bsky.social•89 days ago

I like community standards and terms of service that support that end. If one is using a social media app just to be an asshole, the X is the undisputed champion for that.

jaykellett.bsky.social•89 days ago

I have not read a single article about BlueSky being an echo chamber (by choice). They keep saying it because it keeps working. Stop giving it airtime. We all know it was a line developed by the right.

vinosmax.bsky.social•90 days ago

There are some terrific communities over here. I am loving all the film, book, and tv reviewers/writers. And, of course, cats! There is also engaging discourse on planning, urbanism and transit. It’s good.

themedherbalist.bsky.social•89 days ago

So you want NPR then.

vidit1.bsky.social•90 days ago

What really annoys me is the pretending twitter didn't have problems both before the bluesky exodus, before X-rebrand, before the elon takeover.

I don't like following a ton of a new people and have seen people I was close with slowly leave twitter since 2016. More now than before but most people.

tammylc.bsky.social•90 days ago

And wanting to see the people I follow, not have half my feed be AI algorithmic bullshit.

45xiatai.bsky.social•89 days ago

I appreciate being able to have a conservation with you about diverse topics here, for sure.

vnangia.bsky.social•89 days ago

In essence trying to rage-bait and content-farm the exact thing we’re trying to get away from.

Super frustrating.

dreadzed.bsky.social•89 days ago

Nailed it. I deleted Twitter once Tweedledum took over but it had been dicey for a while. I left Reddit, FB, Tumblr etc because they'd lost a lot of the organic engagement and content. Mastodon never really hooked me but Blue sky is really nailing the vibe. Plus all the academics and journalists!!

jonnyworldbeater.bsky.social•89 days ago

The right-wing owns the outrage engine, and they will run it full steam for any reason that might mean they don't get their way.

painter.bsky.social•90 days ago

🎯

kaleidoscopesci.bsky.social•90 days ago

Exactly. I want to be able to interact and not see the same rage bait over and over again. On the bird site the algorithm made it impossible to find what I was actually interested in and the people I want to connect with.

heywhatsgoingon.bsky.social•90 days ago

I’ve had political disagreements with people here on BlueSky-they were civil, and not full of vitriol. This isn’t an echo chamber, it’s far closer to Point + Counterpoint that some of us fogies grew up watching. Also, flowers, and space, and wildlife photos.

oofmoment420.bsky.social•89 days ago

Heavy on the engagement farming part

tomkopacz.bsky.social•89 days ago

Exactly. There are a bunch of people whom I followed on Xitter that I chose not to follow here, even though I may agree with their political stances, because I'm just tired of "all that."

heathertoday.bsky.social•89 days ago

Indeed. I finally left TwX because it was turning into a cess pool of horribleness. I don’t want that in my life. And so far, it seems much more pleasant over here. It’s just an added benefit that so many lovely people are here giving me useful news and insight.

kevincureton.bsky.social•88 days ago

For me this goes all the way back to USENET. I was in multiple groups, including gay groups. And there were trolls, so many trolls. But we had kill files, which were used to block people. You could share kill file lines with each other. Blocking was also social act.

kevincureton.bsky.social•88 days ago

Imagine you post “I’m blocking SoAndSo” and that becomes a link so others can also block based on that recommendation. That’s what kill files were like. I’d love to see that in Bluesky. Is this something an external developer can make?

the-green-queen.bsky.social•89 days ago

Colonizer mindset framing spaces that don’t cater to you or hold you in the majority as “echo chambers.” 🤷🏽‍♀️

drsidneyzweibel.bsky.social•90 days ago

The more important thing they are missing is that leaving a place that has become toxic for exactly that reason doesn't make the place you go to for your escape an "echo chamber"

Toxicity is toxicity, and it wasn't just the political right who made it toxic, though they outnumber those on the left

lsdjelly.bsky.social•89 days ago

Everyone else is equating hate speech to political stance and it's wild. I don't want to waste time wading though muck and garbage to get to my bird pictures and historical analysis

colin99.bsky.social•90 days ago

I was lucky that my small community on Twitter never had a lot of issues. I still check in for the people that haven't moved over

twyst.bsky.social•90 days ago

Run by a maniac

illumrial.bsky.social•89 days ago

I also just want to be engaged on a site that is:
Open source
Not owned by the richest man in the world

mikeyjsk.bsky.social•89 days ago

ghett0.bsky.social•90 days ago

+1. The fact that my algos are far more "Opt-in" rather than "be farmed into" is my primary motivation for being here.

That, and I have been on the internet for nearly 30 years. You always have to stay ahead of the curve seeking the civil discourse rather than the angry screaming and childishness.

carolinemoore.bsky.social•89 days ago

Scrolling through Twitter started to feel like I was just seeing the same handful of posts over and over again, missing a ton of things that were posted by people I actually followed, and ads and bots.

fwordleproblems.bsky.social•90 days ago

Yeah it's not super-complicated. This is where my pals from online are. We talk about Dune and whatnot. Also politics.

crs1.bsky.social•90 days ago

good luck trying to get present day click farmers to understand your POV; maybe if you set up in a PA diner....

adapples.bsky.social•89 days ago

I came here because everybody I'd been following stopped posting there.

I guess I'm not typical but was never into the algo feed and don't understand why anybody would be. #NetworkingExternalities ‪@michitrota.bsky.social‬

mutual-a.bsky.social•89 days ago

johnkerrison.me•89 days ago

Agreed! 💯

ubermeisters.bsky.social•89 days ago

We want diversity, not divisiveness !!

ubermeisters.bsky.social•89 days ago

Divided we fall, diversed, we stand

stratos.bsky.social•89 days ago

Exactly right

mornorse.bsky.social•89 days ago

Totally agree twitter accumulating more and more advertising, interfering with scrolling, auto click on many an advert, & clickbait bots/twats tagging into anything that had more than two upvotes & it has the MÜSK spouting 💩 which is now being shoved towards all under the no more block curtain.

aquaphase.23rdlegion.com•89 days ago

100%. I grew so weary of actual discussions being bot-slammed with t-shirt ads. The transparency here is just so dang refreshing.

ebroms.bsky.social•89 days ago

📌

doctorzen.net•90 days ago

I also think the "No advertisements" aspect of Bluesky is also a big and underestimated advantage.

rosaluxlux.bsky.social•89 days ago

But there's going to have to be ads someday, right? They have to make money somehow

doctorzen.net•89 days ago

I’ve seen discussion of a subscription model instead of ads: https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/post/3l7bifd4rwd2g

curious-blue-dot.bsky.social•89 days ago

This. Twitter was a great news feed before Elmo trashed it. So far, BlueSky has been a fine news feed.

maggiek.bsky.social•90 days ago

"Actually diverse" here meaning conversations that are able to go beyond weird political talking points. I want to hear from historians and scientists and writers and philosophers and I want them to be able to post links to context and evidence.

theresheis.bsky.social•90 days ago

denismongin.bsky.social•88 days ago

Just did the experiment: same posts about a scientific article I published, here and on X.
Zero like repost on X (~400 follow), versus 16 likes and 7 repost here (~40 followers, just arrived)

Science is definitely encouraged here, and hidden there

danhicks.bsky.social•90 days ago

So you're saying you hate incomprehensible Boomer memes /s

hoboabobo8d8.bsky.social•90 days ago

It'a crazy to me that this isn't being framed as a choice from a consumer perspective instead of a political one.

X and Threads and Facebook are unpleasant! Bsky is actually pleasant, and its moderation is working to scale with its success! That about sums it up!

loresjoberg.bsky.social•89 days ago

I left Twitter because Elon was insulting people for not wanting to pay money to use it, and I am powered by spite. Avoiding the Elonberg rallies was a happy side-effect.

cfoh.bsky.social•89 days ago

It's pretty sad that it's seen as partisan to [checks notes] value facts.

maggiek.bsky.social•90 days ago

Functionally, this explains why I'd rather be here than on Threads. And why this is better than most of post-2016 Twitter even long before Musk bought it.

This is actually optimizing for conversations and information sharing, rather than eyeballs. THAT is what matters to me.

rebecca-altman.bsky.social•89 days ago

🙌

anna-burgess.bsky.social•89 days ago

I never cared about follows. I just don't want my food microblogging to be filled with rage bait. I want to talk about the merits of possibly doing turkey 5 ways for Thanksgiving because it'll be fun: so far I got smoked turkey legs, turkey roulade, and chicken fried turkey.

bauwerks.net•90 days ago

I think a lot of people have forgotten the sentiment around Twitter pre-election 2016 was basically "God this place sucks, who uses it anymore? It's so broken," and then post-election, especially post-inauguration, people remembered a large audience is good for on-the-ground reporting.

bauwerks.net•90 days ago

We kinda let the crusty jankiness slide for four years in the name of reporting/documenting Bad Shit Happening, then the pandemic happened and we forgot that the site used to suck and the broken parts were still there.

bauwerks.net•90 days ago

I'm not defending post-election Twitter, I just think the memory-holing and revisionist history by people who think Twitter really started to suck once Musk bought it is odd to see, especially since most of those users have been around before 2016.

bauwerks.net•89 days ago

🙃 Perpetual reply guys sounding off w/ tired talking points I don't care about or asked for. Only a matter of time until this place is truly as bad as Twitter.

I truly commend women (esp. WOCs) for putting up w/ far more, and far worse, of this shit than I do on a daily basis.

moxiegrrl.bsky.social•89 days ago

I think one of my favorite things about this place so far is that there's so little copypasta regurgitation of content. It's nice to see people's original thoughts instead of the millionth repost of the same quote.

asiegel.bsky.social•89 days ago

Diversity of experiences, ways of thinking, expertise communicating.

What I haven’t yet seen which was real value in Twitter is # hashtag communities …

I hope for thriving #EnergyBSky, #ClimateBSky, #EconBSky, etc … (if they’re active, great, just not seeing them)

malemet.bsky.social•89 days ago

Agreed. Unless someone has an interesting point to make I'm done with political threads. People ranting 'lefty' and 'fascist' at each other got very dull.

mikethemadbiol.bsky.social•89 days ago

I think a key fault in those articles is that there aren’t any good metrics (🤮) for assessing things like harassment (in fact, the typical measures view harassment as a good thing).

anoosh100.bsky.social•89 days ago

Unfortunately, wanting to see factual news and information free of rage- and click-bait IS now a left position, because the right has defined itself—proudly—as Musk’s Xitter.

There’s nothing any of us can do about that framing unless and until the right decides to re-subscribe to reality.

davesag.bsky.social•89 days ago

It’s the lack of ads that drew me in & keeps me here. As soon as I realised BlueSky supported image & video uploads I posted a “kaythanksbye” to Instagram & never went back. I ditched X because of the new “blocked people can read your tweets” thing. I never joined Threads

Also people here seem nice

mkfshard.bsky.social•89 days ago

What gets me is that they're kinda not wrong? Spaces that allow right-wing voices definitionally lack good moderation, and so devolve into the misinformation and bullying and grifting and hate speech endemic to right-wing spaces.

The articles just can't or decide not to identify that.

cyberfuturist.bsky.social•89 days ago

Rage-baiting, content farming, trolling in bad-faith, influencer posting etc are all Right wing because they're all based in profit-based social media under Market economics rather than community-based social media under a shared sense of altruism and good faith interactions with one-another.

lanablue.bsky.social•89 days ago

I joined bluesky ages ago, because open source etc my friends were here and because it's actually fine for sexworkers unlike most other sm platforms.

The influx of liberals from north america who are Extremely focused on a skewed left/right binary is irritating to say the least.

josegm.bsky.social•89 days ago

or actually getting to read posts of the people you follow (and vice versa) instead of getting lost in some weird algorithm :)

docfreeride.bsky.social•89 days ago

Same!

johnblaska.com•90 days ago

Yep

terryt.bsky.social•89 days ago

Yep, exactly.

keriwaters.bsky.social•89 days ago

Yes, I’m so tired of talking about politics. I am also so tired I can’t think of anything to talk about, except politics.

anitaleirfall.bsky.social•89 days ago

Seconded.

ellenb.bsky.social•89 days ago

Yes! I loved Twitter when I was following groups of people w experiences and perspectives not in my day-to-day life, plus deep nerds in areas of professional expertise adjacent to my own.

nuttynimz.bsky.social•89 days ago

And not wanting a site owner who is an actual, real-life supervillain

eagernothings.bsky.social•90 days ago

so the quote you posted is the opposite of what you are frustrated by right? sincerely asking. if people are going to boston globe at a high rate from blue sky what you want to see is happening, unless the comments at the globe articles are all trolls.

maggiek.bsky.social•90 days ago

Yes. The fact that outlinks WORK here is a huge and underrated factor in getting people to use it, I think.

eagernothings.bsky.social•89 days ago

hooray!

hippeaux.bsky.social•89 days ago

I just want to see conversations, instead of a bunch of ads. I want to scroll without the feed resetting itself periodically. That app became so unusable I have a hard time seeing it as an echo chamber for anything.

whistlerheidi.bsky.social•89 days ago

Was just thinking about this eco-chamber problem while having my morning tea. Would like to see more verified journalism on all social media platforms. That said, the toxicity on twitter was impacting my mental health post election & I'm grateful for this community. ✌️

evodynamics.bsky.social•90 days ago

Also, they never tell X/Truth/Gab users to expand beyond their echo chambers by joining BlueSky (not that we want them)

davemayhem.bsky.social•90 days ago

I mean sure, not constantly having to deal with actual Nazis was welcome AF but a site that just works and where you are dealing with humans is soooo nice.

davemayhem.bsky.social•90 days ago

I’d also take issue with it being an echo chamber. I’m following a number of people with political views that differ from my own. Actual differences of view points which is normal for a social space. What’s not normal is the number of frothing far right views.

davemayhem.bsky.social•90 days ago

Framing that as an echo chamber implies very much that there are only 2 possible positions, Nazi and everyone else. If that’s the case most media has been a “everyone else” echo chamber since WW2

laserdog.bsky.social•89 days ago

The smart, creative people are on bsky.

The fact that the smart, creative people are mostly liberal is just a second order effect.

malemet.bsky.social•89 days ago

I just like to read something interesting and possibly comment without somebody going off the deep end and firing off a load of insults. It got very boring.

percyvale21.bsky.social•89 days ago

It’s the quality of the forum and the interactions and information available that matters to me, not the metric of follows. Blue sky has this at the moment and we’d all better protect and nurture this forum lest it goes south like the others.

oajoe.bsky.social•89 days ago

I think it was all of the ads and especially the moving Monopoly ads. That. Would. Not. Go. Away.

frankiefurbo.bsky.social•89 days ago

I agree Maggie. I like BSky because I want to hear other people's opinions and learn from people who know their stuff.

stacydvandeveer.bsky.social•89 days ago

Agreed. It is not an echo chamber and I’m not looking for one. Yes, I want news. I also want rules of engagement that leave Nazis & racists out or on the margins.

argus.bsky.social•89 days ago

Just facts are enough bait for me...

arrpeeohh.bsky.social•90 days ago

Not being thrown constant bait by an algorithm and ability to mass block people with internet brain rot are everything

arrpeeohh.bsky.social•90 days ago

Not being thrown constant bait by an algorithm and mass block people with internet brain rot are everything

briarish.bsky.social•89 days ago

Also... the comments. I used to love reading funny/ insightful responses to all kinds of tweets, and then paid bluechecks arrived and I was not willing to wade through 50 cry laugh emoji to try to find the good stuff.

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