I can’t read the article bc it’s behind a paywall. But if they’re saying Bluesky needs more well known center right voices, they may have a case. Does Bluesky need more grifters like Tim Pool, no!
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lmao right like if we're actually invested in trying to take a vibe check of the political diversity here, we need to remember that the "center" isn't the middle point between "kamala supporters" and "neo-nazis"...
Gosh, so right, you just never feel like you're encountering "a real person in all their raw and imperfect humanity" on bsky. Just a bunch of artificially perfect, shiny facades, walking around on eggshells, too afraid to say what they really think. 😐
How can a digital town square exist when 70% of what is posted is a slurry of foreign and domestic anti-democracy psyops funded hourly by oligarchs who want to take everything.
These people have so little awareness of other people's lives that they can't imagine that "coming up against a real person" can be very unpleasant, not to mention dangerous, for some folks, so they intentionally don't want to reproduce that experience online.
People are not coming here for an echo chamber, they are leaving Twitter because (due to the blue tick prioritisation) it’s becoming an echo chamber of the dumbest comments imaginable.
Or instead of finding a random nazi in your comments and blocking, you can now be swarmed by a stadium-sized echo chamber of Pepes that your feeble blocks are powerless against.
I feel like we can stop reading when a writer, in September of 2024, still thinks musk wants a free and open town square for the exchange of all types of ideas. Was never believable and is just a moronic view now.
Especially since Elon was just blowing it out his hole big-time when he said that thing about the digital town square. He just wanted to be, as visibly as possible to everyone on earth, a Person of Global Importance.
I want to know how often she thinks she interacts with a “real person in all their raw and imperfect humanity” because that is not the ideal town square either. I would rather interact with considerate and polite versions of people even in public, and not their raw, imperfect versions.
Pretty sure if people acted the way do on Twitter in an actual town square they’d get a lot more than a block (unless you preface it with “building” and add “to the noggin”).
Can't read due to the paywall, but I've noticed white women will have this take a lot even though they must have experienced enough misogyny online to know better. But my fellow white women are super good at compartmentalizing anything unpleasant to uphold white supremacy. So.
Knew without even reading it that it was by Jemma Kelly. It's as if the FT has some kind of weird internal contest between her and Janan Ganesh about who can find the most irritating way of parroting banal cliches.
The closest to a racial slur I've been called was "Yankee",
but so much of the
"gay marriage must be banned because gay people can't have children"
argument of slightly pre-Twitter was also an attack on my straight "childless cat people" marriage, as well as wrong about my gay parent friends.
My gay coworker adopted a kid, and they once commented to me on just how hostile the support community around adoption is to lgbt people, which probably turns that gay marriage bit into a feedback cycle, too.
Some of my gay coworkers were bi and had kids from previous marriages, some adopted, some presumably used sperm donors but it would have been rude to ask,
some didn't have kids, some of those would have liked to but didn't want to while they were single, pretty much the full range.
This was a new adoption while we were both working together, so I heard about the various dramas of that particular adoption process in chats over lunch.
Honestly, an echo chamber without violent racist content seems like a lot more effective as a digital town square. Like BlueSky is super good vibes compared to the other place, even in its heyday.
These are also the same people screaming for the government and cops to clear homeless encampments because some people’s simple existence makes them feel “unsafe”, so I don’t think they’re actually keen on “raw and imperfect humanity” anyway.
The question is not whether "the digital town square can exist" but whether we want every social media to _be_ that digital town square. What if this is more like your friend's basement rec room? What if we want it that way?
She forgets everything from Live Journal to the original Facebook consisted only of people you wished to follow. It wasn’t about being forced to read the dumb tweets of a billionaire man-baby, brunchlords, and edgelords. They need to talk to Musk Baby about removing all block and mute on his site.
This is a person who has never been to xoxo, never been on MetaFilter, never been on 4/8chan, and likely never been vetted on character, or been a part of any healthy + vibrant online community.
They won’t get paid here. That’s the big thing. People leaving Twitter means less forced engagement for the big accounts and less click money for them.
“more vile racist content please” seems like something Jemima Kelly perhaps should not have written & then published as her opinion in the Financial Times.
This BS fails to take account of the fact that BSky has an incredibly effective blocking mechanism that the people here choose to deploy against hateful content.
Who is to say how Twitter (or any other platform) might be if you could do similarly.
Ah, yes, my echo chamber of not receiving pointless misogynistic troll comments like this. Enormous echo chamber. Huuuge echo chamber. How dare I close my mind to scintillating opinions like this.
Even if you accept the premise that the presence of racist trolls is a reasonable cost for a free market of ideas or whatever, there's the whole matter of X being owned by an especially powerful racist troll.
Stepping on a volleyball was the cause of one of my first significant injuries; they're apparently not made for that,
and the ball protected itself by throwing me off it :-)
That was how I once knocked myself unconscious. Landed such that my elbow hit the ground first, and then my jaw slammed into the top of my humerus and the lights went out.
Do they take into account that a normal shmo like me that doesn't have a million followers or pay for Twitter gets absolutely no engagement there, but here I can talk to anybody and I almost always get a response, whether the person is famous, in government or anything else?
funny thing about that whole "digital town square" metaphor is that if it was an actual real-life town square and had a bunch of skinhead brown shirt mobs patrolling it just looking for heads to crack, actual real-life people would actually start avoiding that town square as well
It's pretty damn easy for a white person to be telling POC that they should be subjecting themselves to the opinions of people who want them oppressed, enslaved, or killed.
The combination of a lack of algorithm and cauterizing blocks means that a lot of the engagement-farming tactics they use on other sites don’t work here and it drives them crazy.
Yup. They can’t even troll properly here because of the nuclear block. They expect to troll a thread, and sure some will block them. It that just means they get to troll everyone else.
Until they realize the nuclear block prevents them from even seeing the thread anymore. It’s glorious.
Is this the difference between the block here vs Xitter? On Xitter you no longer see the the users posts. But on Bluesky you're blocked from seeing the whole thread?
Bsky blocks you from seeing the blocked post and any children, and you don’t get notifications about the children. You also can’t go around it by opening the thread in incognito mode like you used to for a long time on Xitter.
What's more, this approach runs afoul of the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle. I don't want, nor is it reasonable to expect me, to constantly wade through hip-deep bullshit to be in a social media experience.
You aren't fucking OWED my attention and emotional energy!
typical "I am a principled person because I have a Volatirean approach, so I even welcome opinions I hate!" that comes from being insulated from the consequences of online feedback loops of harassment/doxxing/SWATing/etc.
(Fully realize the irony of my handle decrying a Voltairean approach)
Does this person not realise that the XFR have their own echo chambers, in addition to X, and that the content of those chats, eg Telegram, are utterly vile
Personally, I can do without constantly encountering people with extremely obvious white supremacist dog whistles in their profiles. The Twitter algo would occasionally recommend I follow nazis that I had just reported for being nazis.
This is just false anyhow. X _is_ a silo now. My For You page is almost exclusively Musk amd MAGA content, despite following none of these people. Even regular conservatives that seem to still post there don't show up. My old X featured tons of NRO/Examiner conservatives, all buried under bilge now.
There are SO many women like her in the U.K., delightedly engaging with “banter” (hate speech) because they think it will benefit them.
It is actually impossible to do anti racist work here with white women like we did in the USA, because too many simply won’t engage with anything hard hitting. Yet
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Find us Center-Right voices "with INTEGRITY ".
Nigh impossible, these days, but would be preferred over popularity.
???
Back when I had an account, I got banned for pointing out that the new Twitter logo was the X Window System logo. (I got better.)
It's all happening on X!
Not sure if Twitter is an echo chamber, but it's definitely infested by hatred and cruelty.
but so much of the
"gay marriage must be banned because gay people can't have children"
argument of slightly pre-Twitter was also an attack on my straight "childless cat people" marriage, as well as wrong about my gay parent friends.
some didn't have kids, some of those would have liked to but didn't want to while they were single, pretty much the full range.
Who is to say how Twitter (or any other platform) might be if you could do similarly.
https://reelmemorable.com/2016/07/04/what-does-kimmy-schmidt-trading-places-auntie-mame-have-in-common/
and the ball protected itself by throwing me off it :-)
(Even regardless of the question whether it was ever a good faith argument)
1. She came here and was not the center of attention anymore. Hates that.
2. She came here and was quickly met with mockery when she tried to right wing grift off the users here.
Until they realize the nuclear block prevents them from even seeing the thread anymore. It’s glorious.
like everyone who hasn’t been banned on twitter by 2024 she is a compliant nepotist who has blamed others for being censored
and her privilege has shielded her from realizing 80% of twitter users got siloed and replaced by bots 2 years ago ?
You aren't fucking OWED my attention and emotional energy!
(Fully realize the irony of my handle decrying a Voltairean approach)
(This was a long walk through the Pokédex for no water.)
I'm certainly not going to stop her
It is actually impossible to do anti racist work here with white women like we did in the USA, because too many simply won’t engage with anything hard hitting. Yet