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Bluesky is rolling out Hashtags
- HeckFeck 3y agoDoes anyone still use hashtags? I often searched and tweeted them back in the day on Twitter, they worked well for organic discoverability. But I don't see many uses of them now.
- hermanradtke 3y agoYou can follow a topic without having to follow specific people.
- pjc50 3y agoOn Twitter they got destroyed by spam and then de-prioritized by the platform in favor of the "sidebar" guessing what people were talking about.
- drcongo 3y agoThey're fantastic on Mastodon where there's no algorithm trying to force you to something more stupid. Or spambots, or grifters, or nazis, or pornbots. Hopefully Bluesky is going to follow a model closer to that than the current state of Twitter.
- edm0nd 3y ago#yes #all #the #time
- whywhywhywhy 3y agoNo, every platform apart from maybe Tiktok will apply a heavy negative weight to your post if you use them.
- Spivak 3y agoTumblr is the only social media site that has a successful tagging where the tags actually are meaningful for discovery and it's all due to the community not really the implementation.
- dghughes 3y agoThe word hashtag has almost become a pejorative word. People seem to use like "hashtag whatever" as a taunt. It's like the word karma has become tainted because people only use it to mean something bad as a taunt to someone. In Hindu there is good and bad karma like yin and yang.
- spintin 3y agoWrong prio: videos and animated .gif is 100% the ONLY thing anyone at that company should be spending ANY time on.
- weinzierl 3y agoDMs is what we need first.
- yashasolutions 3y agocan you explain the rational? DM are for private interaction. Social media are more publishing platforms (ie. Media plaftorm with a social aspect). Messaging apps allow for interpersonal interaction but they definitely don't have the same impact. Which use case do you have in mind for prioritizing DMs? Usually DMs are for sales, or harassment (which is sometime the same) If you have friends, you usually have other ways to communicate with outside of bluesky. So I am genuinely curious why you would think that DM are a priority?
- BryantD 3y agoSpeaking for myself, I’ve met three or four people on BlueSky I’d like to have a private communication channel for. I didn’t know them previously.
- Retr0id 3y agoHN doesn't have DMs either, but we usually figure things out one way or another (e.g. contact info in bio)
- weinzierl 3y agoOnly if you are willing to publish contact info in your profile. I am much more willing to open my DMs than doing that. I realize that open DMs are not an option for high profile accounts, but for most people probably safer than publishing their email or - god forbid - their phone number.
- consumer451 3y agoFunny bug in the current implementation, the # emoji is also working as a hashtag. But they are considering keeping it. https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3kmjlcds4ie2q https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3kmjlcds4ie2q
- throwawaycities 3y agoI know on Twitter/X the hashtag emoji isn’t a functional link, but curious why implementing functional hashtag emojis on Bluesky is considered a bug. Sort of related, I’d been waiting like 6 months and finally gained access to Bluesky but never used it because they didn’t allow me to use my emoji domain name(s) as my handle.
- pfraze 3y agoMore of an accident. The hashtag emoji is a combination of code points and guess what the first code point is? ‘#’ The handling is a little wonky but if it doesn’t hurt anything we’ll clean it up and keep it
- throwawaycities 3y agoLife is funny, just last week I learned about a bug on some blockchain explorers where they display certain emojis in code point in base 10 though I think it’s: &# Got to enjoy these kinds of coincidences and happy accidents.
- jameshart 3y agoIt’s not ‘the hashtag emoji’, it’s ’the number key emoji’.
- Phiwise_ 3y ago>they didn’t allow me to use my emoji domain name(s) as my handle. Not that I've been trying to keep up, but this is just about the first Bluesky decision I've heard that I 100% agree with. The usability line needs to be drawn somewhere.
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- whywhywhywhy 3y agoEx-Twitter devs rolling out a feature that if you used it on Twitter during their reign it would harm your post in the algorithm.
- elaus 3y agoYou seem to imply that the founders of Bluesky were the ones pushing for those algorithm changes at Twitter? Do you have any more information on this? I find it hard to believe that this is a decision made by developers.
- Mashimo 3y agoUsing a hashtag on twitter reduced your posts discovery on twitter? Why did they do that?
- blehn 3y agoI would guess that on the whole hashtags provide negative value to users. It's a neat idea but it almost immediately devolves into SEO spam.
- pjc50 3y agoUsers _invented_ hashtags and the platform subsequently provided official mechanics for them. Just as users invented retweets and used to do them manually. People really value discovery, it's just that it's so vulnerable to the SEO arms race.
- jakebsky 3y agoThere are no ex-Twitter devs at Bluesky and only one ex-Twitter employee who started this month. Custom feeds on Bluesky are federated so that anyone can create a new one using any algorithm they wish. There are already many thousands to choose from.
- lost_womble 3y agoObjectively wrong.
- maxehmookau 3y agoAll of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.
- thebiglebrewski 3y agoHaha right, I'm getting major Battlestar Galactica vibes from this launch. The BlueSky UI is scarily like Twitter's UI. Wonder if they'll ever get sued for that...
- blitzar 3y agoI have not see innovation out of Silicon Valley like this since Steve launched Copy and Paste on the very same day.
- colingoodman 3y agoWith Twitter imploding we now have 3 competitors that have nearly the identical user experience as Twitter. The federation concept is interesting, but if it at the end of the day it's just a Twitter clone then I'm rather disappointed.
- BadHumans 3y agoI've used bsky during the invite-only time and lack of hashtags was a problem for me trying to find the content I wanted but even more so it dawned on me that I don't like the Twitter format. Instead of looking for tweets with #art you are better off just using the /r/art subreddit if you want a constant stream of art.
- caditinpiscinam 3y agoCouldn't you simulate a subreddit my making a hashtag #/r/art and filtering for all the matching posts?
- BadHumans 3y agoWhy do that when I can just use /r/art?
- consumer451 3y agoI realize that you mean in general, but specifically today... on r/art vs #art on bsky, a crazy significant portion of new bsky users are in Japan. So there is one difference. My point is that it's a whole different art scene.
- math_dandy 3y agoHashtags are great for “right now” or ephemeral topics that wouldn’t fit into a hierarchy.
- hdhdhsjsbdh 3y agoI’m on Bluesky and tried to get my friends on there too, but without much luck. I don’t find myself using it often. In my opinion, the problem with Bluesky is that it assumes people want old Twitter/social media back. Beyond their protocols (which the vast majority of social media users do not care about), there is little innovation in the UX or platform. Old Twitter had its moment, and was relevant for a time. But the ship of the last 20ish years of social media has sailed, and people either want something new and different, or they’re ready for it to go away entirely.
- dkobia 3y agoI am in a similar predicament. I tried Threads and that had some traction due to the built-in instagram connection but it doesn't take long to see that the Instagram and Twitter audiences are very different. Bluesky is starting from scratch which is very unattractive to anyone who's built an audience on Twitter from the past 10 years or more even if it seems X (Twitter) is mostly bots these days. From what I can see so far on Bluesky, it seems like a journalist circle jerk.
- consumer451 3y ago> From what I can see so far on Bluesky, it seems like a journalist circle jerk. Out of all the circle jerks out there, I do not find the fourth estate very annoying. The C-Suite circle jerk seems far worse. Unlike all other platforms aside from Mastodon, Bluesky is devoid of that top-down control, and I really appreciate that.
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- metacatdud 3y agoI thought was only me. Right from the beginning I felt stale smell. I think this model is kind of of date and for what is worth we have way too many social networks anyway.
- mhitza 3y agoI like most things I read about Bluesky, as it matches nicely to some of my ideas on how a decentralized social media would look like, except hampering message length (couple hundred characters). I think it's counter productive for any kind of serious discussion. Look at HN and how insightful comments can be when you leave room for a couple of paragraphs. Same issue with Mastodon, except I host my own ActivityPub instance set to 5000 characters. Which should be accepted by most Mastodon servers.
- xd1936 3y agoI really loved a good Twitter thread. Breaking down points and ideas into sections forced people to build organization into their rants instead of rambling paragraphs. I found redundancy and reiteration much more rare in the golden years of Twitter.
- jimberlage 3y agoThis was an important differentiator for Twitter; even if you use a thread reader, the author can’t assume that’s the format their text will be read in. So they have to make the best of both worlds, distill the content into its essence and build long form content where each paragraph stands on its own. Bluesky has an opportunity to have a great first-party thread reader experience. Longform content where the author is incentivized to see how it reads in chunks is an underrated thing.
- pfraze 3y agoThis is exactly the reason. In my SSB days, we had an extremely high character limit on posts. People became enormously long-winded; someone called it “full contact blog hockey” and that was about right The message chunking is a feature. It keeps people focused on editing their paragraphs into a form that works for feeds, and it enables replies to and reposts of inner chunks (which is close to a model for transclusion). For longer writing we have two good options 1, make threads work better (composing and rendering) 2, support longform embeds, which people already do via screenshots of text We’ll probably do 1 but I’m interested to try 2
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- unshavedyak 3y agoTangent question: These days i struggle with "Is this mobile app made by the actual developer?". How do you handle this scenario? For example, i wanted to install Bluesky on my phone, if there was an app. The website doesn't link to an app that i can see. Three links, Business Blog and Jobs. I can of course search the Apple App Store, however then i have to verify if `Bluesky PBLLC` is the right account. What's the ideal UX here? Am i as a user being dense?
- pfraze 3y agoNah we need to get those links in there