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They should have hired more builder types and great designers. IMO they had all the press on their side, riding the decentralization wave, and really were given
by _akhe 2y ago
They should have hired more builder types and great designers. IMO they had all the press on their side, riding the decentralization wave, and really were given an excellent opportunity, it's a shame.
Product took forever and when it finally came out it wasn't impressive. They should have staffed up some badass devs & designers who ship or even considered a top tier agency who would have made something truly stunning. Test the market at each step. Decentralization deserved better!
I think a good comparison is OpenAI (including the whole "are they open vs closed" part that Bluesky had to deal with). OpenAI has done an excellent job of: 1) Releasing good products on a good cadence 2) Keeping us waiting in suspense for the next big thing.
Decentralization has a very high excitement potential - I think Bluesky just dropped the ball. Didn't prioritize product.
- arcalinea 2y agoBluesky CEO here. We were founded to build a protocol for Twitter, and likely would have died as a project within Twitter had I not spent half of 2021 negotiating for our independence. In 2022, I got funding and began building an independent protocol team that was still consulting with Twitter on how they might integrate an open protocol. Elon buying Twitter was the factor that changed our plans and led us to build an app, as it became clear a path to adoption within Twitter would never pan out. We were not set up as a product team given the legacy of our origins, but did the best we could last spring, shipping an app to hundreds of thousands of users with just one app dev, pfraze. OpenAI has been around for nine years, and while what they've done is truly impressive, launching projects with a fully-staffed engineering team is very different from building a team as you grow a userbase. Hindsight is 20/20 when it comes to market timing, but our goal from the start has been to deliver a decentralized social experience with good UX, and deliver on the previously theoretical concepts of algorithmic choice and community moderation in a global public square. Because of this, our product focus has been driven by showing what's possible on an open protocol, and only after doing things like custom feeds and third-party labelers have we circled back on some more basic features users have been requesting like DMs and video. We still believe decentralization, and the innovation it enables for social, has high potential, and are always looking at how we can better surface it in the app.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ssahoo 2y ago@Jay - Thanks for jumping in. What was Dorsey's balance on BlueSky(AT) vs Nostr?
- SkyMarshal 2y agoThanks for commenting, always nice to get a reality check from the actual founder, vs just armchair speculating in the ether. I really like what you guys are doing and am amazed you did it with just one app developer. I hope 2024 can be a year of ramping up the feedback->prioritize->implement->feedback loop as quickly as possible. As I said above, I think the space is still wide open, and I think you can win over a lot of users with a federated protocol + clean app UI/UX + sane and decent people like you leading the org and attracting a like-minded community. I wish you the best!
- _akhe 2y ago[dead]
- SkyMarshal 2y agoLol, dude, I was mainly referring to myself armchair speculating in the ether, which is exactly what I was doing in my comment above that you replied to. Maybe I should have been more explicit about that, but pro-tip: Stop being so sensitive on the internet man, you don't have to justify yourself to every online rando, and given your accomplishments it's not even worth your time to. Peace bro.
- _akhe 2y agoYou're on a technology message board, there are going to be opinions - you might be the sensitive one. If you think HN is bad try the others!