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Yeah. That's why Twitter is useful as a kind of flypaper or quarantine. Let the passive stay and let the deliberate find new spaces that can be good the way Twi

Yeah. That's why Twitter is useful as a kind of flypaper or quarantine. Let the passive stay and let the deliberate find new spaces that can be good the way Twitter once was. If Twitter was to go away, places like Bluesky would unavoidably get worse.

lenderton 2y ago
My experience with Bluesky has been similar to my experience with other "disruptive" platforms like Cara (the anti-AI art portfolio app/site). When a "new" (usually overall non-corporate) internet space opens up that, in theory, caters to a broader audience, the most immediate colonizers are the type of people that have some sort of "underground" bent to them - subcultural things like furries, erotic artists, etc. Opening up Cara produces an avalanche of large-breasted foxpeople, and the last time I opened Bluesky I was met with a photo of what appeared to be a boy in his underwear. Mastodon has its dubious reputation also for child pornography. I'm just saying, the mainstream internet is moderated for a reason. Being mainstream, there's money behind it, and with money comes power - this results in moderation that is usually politically motivated, and so in recent years there has been an exodus of the masses to low-moderation platforms like Tiktok, or things like Kick for younger users. When a platform or site is staffed small, such that it cannot afford to moderate, it will be suffocated by the "undesirable" groups I mentioned, earlier, as though they were some sort of choking algae. There are so many of these people "empowered" these days that, from what I have seen, it is really hard to start new social media sites without corporate resources. Twitter is already plagued with OnlyFans bots due to being smaller now, and streaming platforms are forced to aggressively build themselves to be resilient against similar sexual content creators, who are the first people that show up. Most times these creators will be working for an organization. In the end...could Twitter have existed in a non-sh*tty form in the first place? It was rapidly approaching bankruptcy when Musk was (in the end) forced to purchase it (lol). If not him, someone else would have acquired it, probably a corporation, and monetized the content to keep it afloat. I think in the end, the landscape is going to look more like Tiktok (computerized moderation) for anything beyond Meta. Smaller social media platforms will be seedy and not widely populated. Forums will continue to be used by countries with their own internet ecosystems, like Korea or Nigeria or Finland, but not really exist in global lingua franca English beyond a handful of major ones like SomethingAwful.
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  Bingo, the problem is that with a world population of 8 billion, there are easily 8 million people who genuinely do want to see vast amounts of furry porn the moment they open up an app. Filtering out even a tenth of them, say 800 000, just takes too much effort for a startup, so there’s no viable pathway without being incredibly popular and scaling incredibly quickly to just drown out all the unpalatable users. i.e. Tiktok
- julianeon 2y ago
  Bluesky and Mastodon, for the average user, are G rated compared to the avalanche of smut on Twitter/X.
  - tbrownaw 2y ago
    > avalanche of smut on Twitter/X I haven't seen this. Maybe you only run into that sort of thing if you go looking for that sort of thing?
    - add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
      The top replies to any big viral tweet are Onlyfans models and other spammers.
      - tbrownaw 2y ago
        I usually have to expand the "more replies" and often also the "probably spam" sections to see those.
    - julianeon 2y ago
      Even if you accept this at face value (I don’t) note the problem: on Bluesky and Mastodon, you have to look for racy content and then follow it on purpose. It must be a deliberate, intentional choice. For the average user, my experience has been that Bluesky and Mastodon are, if anything, too tame and boring. Whereas Twitter/X is pushing for whatever brings engagement, damn the consequences.

lenderton 2y ago

My experience with Bluesky has been similar to my experience with other "disruptive" platforms like Cara (the anti-AI art portfolio app/site). When a "new" (usually overall non-corporate) internet space opens up that, in theory, caters to a broader audience, the most immediate colonizers are the type of people that have some sort of "underground" bent to them - subcultural things like furries, erotic artists, etc. Opening up Cara produces an avalanche of large-breasted foxpeople, and the last time I opened Bluesky I was met with a photo of what appeared to be a boy in his underwear. Mastodon has its dubious reputation also for child pornography. I'm just saying, the mainstream internet is moderated for a reason. Being mainstream, there's money behind it, and with money comes power - this results in moderation that is usually politically motivated, and so in recent years there has been an exodus of the masses to low-moderation platforms like Tiktok, or things like Kick for younger users. When a platform or site is staffed small, such that it cannot afford to moderate, it will be suffocated by the "undesirable" groups I mentioned, earlier, as though they were some sort of choking algae. There are so many of these people "empowered" these days that, from what I have seen, it is really hard to start new social media sites without corporate resources. Twitter is already plagued with OnlyFans bots due to being smaller now, and streaming platforms are forced to aggressively build themselves to be resilient against similar sexual content creators, who are the first people that show up. Most times these creators will be working for an organization. In the end...could Twitter have existed in a non-sh*tty form in the first place? It was rapidly approaching bankruptcy when Musk was (in the end) forced to purchase it (lol). If not him, someone else would have acquired it, probably a corporation, and monetized the content to keep it afloat. I think in the end, the landscape is going to look more like Tiktok (computerized moderation) for anything beyond Meta. Smaller social media platforms will be seedy and not widely populated. Forums will continue to be used by countries with their own internet ecosystems, like Korea or Nigeria or Finland, but not really exist in global lingua franca English beyond a handful of major ones like SomethingAwful.

MichaelZuo 2y ago
Bingo, the problem is that with a world population of 8 billion, there are easily 8 million people who genuinely do want to see vast amounts of furry porn the moment they open up an app. Filtering out even a tenth of them, say 800 000, just takes too much effort for a startup, so there’s no viable pathway without being incredibly popular and scaling incredibly quickly to just drown out all the unpalatable users. i.e. Tiktok
julianeon 2y ago
Bluesky and Mastodon, for the average user, are G rated compared to the avalanche of smut on Twitter/X.
- tbrownaw 2y ago
  > avalanche of smut on Twitter/X I haven't seen this. Maybe you only run into that sort of thing if you go looking for that sort of thing?
  - add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
    The top replies to any big viral tweet are Onlyfans models and other spammers.
    - tbrownaw 2y ago
      I usually have to expand the "more replies" and often also the "probably spam" sections to see those.
  - julianeon 2y ago
    Even if you accept this at face value (I don’t) note the problem: on Bluesky and Mastodon, you have to look for racy content and then follow it on purpose. It must be a deliberate, intentional choice. For the average user, my experience has been that Bluesky and Mastodon are, if anything, too tame and boring. Whereas Twitter/X is pushing for whatever brings engagement, damn the consequences.