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>The problem is that you are creating an echo chamber Yeah but it's a left wing echo chamber and that's good! /s Incognito window > bsky > discovery feed > ev

>The problem is that you are creating an echo chamber Yeah but it's a left wing echo chamber and that's good! /s Incognito window > bsky > discovery feed > every post is about US politics, Trump bad, rich people bad, Musk bad etc. Same shit just different colors Bsky is not the answer, the only answer is not to use social media at all. And more or less that applies to HN too.

EA-3167 2y ago
I don't think there's anything about Bsky that makes it "left wing" or an echo chamber, it's just that the first people to jump ship from Twitter were by and large, on the left of the US political spectrum. If Bsky ends up with hundreds of millions of people on it then it won't be any sort of echo chamber. For now it's very much dominated by Twitter ex-pats, and that gives it a pretty predictable slant. Unlike Twitter however this isn't being imposed by the owner, it's organic.
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  You aren't wrong, but I'd add that it's also just the never-ending grievance-politics of the reactionary right. Spaces that have them but don't amplify their voices enough are censoring conservatives. Spaces where people can moderate what they get who then opt out of it are censoring conservatives. Endless victim posturing about how silenced all these people are who paradoxically also never shut the fuck up. They love the notion of the marketplace of ideas until said marketplace tells them to kick rocks and then it's crocodile tears.
  - EA-3167 2y ago
    I understand intellectually that employing a double-standard can work in the context of populism, but like you I find it absolutely exhausting. People who's party and ideology control every branch of government still pretend that they're plucky, marginalized freedom fighters. Sigh
- dragonwriter 2y ago
  > I don't think there's anything about Bsky that makes it "left wing" or an echo chamber Bsky lacks (1) ads, (2) paying posters rewarded with promoted reach, and (3) a default algorithmic feed (Discover is algorithmic and exists, but the default feed unless unpinned is always Following.) It also has shareable feeds, as well as the default pinned feeds. Each of these individually makes most users experience of Bluesky a lot more seeing what they choose to see than seeing what the site owner has a financial or other interest in everyone seeing, which in a sense makes it more likely to be a personal echo chamber rather than a single echo chamber or the mythical perfectly unbiased online marketplace of ideas. OTOH, it also got a lot of users specifically in reaction to negative feelings about the central ideological direction perceived at X, which may make it on average more left-wing by comparison, if very much not uniformly left-wing or having any fundamental trait tending toward remaining even relatively left-wing.
itsdrewmiller 2y ago
I just checked this myself and it isn't accurate. The first post was trump, the second was rich people, the third was pigeons, fourth was about bluesky, fifth cheese puns, sixth ken jennings on shirts, seventh cats/maybe wildfires, eighth work really do be like that, ninth us politics, 10th john woo movies.
suzzer99 2y ago
There's also 99.99% less bots on bluesky at the moment. I can live with actual good-faith discourse. But twitter right now is a cesspool of political bots, outrageous take engagement farming, and toxic personal attacks. Obviously, this is going to be a problem with any site that becomes the town square, just like how Yelp and TripAdvisor eventually became so gamed as to be mostly useless. The question to me is can bluesky rise to the level of being useful w/o succumbing to the pitfalls that come with being ubiquitous.
gedpeck 2y ago
Same shit just different colors I think though that Trump truly is worse. If you made this comment in 2008 or 2012 and used Trump or McCain I’d say you are right. But what happens when a person truly is a vile disgusting human being? Then it no longer becomes the same shit. As an extreme example, Kerensky wasn’t as bad as the Bolsheviks. It wasn’t the same shit.
evantbyrne 2y ago
God forbid people have standards of basic human decency. "Trump bad" posts being popular on a website is a world of a difference from a rich guy buying another platform with the specific goal of bringing back literal nazis, as proven in released court documents, doing it, and then going above and beyond by posting that kind of content himself.
rvz 2y ago
> The only answer is not to use social media at all. And more or less that applies to HN too. That is the only correct answer. To essentially delete all your social media accounts. If one wants to stop their alcohol addiction for example (Using Facebook, X), is not done by switching the brand of alcohol (Threads, Bluesky). It is done by stopping altogether (by deleting all your accounts) and only you can do that.

EA-3167 2y ago

I don't think there's anything about Bsky that makes it "left wing" or an echo chamber, it's just that the first people to jump ship from Twitter were by and large, on the left of the US political spectrum. If Bsky ends up with hundreds of millions of people on it then it won't be any sort of echo chamber. For now it's very much dominated by Twitter ex-pats, and that gives it a pretty predictable slant. Unlike Twitter however this isn't being imposed by the owner, it's organic.

ToucanLoucan 2y ago
You aren't wrong, but I'd add that it's also just the never-ending grievance-politics of the reactionary right. Spaces that have them but don't amplify their voices enough are censoring conservatives. Spaces where people can moderate what they get who then opt out of it are censoring conservatives. Endless victim posturing about how silenced all these people are who paradoxically also never shut the fuck up. They love the notion of the marketplace of ideas until said marketplace tells them to kick rocks and then it's crocodile tears.
- EA-3167 2y ago
  I understand intellectually that employing a double-standard can work in the context of populism, but like you I find it absolutely exhausting. People who's party and ideology control every branch of government still pretend that they're plucky, marginalized freedom fighters. Sigh
dragonwriter 2y ago
> I don't think there's anything about Bsky that makes it "left wing" or an echo chamber Bsky lacks (1) ads, (2) paying posters rewarded with promoted reach, and (3) a default algorithmic feed (Discover is algorithmic and exists, but the default feed unless unpinned is always Following.) It also has shareable feeds, as well as the default pinned feeds. Each of these individually makes most users experience of Bluesky a lot more seeing what they choose to see than seeing what the site owner has a financial or other interest in everyone seeing, which in a sense makes it more likely to be a personal echo chamber rather than a single echo chamber or the mythical perfectly unbiased online marketplace of ideas. OTOH, it also got a lot of users specifically in reaction to negative feelings about the central ideological direction perceived at X, which may make it on average more left-wing by comparison, if very much not uniformly left-wing or having any fundamental trait tending toward remaining even relatively left-wing.

itsdrewmiller 2y ago

I just checked this myself and it isn't accurate. The first post was trump, the second was rich people, the third was pigeons, fourth was about bluesky, fifth cheese puns, sixth ken jennings on shirts, seventh cats/maybe wildfires, eighth work really do be like that, ninth us politics, 10th john woo movies.

suzzer99 2y ago

There's also 99.99% less bots on bluesky at the moment. I can live with actual good-faith discourse. But twitter right now is a cesspool of political bots, outrageous take engagement farming, and toxic personal attacks. Obviously, this is going to be a problem with any site that becomes the town square, just like how Yelp and TripAdvisor eventually became so gamed as to be mostly useless. The question to me is can bluesky rise to the level of being useful w/o succumbing to the pitfalls that come with being ubiquitous.

gedpeck 2y ago

Same shit just different colors I think though that Trump truly is worse. If you made this comment in 2008 or 2012 and used Trump or McCain I’d say you are right. But what happens when a person truly is a vile disgusting human being? Then it no longer becomes the same shit. As an extreme example, Kerensky wasn’t as bad as the Bolsheviks. It wasn’t the same shit.

evantbyrne 2y ago

God forbid people have standards of basic human decency. "Trump bad" posts being popular on a website is a world of a difference from a rich guy buying another platform with the specific goal of bringing back literal nazis, as proven in released court documents, doing it, and then going above and beyond by posting that kind of content himself.

rvz 2y ago

> The only answer is not to use social media at all. And more or less that applies to HN too. That is the only correct answer. To essentially delete all your social media accounts. If one wants to stop their alcohol addiction for example (Using Facebook, X), is not done by switching the brand of alcohol (Threads, Bluesky). It is done by stopping altogether (by deleting all your accounts) and only you can do that.