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Bluesky's Quest to Build Nontoxic Social Media
- pmarreck 2y agoIt’s easier to be nontoxic when you don’t have to confront the evidence contrary to your echo chamber
- SanjayMehta 2y agoTheir concept of shared blocklists is quite fascinating; designed to reinforce group think.
- gspr 2y agoWould you call it the same when a bunch of your friends recommend you stay away from someone? Or the opposite, introduce you to someone they like?
- themaninthedark 2y agoOnly for the most part; people online aren't my friends, there is not enough interaction/depth of interaction to get to really know them and being online tends to turn people into fuckwads(1). They just happen to be you're kind of fuckwads. (1)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_disinhibition_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_disinhibition_effect
- SanjayMehta 2y agoThat’s a stretch. It’s well accepted that people tend to be more unpleasant online, and text doesn’t translate nuance well enough to avoid misunderstandings, no matter how many emojis are assigned to the task.
- intended 2y agoBlocklists are used by women quite extensively, to block everything from specific terms to specific harassers and specific communities and topics.
- pmarreck 2y agoBeing put on a shared blocklist isn't a "stay away from this person"; it's a "tell these thousand people to stay away from these other thousand people regardless of actual basis, because 1 person got offended"
- moomin 2y agoActually, shared blocklists originated in the desire to avoid harassment. You can make a case for that being group think if you like, but I doubt you'll convince me.
- SanjayMehta 2y agoI think your statement is the very definition of group think. One person makes a blocklist and everyone else blindly adopts it.
- pseudalopex 2y agoMany people make block lists. And asserting people adopt them blindly is begging the question.
- pmarreck 2y agoIf this answer is satire, it is very clever. In practice, shared blocklists are not utilized to stop harassment, they are utilized to enforce ideological conformity and lack of critical-thinking
- diggan 2y agoSince moderation of some sort is pretty essential on the open web today, you can either subscribe to the "group think" of the platform you're currently using (like X/Twitter today), or you could do it the Bluesky way, let people chose what blocklists to follow. As someone who generally don't do blocklists/mutes/blocking much at all, I know what approach I prefer. I like that people have a choice at least, compared to the alternative approaches.
- konart 2y agoLivejournal had (has?) this concept for 15-20 years. Just saying.
- TMWNN 2y ago>Livejournal had (has?) this concept for 15-20 years. ... and became irrelevant about 20 years ago.
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- akie 2y agoEveryone can join BlueSky, so why wouldn't they need to confront opposing "evidence"?
- calamity_elf 2y agovery easy to block and filter to your tastes.
- akie 2y agoAs far as I know you can deliberately choose who you follow (like on Twitter) and which algorithm you use to compose your feed (unlike Twitter). It gives me more power to decide what is important to me and what isn't. How is that not an improvement?
- bakugo 2y agoTry joining and posting any political statements that aren't strictly far-left, and you'll find out why pretty fast.
- the_real_cher 2y agoJoin until banned for some wrong thing post
- i-LINK 2y agoAn echo chamber, also known as "a community" or "having friends," is basically how most human interaction worked before the Web popularized constant, context-collapsed arguing with various types of reactionaries, conspiracy theorists, bio-essentialists, "race realists," "climate skeptics," etc., about which "evidence" sounds or feels the most correct (rather than what evidence is actually provably correct).
- pmarreck 2y agoFair enough. I suppose that's one way to look at it. Except perhaps greatly-magnified online.
- mrighele 2y agoI think it is the opposite. When you are in your echo chamber you don't realize that your view is toxic because what you get is positive feedback and think that it is in fact "normal". Bluesky has plenty of toxic communities (e.g. the trans one), but hey are on the "good side" of the political spectrum so they get a pass.
- pmarreck 2y agoYeah, that's exactly the problem I'm referring to.
- amazingamazing 2y agoNontoxic social media isn’t possible. The best you can do is ban politics and non relevant (to topic) discussion. Also, blue sky is also beholden to rich people like the rest…
- outime 2y agoIf you ban politics, someone will just say you're playing politics. I personally think the idea of creating a place that suits everyone is unrealistic. It will never happen, and there will always be something that offends one side or the other. It seems like open social networks will always be toxic (whatever that really means).
- Loughla 2y agoThere's a difference between being toxic and not allowing politics. Political discussions aren't inherently toxic, they're just easier to slip into toxicity. Look at HN. There's political conversation here occasionally, but it's not generally toxic. All it takes is clear, consistent, and constant moderation.
- mapt 2y agoThey will be inherently toxic when the politics are inherently toxic. You can be banned from /r/Conservative permanently for showing the slightest deviation from the current propaganda line, but there are such a ready supply of new people that the algorithm attracts who naturally are opposed to the political platform that many bans are handed out per discussion.
- bakugo 2y ago> You can be banned from /r/Conservative permanently for showing the slightest deviation from the current propaganda line This is true for almost every single subreddit. Contemplate why you felt the need to single out r/conservative in particular.
- outime 2y ago
- keyle 2y agoI spend maybe 5 mins a day tops on social media(1)... I'm not particularly invested in Bluesky, but I found it to be the polar opposite of Twitter. It's like everyone who quit the twitter band wagon just went to the twitter clone, as a middle finger move. It's a ying and yang. I'm still on Twitter, because some people just haven't moved on and I still find their content valid. I vomit a little if I happen to click the sidebar and I want to close my account nearly every visit. I honestly hang by a thread just because some accounts there don't offer an alternative (and Musk removed reading content unauthenticated). I'm not particularly invested in Mastodon, but I must say that it is where I found the best value per minute. It feels like the natural follow up to Google+. I find it the most 'balanced' between Bluesky and Twitter. [1] HN excluded, I spend many 5' sessions a day here...
- mapt 2y agoYou should direct some of these comments to the accounts you're following on Twitter. I assume there's some convenient way to cross-post?
- mzajc 2y ago> and Musk removed reading content unauthenticated You might be interested in Nitter: https://status.d420.de/instances https://status.d420.de/instances (you do need a Twitter account to self-host, though)
- DalasNoin 2y agoYou can change every link to Twitter from x.com/... To xcancel.com/... Works well usually
- Loughla 2y agoYou'd be surprised how little impact getting rid of all social media, including Twitter, really has on your life. Just delete it.
- JansjoFromIkea 2y agoI find Bluesky better but I've had to be pretty aggressive about blocking centre-left types. I don't even disagree with most of what they're complaining about, after being away from twitter for years that whole style of discourse is just extremely unpalatable. Def get the impression they're driving people away who were enjoying bluesky previously, there's just so much of them on the feeds atm.
- BozeWolf 2y agoI feel bad to say this, but it looks like it failed already to be non toxic. It at least is a lot less toxic than X. For now. It is X vs BlueSky. It participates in the argument between two groups of people. It does not solve anything. X is a lot worse, but with a growing number of users, a growing number of negativity will come. It starts on the political parts of the platform, but will trickle down to other parts as well. By Bluesky being put away as a platform for 'lefties' on X and users on Bluesky saying "Go to your fascist platform X" to other users it essentially participates in dividing people. At least, on the political parts of the platform. It confirms what an amazing job HN did in the last decade or more. Still a nice community, nice people and quality comments. Although some people will say it is in decline, it is still quite a nice and friendly community. I still enjoy fintwit and like bluesky for energy related things.
- mschuster91 2y ago> By Bluesky being put away as a platform for 'lefties' on X and users on Bluesky saying "Go to your fascist platform X" to other users it essentially participates in dividing people. At least, on the political parts of the platform. What's wrong with that? I mean, yes, lefties can be pretty scathing against their own - particularly the questions of Israel/Palestine and Ukraine/Russia come to my mind as major dividers. But even then: the death threats, "I wish you'd get raped by the n----s you invited to Germany, then you see the results of the great replacement yourself" and similarly inclined comments on Twitter are all but completely absent on Bluesky, and instead of feeding even the most obvious trolls, the general policy is to block them and move on - which is why the far-right is complaining so often about Bluesky being a "librul echo chamber". They just can't fathom that people might not be interested in interacting with them.
- BozeWolf 2y agoWhat is wrong is that it does not help with the discussion. It makes the discussion personal by calling someone a fascist or a leftie. A good discussion is about the subject, not the person. Also it makes both X and Bluesky feel opinionated, making a good discussion impossible. I must say that I did not see any death threats on X either, but i just choose to stay away from that part of the platform.
- k__ 2y agoIt really helps to have multiple "algorithms" AND allowing everyone to build their own.
- emseetech 2y agoI miss when there was no algorithm and everything was a simple time series.
- mcintyre1994 2y agoThey have an actually working version of that too, I think it’s one of the defaults.
- dubiousdabbler 2y agoI only use lists on twitter, never really notice the "algorithm". I rarely see politics and it's all chronological.
- thm 2y agoSome mirrors are cracked, some are polished—but all of them reflect the same world. The question is: how much can you take in? As much as I despise the owner, it's X all day.
- mschuster91 2y ago> The question is: how much can you take in? As much as I despise the owner, it's X all day. The problem with X is, the mirror is artificially dented by a ton of people paying for the privilege of getting their replies prioritised. That in turn drowns out the voice of those not willing to pay Musk for the privilege.
- afacialoftruth 2y ago[flagged]
- throawayonthe 2y agowhat a normal thing to say
- v3ss0n 2y agoMuch out of touch with reality. That is not possible to control human nature with tech.
- willvarfar 2y agoHumans are incredibly easy to 'control' with tech. From pamphlets to books to radio and onwards through history to colour revolutions and influencing elections to getting you to buy things late at night that you won't ever use etc, its happening all the time.
- v3ss0n 2y agoNot to those who are determined to be toxic.
- mapt 2y agoEvery interaction you have with a social network nudges you into one mode of interacting or other. The biggest deviation from the norm with Twitter is the ideas of quote-tweeting and subtweeting, making a new post rather than replying to something you disagree with in the comments. The automatic signal boost this achieves incentivizes it strongly, and when the larger account is the quote-tweeting account, they are inclined to hear reply comments almost exclusively from people who support their critique. The structural decision to make this form of interaction easy and productive leads to very Twitter-specific sort of toxic groupthink. "You, a Twitter nobody, just disagreed with someone on their misinterpretation of a well-documented point of history. In response, they made a new post to their 700k followers calling you a chickenshit know-nothing. Your followers heard nothing. 300 of their followers have piled on to elaborate on your faults." This used to be limited to the sort of instant cancellation associated with "Central Park Karen," who IIRC went viral just after boarding a flight and was fired before she landed.
- willvarfar 2y agoAre any European-based social networks going to pop into existence at this opportune time to get some momentum from the current global western America-is-no-longer-our-friend sentiment?
- mapt 2y agoThere are also more than 7 billion people that aren't in the US or EU. Text microblogging is one of the lowest-bandwidth-requirement, and therefore least-capital-intensive, internet startups.
- cjs_ac 2y agoI think the entire concept of these global social networks is falling out of favour. I expect to see the rise of smaller online communities with well-defined interest scopes and robust community moderation - much like HN.
- BlackFly 2y agohttps://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/ https://lemmyverse.net/ https://lemmyverse.net/ They are federated as well; I just educated myself on BlueSky, I had heard that maybe it wasn't but it looks fairly federated. Companies can always slap a lock on after the fact though.
- hp6 2y agoFor a lot of people pro Palestine views are toxic for a lot of other pro Israel is. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
- the_real_cher 2y agothe problem is both sides are so caught up in their own identity politics that they can't see the other's perspective. the same goes for right-wing and left-wing in America.
- danielbln 2y agoThe bigger problem is that people from societies with FPTP voting systems often tend to think binary. The world is more multi-faceted than that, it's not always two sides to a coin, good vs bad, left vs. right, etc.
- the_real_cher 2y agoAgreed! 400 million peoples interests cant be represented by TWO people.
- hp6 2y agoyea, I much like the approach of "be polite" instead of "don't be toxic", which unfortunately is less and less practiced by both sides.
- mikojan 2y agoThis! It is important to be polite in the face of genocide.
- hp6 2y agoAlmost no one is pro genocide, so why is it happening when most countries are more or less democracies? One theory is that the media and politician change the narrative whichever way it suits them. And imo one way to combat this is with polite measured conversations. As the alternative is easily distorted by the opposite side.
- moomin 2y agoI suspect the only true way to keep social media non-toxic is simply keep the audience small. Plenty of lovely small subreddits out there. Since bluesky isn't at Twitter volumes yet, it's hard to know if any of their changes will matter in the slightest.
- skwee357 2y agoIf by "nontoxic", one means a social media where people complain about the other side, then sure, I guess bluesky is on a great quest. I don't have a dog in US politics fight, but from my experience on BlueSky, it has become a social network for people who disagree with the current US politics, and most of the content there is debunking/criticizing the other side. Whether you think it's nontoxic is up to you, but history has shown that creating isolated echo-chambers is generally a bad idea.
- JKCalhoun 2y agoI just turn off the politics on BlueSky by not following rabid politics-posters. Even the retro-computing enthusiast I follow can have a bad day and repost something political and I'm okay with a little bit of that. (I had to unfollow Mark Hamill though because of the politics firehose. And I generally agree with him politically ... I just don't need it on BlueSky all the time.)
- pseudalopex 2y agoI think 2 things can be true. Bluesky gives users more control to shape their feeds how they want. And many want Twitter with different politics.
- matsemann 2y agoOr maybe many of us just want a social media where we can discuss our hobby without all the polarizing hate? I was part of a cycle community on Twitter. After it became X, my feed is just full of political crap or viral content, not the content I used to see. Most sane people in my circle stopped posting, so the algorithm push other stuff. Couldn't discuss any bicycle topic without some blue check person showing up telling us how they love to run over cyclists. On bsky we've found a new home with custom feeds and stricter moderation. Blocking actually works and even detaches the discussion entirely, so idiots can't use my content to spread their hate. So portraying it as "both sites bad" is dishonest imo, as it's not just that they lean differently.
- antisthenes 2y ago> but history has shown that creating isolated echo-chambers is generally a bad idea. I think it's a great idea for the rest of us. Keeps that kind of demographic mostly self-contained in their echo-chamber, thus freeing up the rest of the internet from culture war content. At least in theory.
- buyucu 2y agosocial media is not toxic. humans are toxic. the only social media that is not toxic is google+ because there are no humans there.
- PeterStuer 2y agoRegardless of your allegiances, if you are all of the same homogenious opinion, how would you even recognize extremism or "toxicity" in your own echo chambers?
- underseacables 2y agoTo a worm in horseradish the world is horseradish.
- tlogan 2y agoIt seems the only reliable way to keep social media nontoxic is by doing both of these things: - Keep the audience small - Create an echo chamber (intentionally or not) You need both. Bluesky has both. Bluesky feels like a small village museum: everyone looks alike, posts alike, and agrees on what to collectively demonize.
- the_third_wave 2y ago> reliable way to keep social media nontoxic ... Bluesky has both. BS is full of vitriol against anything outside of the desired narrative, I do not consider this 'nontoxic' no matter your perspective.
- fawnwind 2y agoHard for me to tell if I'm in the minority or part of some silent majority, but I don't see much toxic or political content on either site, mostly just art and content related to hobbies I have. I only look at my following feeds, and it's pretty easy to mute a few problem words or phrases. I figure if you spend a lot of time on social media, it's worth it to put in the work to tailor the content you see to your tastes.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mikojan 2y agohttps://archive.is/WPV8C https://archive.is/WPV8C
- b800h 2y agoBluesky is as bad as Twitter. The conspiracy theories and absurdly-biased takes are equally pronounced. Someone should start a social media site where you get booted for political talk, like you would from a decent gentleman's club.
- underseacables 2y agoIt's an echo chamber for the left, the same as X is now for the right. Ideas and opinions unchallenged or questioned is what people want.
- ghusto 2y agoA few days ago I said how places like Bluesky only seem to contain posts about how terrible Twitter is, and no actual content of their own. Behold the first post I see: > The administration is a perfect storm of dumb people who enjoy inflicting pain and are addicted to psychotic cruelty and quadrupling down. It ends in total ruin if you don't impeach him. Second post: > you, a rube: “i want my kid to grow up to be a doctor or an engineer or a teacher” lutnick, a genius: “to make america great again your child will make iphones that they will not be able to afford” Third (talking about some Trump post or something): > Again, worth at the last considering the possibility that he’s a malevolent idiot who has no idea what he’s doing. And so it goes on and on. I'm all for a "non-toxic" social platform, but I have yet to see one. All the alternatives are mirror images of Twitter and co. — not in that they're not toxic, but that they're toxic but leaning in another direction politically. It's all the same, people calling other people stupid.
- cucubeleza 2y agoBluesky looks very left wing centered, will make you even more biased to one side and blind for the other. The more you see just one side more extreme (or crazy) you will become.
- projectazorian 2y agoEvery time I open bluesky it seems to be full of over-the-top anxiety posting by delusional leftists - last post I saw was telling LGBT people to start storing cash in their mattresses before Trump confiscates their bank accounts. Either that or it's the embattled rear guard of wokism trying to impose increasingly arcane rules on other posters. That's all less toxic than whatever is happening on twitter these days, but still harmful for the people involved and probably a net negative for society as a whole.
- swat535 2y agoI just want to go back to the early days of Facebook, when it was simply a small list of friends I actually knew and enjoyed hanging out with online. No karma, no upvotes or downvotes, no organizations, just people connecting. Is there even a social platform like that anymore? One that isn’t political, overwhelming, or trying to be everything at once? At this point, it feels like the only real options are private Discord servers or maybe WhatsApp. I guess the elephant in the room is that any successful platform needs advertising, and once businesses get involved, things tend to spiral with ads everywhere, and eventually, politics creep in too.
- iteratethis 2y agoI'm no Dorsey fan but he was right when he said that Bluesky is recreating Twitter. You can offer a million feeds but people want a "discover/hot" tab, it's the dopamine slot machine. The median user doesn't build feeds, they go with the main one and at best block the worst offenders. And thus you are subject to centralization as the chronically-online know all the engagement tactics to dominate the algorithmic feed. You'll either have MAGA propagandists or left-wing depression culture winning. In the case of Mastodon and Bluesky, it's the latter. And it's not just the algorithm. Shared block lists will also be massively abused by activists to over-moderate and gate-keep. No amount of technology can solve a culture war this intense.
- bookofjoe 2y agohttps://archive.ph/cH7KU https://archive.ph/cH7KU
- fortran77 2y agoThere's nothing non-toxic about BlueSky. If you deviate at all from the progressive party line you will get death threats.
- cykros 2y agoThey were aiming for NON toxic? lol. Could have fooled me. Nostr or gtfo.
- fortran77 2y agoRelentlessly excluding wrong thinkers is required for inclusivity.