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Bluesky now platform of choice for science community
- hk1337 1y agoReading through the comments makes it seem like Bluesky is the Titantic and it's proponents are the orchestra on board.
- epistasis 1y agoAny news article that could be interpreted as critical of Musk these days seems to have a broad army of commenters that swarm to add low information critique of critique. This article is likely to be flagged off the front page very quickly too. Edit: yes, and as predicted, this straightforward reporting on the scientific community's migration of social networks has been flagged off the front page, because too many HN folks can not distinguish bad news for Musk from biased against Musk. There's no reason for this to be flagged except for the political motivations od the flashers.
- complianceowl 1y ago[flagged]
- jmclnx 1y agoNo kidding when the other site has filled up with people who only believes statements that any smart 5 year old would think is silly. It is too bad things have got to this point, but we as voters let it happen. At least there are some countries that still value Science. The US seems to be doing all it can to hand what remains of our scientific lead to those countries.
- decremental 1y ago[dead]
- izzydata 1y agoIt's surprising that any serious organization or person would still use Twitter in its current state.
- gjsman-1000 1y agoNo true scotsman's fallacy - no serious person would use X; if you use X you aren't serious.
- fxwin 1y agoThis makes no sense, the comment obviously implies that there are in fact serious orgs using twitter
- pessimizer 1y agoThe question that motivated the comment obviously implies that this is unbelievable for undisclosed reasons (related to its "current state.") Smarter to argue with the premise than the fluff.
- izzydata 1y agoI don't agree. There are still serious organizations and people using Twitter. I believe that to be true. I'm just surprised they haven't moved. For example there are emergency systems or local governments that announce information on Twitter. These feel like serious organizations to me. At minimum I feel like they should be in multiple places and not just Twitter.
- djtango 1y agoUltimately Twitter is timely and has almost universal mindshare. A few weeks ago when there was the pacific earthquake, I had family who were very close to a danger zone vacationing. Google was not sufficient for finding good local timely info as an outsider but twitter was. I would never even think to check BlueSky or Mastodon, and my family will never have heard of them.
- gjsman-1000 1y agoBluesky is still trending downward in activity and has been losing popularity over the last year. https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
- nomilk 1y agoThis is extremely interesting. Didn't know of these stats. Would be great to be able to have twitter, mastodon and bluesky on the same graph (perhaps with different y-axes to allow comparison of their relative trends)
- ozmodiar 1y agoThreads is the one really taking off. Personally I'm not thrilled at Meta and Zuckerberg increasing their stranglehold on social media, but it seems to be the way things are going.
- nomilk 1y agoI haven't seen the stats but suspect Threads may appear to have high growth because it's starting from such a low base.
- Finnucane 1y agoThe weird thing about that is that very little from Threads seems to bleed out to other places. Does anything actually interesting happen there?
- octernion 1y agoas a threads user since the beginning and a big fan of the platform, my answer is strongly "no." which is my favorite reason to be there and i hope it doesn't change. it's full of instagram and facebook users, which to use the common parlance, are all "normies." it's full of normal people have normal opinions in small spaces. there's very little viral posts or bits or memes that are carried outwards. that being said dril started posting again there recently as have some other bigger ex weird twitter people so who knows.
- thaack 1y agoRelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44978815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44978815
- FlyingSnake 1y ago>They ended up with a final sample size of 813 people. I want BlueSky to succeed but this sampling bias is simply too much to ignore. This comment (by nunobrito) from few days ago on a similar topic is best analysis of this topic. > These news are awfully similar to click-bait stating "the science is settled" by grouping a small set of the group and then pretending it represents the whole. The paper failed both to identify the overall number of scientists using X or the cases where multiple platforms are used (most common scenario). Therefore the paper only seems biased on its best scenario or downright propaganda at its worst. > NOSTR and Mastodon should never be left out of any serious research. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44982510 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44982510
- epistasis 1y agoWhat is the sampling bias? You dont explain what it could be, and your quote doesn't give any clues about what the bias could be.
- FlyingSnake 1y agoThe article itself talks about this self-selection/sampling bias due to a minuscule sample size of 813 people. Reducing “science community” to such a small sample is not convincing.
- epistasis 1y agoSelf-selections, sure, that's a risk with any and all surveys and questionnaires, which must be mentioned. But 813? Why wouldn't that be enough? Basic stats puts that at a very healthy number for most questions, and the researchers don't raise any questions about bias about the number.
- pessimizer 1y ago> The paper failed both to identify the overall number of scientists using X or the cases where multiple platforms are used (most common scenario)
- 8cvor6j844qw_d6 1y agoFWIW, Bluesky still seems unfriendly to email alias providers. I never managed to create an account on Bluesky as one of their support email blocks certain email domains. They still have a long way to go.
- andunie 1y agoIt's so odd that they still get to enjoy their status as a "decentralized" "open" social network when it's really just a centralized platform by definition (and it's not even their fault, there is simply no way to do what they want to do without centralization). Sure, someone may say "the AT Protocol is open", but that means nothing because the AT Protocol is not Bluesky, Bluesky is one centralized platform that happens to "talk" that protocol (well, of course, since the "protocol" is literally defined by whatever they happen to be doing), it still controls who can be inside and who can't. TL;DR: Nostr is a much better option for most use cases, sadly for some unfortunate reason it never got to enjoy too much attention from a wider technologist community.
- pfraze 1y agoNostr is just an under specified atproto that doesn’t work very well
- andunie 1y agoCan you expand on that? In my understanding it is a completely different approach.
- psionides 1y agoYou're free to set up your own PDS (which is super easy) and use Bluesky through it, and it works just fine (or even better if the PDS is close to you)
- andunie 1y agoNo, because Bluesky the platform has to actively crawl my PDS, and it can freely decide to not do that.
- nomilk 1y agoCan't help but notice arstechnica seems to have an anti-Elon agenda. I recall them posting articles claiming Twitter's content was important for historical reasons (agree on that) and would disappear once Elon took over, which afaik, didn't happen.
- mistercheph 1y agoowned by conde nast its just normal MSM stuff
- nomilk 1y agoAh, yup. Didn't know this. > Condé Nast media brands include Vogue, The New Yorker, Condé Nast Traveler, Condé Nast Traveller, GQ, Glamour, Architectural Digest, Vanity Fair, Pitchfork, Wired, Bon Appétit, and Ars Technica, among many others. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cond%C3%A9_Nast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cond%C3%A9_Nast
- epistasis 1y agoX hides discussions. If somebody sends you a link you can't see the discussion without an account and logging in and being extensively tracked. Not sure what you mean about anti-Elon bias. This was straightforward reporting of the truth. If reality has an anti-Elon bias then perhaps it's not bias.
- thatoneguy 1y agoReality has an anti-Elon bias
- conradfr 1y agoBefore the take over you couldn't see the linked tweet at all. (it was not always this way though)
- epistasis 1y agoI don't believe that's true, in that visibility only disappeared after Musk's takeover. It's hard to find old news with modern search engines, but here's one article from 2023, post-Elon, that matches my memory: > If you currently try to access Twitter without logging in to your user account, you’ll be unable to see any of the content that was previously available to the wider public. Instead, you’ll meet a Twitter window that asks you to either sign in to the platform or create a new account, effectively blocking you from viewing tweets and user profiles or browsing through threads unless you’re a registered Twitter user. https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/30/23779764/twitter-blocks-unregistered-users-account-tweets https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/30/23779764/twitter-blocks-u... It looks like it was pushed through by claiming the site was under attack, and then access was never restored. In any case, it was one of the things that pushed me off X.
- decremental 1y ago[dead]
- epistasis 1y agoAmong all the major technical benefits of Bluesky over Twitter listed in the article, I'd add two more: * links to external web pages (your paper, your blog, your new dataset, etc.) won't cause your posts to be suppressed * Bluesky discussions are accessible to the open web These two features are absolutely essential for science, and perhaps if X was more like Twitter on free speech and openness to the web then scientists wouldn't have moved away.
- mountainriver 1y agoI found Bluesky to be extremely hostile to AI and mostly far leftists canabalizing each other. I don’t see it as sustainable and fewer people are using it. X is undoubtedly worse but Bluesky doesn’t appear to be the answer.
- zzzeek 1y agoim there, I use Claude every day, am not a far leftist. come on over and there will be two of us.
- zahlman 1y agoThat's been my experience of most Mastodon instances, too (except the ones explicitly created to counter that, which don't tend to get much traction).
- Finnucane 1y agoI follow some actual far-leftists on Mastodon, and they would probably find your assessment of Bluesky to be pretty funny.
- cosmic_cheese 1y agoI don’t know that “AI hostile” is quite accurate. It’s more like it’s not blindly accepted and praised, which is different. Generally any hostility comes down to cases where it’s replacing or could replace people instead of bringing a new capabilities to the table — AI helping detect cancer or discover new treatments for example is a lot more accepted than AI taking the jobs of book cover illustrators, for example. That… kind of makes sense? It’s logical that applications with significant downside, particularly that which impacts peoples’ livelihood, would get greater questioning and pushback. If anything I’d call into question a platform where nobody is asking these questions and wants to charge ahead with zero regard to potential ramifications.
- epistasis 1y agoThere's a big difference between the grifters in AI and the builders. Grifters of all sorts quickly get pigeonholed in Bluesky off into separate communities. There are some builders of AI on BlueSky but far fewer. It's mostly the other sciences that have migrated, because X actively suppressed that type of content on X. Its not uncommon for a Bluesky scientist to have 10x the engagement on Bluesky with a tiny fraction of the followers.
- hingusdingus 1y agoAfter this I expect to see a similar article saying the same for "real" scientists that go to truth social. With a sample size of 100.
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoLast week: Scientists No Longer Find X Professionally Useful, and Have Switched to Bluesky https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44978815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44978815
- iowemoretohim 1y ago> It's not just you. Survey says: "Twitter sucks now and all the cool kids are moving to Bluesky" Ars Technica
- xyzzzzzzz 1y ago[dead]