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Maybe Bluesky has "won"

(anderegg.ca)
461 points GavinAnderegg | 2 comments | 15 Nov 24 19:56 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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kettlecorn ◴[15 Nov 24 20:23 UTC] No.42150525[source]▶
The competitive advantage to BlueSky, over Twitter / X, is that there's tremendous value in connecting intelligent and kind people while maintaining a certain quality standard.

Twitter / X, for political reasons, allowed extremely toxic behavior while at the same time disempowered communities from moderating themselves. If you force each individual user to manually block every troll, bot, or disgusting person it's a losing battle and low quality speech will overwhelm conversations. X folks know that but did it anyways.

It's also becoming more and more clear that we need a relatively neutral medium for free speech. Musk claimed to be building that on X but then did exactly the opposite. It's very hard to trust the algorithm isn't being manipulated in one way or another.

On BlueSky it's incredible how much value is already being produced by connecting intelligent and creative folks as compared to what Twitter became.

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1. nradov ◴[15 Nov 24 20:33 UTC] No.42150658[source]▶
The X Community Notes feature is open source. That is at least a step in the right direction, even if the feed algorithm is still closed.

https://github.com/twitter/communitynotes

For better or worse, X / Twitter was never really about communities. It has always been focused on allowing individuals to broadcast their thoughts. If you want a moderated community discussion then there are much better platforms for that.

We do have neutral mediums for free speech: HTTP and SMTP.

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2. kettlecorn ◴[15 Nov 24 21:16 UTC] No.42151186[source]▶
Community Notes is a great feature.

But on X too much value was / is being lost due to policy and algorithmic choices that discourage signal and encourage noise.

I used to go there for critical discussion of various tech issues or smart people talking about innovations at the cutting edge. As an example I used to use X to learn about modern graphics programming by searching certain terms to see what the smartest people in the field were saying while talking to each other.

It used to be that if a big account Tweeted something often you'd see true experts responding as the first replies. Now you'll see dozens of Bluechecks spamming memes or gross statements before you get to any substance, which inevitably has lower engagement.

Too many smart people have been turned away from the platform and it just doesn't generate the quality of discussion it used to. Already in the communities I care about I'm finding vastly more substance on BlueSky.