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461 points GavinAnderegg | 10 comments | | HN request time: 1.051s | source | bottom
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PaulHoule ◴[] No.42151244[source]
My take is that Bluesky is a nicer place than Mastodon.

Personally I think politics are terrible on microblogging platforms for the reason that you can't say very much in 140 characters or even 1400 characters.

A common kind of profile on that kind of platform is: "There are good people and bad people and I'm one of the good people"

It is very easy to other people and share memes that build group cohesion while driving other people away. Really making progress requires in politics a lot of "I agree with you about 90% but there is 10% that I don't" or "Well, I negotiated something in the backroom that you'd really hate but headed off a situation you would have thought was catastrophic but you won't appreciate that I did it so you and I are both better off if I don't tell you" and other sorts of nuance, you don't want to see how the sausage is made, etc.

To stand Mastodon (where you would have thought fascists were taking over the world a year ago if you believed what you read) I have to have about 20 or so block rules.

I see some people with the same kind of profiles on Bluesky but see a lot less othering in my feed because the "Discover" feed on Bluesky filters out a lot of angry content. My rough estimate is that it removes about 75% of the divisive political junk. That

(1) Immediately improves my feed, but also

(2) Reduces the amount of re-posted angry political content (it's like adding some boron to the coolant in a nuclear reactor) and

(3) Since angry political memes don't work anymore people find a different game to play

My guess is the X-odus folks are less agreeable than average for the same reason why people who "left California" to go to Colorado or someplace else are less agreeable. Those who go are less agreeable than those who stay. On the other hand, a certain amount of suppression of negativity could stop it from spreading and might not even be noticed as "censorship".

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1. Gormo ◴[] No.42153647[source]
> Personally I think politics are terrible on microblogging platforms for the reason that you can't say very much in 140 characters or even 1400 characters.

I think what you're saying here is not that politics are terrible on microblogging platforms, but that microblogging platforms are terrible, which is a pretty valid sentiment.

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2. satvikpendem ◴[] No.42153939[source]
Not really, microblogging is great to get quick news or life updates from people you follow. Yes, if you're trying to engage in discussion then it's not that useful but that is not its only use case.
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3. safety1st ◴[] No.42154468[source]
I was surprised to learn recently that Rousseau, who is usually seen as a radical egalitarian, hated the democratization of publishing. [1]

His reasoning was complex but a lot of it revolved around the simple fact that as you get more people publishing, the intellectual quality of the average published work goes down.

I'm not ready to roll back the printing press, but in retrospect the digital era has proven him right about this. For instance his position kind of predicts Eternal September - the easier it gets to post online, the more numbskulls you have doing it. Microblogging is the ultimate expression of this and frequently the content you find on microblogging platforms is the absolute worst hot takes and generally the most vile stuff the moderation rules will permit because shock value generates impressions. It's every idiot on earth competing to be as flagrant and base as possible.

We usually hold up free speech as a virtue in Western societies and there are a lot of good reasons for that, but I'm increasingly inclined to treat microblogging less like publishing, and more like alcohol/tobacco/gambling, like it's something people do but they know it's not good for them, they do it anyway because it's addictive and easy.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8ucJ29O1kM

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4. Gormo ◴[] No.42154919[source]
Quick news is usually poor-quality news, and "life updates from people you follow" is another way of saying "pointless trivia from people you don't know actually know".
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5. satvikpendem ◴[] No.42154942{3}[source]
Again, not really. News can just be links to articles, or just headlines. The quickness of the news conveyed has no bearing on its quality. And life updates can be similar, for example a creator is making a new library I'd want to use, or updates an existing library I currently use, it's useful to know that information. If that's how you feel about updates from people then I honestly don't know what to tell you.
6. kristianc ◴[] No.42155205[source]
That’s a pretty broad sweep (mis)characterization of Rousseau’s work. He was neither a radical egalitarian or hated the democratization of publishing.

He argues for a society where people are both free and equal, but he recognized that some forms of inequality could coexist with freedom, provided they were rooted in merit or necessity, rather than arbitrary privilege. Also, when he talked about the Rights of Man, it wasn’t a rhetorical flourishes, he did mean man.

It’s a mischaracterization too to say he hated the democratization of publishing. His own ideas gained traction precisely because publishing allowed them to reach broader audiences. His critiques of printing and arts weren’t aimed at access itself but at the unintended consequences that came with it.

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7. moomin ◴[] No.42155420{3}[source]
Honestly not true. At its best, Twitter educated me on many subjects including many non-political ones. And as for journalism, well I’m not sure much that I would recognise as high-quality has survived the economic pressures of the internet in any format.
8. PaulHoule ◴[] No.42156836[source]
It’s generally true that the literary quality of a movement goes down as it grows and gets larger —- early adopters are often better writers if not smarter than the people who follow them

From the viewpoint of a library patron, for instance, feminism is a literary movement because it has left behind a large literature frozen in amber.

The earliest authors of the second wave, say Friedan, Steinem, or de Beauvoir were good reads but in 10 years the movement becomes a lot more “vulgar” (in the Latin sense of “common”) and at its worst you find large format books, cheaply bound and typeset with illustrations that probably got mimeographed before they saw the lithography camera full of radical and sometimes hateful rants.

9. safety1st ◴[] No.42170040{3}[source]
I really appreciate this comment as I always try to read the original authors but what little actual Rousseau I have read was over 20 years ago. I might be relying too much on short takes and what other people say about him. He is on the list for a proper reading eventually!
10. Gormo ◴[] No.42183369[source]
One of the big downsides of most microblogging platforms (and social media in general) is that they consolidate everything into one undifferentiated aggregation, rather than facilitate the creation of many distinct bounded spaces.

Traditional online communities -- BBSes, IRC channels, Usenet groups, even standard blogs -- are all self-contained spaces that have their own norms and expectations, and so preserve the ability to have communities with high standards and high-quality discourse amidst others that fall victim to the kind of regression to the mean you're talking about. HN is a great example of this (as compared to other sites), as is Reddit, where the differences between various subreddits are very apparent.

But social media lumps everything together into a single space, where each participant is looking at a slightly different subset of the whole, and this causes the rot to overwhelm everything pretty rapidly.