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461 points GavinAnderegg | 7 comments | | HN request time: 1.002s | 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. satvikpendem ◴[] No.42153950[source]
I'm not sure Bluesky filters out angry content at all, as this is what I see when I don't follow anyone or have any followers [0]. I wish there was way more filtering than what I currently see as it makes me not want to even interact with Bluesky if that's what I see as a new user.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/XHmidRt

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2. sph ◴[] No.42154830[source]
You are completely off topic.
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3. bjoli ◴[] No.42156133{3}[source]
Oh yes. Very much. But that is what left any kind of impression from the screenshot.
4. Kye ◴[] No.42156630[source]
I don't see any of that because I've gone to the effort to Show Less on that sort of commentary in the Discover feed. None of it is in Following because I don't follow any of them.

I don't know exactly how they populate that with no following, but I can prove it's filtered by showing you this completely unfiltered view: https://firesky.tv

Have Ctrl+F4 ready to go. Good luck.

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5. satvikpendem ◴[] No.42156719[source]
It doesn't show images which is likely the biggest source of angry images, as I see on my feed. My point is that as a new user, I shouldn't have to see such content as I posted, because it turns people off using the platform entirely. I shouldn't have to Show Less, it should ideally be filtered like that automatically.
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7. gethoht ◴[] No.42157272[source]
Basically what I did is just follow some people I knew from twitter, and from that I discovered a few follow lists and block lists that I liked. Within a couple of days I had a pretty well curated and very busy feed of things I was interested in seeing and interacting with.