As a lurker on both Bluesky and Twitter, I find Bluesky is a much more hostile place. Twitter is much more absurd but there is not as much anger.
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I have at least 100 words on my X muted word list and it's just about usable.
This sounds like a bigger indictment of the platform than anything to do with Adobe.
Twitter has the advantage of a broader range so you can escape that while bluesky is almost exclusively used based on strong ideological motivation. It's raison d'etre at this point is basically and highly political so this was bound to happen.
The experience of a person following fantasy football stuff, and another person following politics, will be totally different, regardless of website.
This particular situation is why the only thing I miss from Twitter at this point is the ability to mute an account's reposts rather than the full account.
It's obnoxious, and if the service truly offers a real alternative to Twitter it needs to squash these brigading groups. I get that people don't want to see the posts of brands...so don't follow them. It's incredibly simple. I don't want furry content but I don't run around the platform complaining that some do.
X is much more of an ideological mix.
So you followed a bunch of people you didn't like? That says more about you than the platform...
I mean, yeah, the place is a kind of minefield these days, but I don't blame people. It just happens.
I think it’s more the fact that bluesky’s core demographic are angry political obsessives (who are angry enough about politics to join a new social network over said politics). I can’t think of a worse way to create a community of people than filtering by “I’m angry about political stuff.”
Turns out the old social norm of “don’t talk politics with neighbors” was an example of a good Chestertons fence.
Adobe could try to offer virtual "office hours" with employees helping people learn to use the software, give something back to their users. Instead they immediately treated it like another marketing channel with a formulaic and lazy engagement bait question that I'm sure they thought would work the same way it does on Twitter and Instagram.
If you want to say you don't care about having content creators on your platform, that's at least a coherent take. But you still have to think about the business models of the platforms that keep them around-- short of collecting payments from every ordinary user, there needs to be buy-in from someone wanting reach, whether that's corporate accounts, individual content creators, or someone else. And do you actually know all of those "normal people who happen to say things you find interesting" in real life, or did you find some of them online, i.e. they're basically influencers/content creators with you as an audience member?
If bluesky don’t find a way to escape this spiral of driving away normal people and attracting toxic people it’s going to become a sort of left-wing 4chan.
It's interesting that you see this as a moderation issue for Bluesky rather than an opportunity for a billion dollar brand to rethink the way they communicate online.
Bsky doesn’t have blue check replies which is a major point in its favor too. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a worthwhile blue check reply, it’s like if one purposefully dredged up the worst YouTube video comments they could find and pinned them at the top.
I have a very hard time believing that Bluesky is more hostile than Twitter.
The same way a photo sharing app is going to become dominated by attention starved, narcissists posting sexy photos.
Normal users just don't have the same motivation to post.
It is like complaining rotting meat is attracting flies.
There must be a name for the phenomenon when a minority escapes persecution and hate, and upon reaching their promised land become intolerant and hateful of any outside group.
What is your "track"? Bluesky seemed to be behaving exactly like you described Twitter, and the only explanation I could come up with was that the process of clicking on a post to block/mute the account (which is what I was told to do to curate my feed) was considered enough engagement that my feed should be more and more of what I don't want any of.
For Xitter it didn’t matter how much I trained it, eventually it’d insert something I didn’t want to see and even the slightest hint of engagement would push my feed that direction. This could happen even after multiple weeks of training.
Bluesky seems to focus on curating your own feed, to the point where mass blocklists will block hundreds or thousands of accounts, and not every blocklist is reliable. The "block first, ask questions later" approach is very freeing and I've been practicing it on social media long before it gained traction on Bluesky.
I expect the platform will be very painful for people who believe everyone should be subjected to their opinion (the people who will cry censorship because Reddit shadow-banned them). Good riddance, I'd say; they can be happy on Twitter with the rest of their kind.
On average, my experience has been a lot better. I'm guessing that's mostly because I had to fight and subdue Twitter to exclusively show me content from the people I follow, combined with social media's general attraction to alt-right nutjobs (and of course, Twitter's owner being an alt-right nutjob doesn't help either).
YouTube did this for a while, up until a few months ago if you weren't logged in you'd literally just get an empty page and a search bar at the top as it wouldn't recommend any videos at all. That was temporary for a reason.