[frithsun]

It's inevitable that social media will split up into separate and distinct networks of people who can no longer stand or even undertand the other sociopolitical tribes.

All of us sharing a singular global network was an exceptional and ephemeral circumstance.

[cosmic_cheese]

I don’t think it’s inevitable at all.

In fact I believe that the present day situation boils down to one thing only: the prioritization of engagement at the cost of all else.

That’s what set us down this road. It incentivizes inflammatory posting that eschews nuance and context and twists and exaggerates the subject matter in order to provoke emotional responses — whether they be angry replies, “dunk” quote-posts, reposts, or even spending a couple extra seconds with the post on screen. Anything to steal away more of your attention and mindshare. Over time, this has polarized people to ever further extremes and normalized disrespect and bickering (as opposed to discussion).

It would be an interesting experiment to see the effects of effectively the polar opposite of twitter, where ragebait and other attention-seeking behaviors are actively punished, with the content that’s most readily surfaced instead being that which is thoughtful, candid, and not emotionally charged.

[anon7000]

Added to that is user choice over moderation and algorithms.

That’s what’s truly interesting about BlueSky. It allows for side A and B to both exist, with people who want to be more isolated in a safe space (so to speak) to do so. That’s a really great property. If I want to engage with content I severely disagree with, I can put it in a feed I check infrequently so that it doesn’t impact my life.

Humans aren’t good at coping with a constant barrage of disagreeable (for one’s personal definition of disagreeable) or inflammatory content.

[cosmic_cheese]

I like that aspect about Bluesky too.

On “safe spaces”, as you hint at I think many of us don’t want to be shielded entirely from opposing or otherwise differing lines of thought. Speaking personally, I welcome it if there’s actual discussion to be had. Good faith discussions and exchange of perspectives is great, but I have no patience for trolls, circular logic, insults, “debate” that wouldn’t even pass for high school level, etc.

[raxxorraxor]

Then you need to choose the safe space option. Under no circumstances should you opt to advertise removing content for others. Because your justification with "circular logic" could mean anything. This is the safe space option.

That more free platforms employ spam protection is no excuse.

[cosmic_cheese]

I think circular logic is fairly well defined (from Wikipedia, “Circular reasoning is a logical fallacy in which the reasoner begins with what they are trying to end with. Circular reasoning is not a formal logical fallacy, but a pragmatic defect in an argument whereby the premises are just as much in need of proof or evidence as the conclusion.”)

That said, yes it’s not grounds for a ban. I wouldn’t block over it either unless the person in question is being obnoxious and e.g. following me around between threads and trying to stir up argument about the subject of contention or resorts to personal insults or something like that.

[raxxorraxor]

You will never have an agreement on it. Some see statements as axioms and others do not. Without premises, every form of reasoning can be regarded as circular.

You can have an authority on it that determines something as circular or not. But then you will inevitably end up with dogmatism.

Someone once said that circular reasoning works if the circle is large enough. Knowing the fallacy might help you detect faulty reasoning in your own thoughts. It doesn't allow for much more practical applications.

[EasyMark]

I would love to see a respectful debate starter pack on bluesy get started. Maybe controled by a bot that looks for words that are insults like “troll” “don’t melt snowflake”, etc and will boot you if you get caught. I like political debate, sharing of trustable sources, etc. I don’t like someone telling me I’m just a melting snowflake or cuck, when I bring in a link from a scientific journal to cite as part of my argument

[lone_onion]

I've just started using Bluesky. How does it compare to Reddit? There are dedicated subreddits for the conservatives and the liberals, and every subreddit has moderation rules. I use the right and left-focused subreddits to keep track of what's going on in different universes. However, I must mention that you won't find a reasonable discussion of left vs right ideologies on the main sub-reddits, as Reddit users are predominantly left-leaning. But at least there are smaller forums where these two groups meet and interact, and there is some debate.

[vohk]

Bluesky is a lot more like old, early algorithm twitter.

Reddit is a cluster of independently operated communities that occasionally get signal blasted onto the main feed. The top moderator of a subreddit owns it and sets any standard they like.

With Bluesky there are no defined communities outside of collective engagement with particular topics or hashtags or networks of follows. There is also a "Show me [more/less] of this" button every post, and so far it seems like the platform is pretty solid at respecting your preferences. They also seem to be actively moderating the really open bad behaviour off the platform.

I don't think Bluesky is as good as a well-moderated subreddit for long form discussion, but if you spend a little time curating your feed I think you might enjoy it.

[lone_onion]

Thanks. I'll invest some time in curating my feed. I'm not finding a ton of interesting starter-lists yet. I suppose it will get better over time.

[lmm]

> It would be an interesting experiment to see the effects of effectively the polar opposite of twitter, where ragebait and other attention-seeking behaviors are actively punished, with the content that’s most readily surfaced instead being that which is thoughtful, candid, and not emotionally charged.

Who would read it? The same people who already avoid twitter - not journalists, and therefore not celebs/politicians.

[PittleyDunkin]

> Who would read it?

Presumably, normal people who want to interact with people they already know? interaction with journalists and politicians is valuable in an entirely different manner.

[raxxorraxor]

Their advertising model certainly is a problem. But it isn't the only one, there are more and more users that demand other users be removed because of their opinion. When social networks started to listen to a few of them, they made themselves hostages to more demands. Platforms like Twitter or reddit certainly suffered from this.

[drw85]

I agree that ads are basically controlling most of the internet and public discourse now. Like you can't even use normal words in youtube videos anymore, because your video will be less visible/removed.

On the other hand, there are way too many people/accounts/bots out there that don't actually want to talk or discuss something, but spread false information and incite rage and anger. Those need to be moderated even harder than they already are, i think.

[cosmic_cheese]

Overt support or advocacy for known hate/supremacist groups should fall under the scope of “needs moderation” as well. That sort of content has seen a sharp uptick on X which is one of the reasons why people are now jumping ship.

[EasyMark]

You can say just about whatever you want on bsky as long as you’re civil. I think you will probably get kicked if you start hate-ons for issues like trans, LGBTQ, women, etc that are uncivil. It’s one thing to debate gender, it’s another to say “quit crying qu*r”. That’s likely get you reported and banned or on some blacklists. I think you would probably have to be civil in discussions on groups that are likely protected under say the civil rights act, and modern take on that as to which groups should have been added but haven’t like LGBTQ. Just my take, it’s not the law of the land :). It seems like dems/magas/libertarians aren’t considered protected groups on there and I’ve seen some heated”discussions” that didn’t seem to get cut.

[bfrog]

It wasn’t like this as little as 10 years ago

[_DeadFred_]

You didn't really have people posting from their prepaid phones 10 years ago. Old internet users were a select group.

[shiroiushi]

It shouldn't be any surprise: it's not like the internet's userbase of 1990 represented a broad cross-section of American society, let alone western or global societies. It was mainly a bunch of academics and college students and government users. It's just gotten more and more fragmented as more people have been added.

[user3939382]

And even then we were segregated by usenet, mailing lists, etc.

[ipaddr]

And social media didn't exist

[orbat]

Usenet, BBSs, mailing lists etc. are social media

[lolinder]

In most ways they were far more social than modern social media, in that they were about socializing. The distinguishing characteristic that sets modern social media apart from the old school stuff is the performative aspect of it—where everyone is now encouraged to behave as a content producer optimizing for engagement—which is hardly social.

[mingus88]

Not in the modern sense.

Those mediums do not have algorithms, feeds, followers, profiles, influencers, likes, or any features that many people point to as the toxic aspects of pretty much every commercial social media site of the last decade.

I’d say livejournal was the tipping point where the internet became very self-centered and your value in the platform was measured by how much engagement you were able to get.

Up until that point, in a world before blogs, social sites were mostly centered around shared interests and communities would aggressively police off topic content

[arethuza]

I wonder if Arthur T. Murray would count as an influencer?

[otteromkram]

> Not in the modern sense.

Yes, no one was making that comparison.

[jjav]

> Usenet, BBSs, mailing lists etc. are social media

In a generic sense, yes. People did socialize.

But "social media" today really means: a proprietary platform controlled by a single corporation, where all the user interaction is ultimately just a ploy to keep the participation metrics up so the corporation can profile you better and sell more advertising.

So in that sense, the absolute opposite.

[ipaddr]

Those are very social places but I would classify them as not social media because real names / identities weren't attached.

[ajmurmann]

Not everyone on Twitter uses their real name. Meanwhile I knew the real names of about half the top 20 most active users on a retro gaming phpbb board in the early 00s and had meet many in person and knew we everyone lived, what other hobbies they had and what they did for work or school.

[orbat]

Real names were absolutely used on Usenet especially in the early days, ditto for mailing lists (and still are for that matter), even though technically they are pseudonymous. In any case pseudonymity doesn't seem like it's relevant for whether something is a social medium or not – many social media are pseudonymous (or even anonymous, like the chans). HN is pseudonymous. Reddit. Tumblr. The various Fediverse services.

[llm_trw]

They are social networks not social media, social media is when you scream in a void and the void screams back.

The latrinalia of our age if you will.

[antod]

I wouldn't call the old stuff social networks. What made social networks a new thing was the social graph of connections becoming the information architecture of the content rather than topics. You found stuff (or it found you) by person rather than subject.

Usenet was topic based (eg reddit seems closest these days), mail lists were usually topic based, forums were organised around topics etc.

[spamizbad]

I disagree somewhat. Social media apps are powered by feed algorithms that fall into two camps:

The first camp biases toward sprinkling provocative, highly engaged content in your feed even if it falls outside your network of follows or areas of interest. A sort of “forced discovery”. Elon’s Twitter and YouTube during the 2010s follow this model.

The second camp does the same thing but requires recommended content to track closer to its perception of your interests. TikTok does this exceptionally well, to the point where people often say they feel like their feed is “reading their mind”. Bluesky seems to follow this pattern as well.

The latter is more scalable than the former, but to your point it is an open question how big it scales, and maybe there’s just too many people for either approach to work.

[rescbr]

As far as I understand it, Bluesky's default feed is chronologically sorted posts from who you follow. It is as a dumb pipe as it gets.

[Pufferbo]

There’s multiple feeds, which is one of its main features. There’s user created feeds, which are just aggregates of tags and keywords. These are alright, but prone to issues with cross domain terminology. ie, say you want a football/soccer feed and use the word “spurs”, you’ll end up having it filled with basketball and rodeo posts.

The two default feeds are your followed accounts in chronological order, the other is an algorithmic feed. The algorithmic feed is pretty good to be honest. I “disliked” around 20 political posts the first day, and it has seemed to responded fairly quick to that feedback.

[empthought]

No matter how many times I choose "Show less like this" on furry manga art in the algorithmic feed, I still see it show up. :(

[Onavo]

The second camp is just artificially creating echo chambers, a virtual "separate and distinct network" for the parts that matter.

[the_snooze]

The "echo chamber" argument really doesn't speak to me because all I want is a place where I can get timely updates about: people in my research field, pictures of cute dogs, and municipal government activities. The more a website stays laser-focused on my interests, the better.

[cosmic_cheese]

I think those things you’ve mentioned are what most people came to social media for originally, but it’s gotten lost in all the noise. The original point of social networks was to be social and connect with people in your industry or who share your interests or share a locality in common, and X especially has drifted far from that ideal — lots of users now log onto it to find something/somebody to be angry at and to argue/troll.

[mingus88]

I’m still using an RSS reader for that very purpose. I want my trusted content displayed chronologically; miss me with the algorithm and the recommended influencers. I’ve been on the internet long enough to know what I want and how to find it.

[AlienRobot]

I share the sentiment.

It seems some people got on the internet to argue and never learned to enjoy anything. I'm a bit sorry for them, to be honest.

[hooverd]

It's kind of alarming, not that I'm not guilty of it, but you do see people whose entire online presence is just stuffing their face with negative interactions.

[hooverd]

HackerNews is an echo chamber. You're not even allowed to call people f*ggots or speculate about the Jews here!

[derbOac]

That makes a lot of assumptions about the nature of the content provided by the recommendation algorithms, as well as human nature. A good recommendation engine, for example, would recognize when someone either likes a broad range of sources politically speaking, or likes a neutral region.

Conversely, it's unclear that a recommendation engine would be able to predict what would be best at "disrupting an echo chamber", and more importantly, when that is desirable, and what "desirable" even means. It's also unclear that the first model is successful at all in disrupting echo chambers, as opposed to exacerbating or amplifying existing positions. I think there's good reasons to think that provocative can be less effective if anything.

[spamizbad]

I disagree with this: if the only thing you allow to pierce the veil is selected based on engagement metrics you just walk away with a shallow view of your opposition. If anything this may entrench your existing views and give you a false sense of intellectual and/or moral superiority.

You need to “meet people where they are” and the first type of algorithm just doesn’t do that. It just says “conservatives/liberals really like this, so you’re going to be forced to see this too because you show interest in politics”

To give an example: let’s say I’m a small business owner who voted Trump but has some lingering concerns around how tariffs might impact my business. Am I going to be better informed reading some engagement-bait post from liberals talking about how I’m going to get “deservedly” crushed by tariffs or a post from a conservative economist laying out the cold hard facts (both good and bad)?

[Onavo]

Your argument is in support of mine. Separate networks are an interesting legal and software engineering detail, but from the POV of the user, as long as they see what they want to see, they will stay with the network.

[spamizbad]

Ah you’re right.

[jowea]

I don't know, the entire point of the "algorithmic bubble" was to keep the tribes separate but happy, no? And the value of the network still increases with more people on it. Maybe some future social media will figure out how to keep everyone happy at the same time. For example, I think everyone but a couple of hardcore FOSS advocates and the far-right are still using Youtube.

[beeflet]

Is it inevitable? I am not sure either way.

I think that if you look at real-life Friend-to-Friend groups, this is what you find: clusters of people with similar values. So it it makes sense that the same applies to F2F groups over the internet. But most social media is not F2F groups.

Most (advertiser-driven) social media (including this site) is based on the idea of what I call "implicit ranking": The idea that a user can influence what another user sees (through "likes", "votes", "reports", "bumps", etc.) without having an explicit consensual relationship with them (such as a "subscription", "following", or "sharing" or "direct message channel").

This "implicit ranking" model is pretty successful because it is better at finding engaging content is and probably the dominant form of social media. In contrast to F2F, implicit ranking networks tend to promote controversial content from outgroups because angry users are engaged. We all love to flamewar sometimes, I'll admit it.

[ks2048]

It does seem natural to happen. But there are loads of "neutral" accounts: gov agencies, businesses, etc that use social media for announcements and simple broadcast communication. Most are on Twitter now. I think I big question is will they add bluesky, or move (probably not, because of inertia), or something else.

[PittleyDunkin]

> All of us sharing a singular global network was an exceptional and ephemeral circumstance.

Did this happen at all? Social networks have always been balkanized by culture.

[dehrmann]

If the algorithm doesn't make the filter bubble, people will make it on their own.

[CaptainFever]

See the Fediverse for example, which prides itself on not having algorithms, and is yet the most echo-chambery and radical place I know of. People automatically filter themselves into different servers, and defederate with each other with frequency.

(Whether or not this is good or bad depends on your moral views. But I think it is obvious that "algorithms" are not really to blame.)

[_DeadFred_]

Didn't it spring up in response to those blameless "algorithms"?

[dehrmann]

It's more a product of cheaper and easier content distribution. When TV is expensive to produce, there are only three channels, and it's heavily regulated, you target your content to be broadly appealing and inoffensive. The rise of cable TV, revocation of the fairness doctrine, rise of the internet, and fall of the USSR all led to more exposure to broader views. Like GP said, whether this is good or bad depends on your view.

[CaptainFever]

This is another good point. I didn't actually intend to make this point, but I wanted to thank you for pointing this out.

I am not a sociologist, just a layman. But I feel that there seems to be two axis of communication. Mass (you don't know who you're talking to) vs targeted (you do know who you're talking to, like friends). Then, professional (you try to be unoffensive) vs casual (you have no such obligation).

Before the Internet, generally communication happened either mass-professional (e.g. TVs, newspapers, magazines) or targeted-casual (e.g. chatting with friends and family). This reduced offense, since mass channels were largely unoffensive as you said, while targeted channels knew how to avoid offense (i.e. you knew how to not offend your friends and family).

However, the Internet enabled a lot of mass-casual communication. And this created a lot of offense, because you didn't know who would read your messages (i.e. Twitter posts), while you didn't have the professional obligation to make sure it was unoffensive and easy to understand. This created a lot of misunderstandings, offense, etc., which leads to cancellations, hate mobs, etc.

Do note that once again I am not a sociologist, and there seems to be holes in this view. What about large group gatherings? Trashy magazines? Clubs? They seem to be examples of mass-casual communication too.

[CaptainFever]

You are correct, but my point was that it seems to me, that even though engagement algorithms aren't really a thing in the Fediverse, such filter bubbles still appear via self-sorting and de-federation. So yes, perhaps algorithms are to blame for filter bubbles in centralized social media, but removing algorithms doesn't remove filter bubbles, because people create it by themselves anyway.

TL;DR: Blaming the algorithm (correct or not) doesn't actually matter in the end, because filter bubbles happen with or without them.

[nitwit005]

The press coverage is a bit misleading. Everyone is leaving Twitter. Liberals are just leaving faster.

Keep in mind that a lot of Twitter users never wanted political content. They were there for sports, art, science discussions, etc. Some of those communities are clearly migrating.

[EasyMark]

I think I’ve even noticed a huge decrease in hate bots lately in my feed, certainly doesn’t seem to up date as often (aka takes longer for my usual “followees”to go off the firehouse, as they have some precedence in the feed make up

[fooker]

There's one single that prevents this: sharing screenshots, and the impossibly difficult task of blocking those in practice.

[EasyMark]

I use both X and bsky. I would say the behavior on bsky and the hate language is dialed down by a factor of 10.

[emseetech]

I'm not convinced everyone sharing a singular global network was ever a good idea in the first place.

[protocolture]

Not really.

The issue is that social media sites produce feeds and content matching, forcing alternative views in your face.

Its like, they have decided to push metcalfes law as far as possible, to see when the breaking point is. Like a giant social experiment.

But if everyone is in one place thats still the most desirable network to be on. Just dont push Joe Blo's dumbest political opinions in my face as sponsored content.