[olivierduval]

Actually, focusing on "engagement" is already showing that the game is lost and that the we're seing another Twitter clone... :-(

Because "engagement" is about "money" and "ad" and "sponsor" and "business"... and not about anything close to "social" or "society" or "human". So, sooner or later (but most probably "sooner"), you'll see clickbait and other usual tricks to grow up "engagement"... and any interesting post will disappear

So I won't even matter to create an account or have a look. I'll wait for the next one, or the next next one... hoping some people will understand that quality content is not measured by some kind of "engagement"

EDITED: if you matter enough to downvote, at least explain WHY you think I'm wrong ;-)

[verdverm]

1. Bluesky has stated they have no intention to add ads. Subscriptions are apparently coming soon

2. ATProto makes algorithms pluggable. Anyone can develop on, users can sub to those of their choosing, making switching easy should one become bad. It means there can be real feed competition without needing to move networks or apps. Same for moderation, individual choice and control is central to the design

[olivierduval]

The problem is not "ads" per se... it's engagement focus

Ads or clickbait posts or filtering/ordering algorithms are just some consequences of engagement focus (also called "attention economy" because what matters is... well... attention... measured by "engagement")

As long as focus is on "engagement" and not on "quality content", you'll have some Twitter/Facebook/Tiktok/... clone.

Subscriptions COULD shift the focus on quality (because if people are convinced that you provide quality content, they might pay for it) but it requires (as shown for a long time) at least : - easy way to discover real quality content (a bit like Wikipedia in a way) - easy way to pay once to subscribe to different providers. That's the same old problem for the newspapers: people dont want to pay a yearly subscription - or even a newspaper issue - to read once a single article. They MAY pay a subscription if they can read any article in any newspaper (in a big bag of newspaper). Then this revenue has to be redistributed among the different newspapers...

[adaptbrian]

Pluggable algorithms, is this being done anywhere else? Dare I call this innovation? Antithesis to everything that is current in social engineering.

[verdverm]

Not just pluggable, stackable

https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderati...

[jaredhallen]

Sorry to be cynical, but I think history has demonstrated that a company stating something isn't worth an awful lot.