[nathell]

I’ve been perusing Bubbles increasingly often since discovering that my blog is syndicated there, a few weeks ago.

It feels really refreshing compared to doomscrolling of social media, or indeed even to HN. It’s so diverse and humane. The indie blogosphere is coming to life.

Kudos to the author. A great idea, splendidly executed. I hope it grows and doesn’t change much.

[flir]

Just glanced at the front page - it seems to be very "blog posts about blogging" (4 out of the top 5 posts right now). Is it always like that?

The "My" tab looks like it covers the same ground as a feed reader would. I wonder who the audience is for that feature.

[jl6]

Is blogging always like that? Always has been.

[flir]

From memory, there was a long tail of blogs like that way back when, but a core of solid, interesting content. I have an expectation that an aggregator would bubble the interesting stuff up, and the self-referential stuff down. But maybe this is just content the audience finds interesting.

[jl6]

There is still solid and interesting content, it’s just that the material is so diverse that attention is spread thinly. Meanwhile, blogging is the one thing bloggers definitely have in common, so the attention is more concentrated.

It’s a failing of aggregators that they optimize for attention concentration rather than interestingness. But is there even such a thing, objectively?

[flir]

> attention concentration rather than interestingness

With sufficiently rich data, I think they're equivalent.

I think collaborative filtering works much better once you have a critical mass of users/data - enough that taste clusters emerge. Otherwise it just defaults to whatever's globally popular. Google Reader managed it quite well. Librarything is fantastic at it (far better than Amazon).

I wrote a simple recommendation engine for musical taste in the early 2k's (pre-last.fm), but it had very little data available to it. The result? It recommended Radiohead to everyone. (Looking back, this was my first exposure to The Bitter Lesson).

[woodpanel]

> it’s so diverse and humane

Opened the page, first entry: „white supremacist dogwhistle“

One can’t make this much diversity and humaneness up.

Yes, their frontpage overall seems normal and you probably meant well, but that this is their first entry is just hilarious.

[finjo]

If anti-racism is hilarious to you, then yes please do us both a favor and stay away from bubbles.

[ykonstant]

Hmmm... very disappointing that when I unchecked "politics" in Filter, that post remained in the list.

[Royce-CMR]

The post (after reading it) is not political in the today sense. It’s connecting an in vogue concept to toxic thought patterns and notes a correlation in both the patterns and trending association of some influencers to a specific political segment.

The point the author is trying to cover is that a lifestyle and aesthetic the author naturally aligns with actually actively excludes her - and that pattern is seen elsewhere and (author opinion) has wider implications.

I’d argue it’s a fair and not a political statement (there is some text that indicates the preference of the author) but a human realizing and sharing their exclusion from a group and that the exclusion expands into (again, author perspective) defined categories of people. Talking about thoughts and opinions is… what I expect from a blog.