I'm not familiar with the other similar sites, but Bluesky seems much more interesting as a product than Twitter/X ever did. I think the way they encourage users to build/share custom feeds, and especially how they can be independent of your follow graph, is really interesting. The problem with these sites has always been having a single algorithmic feed controlled by someone else IMO.
Some interesting feeds I've seen are only posts by mutuals, lots of curated feeds that just show a subset of posts by a small number of accounts (whether or not you follow them), a following feed that filters out reposts/replies, a custom open source Discover algorithm based on your likes.
This feels way more interesting to me than anything Twitter/X has ever tried to do, even if you really like their single algorithm and the way their following feed works.
Custom feeds and starter packs seem to be promoted much more on Bluesky than lists were on Twitter, but how different are the actual capabilities from Twitter lists? I never looked at my algorithmic feed. Instead I make a "list" of accounts I followed and pinned that list to my home view. That way I only got exactly their posts in chronological order (with no ads). I saw that recommended by some HN user long ago, but I don't remember who.
I have fully switched to Bluesky at this point anyway, but the list approach worked fine for me on Twitter long after most users were complaining about the feed algo.
I thought Twitter lists could only be used for a list of accounts, so you'd see everything posted by everyone in the list. Whereas Bluesky feeds can only show posts with certain tags/content etc, and can be based on things like your following/likes without you maintaining the list of those. I might be wrong though about the limitations of lists because I never used them much.
And the starter packs who make it easy and quick to straight up build a follow base of curated content uniquely. That stuff only makes Twitter less relevant in an instant.
> I have written before in The Atlantic about a problem that I see as superordinate to all of these others: People just aren’t meant to talk with one another this much
The irony of publishing an article intended for a mass audience about how people shouldn't talk to each other. Obviously journalists are the only ones who can be trusted with such power...
Err, turning "shouldn't be talking to each other this much" to "shouldn't be talking to each other" is quite the leap. The author is clearly referring to the minute-by-minute stimulation that a microblogging platform provides, not making the case that people should be cutting off all communication with each other.
X's mandatory self-reported figures in the EU show they lost about 6 million monthly active users in the first half of 2024. There doesn't seem to be similar data for the US and UK, but other metrics, like Similarweb, show declines in those places as well.[0]
I just proved your point down below. You don't like voting, do you?
Also, it's advertisers that stay away, and it's X challenging them in court over it. The world is getting weirder by the day.
Do you have an uncle that can't stop ranting and calling people names? People just leave his presence. That behavior is just the worst and we're not born to suffer it, passively. That's the whole point of the free speech fallacy. Now the shouters are in power, so they can pour their trauma down our throats, as if this were some therapy. No, it's just abuse and it's perverse. That's why people leave X. They have a target on their back.
You literally have a "Following" tab where you can have a timeline for only people you care about. You also have both a mute & a block button. Any platform focused on news & politics will have people fighting & insulting each other, learn to deal with it.
Advertisers have left as part of a concerted pressure campaign to bring back censorship. This effort has been coordinated by NGOs that ironically receive funding by the US Gov't as part of their mis/dis/malinformation playbook in order to keep in check populist political movements that may undermine the State Department's interests. As soon as Elon sued GARM, it broke apart, and I bet the Trump admin will target NewsGuard and kill it as well.
I may disagree with people politically, but I would never ask to ban them. Heck, I don't even report people who hurl racist insults at me, I just counter-attack, just like I would in real life.
Before Elon bought Twitter, if someone called me the n word and I reported it, they took action. After Elon bought Twitter, they tell me no rules were broken. So this is absolute nonsense
Counterexamples include LinkedIn, HN and various subreddits (not all) - they're operating at large scale, very lively but low levels of nasty (as a percentage).
IME, LinkedIn suffers from a different problem: on there, "everything is awesome", and the toxic positivity embedded in its DNA always snuffs out any authentic rancor.
So yes, it's free of bad behavior -- but it's also free of "normal" conversations. It's just full of "thought leaders", "visionaries", and "visionary thought leaders".
Anecdotal but for my startup (caido.io) I have seen an uptick of follows this week on bluesky. I had abandoned hope a few months ago, but I will restart posting our company updates on it.
Has a clone of a social media site ever replaced an original? The closest I can think of is Tiktok being kinda similar to Vine but that feels like a stretch.
I don't think Bluesky will succeed unless it offers something different to the basic Twitter experience. It's hard to picture enough people giving up Twitter (or using both) for it to reach the critical mass required to sustain it.
I can't really understand why people use Twitter at all, since it's inception. It's never felt like a compelling platform and everyone I know has an account, like myself, but made it years ago for some reason and never used it.
a tweet originally was called a "status", twitter used to be a place where you would publish your instant messenger status. Early adopters used it to unify their multiple messenger platforms statuses into one.
If you changed your status on the old messengers e.g. "making a cup of tea" then it had some utility at any rate, a status was a kind of temporary notice, to be replaced by another status at another time. In an IM application you would see your online and offline contacts and see their status underneath their name. People had a few different unconnected IM applications. You could use the API to set your status in twitter and it would be set in AIM (or was it both ways?)
You could SMS in a status/tweet from a phone, many people loved that.
After that it became a way to record or broadcast other temporary notices, and then to a kind of realtime status. The concepts of a conversation happened then, talking about a topic but without direct refering other people and then with mentions @handle threads on twitter happened afterwards.
The twitter tech folks were considering making the metadata around a tweet as more important than the inside content. (e.g. RDF, foaf, geo, links, wikipedia uuids, subject topics, etc etc)
And then the masses joined in a few years after with Oprah and it was all about the message.
After that the push to VC eternal growth and the algorithm powered feed was what encouraged bad behaviour and a range of un-satisfactory responses to that behaviour which continues to this day.
Reddit for Digg, Facebook for MySpace to some extent (they were pretty similar in the early days), arguably MySpace for Friendster. Stretching it a bit, Tumblr for Livejournal; they’re weren’t _that_ similar, but then nor are Twitter and Bluesky, under the surface.
The Twitter replacement for me isn't Bluesky, it's a combination of Bluesky and being less online. I won't get attached to Bluesky. If it significantly degrades like Twitter I'll move on from it pretty easily. I've already started to get mildly turned off by Bluesky since it began interrupting profiles and feeds with "suggestion" blocks. The engagement hacking has started.
Elon buying Twitter and ruining the platform with spam, lower quality posts being promoted, and many of my favorite creators leaving. It cured my Twitter addiction. So I appreciate Elon for that.
Back when I was younger and addicted to Reddit I remember unfollowing all my subreddits and hacking together a little script that hid the follow button. That friction made Reddit a lot less desirable.
I’ll no doubt eventually try out Bluesky, but I don’t think it could ever capture Twitter’s magic pre-Elon.
isn't it obvious to everyone that the X/Twitter exodus is just a forum split?
haven't all of us of a certain age participated in a forum that eventually devolved into drama, and then everyone picks sides, and someone makes a new forum, and half the group leaves?
That's all that's happening on X. Now we have a bunch of twitters: X, Bluesky, Truth, Fediverse.
They're all twitters and the X exodus is just a twitter split. X will go on, but smaller, and people will share posts between the twitters the way they always have shared posted between social media sites: with screenshots.
Unless Bluesky or Threads tap into the Zeitgeist, Twitter isn't going anywhere. As much as whatever political side would love to see it falter, those invested in its downfall might have to temper their expectations. Twitter is a mirror of the human fabric — messy, contradictory, brutal. For all its flaws, it's the only service that reflects society's pulse in real-time.
It used to, now it's got a load of ads and heavy prioritization of accounts that pay money to use it. It's also locked down on technologies like the API that used to make it interesting.
All social networking sites seem inevitable till they fail, remember digg?
Bluesky and threads are building interesting sets of communities, and with the number of active users they have now, it's likely that they'll stay there.
There are 15k+ starter packs on the directory now https://blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs and just a quick scroll through them shows the diversity of groups using the platform.
Bluesky appears (for now at least) more open to API driven interaction and doesn't default to an algorithmic view, avoiding some of the more annoying things on twitter.
Now as they grow there will be inevitable problems with scammers/spammers and the rest but all popular sites that allow user generated content have to deal with that eventually.
> For all its flaws, it's the only service that reflects society's pulse in real-time.
Is there such thing as accurately "reflecting society's pulse" within individual posts? Sure, maybe you can pull big data to understand public sentiment on certain topics or events. But the platform's goal is to present users with content they are most likely to engage with, so that they spend as much time on the platform as possible (and therefore view as many ads as possible). That content does not reflect society—it's often targeted ragebait. When users are goaded en masse by ragebait and engagement farming, some percentage are going to develop a distorted view of public sentiment, and their own engagement will further the issue.
The fact is that content discovery algorithms and moderation largely shape the tone and personality of a platform, both for a viewer and for a contributor (who is psychologically inclined to want to fit in).
Twitter isn't going to collapse and die overnight, but this could be the start of a 5-year trend where the "utility" of Twitter over other platforms gradually shrinks as reputable brands and public figures diversify their presence.
> For all its flaws, it's the only service that reflects society's pulse in real-time.
Assume it’s true for a min, why does a society need a website reflect its pulse? It is useful for company and govt to harvest the data, but I failed to see any meanful way common individuals will benefit much from it.
I think the real problem on Twitter is the massive amount of spam that now exists. It's much worse than it was a couple of years ago. If all it consists of is bots and hucksters that pay to appear at the top of viral posts, it will cease to be a useful "pulse". That being said, this might just be the end of there being a single, central Twitter-like platform. There are already right-wing clones like Gab and Truth Social, it could be that more and more niche platforms pop up.
I think it just comes in waves. Years ago, I'd see links to Twitter and replies full of crypto scammer. It has been a while since I've seen that problem to that degree, though there was a smaller wave of them a few months ago.
Meanwhile, my YouTube feed regularly gets attacked with AI generated crypto ads using the Tesla or SpaceX brands.
https://archive.ph/Lb88G
I'm not familiar with the other similar sites, but Bluesky seems much more interesting as a product than Twitter/X ever did. I think the way they encourage users to build/share custom feeds, and especially how they can be independent of your follow graph, is really interesting. The problem with these sites has always been having a single algorithmic feed controlled by someone else IMO.
Some interesting feeds I've seen are only posts by mutuals, lots of curated feeds that just show a subset of posts by a small number of accounts (whether or not you follow them), a following feed that filters out reposts/replies, a custom open source Discover algorithm based on your likes.
This feels way more interesting to me than anything Twitter/X has ever tried to do, even if you really like their single algorithm and the way their following feed works.
Custom feeds and starter packs seem to be promoted much more on Bluesky than lists were on Twitter, but how different are the actual capabilities from Twitter lists? I never looked at my algorithmic feed. Instead I make a "list" of accounts I followed and pinned that list to my home view. That way I only got exactly their posts in chronological order (with no ads). I saw that recommended by some HN user long ago, but I don't remember who.
I have fully switched to Bluesky at this point anyway, but the list approach worked fine for me on Twitter long after most users were complaining about the feed algo.
I thought Twitter lists could only be used for a list of accounts, so you'd see everything posted by everyone in the list. Whereas Bluesky feeds can only show posts with certain tags/content etc, and can be based on things like your following/likes without you maintaining the list of those. I might be wrong though about the limitations of lists because I never used them much.
And the starter packs who make it easy and quick to straight up build a follow base of curated content uniquely. That stuff only makes Twitter less relevant in an instant.
> I have written before in The Atlantic about a problem that I see as superordinate to all of these others: People just aren’t meant to talk with one another this much
The irony of publishing an article intended for a mass audience about how people shouldn't talk to each other. Obviously journalists are the only ones who can be trusted with such power...
Err, turning "shouldn't be talking to each other this much" to "shouldn't be talking to each other" is quite the leap. The author is clearly referring to the minute-by-minute stimulation that a microblogging platform provides, not making the case that people should be cutting off all communication with each other.
publishing != talking
If your point is that it's written word, then neither is social media talking.
Both of them are people putting/ publishing text out to a mass audience, in a public way.
publishing == talking down to
Choose different publications.
Strange article, social media isn’t going anywhere, it’s just evolving. The decline of X is due to Elon, that’s all.
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X's mandatory self-reported figures in the EU show they lost about 6 million monthly active users in the first half of 2024. There doesn't seem to be similar data for the US and UK, but other metrics, like Similarweb, show declines in those places as well.[0]
[0]https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/x-formerly-twitter-los...
I just proved your point down below. You don't like voting, do you?
Also, it's advertisers that stay away, and it's X challenging them in court over it. The world is getting weirder by the day.
Do you have an uncle that can't stop ranting and calling people names? People just leave his presence. That behavior is just the worst and we're not born to suffer it, passively. That's the whole point of the free speech fallacy. Now the shouters are in power, so they can pour their trauma down our throats, as if this were some therapy. No, it's just abuse and it's perverse. That's why people leave X. They have a target on their back.
You literally have a "Following" tab where you can have a timeline for only people you care about. You also have both a mute & a block button. Any platform focused on news & politics will have people fighting & insulting each other, learn to deal with it.
Advertisers have left as part of a concerted pressure campaign to bring back censorship. This effort has been coordinated by NGOs that ironically receive funding by the US Gov't as part of their mis/dis/malinformation playbook in order to keep in check populist political movements that may undermine the State Department's interests. As soon as Elon sued GARM, it broke apart, and I bet the Trump admin will target NewsGuard and kill it as well.
> Also, it's advertisers that stay away,
They are coming back and line up
X is the 15th largest social network by MAU[1], and falling.
And there is some irony in your praise for tolerance.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_platforms_with_...
I may disagree with people politically, but I would never ask to ban them. Heck, I don't even report people who hurl racist insults at me, I just counter-attack, just like I would in real life.
Before Elon bought Twitter, if someone called me the n word and I reported it, they took action. After Elon bought Twitter, they tell me no rules were broken. So this is absolute nonsense
X usage may be at an all time high, but it’s mostly “Pussy In Bio” bots.
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"Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
-1 to the conclusion.
Counterexamples include LinkedIn, HN and various subreddits (not all) - they're operating at large scale, very lively but low levels of nasty (as a percentage).
LinkedIn has a lot of garbage
You're right!
IME, LinkedIn suffers from a different problem: on there, "everything is awesome", and the toxic positivity embedded in its DNA always snuffs out any authentic rancor.
So yes, it's free of bad behavior -- but it's also free of "normal" conversations. It's just full of "thought leaders", "visionaries", and "visionary thought leaders".
Anecdotal but for my startup (caido.io) I have seen an uptick of follows this week on bluesky. I had abandoned hope a few months ago, but I will restart posting our company updates on it.
Has a clone of a social media site ever replaced an original? The closest I can think of is Tiktok being kinda similar to Vine but that feels like a stretch.
I don't think Bluesky will succeed unless it offers something different to the basic Twitter experience. It's hard to picture enough people giving up Twitter (or using both) for it to reach the critical mass required to sustain it.
I can't really understand why people use Twitter at all, since it's inception. It's never felt like a compelling platform and everyone I know has an account, like myself, but made it years ago for some reason and never used it.
a tweet originally was called a "status", twitter used to be a place where you would publish your instant messenger status. Early adopters used it to unify their multiple messenger platforms statuses into one.
If you changed your status on the old messengers e.g. "making a cup of tea" then it had some utility at any rate, a status was a kind of temporary notice, to be replaced by another status at another time. In an IM application you would see your online and offline contacts and see their status underneath their name. People had a few different unconnected IM applications. You could use the API to set your status in twitter and it would be set in AIM (or was it both ways?)
You could SMS in a status/tweet from a phone, many people loved that.
After that it became a way to record or broadcast other temporary notices, and then to a kind of realtime status. The concepts of a conversation happened then, talking about a topic but without direct refering other people and then with mentions @handle threads on twitter happened afterwards.
The twitter tech folks were considering making the metadata around a tweet as more important than the inside content. (e.g. RDF, foaf, geo, links, wikipedia uuids, subject topics, etc etc)
And then the masses joined in a few years after with Oprah and it was all about the message.
After that the push to VC eternal growth and the algorithm powered feed was what encouraged bad behaviour and a range of un-satisfactory responses to that behaviour which continues to this day.
So finger and ~/.plan was the original twitter then?
I used it professionally to learn about research articles written by my peers at conferences. Most academics I know have moved to Linkedin now.
I feel like Facebook was often considered a MySpace clone in its early days, despite certain differences, and I certainly think it took its place.
Reddit for Digg, Facebook for MySpace to some extent (they were pretty similar in the early days), arguably MySpace for Friendster. Stretching it a bit, Tumblr for Livejournal; they’re weren’t _that_ similar, but then nor are Twitter and Bluesky, under the surface.
Instagram copied Snapchat Stories, which I think is close to what you are talking about...
reddit used to be the smaller, less popular version of digg :)
I would have said it was a Something Awful replacement.
Have fascists ever taken over America before? We live in unprecedented times.
The Twitter replacement for me isn't Bluesky, it's a combination of Bluesky and being less online. I won't get attached to Bluesky. If it significantly degrades like Twitter I'll move on from it pretty easily. I've already started to get mildly turned off by Bluesky since it began interrupting profiles and feeds with "suggestion" blocks. The engagement hacking has started.
Elon buying Twitter and ruining the platform with spam, lower quality posts being promoted, and many of my favorite creators leaving. It cured my Twitter addiction. So I appreciate Elon for that.
Back when I was younger and addicted to Reddit I remember unfollowing all my subreddits and hacking together a little script that hid the follow button. That friction made Reddit a lot less desirable.
I’ll no doubt eventually try out Bluesky, but I don’t think it could ever capture Twitter’s magic pre-Elon.
"Whatever happens, I still hope that social media itself will fade away."
"About the Author
Ian Bogost is a contributing writer at The Atlantic."
> Gen Xers and Oldlennials
As an oldlennial, I am not sure I care for this term.
As a GenXer, I think it's hilarious.
isn't it obvious to everyone that the X/Twitter exodus is just a forum split?
haven't all of us of a certain age participated in a forum that eventually devolved into drama, and then everyone picks sides, and someone makes a new forum, and half the group leaves?
That's all that's happening on X. Now we have a bunch of twitters: X, Bluesky, Truth, Fediverse.
They're all twitters and the X exodus is just a twitter split. X will go on, but smaller, and people will share posts between the twitters the way they always have shared posted between social media sites: with screenshots.
Nature is healing.
Is it a forum split, or is it Digg->Reddit or MySpace->Facebook?
I think that will depend on whether Must decides to keep running it at a loss.
He has the resources to keep it going for years as a forum for his groupies, but if anyone else were in charge it would be a die-off for sure.
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Unless Bluesky or Threads tap into the Zeitgeist, Twitter isn't going anywhere. As much as whatever political side would love to see it falter, those invested in its downfall might have to temper their expectations. Twitter is a mirror of the human fabric — messy, contradictory, brutal. For all its flaws, it's the only service that reflects society's pulse in real-time.
It used to, now it's got a load of ads and heavy prioritization of accounts that pay money to use it. It's also locked down on technologies like the API that used to make it interesting.
All social networking sites seem inevitable till they fail, remember digg?
Bluesky and threads are building interesting sets of communities, and with the number of active users they have now, it's likely that they'll stay there.
There are 15k+ starter packs on the directory now https://blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs and just a quick scroll through them shows the diversity of groups using the platform.
Bluesky appears (for now at least) more open to API driven interaction and doesn't default to an algorithmic view, avoiding some of the more annoying things on twitter.
Now as they grow there will be inevitable problems with scammers/spammers and the rest but all popular sites that allow user generated content have to deal with that eventually.
> For all its flaws, it's the only service that reflects society's pulse in real-time.
Is there such thing as accurately "reflecting society's pulse" within individual posts? Sure, maybe you can pull big data to understand public sentiment on certain topics or events. But the platform's goal is to present users with content they are most likely to engage with, so that they spend as much time on the platform as possible (and therefore view as many ads as possible). That content does not reflect society—it's often targeted ragebait. When users are goaded en masse by ragebait and engagement farming, some percentage are going to develop a distorted view of public sentiment, and their own engagement will further the issue.
The fact is that content discovery algorithms and moderation largely shape the tone and personality of a platform, both for a viewer and for a contributor (who is psychologically inclined to want to fit in).
Twitter isn't going to collapse and die overnight, but this could be the start of a 5-year trend where the "utility" of Twitter over other platforms gradually shrinks as reputable brands and public figures diversify their presence.
> For all its flaws, it's the only service that reflects society's pulse in real-time.
Assume it’s true for a min, why does a society need a website reflect its pulse? It is useful for company and govt to harvest the data, but I failed to see any meanful way common individuals will benefit much from it.
I think the real problem on Twitter is the massive amount of spam that now exists. It's much worse than it was a couple of years ago. If all it consists of is bots and hucksters that pay to appear at the top of viral posts, it will cease to be a useful "pulse". That being said, this might just be the end of there being a single, central Twitter-like platform. There are already right-wing clones like Gab and Truth Social, it could be that more and more niche platforms pop up.
I think it just comes in waves. Years ago, I'd see links to Twitter and replies full of crypto scammer. It has been a while since I've seen that problem to that degree, though there was a smaller wave of them a few months ago.
Meanwhile, my YouTube feed regularly gets attacked with AI generated crypto ads using the Tesla or SpaceX brands.
90% of the suggested posts are clickbaity threads people post for engagement. Its become very hard to navigate to real content.
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