Twitter is far from a wasteland. Nothing that matters is exclusively on Bluesky, but a lot of it is on Twitter. The "old media" heavily relies on Twitter, too. Anger is a major driver of engagement on any medium, it's only natural that this shows through on Twitter.
Alternative platforms appear to be more civil because they're islands of echo-chambers. The anger is still there, it's just directed at the more abstract out-group, rather than any individuals that are part of the conversation.
> Alternative platforms appear to be more civil because they're islands of echo-chambers. The anger is still there, it's just directed at the more abstract out-group, rather than any individuals that are part of the conversation.
I'd say there are less bots and Putin-financed "fifth column" groups around on the Twitter alternatives, and that is the key thing. The porn spammers that make up half of the "likes" notifications on Twitter just don't see bsky or the fediverse as juicy targets and Instagram/Threads has far better tooling to yeet them, and the Putin propaganda army knows that the utter majority of people on bsky/fediverse are progressives where their points just don't appeal.
Social media would be way less toxic if the Western world had yeeted Russia off of the Internet after 2014.
To me, the real fifth column are the ones actively destroying all the values that are supposed to define "The Western world" in an attempt to save it, if only in name.
It's a mental shortcut to think that anyone who disagrees must've been influenced by some foreign power. Of course Russia picks up on dissent and attempts to amplify it, but it didn't create that dissent.
I loved it when it was T9 text (sms) to tweet. It was a novel way to share what you were doing say to day. The transformation from personal—to-promotional was their business plan.
When the feed becomes suggested, that’s when shit hit the fan for every social product. They still offer that as annoyware where you have to click over to it, but the nash equilibrium means that even the people you follow are trying to go viral instead of just sharing thoughts.
Reddit targeted the market for thoughtful discussion, and Twitter became the place for one-directional, bumper-sticker, talk radio style politics where nobody actually cares about the truth.
But for those few years between 2006-2010, Twitter was really a cool product.
Bluesky (ATProto) and Mastodon (ActivityPub) are designed differently, federated
I'm partial to ATProto, especially when it comes to user choice for algos, moderation, data hosting, and UI. There have been a few good HN posts lately, and in particular the comments therein
Pffft. X is by far the most important social network for people and things that matter. So not your vacation photos on Facebook or some influencer posting semi-nude pics on Instagram. It has only gotten better since Musk made moderation neutral, as opposed to the previous absurdly one-sided suppression of anything that deviates even slightly from ultra-left Liberal Silicon Valley ideology.
