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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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