| ▲ | giancarlostoro 7 hours ago |
| There's people from all walks of life and all corners of the internet on there still, good and bad. Twitter was always a darned mess, the only difference now is you can't just report people and bully them off the site. Contrast to me trying to open BlueSky, and seeing death threats and other insane things. I've also heard (though never personally seen, nor do I want to) that BlueSky has a CSAM problem. Those two factors alone kept me from even trying it out. What's really weird is there were a ton of claims that disappeared, about how X was full of bots, but X is the opposite of full of bots. Maybe there's one or another, but they're highly under the radar, X has improved their bot problem drastically. Edit (tweaked some words, and wanted to add): Then there was Threads, I am not in any way interested in "New Twitter" by Mark Zuckerberg, no thanks. |
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| ▲ | nobleach 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I really can't deal with BlueSky. I wanted to because I had a lot of good "starter packs" for NeoVim and OCaml development. Nerd stuff is the reason I visit these sites. The problem is, I start following people and it almost always turns into politics. I may even AGREE with the person's politics but I hate reading and talking about it. God forbid I ever disagree. Funny thing though. I've heard the claims of "CSAM on Twitter" and now "CSAM on BlueSky". I've never had any of that ransomly show up. I do still have 2 or so random follows from clip-art female avatars with no tweets - per week. I've never quite figured out how that scam is supposed to work. I used to block 'em, now I ignore 'em. |
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| ▲ | numpad0 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | What actually show up consistently wherever "CSAM on ___" claims are used against, from Twitter to actual porn sites, or WWW in general, is large amount of contents related to anime and/or East Asians(often above 25) on a rapid constant growth and/or already dominating the place. Only rarely it's about actual CSAM. | | |
| ▲ | giancarlostoro 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | The anime thing can still be illegal if its depicting a minor, or what looks like a minor in a sexual way, in various jurisdictions. Honestly sounds like a nightmare to moderate. | | |
| ▲ | numpad0 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | My point is that "CSAM in platform" claims often refers to those contents(despite the fact that this tactic in practice results in special carve outs and tried-and-tested legitimacy and free additional popularity for those contents, with hilarity), not necessarily that those ought to be legal(though that kind of is my stance). |
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| ▲ | xhevahir 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I don't know whether it's a founder effect of the users that fled there from X, or the mass-blocking features, but no site is as good at enforcing political orthodoxy as Bluesky. A near perfect echo chamber. | | |
| ▲ | senderista 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Oh I think Mastodon at least comes close. | | |
| ▲ | stephen_g 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I find Mastodon fairly chill and a fairly wide range of opinions, I think part of it is that Bluesky attracts most of the more extreme political people who might otherwise go to Mastodon. On Mastodon people are more likely to just block people who they really don't like and move on so there aren't really pile-ons and all that and different opinions co-exist. You obviously get more of the people with more 'popular' political opinions in the Trending feed but that's not the default and you don't have to follow that if you can find enough good people or hashtags to follow. | | |
| ▲ | senderista an hour ago | parent [-] | | I don't really see coexistence of meaningfully different political positions at all on Mastodon (I think anyone resembling say a centrist Democrat would be quickly hounded off the platform), but that might be a consequence of who I follow. |
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| ▲ | ceroxylon 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I want to like Bluesky but have run into the same issue with politics as you. Worse yet, people get so blinded that they lose the plot entirely... I asked someone about the accounting of a Palestinian fund raiser they were promoting. They got very defensive so I looked into it, and it was a scam. I pointed this out to the poster to let them know, and they wrote a snide response which got their followers to brigade me. | |
| ▲ | dokyun 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Nerd stuff is the reason I visit these sites. Fedi is a lot better if you want nerd stuff specifically, running instances attracts a lot of hackers who're geared toward it. The big instances are pretty much the same shlock you get on Twitter/Bluesky but there's a lot of cool people in the margins (tip: look for instances that aren't running Mastodon). | |
| ▲ | anonzzzies 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Never had issues with bluesky, but i'm a lurker and I have a llm filtering (here on HN, X, bluesky, reddit etc) which removes political stuff and boosts stuff I likely will like. | | |
| ▲ | hypfer 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | From what I heard, bluesky (unsurprisingly) has the exact same toxicity problems as twitter. There was I think this piece of writing in 2024 (just googled it, don't quote me on that)
https://www.thefp.com/p/jesse-singal-bluesky-has-a-death-thr... iirc there were newer instances too, but why bother reading on that, when you can just look at how the system is built. Twitter and Twitter-ish systems are just fundamentally anti-human.
The same can be said about most of social media, actually, but Twitter is high up on the worst offender list, and Bluesky just cloned it. Again. | | |
| ▲ | cagey 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I found this[0] to be an interesting perspective: "Bluesky Isn't a Bubble. It's a Containment Dome. Pray that Bluesky doesn't die entirely — we need it so the worst liberal posts are kept in a place where the broader public won't ever see them." [0] https://www.joshbarro.com/p/bluesky-isnt-a-bubble-its-a-cont... | | |
| ▲ | hypfer 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Ha, nice one. And same is true for the fediverse. It should've been like that with Twitter too, but Twitter unfortunately became the clubhouse of the journalist class, and they kinda did control the media.
So they made everyone believe that whatever social ingroup infighting skirmish bs is happening would be relevant to the people at large. Elon saw that, thought "hey I want that" and bought it - not changing anything about it other than giving the microphone to even worse people. While everyone thinks they can call themself "journalist" (no matter the merit, ethics or similar), at the very least, all of their infighting led to a certain baseline of quality back then. So there was that. Oh well. Many such cases. Someone not interested in changing the system but changing who is on top I mean. __ Welp, that Josh Barro guy you linked seems equally unpleasant looking at his website's front page. |
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| ▲ | cmrdporcupine 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yep, if there's a recommendation algorithm and a "this is my megaphone" style posting, it just inevitably becomes an echo chamber of narcissism. Even Mastodon which has no algorithm trends towards the obnoxious when you start going into various corners. As much as I hate Facebook now, the OG Facebook which was strictly a feed of "this is what my friends and family are posting" and nothing else... was ideal. Not public. Just private in an inner group. the much maligned Google+ honestly had a good model too. | | |
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| ▲ | nemomarx 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| If you look at the replies to basically any big post, you'll see all the blue checkmark bots in there. Usually just copying posts, sometimes doing a weird ai summary of the original post in a way that isn't actually replying to it. I've got no idea if they're somehow making money off it or what's up |
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| ▲ | tuesdaynight 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Followed by the porn bots, the racist bots, the "American" bot, etc. I'm really surprised how someone can use X and say that it is not full of bots. It's the same on Reddit. | | |
| ▲ | giancarlostoro 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Maybe it's whatever social media Bubble X has me under, but I only follow people I know or are completely relevant, not random meme accounts. |
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| ▲ | numpad0 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > I've also heard (though never personally seen, nor do I want to) that BlueSky has a CSAM problem. There really isn't, unless you mean anime content(of both SFW and NSFW alike) by "CSAM". In case you mean by that, then there is, otherwise no. It also appears to be highly locale dependent - some say they see timeline filled to the brim with fetish furry images and male gay nudity dressed with right wing politics, but my timeline is like just Twitter 2014 stuck at 3AM without any of those. I don't use any filters or blocklists, the place seem naturally nice-ish. > about how X was full of bots They appear to have largely given up and scaled back efforts to replace existing social graphs by funding African/Middle Eastern/Indian/South Asian content farms under the guise of revenue sharing programs, burning out talents west to east, likely with the conclusion that they're all equally incapable of understanding contents posted on Twitter even without the language barrier, let alone gaining popularity and even with literal algorithmic manipulations. Or they just burned through quite a deep talent pool globally. That effort started after Twitter was bought, beginning around South Africa or Nigeria. So it's not an improvement, unless you count someone ceasing hostility as an improvement. |
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| ▲ | ErroneousBosh 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Bluesky has a weed problem, but eventually you can tune the algorithm to only show you thirty or forty posts about weed every day. |
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| ▲ | numpad0 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I think those are ultimately a locale dependent content bandwidth problem. Unwanted content has to be recommended if there were nothing else to show. Discovery feed on bsky.app gives me game news, local news, cat pics, some center-left politics, manga panels, food pics, random personal updates, cat pics, all warm and fuzzy stuffs. I don't get any CSAM, alt-right, nazism, weed, ragebaits, unwanted gay contents. Simply none of those. But I don't normally set the language to English, and I suspect that might have to do with not getting those stuffs. | |
| ▲ | criddell 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Bluesky is shrinking. https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/11/blueskys-active-user-base-... |
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| ▲ | smith7018 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I genuinely can't take this comment seriously if you think BlueSky has a CSAM and bullying problem while staying on X. |
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| ▲ | devmor 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > I've also heard (though never personally seen, nor do I want to) that BlueSky has a CSAM problem. I left X permanently because the unfathomable amount of CSAM being generated by Grok, without seeing it myself, sickened me to the point of no return. I don’t use Bluesky but it seems to me that if this is a real concern to you, then you should have left X as well. |
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| ▲ | criddell 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | I only log in to X a couple times a month, but the only type of Grok post I've ever seen is somebody retweeting a post and adding something like "grok, is this true?". |
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| ▲ | utopiah 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
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| ▲ | tolerance 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I would love to see a visual representation of what you think those sort of people look like. | | |
| ▲ | utopiah 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Fiction would led us to believe they look ugly or gorgeous... history has shown us they look very banal. | | |
| ▲ | tolerance 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Right. All that's left is for us to figure out how to specify the type of banality you and I and our sibling commenter are imagining. |
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| ▲ | davidw 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Probably pretty ... banal, like Hannah Arendt pointed out. |
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| ▲ | hypfer 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Not really. I mean you'd wish that that was the case, but the reality is even bleaker. The "specific kind" is not all that specific. Like yeah, of course, the crypto, AI and business grifters are a lot louder on Twitter now, but.. wouldn't say that they're not on HN as well, so. I mean I understand that you would want to shame people into leaving that platform, but to feel shame you first need to be present in the room and conversation. Apathic people on autopilot are not even taking part in the conversation you'd like to have. They just scroll. |
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