> I don't know how it came to be like that.

The earliest bluesky users tended to be the most toxic users of old Twitter, it's not too surprising

bsky is primarily seeded with a culturally anti-AI, human-centric artist (illustrators, gamedevs, hobby coders, writers) core — these are the first folks who wanted to leave twitter/X but continue to share their art. Rick's og dogpiled post is now deleted so I don't know the exact drama, but I'd bet good money that he was either introducing AI features to paint.net, or trying to ship some vibecoded stuff no one asked for that is obviously vibecoded, and advertising them to the core hater-group as something they would be excited about.

I'm not defending the dogpiling behaviour or even anti-AI sentiments in general. However, no one is entitled to saying things to people who don't want to hear it and receive only positive feedback for it. Sometimes even if you're excited about a thing, you have to keep it to yourself until you're in a room with others who would actually share your excitement. AKA maybe bsky isn't the place for him to share that excitement, and IMO that's neither good nor bad, but it's important to know that when you're cultivated a large-ish audience.

> I don't know how it came to be like that.

It's intrinsic to the medium. The Twitter-like format is inherently toxic and irredeemable. It can't be fixed.

The microblogging format with likes and reposts selects for short highly viral stuff that pokes at the brain stem. Rage bait, trolling, lynch mobs, and stupid brain rot stuff are all ideal forms of content for this medium. Nuanced and genuinely insightful ideas are too long.

I think short form content in general is bad. Short form video seems to be less actively toxic but more brainless and attention-destroying. Short form content is the refined sugar (or in some cases the crack or the fentanyl) of discourse.

Reddit-style sites (like this one) are better but still suffer from these problems. HN avoids the worst of it by having a culture and mod policy of downvoting trolling and low-effort crap.

I believe you misspelled 'Digg culture', sir.

> It's deeply baked into the BlueSky culture and I don't know how it came to be like that.

Bluesky was the refuge for Blue MAGA after Elon came out for Trump. That group (myself included at the time), comprised the majority of the user base and growth. Most have since returned to X, I stopped using Big Social media altogether. Bluesky leadership had a number of fumbles along the way that I suspects puts them post peak forever.

Someone dubbed "the running of Will Stancil" which I think describes a particular phenomenon of anti-engagement. I think there are some of anti- derangements about.

But generally these things cluster very strongly around specific people.

Alas Journalists I think are high value targets. Ideally they'd use tools like blocklists to help each other defend against dog piling. Ideally we'd have more automated response systems to detect and manage problems, which we could build, because of how Bluesky data is (so far, "spaces" incoming which change the gane) all public data. Blocking posts etc. The ability to handle this problems is much higher on Bluesky than elsewhere.

This can happen on Bluesky. It sucks. But for most people it's not an issue at all. It does unfortunately drive off some higher profile people though.

HN sure seems desperate to believe BlueSky is the bad spot. I suspect other networks too have metrically built up this defense systems for themselves, to justify their continued use. x spectacle of posts to sing the propaganda song that this is the bad place over here, it's too left, it's too woke, it's too activist, it's too digpiley. It seems unmoored, completely unhinged to me.

It would be interesting to figure out if these that do the dogpiling are real users or not. It does not reflect my experience on BlueSky. But I am just a single datapoint.

Bluesky is by and large the leftist version of Truth Social, but with a small group of people who have isolated themselves from the political content.