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I finally tried it and as a new member literally every recommended post was US culture wars stuff. Is that the normal experience, or am I getting some kind of b

by _teyd 3y ago

I finally tried it and as a new member literally every recommended post was US culture wars stuff. Is that the normal experience, or am I getting some kind of bias based on who I received an invite from?

jddj 3y ago
It was billed as a twitter alternative
GaggiX 3y ago
Finally a real Twitter competitor.
MoSattler 3y ago
I am so tired of it. I wish there was an AI filter for social media that let me block out this stuff.
- finnjohnsen2 3y ago
  When USA reelect Trump my willingness to pay for such a service is infinite
finnjohnsen2 3y ago
Thanks for the warning
unpopularopp 3y ago
And unfortunately I see the same shit on Mastodon as well 24/7…
- scopeh 3y ago
  I don't think there is any algorithm magic in mastodon. your feed is who you follow and who they boost. maybe its time for you to have a clean up.
  - unpopularopp 3y ago
    Just like OP I also mean the recommended stuff https://mastodon.social/explore https://mastodon.social/explore Same shit as on Twitter and Bluesky
    - rakoo 3y ago
      This is the recommended stuff as seen from on one single server. It doesn't represent one's experience. The whole point of Mastodon is to only get what you want, not the rest. It's easy to build your own network of sources. The explore feed is useless :)
    - mgbmtl 3y ago
      Yeah I have an account on that Mastodon server and even logged-in, that page shows popular (rage-bait) content regardless of my personal preferences. It filtered by language but not region (so it was mostly content from another continent). However, my actual Mastodon feed only has content from people I follow, without any recommendations, and that works great.
    - rsynnott 3y ago
      Oh, huh, I didn't know anyone used that.
jug 3y ago
It had nothing of the sort when the network was younger but it seems like everything steers towards that sort of political profile eventually, regardless of name. And 2024 is probably going to be particularly nasty for obvious reasons.
sph 3y ago
Twitter-style social media has become its own subculture, made of: - people who like to argue online - people who can easily turn any complex topic into a 100-odd character slogans - people who like to put the world into hashtag-sized boxes - masochists who enjoy getting into the ragebait du jour - a vanishing minority who didn't get the memo and somehow the Algorithm has kept them in a bubble of sanity - bots Coincidentally most of these groups, including bots, really love the entire US culture war bullshit. They're the one that are keeping it alive, with the help of journalists, the last category of people that live on that type of social media and then report on some newspaper @oneidiotontwitter's troll post as if it were public opinion, in a perpetual cycle of mental and cultural noise. --- Look outside. People are going about their lives. The sun is somewhere in the sky. Probably not much is going on around you. That's the real world.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  Yes, kind of. But each platform's mechanics encourage certain behaviours over others. The Twitter website (not the culture of it's users), as an advertising-funded platform, is highly geared to optimise for 'engagement', which encourages all of these behaviours.
  - sph 3y ago
    I would have agreed until the explosion of Mastodon, where it's become apparent that even without engagement algorithms, the culture wars and other nonsense are thriving on that platform as well. We blamed the Algorithm, but perhaps the issue was the users all along.
    - mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
      Here's how I see it. Maybe "the algorithm" was the problem initially, but the problem has since metastasised into every aspect of American culture, and so removing the original tumour is no longer as helpful.
    - itsoktocry 3y ago
      >We blamed the Algorithm, but perhaps the issue was the users all along. always-has-been.jpg It's one of the strangest things about the meta-conversation regarding social media. The "left" (I'll use quotes because these things aren't strictly defined) thinks that, for example, anti-immigration sentiment or support for Trump comes from "Russian bot farms" fooling the public. It's unfathomable to some people that smart, good, hard-working people could hold those views.
consumer451 3y ago
What kind of stuff are you into? I follow EU gov stuff, a bunch of scientists, Neil Gaiman, Molly White, bunch of journalists. Also, did you scroll all the way through https://bsky.app/feeds https://bsky.app/feeds for various interests? Oh, and one really useful thing that I found for discovery is the little + icon to the left of the Follow button on people's profile pages. It shows suggestions of who they are following, so I built up a bunch of good follows that way.
- dijit 3y ago
  I'm not accusing you of this, but I do find it sort of odd how the victim blaming in social media goes. "My default experience is openly hostile and promotes division" "My experience is that if you tailor it then it's very valuable". "OK, but the default experience was hostile and I don't have the means to coerce the good vibes experience" "Skill issue". It happens on every conversation about Twitter, less so regarding TikTok and co. But it's an interesting pattern I see all too often.
  - consumer451 3y ago
    Yeah, I am just a user trying to help someone navigate a new platform, which is still being developed and is probably not ideal. Troubleshooting does fit common patterns maybe?
    - dijit 3y ago
      As mentioned, I'm not accusing you of doing it. I think it's right to try to help people, I often mark things as "Not Interested" if it's divisive, but since we tend to have less control about emotional responses, we all have a sense that we have a duty to fairness and with the understanding that humans tend to want to correct bad information rather than letting it go uncorrected (that's why the best way to get an answer to your question is to post an incorrect answer rather than ask). -- combined, these issues mean you will likely interact in some way with the divisive content if it's delivered to you. Seeking to actively diminish it is difficult, it requires thought and intentional moves to ignore and flag content as uninteresting or to heavily curate your feeds. This, I feel, is why it's victim blaming; because the intent of the media platform by default is to engage and they do so by baiting emotional or corrective responses in the interest of fairness.
whywhywhywhy 3y ago
> Is that the normal experience Yes, this is the tricky thing about internet communities. Bluesky is mostly made up of older school Twitter addicts angry at Twitter's takeover and yeah all they tend to talk about is that and culture war adjacent stuff. Shows a bit of the naivety of the Bluesky devs they didn't clock this as a problem and try and help people who don't want to talk about that find their community on there.
- itsoktocry 3y ago
  >Bluesky is mostly made up of older school Twitter addicts angry at Twitter's takeover Exactly. Bluesky was born in the shadow of Elon taking over Twitter. But Twitter still exists, so who went to Bluesky? A lot of people who disagree with Elon's (recent) politics. The politics of Bluesky will reflect that.
lbeltrame 3y ago
One of the reasons I entered an apparently very focused Mastodon instance and left after two months. I was absolutely not interested in discussing politics, let alone culture wars that are absolutely incomprehensible to me. It doesn't surprise me that BlueSky goes in the same direction, to be honest.
emayljames 3y ago
If you mean "culture wars" as in the right leaning people who are obsessed with attacking minority groups, that is fine. If you mean said minority groups just trying to exist in a space without harrasment then that is not fine at all.
- edm0nd 3y ago
  both can be fine and part of culture wars.
- j4yav 3y ago
  I wasn’t referring to minorities existing without harassment. Not even sure where that came from, but jumping to that sort of conclusion is exactly what I’m talking about.
yashasolutions 3y ago
I think it is normal. I have tried to find other creators or content source, but the topics I care about (mostly engineering and education) are under-represented on Bluesky. It is probably due to how Bluesky was populated - a specific demographic of twitter were the first movers to bluesky, and it has attracted more of the same. I guess there is a market for this. As a side note on Thread and Mastodon: the experience there was different. Thread has a larger tech community so there is actually interesting content (for me at least) and Mastodon, it really depends on the instance, but even on the first instance (mastodon.social) you can find good content if you search by hashtag, and you can find some real nice people to follow (and since it's the multiverse, you can follow from any instance anyway) so it's all about building the social graph you want)
fidotron 3y ago
It amazes me the extent to which the existence of BlueSky has improved my Twitter experience. It went from unusable to all the nonsense moving somewhere else and safely avoidable. Let people argue in their own bubbles and leave the rest of us in peace.
- itsoktocry 3y ago
  >It went from unusable to all the nonsense moving somewhere else and safely avoidable. You mean you moved from a place that showed content you disagree with, to your own bubble. You can admit that without claiming everything outside your point of view is silly.
  - fidotron 3y ago
    No, all sides of the US culture wars disappeared. It used to be that regardless of your position, even active disinterest, this stuff was forced on you, and now that is not the case.

by _teyd 3y ago

jddj 3y ago

It was billed as a twitter alternative

GaggiX 3y ago

Finally a real Twitter competitor.

MoSattler 3y ago

I am so tired of it. I wish there was an AI filter for social media that let me block out this stuff.

finnjohnsen2 3y ago
When USA reelect Trump my willingness to pay for such a service is infinite

finnjohnsen2 3y ago

Thanks for the warning

unpopularopp 3y ago

And unfortunately I see the same shit on Mastodon as well 24/7…

scopeh 3y ago
I don't think there is any algorithm magic in mastodon. your feed is who you follow and who they boost. maybe its time for you to have a clean up.
- unpopularopp 3y ago
  Just like OP I also mean the recommended stuff https://mastodon.social/explore https://mastodon.social/explore Same shit as on Twitter and Bluesky
  - rakoo 3y ago
    This is the recommended stuff as seen from on one single server. It doesn't represent one's experience. The whole point of Mastodon is to only get what you want, not the rest. It's easy to build your own network of sources. The explore feed is useless :)
  - mgbmtl 3y ago
    Yeah I have an account on that Mastodon server and even logged-in, that page shows popular (rage-bait) content regardless of my personal preferences. It filtered by language but not region (so it was mostly content from another continent). However, my actual Mastodon feed only has content from people I follow, without any recommendations, and that works great.
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    Oh, huh, I didn't know anyone used that.

jug 3y ago

It had nothing of the sort when the network was younger but it seems like everything steers towards that sort of political profile eventually, regardless of name. And 2024 is probably going to be particularly nasty for obvious reasons.

sph 3y ago

Twitter-style social media has become its own subculture, made of: - people who like to argue online - people who can easily turn any complex topic into a 100-odd character slogans - people who like to put the world into hashtag-sized boxes - masochists who enjoy getting into the ragebait du jour - a vanishing minority who didn't get the memo and somehow the Algorithm has kept them in a bubble of sanity - bots Coincidentally most of these groups, including bots, really love the entire US culture war bullshit. They're the one that are keeping it alive, with the help of journalists, the last category of people that live on that type of social media and then report on some newspaper @oneidiotontwitter's troll post as if it were public opinion, in a perpetual cycle of mental and cultural noise. --- Look outside. People are going about their lives. The sun is somewhere in the sky. Probably not much is going on around you. That's the real world.

madeofpalk 3y ago
Yes, kind of. But each platform's mechanics encourage certain behaviours over others. The Twitter website (not the culture of it's users), as an advertising-funded platform, is highly geared to optimise for 'engagement', which encourages all of these behaviours.
- sph 3y ago
  I would have agreed until the explosion of Mastodon, where it's become apparent that even without engagement algorithms, the culture wars and other nonsense are thriving on that platform as well. We blamed the Algorithm, but perhaps the issue was the users all along.
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
    Here's how I see it. Maybe "the algorithm" was the problem initially, but the problem has since metastasised into every aspect of American culture, and so removing the original tumour is no longer as helpful.
  - itsoktocry 3y ago
    >We blamed the Algorithm, but perhaps the issue was the users all along. always-has-been.jpg It's one of the strangest things about the meta-conversation regarding social media. The "left" (I'll use quotes because these things aren't strictly defined) thinks that, for example, anti-immigration sentiment or support for Trump comes from "Russian bot farms" fooling the public. It's unfathomable to some people that smart, good, hard-working people could hold those views.

consumer451 3y ago

What kind of stuff are you into? I follow EU gov stuff, a bunch of scientists, Neil Gaiman, Molly White, bunch of journalists. Also, did you scroll all the way through https://bsky.app/feeds https://bsky.app/feeds for various interests? Oh, and one really useful thing that I found for discovery is the little + icon to the left of the Follow button on people's profile pages. It shows suggestions of who they are following, so I built up a bunch of good follows that way.

dijit 3y ago
I'm not accusing you of this, but I do find it sort of odd how the victim blaming in social media goes. "My default experience is openly hostile and promotes division" "My experience is that if you tailor it then it's very valuable". "OK, but the default experience was hostile and I don't have the means to coerce the good vibes experience" "Skill issue". It happens on every conversation about Twitter, less so regarding TikTok and co. But it's an interesting pattern I see all too often.
- consumer451 3y ago
  Yeah, I am just a user trying to help someone navigate a new platform, which is still being developed and is probably not ideal. Troubleshooting does fit common patterns maybe?
  - dijit 3y ago
    As mentioned, I'm not accusing you of doing it. I think it's right to try to help people, I often mark things as "Not Interested" if it's divisive, but since we tend to have less control about emotional responses, we all have a sense that we have a duty to fairness and with the understanding that humans tend to want to correct bad information rather than letting it go uncorrected (that's why the best way to get an answer to your question is to post an incorrect answer rather than ask). -- combined, these issues mean you will likely interact in some way with the divisive content if it's delivered to you. Seeking to actively diminish it is difficult, it requires thought and intentional moves to ignore and flag content as uninteresting or to heavily curate your feeds. This, I feel, is why it's victim blaming; because the intent of the media platform by default is to engage and they do so by baiting emotional or corrective responses in the interest of fairness.

whywhywhywhy 3y ago

> Is that the normal experience Yes, this is the tricky thing about internet communities. Bluesky is mostly made up of older school Twitter addicts angry at Twitter's takeover and yeah all they tend to talk about is that and culture war adjacent stuff. Shows a bit of the naivety of the Bluesky devs they didn't clock this as a problem and try and help people who don't want to talk about that find their community on there.

itsoktocry 3y ago
>Bluesky is mostly made up of older school Twitter addicts angry at Twitter's takeover Exactly. Bluesky was born in the shadow of Elon taking over Twitter. But Twitter still exists, so who went to Bluesky? A lot of people who disagree with Elon's (recent) politics. The politics of Bluesky will reflect that.

lbeltrame 3y ago

One of the reasons I entered an apparently very focused Mastodon instance and left after two months. I was absolutely not interested in discussing politics, let alone culture wars that are absolutely incomprehensible to me. It doesn't surprise me that BlueSky goes in the same direction, to be honest.

emayljames 3y ago

If you mean "culture wars" as in the right leaning people who are obsessed with attacking minority groups, that is fine. If you mean said minority groups just trying to exist in a space without harrasment then that is not fine at all.

edm0nd 3y ago
both can be fine and part of culture wars.
j4yav 3y ago
I wasn’t referring to minorities existing without harassment. Not even sure where that came from, but jumping to that sort of conclusion is exactly what I’m talking about.

yashasolutions 3y ago

I think it is normal. I have tried to find other creators or content source, but the topics I care about (mostly engineering and education) are under-represented on Bluesky. It is probably due to how Bluesky was populated - a specific demographic of twitter were the first movers to bluesky, and it has attracted more of the same. I guess there is a market for this. As a side note on Thread and Mastodon: the experience there was different. Thread has a larger tech community so there is actually interesting content (for me at least) and Mastodon, it really depends on the instance, but even on the first instance (mastodon.social) you can find good content if you search by hashtag, and you can find some real nice people to follow (and since it's the multiverse, you can follow from any instance anyway) so it's all about building the social graph you want)

fidotron 3y ago

It amazes me the extent to which the existence of BlueSky has improved my Twitter experience. It went from unusable to all the nonsense moving somewhere else and safely avoidable. Let people argue in their own bubbles and leave the rest of us in peace.

itsoktocry 3y ago
>It went from unusable to all the nonsense moving somewhere else and safely avoidable. You mean you moved from a place that showed content you disagree with, to your own bubble. You can admit that without claiming everything outside your point of view is silly.
- fidotron 3y ago
  No, all sides of the US culture wars disappeared. It used to be that regardless of your position, even active disinterest, this stuff was forced on you, and now that is not the case.