This is a pretty great, long form post about the structure of Bluesky, and how it’s largely kinda pretending to be decentralized at the moment. I’m not trying to make a dig at it. I’ve enjoyed the platform myself for a while, but it’s good to learn more about how it actually works.
This article was shared on Mastodon via its author here.
I’m staying on Lemmy and off Bluesky.
I seek and spread knowledge from/to helpful lemmings and not interested in another Twitter wannabe gossip app, hopping on the “decentralized” train to grain traction.
deleted by creator
I take it you tried out bsky and had a bad experience…
deleted by creator
Ew, a centrist
People on Reddit do circlejerks about their feeling of “actually discussing real things”, except it’s only a feeling.
It’s a bit like with printed media in societies that saw rapid growth of literacy, people literate in the first generation would trust anything printed as if it were solid fact. And many people still trust anything printed and kinda official as if it were fact and think that being critical of that is backwards and worth irony. It’s really impossible to talk to such.
In this case - the Web has mostly moved to formats disadvantaging any exchange of normal texts, and things like Reddit (or Lemmy) seem, for people not used to that, automatically better for nuanced opinions. They are not.
Just like you can print any text, My Struggle and Elders of Sion and The Capital included, you can make any bullshit look appealing on Reddit with sufficiently eloquent or smart-looking text.
FFS, people actually reading books and writing something knew this since before Gutenberg. How did we even come to this miserable situation.
deleted by creator
Before I left Reddit, for some time it had started to feel like every comment thread would quickly devolve into a chain of “um actually”. So much so that I stopped commenting. I didn’t need the hit to the ego and I have no interest in getting into internet arguments. I haven’t had that experience here, and ir’s encouraged me to participate far more than I did there.
This!
That…became an all too common upvoted reply. At one point Reddit was good, but for years it’s been sliding into enshitification.
deleted by creator
No, like I said, it’s an illusion among Redditors.
Both actively harmful due to the way human brains are wired. Putting pressure onto people actually having a spine, and provoking ape behavior from the rest.
It wasn’t one day. Soft censorship in favor of China and Democratic party and what not became a thing much earlier.
They all very circlejerks of some kind. The paradigm works this way.
Length of text and softness of moderation are good, but do not change the fact that any fool can write a long elaborate smart-looking text, that has nothing to do with honest discussion.
deleted by creator
You get likes for dumb shit. You get dislikes for angry dumb shit. You get a lot of likes for dangerous vile dumb shit.
What you get a lot of dislikes for is nuance and something that could sober the crowd up if they listened. Possibly dumb shit too, but correctly positioned to irritate the comfort of dangerous vile dumb shit.
No, opinions can only be expressed in a friendly conversation. Opinions are a systems of thought with all the accompanying context. You can’t possibly express an opinion while fighting someone.
I’ve just described what they say.
EDIT: BTW, about instincts - I’ve just turned off scores on Lemmy. You should try that, you’ll feel that you unexpectedly need to have your own opinion, very often - which means that with scores displayed you would not think.
deleted by creator
This sentence doesn’t make any sense. In a discussion all sides are equally contrarian.
This also doesn’t make sense ; any person providing a useful answer would read the comment itself and not trust crowd vote.
😂
I was on there for 10 years and it has been nothing but a massive circlejerk for the majority of the subs with obvious bots and astrosurfing.