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Comment by reducesuffering | Hacker News Reader

There's been a large tech migration to BlueSky the past few days. Initially I was really excited as it was mostly high signal people, reminiscent of HN or early Twitter. However, I quickly encountered there's a large existing userbase that adopted it because of lefty / anti-Musk echo chamber views.

Matt Yglesias, a milquetoast centrist liberal Harris voter, founder of Vox, had his comments entirely brigaded by leftists doxing his old house, threatening him with hammers, and the highest liked comment is: "matty i hate to break it to you but the majority of this website would chase you around with a shovel" https://bsky.app/profile/manateejay.bsky.social/post/3k7x4lk...

You'd think if the milieu was intellectual, you'd have some reasonable debates about policy but it's all "gtfo" and threats.

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Expecting ideological consistency from twelve million people seems like wishful thinking.

I didn't indicate that at all. What I expect in a platform I'd want to use is thoughtful discussion from diverse perspectives. Leaving right-wing echo chamber filled with godawful comments to join left-wing echo chamber filled with godawful comments isn't much of an improvement. I think HN treads this far better.

"echo chambers" are groups with ideological consistency. Expecting everyone to prioritize "thoughtful discussion" is asking for consistency: some people aren't interested in discussion. A few accounts saying the same stuff doesn't mean that all the accounts are.

I'm not saying anything said against Matty are good or bad, just that like, you're taking one incident and claiming that the whole site is one thing. It's really not.

It's not just one incident though. This was over Matt's entire Bluesky tenure and there are many more examples elsewhere like: https://x.com/jessesingal/status/1849556209956769937/photo/1

I don't think you'll find almost any post in the 50% right of US political opinion that wouldn't be viciously attacked as a way to enforce conformity rather than debate its merits. That's an echo chamber to me and most people I reckon.

There's still a large lefty userbase but centrists are growing on the network and I think at this point in time that kind of behavior won't be tolerated anymore because there's enough diversity in the network to push back. In my experience Bluesky is a lot less homogeneous than the other splinter networks like Mastodon or Lemmy which all converged on the same exact nerd archetype. YMMV but if you're a centrist I would certainly try the network out.

I’d say a large part of that is quickly dissolving —- they had less than 2M users at the time, and now have over 13M. I’m no Matt Iglesias fan and I don’t expect him to ever be given a warm welcome by any zoomer-dominated space, but obviously threats are an easy no-go.

Hopefully they get a handle on that; a reputation for lax moderation re:violence could easily deflate their sudden hype.

Yeah it's explicitly against our mod rules. https://bsky.social/about/support/community-guidelines

That sounds nearly indistinguishable from the caliber of bottom-barrel discussion that happens on Twitter/X. Not to say it's justifiable on either platform, but I can't really recall any threads on Twitter promoting high-value content over funny reactionary gobbledygook.

I'm in agreement there about the first part, although I still find some high value thread on Twitter. Was hopeful BlueSky was going to be a lot better but I'd rather not have to sift through crud on either. Hopeful one day that can be true.

I was not a big Twitter user, so this may have been possible there as well, but...

I have been really enjoying the ability to create my own user Lists, and then being able to pin them to my Feeds. I have one for Astro, one for Web Dev, etc.

The next feature that I really want to see is the ability to move all users in a Starter Pack directly into one of my own Lists. That's a nice way to 10x my list size by interest group. The coolest thing is that I just created a decent feature request for that, and I know it will at least be considered.

Interest groups are something that I have realized is why I still come back to Reddit a lot. Nothing else does that as well as Reddit. While big Bsky Lists are not the same thing, it does scratch that same itch.

I could imagine user curated Lists becoming a bigger thing on Bksy, as far as finding other user's great lists and pinning them to my own feeds.

Do you find it interesting to browse for interests specifically on Bluesky? I'm very selective about who I follow and so my chronological feed is very relevant to me. There's a couple folks I have that push the boundaries of how activist-y I want my feed to be, but they're not so out there that I get angry (and if they are they get unfollowed.) Just curious if you find more value in the List approach than a chronological one.

Yes, mostly why I use it. In my case, I also follow too many people for the Following feed to show me everything, by everyone.

Also, sometimes I am in the mood for one nerdy topic, while other times I am in the mood for another.

Apologies for missing your reply for so long.

Thanks for the reply! I'll try the list approach myself. The Mutuals list is one of my favorites because I catch stuff I wouldn't otherwise.

Unfortunately Twitter Matts (Matt Yglesias, Matt Bruenig etc) are an invasive species to blue sky, and the native species don’t know that annoyance and anger is what they feed on.

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