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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

It always comes back to the userbase. I don't know how many times technologists need to learn the lesson that normal people simply don't care about ideological technical principles like decentralization and often actually prefer the benefits of centralized systems like ease of use and typically stronger moderation. And when it comes to social media, businesses are naturally going to end up prioritizing the desires of the majority of their userbase.

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> It always comes back to the userbase. I don't know how many times technologists need to learn the lesson that normal people simply don't care about ideological technical principles like decentralization and often actually prefer the benefits of centralized systems like ease of use and typically stronger moderation.

The choice need not be limited to the familiar corporate hellscape vs decentralized usability nightmare dichotomy. Middle grounds can exist if we want them to.

I've seen a lot of general support for the criticisms and concepts described in this article:

https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/

Anyone who builds what they describe there can expect it to take off faster than ever.

Oh hah, I guess my blog post came a month after this one. Near-identical subject matter.

[0] https://abner.page/post/exit-the-feed/

I think more important than usability is the lack of moderation on some websites

Correction: businesses are naturally going to end up prioritizing the desires of the majority of their customers

And for social media that isn't their userbase.

That remains to be seen. Typically, the userbase is the product for a social media company, not their customers. Which means without a sizable enough userbase, there is nothing to actually sell to their customers. Bluesky has claimed to be different, but they are very much still in the early phase of trying to attract enough users so they need to cater to those users' priorities and decentralization simply isn't a priority that will attract many users.

Businesses are naturally going to end up prioritizing the desires of the majority of their customers and for “free”, ad-supported[0] social media that isn’t their userbase.

I’d like to see Bluesky’s long-term business plan and what they will do when someone inevitably wants return on investment.

[0] Yes, this describes all of current social media, but it doesn’t have to be this way. This business model should not be legal: as long as there is one “free” social media platform, that is the platform that is going to be used, simply because even $1 is infinitely more than $0 and no one can compete with free.

common people arent really using twitter or bluesky that much anyways. its just the crazies that are on there.

Always was.

It's why I found it so dismaying when we went through years of apparently serious newspapers reporting on every twitter-storm as if it was important. Yes, it was a good if unreliable source of breaking news, but the general noise of people fighting back and forwards about whatever it was that week ... was just noise, among a relatively small group of motivated crazies. Using it as a societal barometer just results in skewed coverage and an emphasis on American social issues that aren't necessarily as relevant everywhere else.

yep thats why these platforms are so toxic. bunch of lunatics locked in an asylum together.

It's shockingly common for people to cite Twitter and Bluesky posts as evidence of what the average American of political party X or Y believes. I do not understand how they came to be so deluded.

Usually those people are literally quoting representatives of those parties. They are, wait for it, representative of their respective parties.

I don't need to go find loonies. I can get on Twitter or Truth Social and get it from the horse's mouth.

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