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Comment by eek2121 | Hacker News Reader

Is he on bluesky or another platform? There is a ton of folks, including myself, who won't use "X" at all, some political, some due to other reasons. For me? All of the above and plus they demand that I install an app on my phone, something I am not willing to do, especially since most of the folks I've followed went to Bluesky, AND I've found way more awesome folks there than I ever did on X. I'm not shilling Bluesky, it is just the biggest/most widely accepted platform in this social area if you exclude meta/facebook.

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It's not just the user hostile website that forces their app down your throat. It's also the algorithm that decides what you get to see (and thus, what you think). We know it's biased. The creator doesn't exactly keep the fact secret that it's being manipulated to agree with a certain agenda.

And the owner is despicable.

But he made a flying car!

Let's be honest, it's probably just a falling with style car.

That's probably true for all major platforms and companies, depending on your framework, ideology and the particular political/moral lens you choose to use.

Fair.

For FF users I recommend https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/control-panel...

> By default, your Home timeline will be the reverse-chronological "Following" timeline, which will only contain tweets and quote tweets from the people you follow. The algorithmic "For you" timeline will be hidden

Can you substantiate the claims about the supposedly biased algorithm and what exactly the "creator" said about it?

In my experience it isn't noticeably worse than other platforms, and I'm not aware of concrete complaints such as the incidents with Grok's system prompt, which is a different product.

My "For You" twitter feed is literally 100% pro-Trump bot posts. The site is entirely unusable unless you just follow specific people and use "Following" rather than "For You". I'd guess that less than 10% of the site traffic is human.

The algorithm will also basically ignore you unless you pay for a blue checkmark premium account (what used to be verified). It's like being shadow banned - you can post, but most people will not see you.

It's also my experience that visibility of my comments is quite low without paying.

Only occasionally, once the comment picks up some likes, more people view it.

I don't have that issue with my For You, it's mostly tech.

My "for you" has zero pro-Trump posts. It's quite easy to train the algo. Just click not interested, show less on that stuff and follow the odd person you like, say the author of this post. Within a day or two it'll have learned.

The more obvious bias is towards Premium subscribers over us freeloaders. The reply-ranking algorithm was a nightmare for a while; they strictly adhered to the rules of gold check > blue check > normal account. It's still not great, but eventually they added enough slack to let normal accounts with good quips outrank 30 paying users saying "lol", and tweaked some things so it's no longer so easy to shill tshirts/whatever by tagging Grok for the gold check double-boost.

But they're still reticent to ban any Premium account without a reason good enough to give up the $8/month. I have some sympathy for trying to moderate in the era of LLMs that can generate perfectly on-topic replies that even take images into context. But I think they need a more targeted approach against OnlyFans bots replying to popular tweets with a standard formula of some sexual reference and an insane claim. Sometimes they're less sexual and more straight up horrifying [0]:

> i breed mantises for fun and once tried grafting two ooths together just to see what hatched. got a whole clutch of nymphs that all just twitched in circles and died by day two. butterfly chimera energy hits different when it's your own disaster.

The other bot replies to the same OP are the more typical sexualized sort; they tend to reply in swarms.

[0] https://x.com/ariexsha/status/2110924715103514871

Here's just one example: https://www.itechguides.com/elon-says-hes-working-to-fix-gro...

AFAIK X published their algorithm which more or less just says: "we use grok to decide which posts to show".

You can just follow on the web: https://www.goodfire.com/research && https://www.goodfire.com/blog.

Oh man, I wish everyone just moved somewhere else, specially if they are aiming to make something public. You can choose any server on bluesky nowadays. Scientists in Europe, please check out https://mu.social which is hosted by an european open foundation

The way X tries to force me to use an app is very creepy.

Bluesky from John Gruber, say is nothing like X, and i don't doubt it one bit. You are def shilling it.

Bluesky is closer to Truth Social, but for Blue MAGA, though has non-political communities as well.

I left Bluesky because they hid their VC funding from the community for almost a year and now a partner from the VC is running the show as CEO. Their CTO has also attacked me personally here on HN because I wrote criticism of the new, weak, permissioned data proposal. These are not the folks to bring us better social media. I expect it to linger on like Mastodon, never moving beyond a few million people.

Don't know much about it, but generally the research community there is better in my experience in terms of thoughtful researcher discussion.

Twitter is better for hot takes (though still crowded with "thought leaders" that don't know what they are talking about. Twitter also makes it impossible to avoid political propaganda and (weirdly) violent content.

How is it not "like X"? It's practically a knock-off outside of the userbase.

However, Bsky people really hate AI last I checked.

eh, there are plenty of AI researchers on there. Also a handy "AI haters" labeler you can subscribe to to filter out people who just want to yell.

The labeler thing is cool; I really like ATproto because you can do interesting things with it. If I'm honest, though, I mainly like Bluesky because I don't get called slurs on there.

Here’s a starter pack for some AI people on Bluesky: https://go.bsky.app/L71zwey

There are some people that hate AI on Bluesky, but it’s nothing like Mastodon from what I’ve heard.

There are a heap of pro-AI people on Bluesky, it's fine

That was my experience as well. I can't believe I went all the way from Mastodon, to Bluesky, and back to X and finding that X somehow now had friendlier people and less hate than Bluesky.

There is a small group of AI people on Bluesky, some are nice, but some are... quite behind the curve.

If Bluesky was a nicer place, I'd prefer to be there because of the ability to make third party clients, and atproto. But all the info is on X, and they do a surprisingly good job with the For You feed now.

Also just curating your feed (i.e. judiciously using blocking and muting) and instead viewing just "Following" removes something like 99.9% of all common complaints re: Twitter, while still giving you access to a much less-biased (or easier to equally-bias through curation: e.g. you can't get an accurate view of RW ideology following only BlueSky posters) and far larger public square than anything else.

Curating your feed also works on BlueSky. Sure there are anti AI people there, but the crazy ones I just block. It’s really not that hard. And I know there’s no algo behind what I’m seeing.

I do admit that there is some FOMO, but that’s what HN is for, to surface that stuff so I don’t have to go read it on X.

I choose Bsky because I’m not giving eyeballs and money to an evil toddler. I’m already doing enough of that with my 401k and taxes.

You can certainly use both X/Twitter and BlueSky (and Mastodon, for that matter), and I did for a while.

Just if you curate your Twitter feed, you gain very little extra from BlueSky or Mastodon, and if you choose only the latter two, you get a much more biased and limited set of views. (Twitter has plenty of crazies from all parts of the political spectrum, but BlueSky and Mastodon run mostly left, and have much, much smaller user bases). HN also is extremely limited in what it discusses, so it doesn't make up for what is missed by ignoring X either, IMO. X is still one of the most efficient general public squares by a long shot.

If you can't stand Elon and don't care about what you're missing on X though, I can fully understand just not bothering with it. You aren't missing much.

Yeah unfortunately bluesky turning out that way was always inevitable. It was created because of-- and filled with people motivated by-- a deep emotional reaction to X.

Gonna sound total boomer here but I've never used any of it and feel like I haven't missed anything. Or maybe I'd be flying spaceships by now if I scrolled through X every day, who knows

Your not - I always found it a terrible version of a forum with bizarre threading

Not as much as Mastodon does!

A lot of people in general hate AI. Twitter is a bit of bubble in that regard (and many other)

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/12/key-findi...

https://nitter.netbub.com/nickcammarata

You don’t need Twitter app on your phone, web works seamlessly.

Their new "Prove you're a human" is the problem here. Once you get that prompt once your only option is to install the app and upload biometrics.

Fuck that.

How come I can’t downvote this? Totally off topic

Not sure what you're talking about. I strictly use the X website and it works great.

The fascism, of course.

The website is so bad that, before xcancel was hit with a C&D, it was faster to stop an x.com page load, edit the URL to xcancel.com even with my phone's on-screen keyboard, and load that, than to wait for the real x.com version.

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