>The social media site that many sought as an alternative to X fosters groupthink and pointless activism.
I'm not sure what else someone would expect from modern social media. People keep thinking that the problem with the internet is that people are falling into the "wrong" crowd, or getting the "wrong" ideas. This is very old fashioned thinking and relies on real-world intuition. (imagine a good kid who fell into a bad group of friends and fell to a life of crime. This is effectively what a lot of people seem to think happens with online extremism.) The problem with extremism online is the methods of communication themselves.
Modern social media works by grouping and virally spreading ideas. This is similar in some ways to how communication has historically worked, except the pace and the reach does weird things to people. I'd argue that when you can share and like and there's an algorithmic feed, you're _always_ going to see moves towards extremism, group think, virality, outrage, etc. It's inherent to how these technologies work. In real-world communities, these effects are at play, but they are tempered by other factors. For example, just try going on a political rant against the person at who's home you're eating dinner. You wouldn't do it, you wouldn't want to be rude, to be a bad guest. But blurting out something outrageous or extreme online carries no such feedback. Combine that with a format that puts a LOT of people in contact with each other and then surfaces anything that is "engaging" and you're going to get the same sort of thing you have on Twitter / X.
The saddest part of the Twitter exodus post-Musk is that a lot of people seem to think that Twitter was a great place until Musk ruined it. It had a lot of the same sort of problems and evils, but perhaps for different targets and topics.
Twitter was extremely valuable to me pre-Musk. I followed a lot of creative and technical people doing work I felt was great or valuable, and often it gave me insight into trends well before they occurred. It also made accessible brief discussions with people who normally were difficult to reach.
My own personal work was interesting enough to others that the right people shared it and I ended up with some major executives and founders in tech following my small account just because they found my work interesting. I also got many job offers just through sharing my work and having positive discussions with people.
Now so much of that is destroyed. The algorithm rarely surfaces novel and interesting things from people you don't yet follow, it instead surfaces blue-check accounts trying to be full time influencers. If a large account posts something you can't add insight to the conversation because your comment will be far below blue check accounts responding with arbitrary nonsense for engagement farming.
Many of the most interesting people on the platform have bailed out because there's just so much toxicity and distracting stress tolerated on the platform now, and no way to self-moderate it beyond ineffectually banning individual accounts.
Twitter was imperfect before Musk, but still extremely valuable in my circle. Now I feel Musk views the platform primarily as a way to manipulate social and political outcomes rather than a place that enriches its users.
This was during the same era that you had many people losing their jobs or reputations because of outrage mobs on the platform. I wouldn't claim that Twitter had no positive aspects at all, but that the negatives far outweighed the positive. (and yes, the outrage mobs are at least just as bad, potentially worse, but just pointed at different targets.)
The toxicity that you're decrying was also there before, maybe just not in your circles or aimed at you.
Frankly I always felt like the "outrage mobs" were almost always consequences catching up to people who did bad things. In a few cases sure it wasn't, but in most cases it was just jerks upset they couldn't just use their power to get away with their behavior.
I remember some of the uproar from tech folks getting criticism in that era. They were mad at things like articles coming out about toxic workplace culture at startups, or reports on pseudo-fraudulent behavior at startups. Many of those people said stuff like "defend founders". Years later those same people who whined about consequences were some of the first to also buy into crypto scams and use their power to try to pressure people into hyping up and not criticizing crypto.
That behavior made me very cynical about a lot of the VC world and much of tech in general. In general I wish those people had more reputational damage for using their public presence to push tribalism in pursuit of power or scamming people of their money.
I have a harm time taking the submission at face value. It's wild to me to see MSNBC / MS NOW casting such stones.
There doesn't seem to be any attempt there to find merit. Well other than the brief second paragraph, which just notes:
> and I especially enjoy fewer neo-Nazis advocating violence responding to my posts.
There's no looking at how there's a public API, there's no looking at how there are other apps all working on atproto. They don't cite any of the bad experiences where they felt wronged. It's a hit piece.
> Bluesky promotes groupthink. It’s easy to feel an illusory sense of consensus when most everyone seemingly agrees on a surface level on who the villains are. But political thinking cannot be refined without intense interrogation, friction and dissent. Bluesky’s mainstream scene is cocooned, insulated against sustained confrontation from either its left or its right.
And it's just wrong. I love this challenge here, I think this speaks to an amazing virtuous and right stance. But I see it all the time. There is a lot of agreeing about how wild the Supreme Court has been in tearing down hundreds of years of law, how ridiculously off the map the GOP is, how batshit ludicrous this grifter pedophile in the white house is. But that's all true actually? And I do see a lot of debate and engagement and questioning, discussion of topics. Sometimes it is a contest of the loudest typer winning, but overall I find Bluesky really far more interested in good engagement and discussion, better at looking for signal than anywhere else. (And we have Will Stancil posts to debate, lol.)
There's a non-zero chance that Bluesky feels boring because it's actually a somewhat reasonable place, with reasonable people. X wants to be radical and extreme. Rage bait and madness keep people engaged. A lot. It's an advantage for a site to be unreasonable alas. Oh and the new management keeps promoting the nazis & is an incredible dirtbag gutter racist & provoker. Who builds CSAM making AI.
It's not going to have the same "diverse" spirit, Zeeshan Aleem. You go on and on throwing dirt. It's unengaged in that activity, doing malice out of hand without actually building the case. I struggle to consider the article in good faith. This feels like propoganda. It feels manufactured.
I'm not sure what else someone would expect from modern social media. People keep thinking that the problem with the internet is that people are falling into the "wrong" crowd, or getting the "wrong" ideas. This is very old fashioned thinking and relies on real-world intuition. (imagine a good kid who fell into a bad group of friends and fell to a life of crime. This is effectively what a lot of people seem to think happens with online extremism.) The problem with extremism online is the methods of communication themselves.
Modern social media works by grouping and virally spreading ideas. This is similar in some ways to how communication has historically worked, except the pace and the reach does weird things to people. I'd argue that when you can share and like and there's an algorithmic feed, you're _always_ going to see moves towards extremism, group think, virality, outrage, etc. It's inherent to how these technologies work. In real-world communities, these effects are at play, but they are tempered by other factors. For example, just try going on a political rant against the person at who's home you're eating dinner. You wouldn't do it, you wouldn't want to be rude, to be a bad guest. But blurting out something outrageous or extreme online carries no such feedback. Combine that with a format that puts a LOT of people in contact with each other and then surfaces anything that is "engaging" and you're going to get the same sort of thing you have on Twitter / X.
The saddest part of the Twitter exodus post-Musk is that a lot of people seem to think that Twitter was a great place until Musk ruined it. It had a lot of the same sort of problems and evils, but perhaps for different targets and topics.