Yeah, I'm surprised by how many here are responding with weird Adobe rants. They posted fairly innocuous stuff, were attacked, and ultimately chose to abandon the platform as a result.
This sounds like a bigger indictment of the platform than anything to do with Adobe.
Since when did a damn website have to be a "platform"? Did anyone ask to chat with Time Warner on the public AOL chatrooms of the 90s? Were Digg users interested in hearing from Blockbuster in the 2000s?
Adobe could try to offer virtual "office hours" with employees helping people learn to use the software, give something back to their users. Instead they immediately treated it like another marketing channel with a formulaic and lazy engagement bait question that I'm sure they thought would work the same way it does on Twitter and Instagram.
Platforms which drive away normal users with unwarranted hate become increasingly concentrated with toxic people over time.
If bluesky don’t find a way to escape this spiral of driving away normal people and attracting toxic people it’s going to become a sort of left-wing 4chan.
Have a peek at the Facebook comments on Adobe's account. The sentiment is the same. We live in an economy where customers have no outlet to have their concerns heard, while companies set up shop on communal forums to blast their bullhorn. Why should communication be one way?
It's interesting that you see this as a moderation issue for Bluesky rather than an opportunity for a billion dollar brand to rethink the way they communicate online.
I'm addressing the assertion that mean comments will scare off 'normal people'. It hasn't yet on Facebook, Reddit, Instagram etc. Brand pages get blasted everywhere, it comes with the territory.
Facebook has size and inertia. Bluesky is small so needs high status early adopters. Such people have reputations to maintain so will avoid toxic drama like Bluesky. The sites are in different life stages.
Twitter/X doesn’t have a problem with corporate accounts. They murdered reach on brand accounts in the algorithm loooong ago (mid 2010s), you basically will never see company tweets in the feed even if you follow them.
I think it’s more the fact that bluesky’s core demographic are angry political obsessives (who are angry enough about politics to join a new social network over said politics). I can’t think of a worse way to create a community of people than filtering by “I’m angry about political stuff.”
Turns out the old social norm of “don’t talk politics with neighbors” was an example of a good Chestertons fence.
I'm pretty left leaning and I don't like Bluesky. For me, it's too hostile and too much of an angry echo chamber. X is scattered wildly but I with muting I have been able to shape to get a more reasonable feed.
I don't understand why people struggle with either site. Follow only people you want to see. Both sites allow you to only see posts from those accounts. Problem solved.
There are a lot of people I'd love to see content from on all of the platforms who aren't where I want them to be, for a variety of reasons. That's not really a great argument.
Ok I guess I'll simplify the point for you: You can't follow the "people you want to see" if the platform is so hostile that the people you want to see are driven from it.
Being intolerant of soulless rent-seeking corporations doesn’t turn you into a cool person. It just shows you are intolerant.
There must be a name for the phenomenon when a minority escapes persecution and hate, and upon reaching their promised land become intolerant and hateful of any outside group.
This is IMO the problem. I don't use these sites to follow "content creators". For the most part I'm following normal people who happen to say things I find interesting.
I don't think they were saying it's a problem for people following content creators. It's more a problem for content creators, because they usually want the greatest reach possible, so they want to be on platforms that people use, which requires them to put up with the emotional swingings of the platforms' userbases.
If you want to say you don't care about having content creators on your platform, that's at least a coherent take. But you still have to think about the business models of the platforms that keep them around-- short of collecting payments from every ordinary user, there needs to be buy-in from someone wanting reach, whether that's corporate accounts, individual content creators, or someone else. And do you actually know all of those "normal people who happen to say things you find interesting" in real life, or did you find some of them online, i.e. they're basically influencers/content creators with you as an audience member?
That is indeed what I'm saying. I treat social media more like I treated Usenet back in the day. To me that's a superior model than the influencer model.
Then you decide if the positives outweigh the negatives and unfollow them or not.
This particular situation is why the only thing I miss from Twitter at this point is the ability to mute an account's reposts rather than the full account.
Same here. I'd agree with many of the political positions on Bluesky but it looks like the left equivalent of what Truth Social is on the right - Bluesky recently started publishing home addresses of DOGE employees, with the intent seeming to be to target them with violence.
As is the case with most ideological echo chambers, they devolve into struggle sessions. You find the same thing happening in the niche right-wing movement sections of twitter, it's just "this person is secretly indian/jewish" instead of "this person is secretly a racist/xyzphobe".
Twitter has the advantage of a broader range so you can escape that while bluesky is almost exclusively used based on strong ideological motivation. It's raison d'etre at this point is basically and highly political so this was bound to happen.
Likewise here, the amount of just pure made up crap/misinformation on X has definitely increased (perhaps because accounts get paid for views/engagement now) or the algorithm seems to push it more, but it's not an echo chamber.
I have at least 100 words on my X muted word list and it's just about usable.
This is a weird argument because Bluesky doesn't have a "feed"... by default you see only the people you follow unless you subscribe to specific other feeds.
So you followed a bunch of people you didn't like? That says more about you than the platform...
There's a default feed, and it's awful. Part of why I gave up on the site, it never seemed to "get" me, their features for tuning it don't work, and the alternative feeds weren't what I wanted at all.
If there's no feed there is no way to see any posts of people you might want to follow. So I highly doubt there isn't any feed.
YouTube did this for a while, up until a few months ago if you weren't logged in you'd literally just get an empty page and a search bar at the top as it wouldn't recommend any videos at all. That was temporary for a reason.
So far, Bluesky hasn't been inserting alt-right nutjobs into my feed like Twitter has.
Bluesky seems to focus on curating your own feed, to the point where mass blocklists will block hundreds or thousands of accounts, and not every blocklist is reliable. The "block first, ask questions later" approach is very freeing and I've been practicing it on social media long before it gained traction on Bluesky.
I expect the platform will be very painful for people who believe everyone should be subjected to their opinion (the people who will cry censorship because Reddit shadow-banned them). Good riddance, I'd say; they can be happy on Twitter with the rest of their kind.
On average, my experience has been a lot better. I'm guessing that's mostly because I had to fight and subdue Twitter to exclusively show me content from the people I follow, combined with social media's general attraction to alt-right nutjobs (and of course, Twitter's owner being an alt-right nutjob doesn't help either).
I find that the extremes of hostility are worse on bluesky, but the average skeet is much less hostile. And there's just straight up fewer skeets to be angry about.
Being familiar only with the street slang for "skeet" and not Bluesky's relatively recent adoption of "skeet" to mean "Bluesky post", my parser really had to do some work to try to understand this sentence.
I don’t use either lately because I’ve found that to be better for mental health overall, but to me it seemed that Bluesky was generally better about staying “on track” when it comes to showing relevant things, once trained. Xitter really, really likes to veer off course and so much as stopping scrolling for a second while an undesired post is on screen is enough for it to start showing more of the same type.
Bsky doesn’t have blue check replies which is a major point in its favor too. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a worthwhile blue check reply, it’s like if one purposefully dredged up the worst YouTube video comments they could find and pinned them at the top.
> but to me it seemed that Bluesky was generally better about staying “on track” when it comes to showing relevant things, once trained. Xitter really, really likes to veer off course and so much as stopping scrolling for a second while an undesired post is on screen is enough for it to start showing more of the same type.
What is your "track"? Bluesky seemed to be behaving exactly like you described Twitter, and the only explanation I could come up with was that the process of clicking on a post to block/mute the account (which is what I was told to do to curate my feed) was considered enough engagement that my feed should be more and more of what I don't want any of.
For me at least, Bsky acted that initially but it tapered off after a certain threshold of training. After that it was pretty solid.
For Xitter it didn’t matter how much I trained it, eventually it’d insert something I didn’t want to see and even the slightest hint of engagement would push my feed that direction. This could happen even after multiple weeks of training.
Bluesky currently has the kuro5hin "A Group Is It's Own Worst Enemy" effect going on. People who think they claimed land first believe that they get to define the future of the service for everyone else.
It's obnoxious, and if the service truly offers a real alternative to Twitter it needs to squash these brigading groups. I get that people don't want to see the posts of brands...so don't follow them. It's incredibly simple. I don't want furry content but I don't run around the platform complaining that some do.
Maybe it shouldn't have been surprising after Democrats removed abolishing the death penalty from their party platform, but all the Mangione stuff on bluesky was pretty sad to see.
It figures. One's knee-deep in censorship and the other one is more or less free-for-all, so you get high levels of hostility and an extreme range of ideas respectively from the get go.
If a new a Twitter/Bluesky replacement is to promote civil discourse, it will need to _restrict_ reach as a core feature. Which... seems antithetical to a social media platform. But as long as "enragement = engagement" holds true, each new social media platform will eventually devolve into the same kind of cesspool as its predecessors.
But...restricted reach is exactly how Bluesky works. People you follow show up in your feed, and only them. You can look at other feeds that are not as restricted, but you are making that choice.
People will just go back to Twitter/X, again, because despite all the falling-sky predictions it remains the single most important social media platform of our day. Governments around the world announce actual world-changing news on it - kind of all you need to know.
The Bluesky community is left-leaning and mainly consists of early adopters - basically, a group of active idealists. It's unsurprising that they are highly hostile toward a company with a history of exploitative behavior. Additionally, the current political situation significantly affects their emotional stability, negatively.
I mean, yeah, the place is a kind of minefield these days, but I don't blame people. It just happens.
Bluesky is the worst of old Twitter concentrated into one place. It's some weird mixture of the hall monitors of Mastodon crossed with wannabe members of the weather underground. Like a leftwing Gab full of only Kara Swisher and Taylor Lorenz types. This sort of of faux outrage at adobe is par for the course - its awful over there.
I have a much different experience on Twitter. It has a much higher tolerance for racism, misogyny, gay/transphobia, and wild conspiracies. It got much worse after the election and I finally bailed on it after the inauguration. I have not missed it.
Bluesky has all that but just in the anti direction. I was hoping for a more absolute of not disparaging anyone based on their race, gender, or sexual preference.
That it gives no-one pause to make disparaging remarks against white males, and violent allusions towards the outgroup are tolerated. That is not the vibe I want to see. I would hope that, starting fresh, there would be more cultural backlash against racial and gendered stereotypes and violence.
In my experience, that is completely untrue. I think it is more of "you are the company you keep" situation. Bluesky is obviously more socially liberal and therefore, IMO objectively smarter, nicer users and community. On Bluesky you have more control over your experience which makes me wonder how genuine your post is.
The last time I logged into my twitter account (which I use maybe once or twice a year to post about tech or complain to a customer service account) the first thing I saw was a paid ad espousing white nationalism and The Great Replacement conspiracy theory.
I have a very hard time believing that Bluesky is more hostile than Twitter.
