The same problems continue no matter the platform.
Is it a fresh start for you and me, or for engagement clout chasing influencers making money off our attention?
Big time influencers and famous people who know how to build up a following, are now using tried and true things like engagement farming questions. Examples are asking the audience to recommend their favourite recipe or a good movie to watch on streaming, or a book to read. It’s funny to see long-time twitter hotshots reverting to these tricks starting out on bluesky.
I’m seeing a lot more people starting to point out, like I did last month, that the block lists circulating for Bluesky are questionable. If Bluesky is a decent platform that’s being managed well, you shouldn’t need to pre-block anyone like you did on Twitter to avoid being bombarded by it. All you should need to do is not follow, and unfollow anyone who’s reposting garbage stuff. And save the block button for nuisances who are deliberately trolling.
The other day something disappointing happened on Bluesky and I haven’t even been using it that much, though I’ve had the account for almost a year maybe. I was following someone on social media for years who posted a lot of nature content. And when they moved to Bluesky, then I followed them on Bluesky only to find the other day they were reposting “clever” posts by the author hotshot guy who a few years ago sent his alt-right fans after me. This famous guy posted a screenshot of some post of mine and held me up as an example of A Bad Person Online for criticizing a big shot famous person with a big following and hobnobbing with all the fancy people. I criticized a comment he made for its seemingly thoughtless disregard for disabled and high risk people. It’s apparently worse to criticize someone than for someone to be thoughtlessly cruel. So this guy’s alt-right type followers were for weeks telling me to commit suicide, saying gross things to me in DMs, and even harassing unwitting followers of mine, and I didn’t even know why at first, someone had to inform me of what had happened and why I was suddenly getting the mass trolling. This fancy author also accused me of “silencing” this bigshot scientist off of twitter, despite his huge platform, by merely voicing my concerns, as someone with no such platform. At least one woman with a huge platform backed him up too, even though she surely knew about the sexist harassment I was enduring because of all this. It was very disappointing. The thing is, this guy on bluesky who I was probably retweeting back on twitter, was probably also retweeting that horrid person who did that to me all the while, and I just didn’t know all that time because I had that author guy blocked. So here I was reposting content from someone who was boosting this gross guy, a published author with a huge following, who’d sent his legions of fans, mostly alt-right new atheist covid contrarian types, to come after me.
My point is that all the influencers, as well as the toxic people on twitter are moving over to bluesky because that’s where their targets are after all. They have other places where they congregate for their cozy community, and it’s not the open social media. Community activism doesn’t happen on the open unmoderated or lightly moderated anonymous social media with people prioritizing likes and subscribes and followers and attention farming. And posting online is not activism. Don’t rely on parasocial relationships with big shots. And it’s true that smaller groups in more moderated spaces are going to be more conducive to making friends – or plans. There’s a reason people form and like small chat groups. And also a reason why larger groups and forums need to have enforced rules.
Maybe over the past couple years if you’ve been on bluesky, it seemed like a more closed system. And nice in comparison to twitter because twitter is a total shitshow and everyone was boiled slowly like the apocryphal frog in the pot, so many people still don’t realize how bad it’s gotten. And bluesky at least has some moderation - and more importantly up until recently it was inhabited by primarily early adopters for a period of time, which creates a certain self selection of people. But it’s not going to be better just because. All the problems are migrating there, and the bots and sock puppets and troll farms will soon be in full operation there as well. The only benefit is that hopefully they won’t close down access to the data so that infosec researchers have access to it to analyse it and people who are interested will be able to find out.
There is no safe open social media platform, and arguably nothing that’s truly safe online. People follow "popular" gross violent people all the damn time - many times because they have no idea about many of the bad things because the app only shows people what they want to see and avoids showing people stuff that would make them disengage and close out.
All these platforms are all manipulated, internally and externally in some way. And they all seem to tend to be a diversion from better things because a large inherent priority is keeping people on the platform.
I realize people use them as a way to connect and advertise, and that makes sense, my point isn’t that everyone should just give up on social media and that everyone needs to go back to privately hosted blogs or bare bones email lists and RSS readers. The point is to know how these platforms go wrong, and avoid the pitfalls, and avoid letting any app become a pointless time sink. Though I do know people with full lives who’ve never had any accounts on any social media, so that is an option for many. Also, why not start a newsletter or blog of your own if you might have something important or interesting to communicate? You might be surprised that there are people interested.
I receive some interesting email replies and comments to my substack post emails. And at least when I see these emails in my inbox, I know it’s likely not just gonna be about sick burns for an audience, because it’s an email to me — so it’s typically someone genuinely interested in telling me about something, or asking about something, or at least just sounding off.
There’s going to be a lot to sound off about when even more of the information landscape is taken over by scammy crypto stuff and AI generated garbage.
I suggest writing to elected reps to complain about it first, before posting to social media. But maybe we’ll still see you on the next geocities.