[tstactplsignore]

Circa 2018-2020, Twitter felt genuinely unique as a social media platform to find intelligent scientific and policy discussion. The quality of discussion in my feed felt much higher than reddit or HN. I could barely imagine leaving it. By 2024, that completely reversed, and it felt much so, so stupider than anywhere else. So many scientists have left. Eventually I left despite having 1000s of followers.

Bluesky has recapitulated or even surpassed peak sci twitter. The signal:noise is excellent. However, it requires some work because there is no algorithm. Aggressively unfollow people with low signal:noise, use the custom feeds that disable reposts and enable replies, use the Quiet Posters feed, and use sill.social. This has created a science feed that for me surpasses even the peak of Twitter, let alone X today which is unusable for scientific discussion.

Finally, the thing that drives me crazy is that Bluesky is literally a popular open-source, nonprofit, Ad-less, algorithm-less, truly free and partially decentralized social media network. It's what we all dreamed about in the 2010s! It's Mastodon but actually popular! But half the tech community have convinced themselves it's a "liberal bubble" (that anyone can join....) and that the website that apparently isn't a bubble is the, err, website run by a billionaire with an algorithm designed to promote certain political content that agrees with that billionaire. Absolutely bizarre situation.

[otterley]

Like what?