[nkohari]

I think what's disappointing is that so many people that I've followed for years now routinely engage in daily political slapfights, or at least retweet ragebait. In the blogging era, it would have been really weird for a software engineer to sit down and write several paragraphs about their political views, but the friction of hitting "repost" is so comparatively low that everyone does it. Myself included, honestly, although I've been trying not to.

I don't have any problem with people having and voicing thoughts on politics. Everyone should strive to be well-informed and be capable of having reasonable conversations about politics, especially with people with whom they disagree. (Obviously, that's a charitable description of what's happening on social media, but that's a different topic.)

I guess ultimately the problem is that I want to follow topics, not people, and there isn't a great way to do that. Reddit provides an alternative but is comparatively low-volume, and voting represents a fundamental design problem because it by definition creates an echo chamber. And that's not even taking into account how over-moderated the site is at this point.

[sjsdaiuasgdia]

To follow topics on Bluesky, add feeds for those topics.

The "Following" tab is literally that - chronologically ordered posts and replies from accounts you follow. The "Discover" and "Popular with Friends" tabs give you algorithm-sourced stuff that is somewhat connected to who you follow.

When I click on the tab for the Game Dev feed, I see nothing but posts about game dev. When I click on the Astronomy feed, I only see telescopes and pictures taken with telescopes.

[mrguyorama]

The reality is that microblogging, whether it be on X or bluesky or mastadon or even facebook posts, will ALWAYS be lower signal, lower value than real, curated or effort filled content.

I like John Green a lot, including his vlogs that are just him speaking about stuff he doesn't know for half an hour, but I still do not go read what he posts on Bluesky, because it's as low quality, low signal, low intent, and low effort as comments here on HN.

It's just not useful. It's not a good use of my time to read random tweets from people.

When I first got a twitter account in like 2010, I very very instantly recognized it was not for me. If something is important, someone will take the effort to make an actual piece of real content about it, like a blog or video or essay or book. Hell, even a thorough reddit post is better than microblogging.

If it's not worth going through that effort to get the message out to people, why should I consider that a valuable message?

It's emblematic of the past 20 years of social development in my opinion. If the only thing stopping you from getting the word about something super duper important is that writing a page essay is too hard, nobody really needs to care about that, because writing an essay is so easy we make children do it

It's all noise. The signal doesn't go on twitter, it goes on real platforms where you might make money from good signal, or like, a freaking scientific paper, or the front page of a news org.