The problem is that you are creating an echo chamber. My experience using let’s quit “insert company name” is that these echo chambers tend to be toxic and terrible. IE.. Gab, Truth Social, etc.
It’s very difficult to do unless you can have broad consensus. I tend to use Twitter for an industry wide group and while a few individuals have moved, the Bluesky version just doesn’t have the reach or usefulness of the twitter or x version.
Twitter is already, and increasingly so, an echo chamber of the type of people who want to stay on Twitter.
From that vantage point it is the conscious decision to stay on the network during an exodus that creates an echo chamber. Something similar happened with facebook. The people who are still on facebook in 2025 are having a pretty different conversation than occurs in some other places.
It's still way more diverse than any other platform. Blue sky is still mostly a "tech bro" related, western tech circles centric platform. You absolutely do not get even close to the variety and diversity that X has.
This will eventually shift. There is legitimately very little reason to use X unless you're a Musk-stan. Case in point: I started using twitter regularly during the CA fires & blackouts in 2017. I was amazed at how quickly I could get a read on a situation and actual on the ground facts at near real-time speed.
For the Palisades fire, I'm struggling to make X nearly as useful as it was. There is a lot of random diatribe and speculation but on-the-ground facts just don't appear.
I chuckle at the argument that you're entering an echo chamber when you leave X.
News flash: X is already an echo chamber!
Maybe the "oh no don't leave for an echo chamber!" assertion is a case of people remembering the pre-X version of twitter, and comparing competitors to that - rather than what X is today. Or maybe it's a case of "boiling a frog," where people on X are actually unaware of what it has become.
Or maybe... it's actually just a bad faith argument by people who like the current X echo chamber.
> Or maybe... it's actually just a bad faith argument by people who like the current X echo chamber.
I won't pretend to speak to the motivations of any HN users, but I've seen some of these conversations play out where someone invokes the concept of an echo chamber only when it means LGBTQIA+ people can just exist without being harassed. That's an undesirable outcome to those folks.
I would like to think HN is better than that, but more frequently in the past few months, I've been disappointed by commentators on this website, so I wouldn't put any money on that bet.
Echo chambers can be dangerous, but misinformation and unchecked bigotry are more dangerous. Whereas the consequences of an echo chamber are abstract, I can measure the consequences of the latter in deaths.
So my go-to question is simply, "What are your priorities?"
For real, those people just want to spew their hateful eliminatory rhetoric towards trans people, and asking them not to is somehow creating a left-wing echo chamber. I feel like I'm losing my mind.
Every major LA fire hashtag is a 10-1 ratio of political nonsense and engagement farming to actual content. Maybe 20-1. It's depressing to try to sift through for actual information. The LA local news was light-years more timely and informative than twitter.
Is there a personal reason you have to keep with it at all at that level? Not doubting you do, but I feel like people are generally addicted to keeping up with shit that affects their emotions and really doesn't need to.
The thread was about quitting X. I quit X because it was designed to make me chronically scroll through emotionally charged but irrelevant tidbits of information constantly. I'm not making an inherent value judgement about the fires, and perhaps it wasn't the best choice of subject to make a point about, but it's just that if it's not fires, it's always something else. If I'm not in LA and don't know anyone in LA, I can realistically do without moment to moment updates, even if I have sympathy for the sorrow they might be experiencing, but I'd also sure as hell hope that if I needed those updates, they would be available on a publicly accessible platform.
Saying I'm calling someone out though seems a bit of a reach.
Ya, I'd assume so, they just said they started using it regularly then, but not that they needed to, so I'd assume that'd be why, but it's not like LA people are the only ones chronically checking up on the situation.
I remember during covid and after when we had nearby wildfires. even during a mass shooting event a few years back how useful twitter was for realtime information sharing between public and agencies. There was a few years I'd regularly know things before radio/news picked them up. I also remember how during major world events twitter would explode in volume and reactions to the point third party systems would struggle (I once upon a time worked on one of those third party systems)
Now I struggle to find regular updates and half the accounts I used to follow are idle. By the time that third party twitter processor I had worked for shut down, the cadence of posts were so scheduled it was obviously driven by bots and not organic reactions. Even major world events would be gamed by bots as fast as real reactions which had significantly decreased on their own.
I haven't found a replacement to be fair, but I definitely see the enshittification of it from an incredibly useful short form broadcast channel to an engagement-gamified advertising megaphone.
It definitely doesn't predate the song, at least by my memory. (and fwiw, Wikipedia, Know Your Meme, Urban Dictionary, and Oxford English Dictionary all credit the song and have no references prior to that.)
> The problem is that you are creating an echo chamber.
How's that? Bluesky, say, has a fair bit of diverse opinion. It's low on the far-right (though there are certainly some; I subscribe to a few blocklists to filter their nonsense out), which has a bit of a personal affinity for Musk, but to an extent, y'know, who needs 'em? Like, it is not the case that there exist two opinions, far-right lunacy and everything else; the non-far-right segment contains multitudes.
X is already a far right echo chamber, if you create a new account and navigate to the "for you" page, all you see is Elon Musk, Alex Jones, Andrew Tate and other far right "role models".
It's unfortunate that X still retains a greater reach than its alternatives, but that can change in the medium term.
I follow a bunch of Japanese game developers, who at present don't have a strong motivator to leave X. Most of them are also on LINE, but I'm a little reluctant to try it since I don't actually read Japanese. (ETA: I looked at LINE just now and it seems more like a chat app than a board where users post information for anyone, so I think it's off the table.)
Then just don't navigate to For You. I wish I could just see my friends on Facebook (those are the people I care about), but I can't turn off crappy suggestions.
With X I can control my own feed by using the followers tab.
The For You page is just an example, Musk appears everywhere on the platform, watch a video, swipe it and a video of Musk (totally unrelated) pops up. X is basically a right-wing propaganda machine now, which is one of the reasons I don't use it.
There's also 99.99% less bots on bluesky at the moment. I can live with actual good-faith discourse. But twitter right now is a cesspool of political bots, outrageous take engagement farming, and toxic personal attacks.
Obviously, this is going to be a problem with any site that becomes the town square, just like how Yelp and TripAdvisor eventually became so gamed as to be mostly useless. The question to me is can bluesky rise to the level of being useful w/o succumbing to the pitfalls that come with being ubiquitous.
God forbid people have standards of basic human decency. "Trump bad" posts being popular on a website is a world of a difference from a rich guy buying another platform with the specific goal of bringing back literal nazis, as proven in released court documents, doing it, and then going above and beyond by posting that kind of content himself.
I just checked this myself and it isn't accurate. The first post was trump, the second was rich people, the third was pigeons, fourth was about bluesky, fifth cheese puns, sixth ken jennings on shirts, seventh cats/maybe wildfires, eighth work really do be like that, ninth us politics, 10th john woo movies.
I don't think there's anything about Bsky that makes it "left wing" or an echo chamber, it's just that the first people to jump ship from Twitter were by and large, on the left of the US political spectrum. If Bsky ends up with hundreds of millions of people on it then it won't be any sort of echo chamber.
For now it's very much dominated by Twitter ex-pats, and that gives it a pretty predictable slant. Unlike Twitter however this isn't being imposed by the owner, it's organic.
> I don't think there's anything about Bsky that makes it "left wing" or an echo chamber
Bsky lacks (1) ads, (2) paying posters rewarded with promoted reach, and (3) a default algorithmic feed (Discover is algorithmic and exists, but the default feed unless unpinned is always Following.) It also has shareable feeds, as well as the default pinned feeds.
Each of these individually makes most users experience of Bluesky a lot more seeing what they choose to see than seeing what the site owner has a financial or other interest in everyone seeing, which in a sense makes it more likely to be a personal echo chamber rather than a single echo chamber or the mythical perfectly unbiased online marketplace of ideas.
OTOH, it also got a lot of users specifically in reaction to negative feelings about the central ideological direction perceived at X, which may make it on average more left-wing by comparison, if very much not uniformly left-wing or having any fundamental trait tending toward remaining even relatively left-wing.
You aren't wrong, but I'd add that it's also just the never-ending grievance-politics of the reactionary right. Spaces that have them but don't amplify their voices enough are censoring conservatives. Spaces where people can moderate what they get who then opt out of it are censoring conservatives. Endless victim posturing about how silenced all these people are who paradoxically also never shut the fuck up.
They love the notion of the marketplace of ideas until said marketplace tells them to kick rocks and then it's crocodile tears.
I understand intellectually that employing a double-standard can work in the context of populism, but like you I find it absolutely exhausting. People who's party and ideology control every branch of government still pretend that they're plucky, marginalized freedom fighters.
I think though that Trump truly is worse. If you made this comment in 2008 or 2012 and used Trump or McCain I’d say you are right. But what happens when a person truly is a vile disgusting human being? Then it no longer becomes the same shit. As an extreme example, Kerensky wasn’t as bad as the Bolsheviks. It wasn’t the same shit.
It’s very difficult to do unless you can have broad consensus. I tend to use Twitter for an industry wide group and while a few individuals have moved, the Bluesky version just doesn’t have the reach or usefulness of the twitter or x version.