Based on the stats I've seen, active users did drop a bit from peak, but things have long since stabilized.
I personally use BlueSky and don't use X. Ignoring the Musk factor for a moment, X pushes app use and requires you to log in. It is also filled to the brim with ads and promoted posts. BlueSky doesn't require an app at all (sure, everything I stated could change down the road, but we can't measure things on a "possibly/maybe", we need to compare what the platforms currently do)
What holds Bluesky back is exactly things like these: Big accounts refusing to migrate from X (or use both). The more big folks that migrate, the more folks will switch.
from something like nearly 20M to around 1M, a bit more than a bit, user measurements should be easier, but they are often presented in bias to make things look better than reality (imo)
Sites which track users across many websites (imperfect, but still a useful relative signal) report ~25% drop over the last year. Took a look after asking to see for myself.
> What holds Bluesky back is
(imo)
technical:
- super slow development for the most requested features
- defaulting to public, anyone in the world can read what you write (people want privacy in comms/social)
- control over the protocol in practice
non-technical:
- several own goals by the leadership
- group think in the development ecosystem
- taking Bain Capital money and hiding it from everyone for 10 months (this is the exact opposite of their supposed ethos)
- significant political / activist community, which is giddy to dogpile if you talk about something they do not like (eg. Ai)
I was personally attacked several times in the "atmosphere" for having different views, and by the CTO here on HN, who picked one critique among pros/cons I listed in an attempt to troll me, or get under my skin. (too online like behavior)
this isn't the invention of the wheel, electricity, etc. You are definitely overhyping it. LLMs hallucinate. It is an unsolvable problem defined by the very nature of the architecture itself. No amount of thinking or counter thinking or triple checking will fix it because LLMs don't understand the basis of what is right and wrong, what looks right and wrong, why saying or doing the wrong thing is bad, and why or when it should realize what it produced is wrong, and what it should do about it.
Big Tech wants to make humans the go-between, however, the thinking and problem solving wasn't the problem to begin with. Checking for mistakes, correcting them, and presenting the corrected versions is the hard part. If a human does not go through the steps of solving the problem, they can't effectively analyze or process the output, which will always lead to mistakes. The only way for LLMs to take over any jobs would be if humans were perfectionists and could check every single bit of work without fault (since LLMs will always make some mistakes: a "perfect" LLM isn't possible anymore than a perfect human being is). Humans (especially myself are disaster and mistake prone.
That's why you should not invest now unless you are short term trading, and you should get that bag of popcorn ready. Trillion dollar valuations aren't real. It's a fake number propped up by a bubble. The US is in record debt, and it will be unable to backstop the financial loss...without taxing heavily the very folks that want to be backstopped. Those folks are dimwits and are only focused on making a buck. They are assuming everything will work out, either via investors/revenue/profits or a government bailout.
Bear Stearns had the same attitude.
In 2008 the government had leeway. This time, they do not. Regardless of political party.
Disclaimer: Please note I do not have an investment in any company, not even in a 401k. I am a disabled software engineer (and manager, in some cases) who worked in/with startups with various sectors. I have knowledge about all the financial and investor nonsense that goes into startups and small businesses. As an autistic millennial, who has definitely been around the block with bubbles, I am also interested in tech and finance. I also have a decent amount of knowledge about the damn stock market. I don't and will never claim to be an expert in any of those things, however, I know enough to say that a whole bunch of folks are going to lose a TON of money at some point within the next few months/years (likely before 2030, possibly by 2028), so if you are overexposed to the stock market (pretend it drops to zero, won't happen, however, it will drop, and no stock is safe, this goes for you FIRE folks as well), you should back off your investments to an acceptable level (the most amount of money you'd be fine with losing ALL of).
Is he on bluesky or another platform? There is a ton of folks, including myself, who won't use "X" at all, some political, some due to other reasons. For me? All of the above and plus they demand that I install an app on my phone, something I am not willing to do, especially since most of the folks I've followed went to Bluesky, AND I've found way more awesome folks there than I ever did on X. I'm not shilling Bluesky, it is just the biggest/most widely accepted platform in this social area if you exclude meta/facebook.
It's not just the user hostile website that forces their app down your throat.
It's also the algorithm that decides what you get to see (and thus, what you think). We know it's biased. The creator doesn't exactly keep the fact secret that it's being manipulated to agree with a certain agenda.
> By default, your Home timeline will be the reverse-chronological "Following" timeline, which will only contain tweets and quote tweets from the people you follow. The algorithmic "For you" timeline will be hidden
Can you substantiate the claims about the supposedly biased algorithm and what exactly the "creator" said about it?
In my experience it isn't noticeably worse than other platforms, and I'm not aware of concrete complaints such as the incidents with Grok's system prompt, which is a different product.
The more obvious bias is towards Premium subscribers over us freeloaders. The reply-ranking algorithm was a nightmare for a while; they strictly adhered to the rules of gold check > blue check > normal account. It's still not great, but eventually they added enough slack to let normal accounts with good quips outrank 30 paying users saying "lol", and tweaked some things so it's no longer so easy to shill tshirts/whatever by tagging Grok for the gold check double-boost.
But they're still reticent to ban any Premium account without a reason good enough to give up the $8/month. I have some sympathy for trying to moderate in the era of LLMs that can generate perfectly on-topic replies that even take images into context. But I think they need a more targeted approach against OnlyFans bots replying to popular tweets with a standard formula of some sexual reference and an insane claim. Sometimes they're less sexual and more straight up horrifying [0]:
> i breed mantises for fun and once tried grafting two ooths together just to see what hatched. got a whole clutch of nymphs that all just twitched in circles and died by day two. butterfly chimera energy hits different when it's your own disaster.
The other bot replies to the same OP are the more typical sexualized sort; they tend to reply in swarms.
My "For You" twitter feed is literally 100% pro-Trump bot posts. The site is entirely unusable unless you just follow specific people and use "Following" rather than "For You". I'd guess that less than 10% of the site traffic is human.
The algorithm will also basically ignore you unless you pay for a blue checkmark premium account (what used to be verified). It's like being shadow banned - you can post, but most people will not see you.
My "for you" has zero pro-Trump posts. It's quite easy to train the algo. Just click not interested, show less on that stuff and follow the odd person you like, say the author of this post. Within a day or two it'll have learned.
That's probably true for all major platforms and companies, depending on your framework, ideology and the particular political/moral lens you choose to use.
Oh man, I wish everyone just moved somewhere else, specially if they are aiming to make something public. You can choose any server on bluesky nowadays. Scientists in Europe, please check out https://mu.social which is hosted by an european open foundation
Bluesky is closer to Truth Social, but for Blue MAGA, though has non-political communities as well.
I left Bluesky because they hid their VC funding from the community for almost a year and now a partner from the VC is running the show as CEO. Their CTO has also attacked me personally here on HN because I wrote criticism of the new, weak, permissioned data proposal. These are not the folks to bring us better social media. I expect it to linger on like Mastodon, never moving beyond a few million people.
That was my experience as well. I can't believe I went all the way from Mastodon, to Bluesky, and back to X and finding that X somehow now had friendlier people and less hate than Bluesky.
There is a small group of AI people on Bluesky, some are nice, but some are... quite behind the curve.
If Bluesky was a nicer place, I'd prefer to be there because of the ability to make third party clients, and atproto. But all the info is on X, and they do a surprisingly good job with the For You feed now.
Also just curating your feed (i.e. judiciously using blocking and muting) and instead viewing just "Following" removes something like 99.9% of all common complaints re: Twitter, while still giving you access to a much less-biased (or easier to equally-bias through curation: e.g. you can't get an accurate view of RW ideology following only BlueSky posters) and far larger public square than anything else.
Curating your feed also works on BlueSky. Sure there are anti AI people there, but the crazy ones I just block. It’s really not that hard. And I know there’s no algo behind what I’m seeing.
I do admit that there is some FOMO, but that’s what HN is for, to surface that stuff so I don’t have to go read it on X.
I choose Bsky because I’m not giving eyeballs and money to an evil toddler. I’m already doing enough of that with my 401k and taxes.
You can certainly use both X/Twitter and BlueSky (and Mastodon, for that matter), and I did for a while.
Just if you curate your Twitter feed, you gain very little extra from BlueSky or Mastodon, and if you choose only the latter two, you get a much more biased and limited set of views. (Twitter has plenty of crazies from all parts of the political spectrum, but BlueSky and Mastodon run mostly left, and have much, much smaller user bases). HN also is extremely limited in what it discusses, so it doesn't make up for what is missed by ignoring X either, IMO. X is still one of the most efficient general public squares by a long shot.
If you can't stand Elon and don't care about what you're missing on X though, I can fully understand just not bothering with it. You aren't missing much.
Yeah unfortunately bluesky turning out that way was always inevitable. It was created because of-- and filled with people motivated by-- a deep emotional reaction to X.
Gonna sound total boomer here but I've never used any of it and feel like I haven't missed anything. Or maybe I'd be flying spaceships by now if I scrolled through X every day, who knows
eh, there are plenty of AI researchers on there. Also a handy "AI haters" labeler you can subscribe to to filter out people who just want to yell.
The labeler thing is cool; I really like ATproto because you can do interesting things with it. If I'm honest, though, I mainly like Bluesky because I don't get called slurs on there.
The website is so bad that, before xcancel was hit with a C&D, it was faster to stop an x.com page load, edit the URL to xcancel.com even with my phone's on-screen keyboard, and load that, than to wait for the real x.com version.
I feel like reasoning is a useless metric, and we should instead focus on results, and time to achieved said results. That is a more useful metric overall.
The only thing that I will add is that if you buy a smart appliance, you totally deserve this.
At my local home depot where I shop, there is like 1 of each type of appliance that has any type of smarts, and each one is always the most expensive. All the rest, and more reasonable, are dumb. No apps, no wifi, etc. I'm not usually a guy who cheaps out on stuff, but I also know when I'm overpaying, and would never pay $2,000 for a fridge just because it has a giant screen (and now shows ads apparently...ahem...samsung)
I have 3 Keurig coffee makers, and they are dumb as a brick.
If you buy something that can connect to wifi/the internet, please understand that you are never actually buying it. You are actually only renting it. Either you pay the price via lack of privacy, or you pay the price via subscription...and the company at the other end of the deal controls which bargain you get...you have no input.
Keurig could brick all their smart coffee makers tomorrow and demand users cough up $30/mo, and users would then have to decide on whether they should toss their coffee makers or pay up.
I'm not saying it's right. Governments aren't doing enough in this area, especially the US, but also Europe. However, that is the name of the game.
Buy something dumb and enjoy not having to worry about this nonsense at all.
The vast majority of consumers don't understand that purchasing hardware with cloud integration essentially means they're renting their own products. I don't think it's a very logical conclusion to make either, unless you spend some time thinking about it. Therefore I don't think it's fair at all to say that they deserve this. Lawmakers need to push back on this, but that I think we agree on.
I don't get what your point is. Are you saying people don't fix and improve their homes?
Leave cracks and potholes on the pavement for long enough, allow some dilapidated building to stand for long enough, and it just becomes part of the identity of the city and the people who live in it? It turns into the city's "character" ?
It's very interesting to observe the different perspectives in this thread, which seem to be mutually exclusive. When talking about urban decay, some people think of an artist's loft in a run-down brick factory from the 19th century with Graffiti on the walls and exposed steel beams, others of potholes, trash, and overdue maintenance.
Admittedly, I didn't click your link, however, based on what you've stated, there is some inaccuracy. All these big companies take your requests and the context, and route it based on the content, cost, etc.
What Anthropic presents as Opus 5.5 isn't actually a single model...it's Anthropic's ecosystem as a whole. If you are lucky, you get the top model handling your issues all the time, however, that never happens. What really happens is that your request and content are graded along with your subscription (example: API? subscription, if so, what tier? how much has the user used it? Do we trust the user? how much? how much are they paying? are they asking something we think is dangerous?) and your request and context are routed accordingly.
Anthropic isn't alone in this behavior, Open AI does it as well, just look at the respective subreddits on reddit for both if you need some examples, or just play around with the various models from both companies.
There are a few folks who've done some analysis on this (their findings were posted on reddit and X), and a bigger multi-national study is apparently coming, though I admittedly don't know their findings.
I guess the tl;dr is that Anthropic and Open AI are actually selling you "best-effort" routers, so you may or may not get the best in class model, and only they get to determine if you do or do not. No guarantees.
I personally use BlueSky and don't use X. Ignoring the Musk factor for a moment, X pushes app use and requires you to log in. It is also filled to the brim with ads and promoted posts. BlueSky doesn't require an app at all (sure, everything I stated could change down the road, but we can't measure things on a "possibly/maybe", we need to compare what the platforms currently do)
What holds Bluesky back is exactly things like these: Big accounts refusing to migrate from X (or use both). The more big folks that migrate, the more folks will switch.
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