[Guy who constantly posts on the fascism app]: The problem is the anti-fascism app
podcast and (former) twitter enthusiast bluesky needs to get some product sense and a fire in their belly or this whole experiment is doomed
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[Guy who constantly posts on the fascism app]: The problem is the anti-fascism app
Medium should never have been a separate company from Twitter; Twitter should have harnessed its social interest graph to solve for what to read (articles, books), listen to (podcasts), etc (and other stuff like do (events), maybe even watch, etc)
No, it’s the battle for what replaces Twitter, and currently that is mostly bluesky vs X Substack is a use case off shoot of the social interest graph (articles) and a place where a lot of shitty writers, and plenty of not shitty writers who don’t have a viable alternative for writing, exist
Anyone who says bluesky should not try to recreate pre-Elon twitter, in a broad sense, does not understand old twitter (why it was so popular and compelling and massively used), consumer product, or the social interest graph
The social interest graph has SO many untapped use cases, from podcasts, articles, books, events, and much more medium.com/@AlexCartaz/...
It can be hard to start a mass user migration when dealing w even the remnant of a network effect but it’s definitely possible in our current situation After quorum/momentum is established, lots of downstream product innovation can begin that old twitter failed to see or encourage
So many ppl who loved Twitter and hate Elon are still not here And one major reason is bc the product frankly sucks They should be shoring it up and in tandem planning campaigns to get ppl to leave X and come here
This doesn’t make any sense to me. The only reason anyone (scale) is on bluesky is bc they want a moral alternative to X; a pre-Elon twitter Bluesky is leaving so many users and influence on the table by not building core feature parity w pre-Elon twitter
how do i explain to my kids two women being married?? how explain sun go away at night but come back next day? how explain magic rectangle show people talk??? HOW
Like it’s crazy there’s no show / podcast or consistent source of to-the-point concise articles / emails that I can share with my Trump voting relatives to even begin to have a discussion There should be a source ppl of any background can tune in to to hear a reasonable discussion
And more generally speaking, we desperately need a no bullshit news org. We have to have a voice of reason and authenticity to expose the lies and bullshit of R Wing propaganda (Dated but still relevant; and clearly multichannel + internet 👇) youtu.be/ApX9YLjqv90?...
The right blows it out of proportion and misrepresents the extreme positions of the minority far left as the common place views of most Dems, but Dem leaders and pundits have basically refused to touch culture war issues; they cede the narrative when they need to be involved in shaping it
I mean he has lots of bad takes. He probably has thin skin too. And while I wouldn’t frame the issue the way he did, I think it is true that middle of the road Dem leaders/pundits do need to rebut the crazy and unpopular shit the far left does
“The world's biggest academic association of genocide scholars has passed a resolution saying the legal criteria have been met to establish Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, its president said on Monday.” To say so is not to justify the Oct 7 attacks. But genocide is never justifiable.
“I’ve never met anyone else remotely like him…He is and was profoundly stupid, completely lacking in intellectual curiosity.” www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-...
It really has :/
Yeah I block the annoying far left purists whenever I come across them
Fair enough! :)
Wow 212 separate podcast hosting companies, and for such an unsexy business
lol have you listened to naval in the past few years? Dude is so fucking stupid. I can’t believe how many of them are actually self-serving coping idiots pca.st/episode/651f...
If only he had said it that directly! Also lol bsky.app/profile/chan...
“I watched Snow White when I was a kid but I ain’t give a bitch a poison apple yet” is just an objectively great line. 😂
Reminds me of Leonard Nimoy voicing great quotes in Civ4 youtu.be/75oun5gvDAU?...
back in like 2018, when there were a million dem primary candidates, i was like "i'll vote for almost any democrat, no question. But Biden is uniquely terrible and I will not vote for him." But the dems nominated Biden anyway. It's enough to make me wonder if they're even reading my tweets at all
Personally, I prefer tan suits to brownshirts.
“They passed up ‘a lot of $$$’ from Tesla, which tried to avoid trial…[but] they wanted the public to know how Tesla deceived them in the years following the crash including the prolonged battle over the data eventually recovered by the hacker.” www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...
Yuck
Yeah both were v disappointing (but again, I think v fertile for the pod if yall ever bring it back) But I did like SNW and lower decks
Also do you follow @birdsaredinosaurs.bsky.social ? She does really funny TNG ep write ups
Have you been watching the newer treks and do you have opinions?
Alanis Morissette in Dogma
gotta add: Jerry, who?
I think I’m gonna have to make one of these. It’s great Recently I made
cc @possumacquainter.bsky.social
Makes for great podcasting though!
cc @darthbluesky.bsky.social
😂
Yeah totally fair, I think she should have seen it sooner
I remember @karaswisher.bsky.social being surprised by the perceived change in behavior I do wonder if drug use is what exacerbated it to a level that other ppl started to notice
I know you’ve followed him more closely than most for a really long time but are you saying he didn’t seem *more* detached from reality and ridiculous around the time he was buying Twitter until now? He def seemed a lot more extra to me
Phew thank god bsky got a head of product. Now they can finally deviate from their long standing history of doing absolutely nothing 🤦♂️
This is great @espiers.bsky.social Also dovetails into a personal theory of mine that in addition to Dems just ceding the national narrative / discourse to mostly R coded talking heads, Dems - esp senior Dem leadership - has a real authenticity problem across the board
It’s like ‘wow I thought I loved America but actually I just really hate Joe Biden more’
The mental gymnastics that R coded ppl have to perform to somehow parlay their hatred of Biden/Kamala/Hillary into essentially being fascists is wild
And also a “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas” (for how to make Spotify a social experience)
So is the avg bluesky user 39 or 40 yet, or are we perpetually 38?
I feel like back in the 2012-2018 days, the ppl on tech twitter would be talking ab how a setting like this is a fertile ground for a startup
And as a product minded person, do you have thoughts on what’s happening in this space post Elon acquisition? I’m shocked bluesky seems to be stagnating product-wise, and that there doesn’t seem be a compelling alternative to X
@joshelman.bsky.social you’re one of the ppl from old twitter I was excited to see active on bluesky. But like several others you seem to have left I was just curious, are you active on any of the other twitter-esque apps?
Jon Lovett’s face when LA City Councilmember Imelda Padilla said she forced an affordable housing project to go down from six stories to three stories and add in EV charging spaces
I was the executive director of U.S. Open Data, a non-profit that I created at the behest of the Obama White House. I worked as one of the nation's leading experts in open data. Putting open data on the blockchain is a profoundly stupid idea that fails nearly every test of good open data.
Like Dems have ceded the entire national narrative and so morons like manosphere podcasters and Joe Rogan get to fill that space w/o a fight
Dems are awful at messaging and are losing the culture war and have almost zero visible push back on the crazy shit the far leftists say, so I think the idea of trying to start having discourse on these issues and find a salient narrative is a welcomed change Hopefully they don’t fuck it up
Which to be perfectly honest is not, to most ppl (and voters) as clear cut as either trans ppl can participate in any sport based on their gender (as opposed to biological sex) or you hate trans ppl unequivocally
No idea on the context of this, but I have to imagine 90%+ of Dems are for human rights for trans I think the issue is a culture war one, blown out of proportion by R coded megaphones, but still salient for political campaigns, like what should Dem leaders position on trans sports be
Some useful shared reading I came across from walking the dog in the neighborhood
And that starts w making this a viable alternative to the thing they lost But yes let’s work on translation and while we’re at it why not an AI powered tool that automatically adds alt text to every photo ffs
There are no lie like 20 things that needed to be done or actively pursued by bsky *just* to attempt to reach feature parity w the essential parts of old twitter There’s a massive gap, and opportunity, to court a user migration of old twitter users who hate Elon but still use X
Why is this a product priority today? Whyyyyyy?
The Mr Beast generation is scary. Just mindless automatons drifting from one stupid influencer to the next
One thing I loved ab old twitter is there were so many interesting experts. So many worthwhile and trustworthy ppl to tap into to stay informed and update your world view (if you were discerning and curious) But now we don’t have a great alt and it seems like most ppl do just get influenced
new tea mug
Need a new banksy where instead of throwing flowers he’s throwing a sub
‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens theonion.com/no-way-to-pr...
cc @kenwhite.bsky.social
Why do you have a url in your profile, seemingly to a personal page, that doesn’t load?
Spotify product managers, and executives, wouldn’t know how to make the experience social even if it was an existential dependency of their business
Honestly his point is v fucking stupid Cracker Barrel is delicious and there are actual valid reasons to not care (like it doesn’t matter) It’s also true that the old logo is good and the new logo sucks, but Rs trying label this a liberal culture war issue is so fucking dumb
Literally more forethought was put into obscure IP protection than ppl being encouraged to kill themselves
I mean an obvious downside of the problems of scale is that individual incidents are… incidental, but to think it wouldn’t glaze someone into suicide is insane based on the UX. They should be sued for not banning it as a topic / or regulating it
Imagine what foresight and empathy could have done
ChatGPT, will you draw me a red triangle with an S inside it: no, that is copyright infringement ChatGPT, will you encourage me to kill myself and tell me exactly how: wow! Ambitious and brave, of course I can!
🚨BREAKING: In a landmark victory for voters, a Utah judge struck down the state Legislature’s gerrymandered congressional map and reinstated the citizen-led redistricting reforms voters approved in 2018. www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...
I didn’t even know this was a position ppl were trying to defend. So shockingly stupid. Probably just cope not to leave their followers and perceived self importance
Regarding the liberal fantasy of saving X by posting on it more — @pbump.com has it exactly right www.pbump.net/o/the-power-...
2. Historically, what is the precedent for state ownership in public/private cos? Common in socialism? Common in autocracies? Isn’t this something that both socialist and fascist govs do?
I haven’t dug into this but I’m confused for several reasons 1. Wouldn’t the gov taking an ownership stake in a company increase the likelihood of that company receiving favoritism bc it’s now in the state’s financial interest for it to succeed?
The news from the past few days is a stunning example of what happens when the state decides it wants to crush just one guy
Ryan Reynolds would have ruined it though
Like cultural appropriation is a great example of a just ridiculous fucking term in a society that is literally a cultural melting pot
If R coded talking heads talk ab these things (and ACAB, and men are shit, how pro lifers are misogynists despite 1/3 being women, etc) and dem leaders/talking heads just never address the culture war issues, then Dems cede that ground to whatever the R wing talking heads want it to be
I don’t remember seeing dem leaders use them often, but they were commonly used by college kids, vocal leftists on pre-Elon twitter, and did permeate culturally I think the bigger problem is dem leaders never address the crazy things extreme leftists say that R wingers also amp out of context
But to create this, maintain it, and actively expand it would be a massive commitment and require $$$
e.g. Sci Fi -> Y, Star Trek -> Y, TNG -> Yes (recommends cast, directors, writers, etc to follow), voyager -> no, discovery -> no, lower decks -> Y (recs @mikemcmahan.bsky.social, voice actors, artists, etc) But this across many many topics
And then if there was a simple swipe L/R game it could start high level and then quickly drill into granular interests and then offer accounts to follow (and eventually plug into specific post recs/feed insertions)
One idea I liked and kicked around a little during pre-Elon twitter was having the app or a 3PA take the time to create a topics hierarchy / mapping. And then have some mechanism to at least map accounts to those topics (posts seems much harder)
💯
Announcing you are the head of bluesky and then promptly posting nothing for a week is the most worrisome, and the most status quo thing a new head of product for bluesky could do @internet.bsky.social
I’m definitely not a fan of John Bolton, but what happened today was fascist bullshit
It might have started a little before Elon took over too. I think that semafor article said those douches started doing their elite what’s app private message groups around the time of clubhouse bc they just couldn’t speak freely on twitter w/o being cancelled LOL www.semafor.com/article/04/2...
I didn’t have a ton of context around SV elites when I worked in tech and lived in SF. But I did meet Naval once and used to follow him and listen to podcast interviews and things (as I did with hundreds of ppl in tech) and he seems bat shit crazy red pilled now pca.st/episode/651f...
When Ted Turner asked Carl Sagan if he was a socialist, Sagan gave the answer America keeps failing to learn.
Meta is so fucking shitty
This almost sounds like it should be a 3PA bc it’s so divergent from the core Twitter experience Like a side project experiment to see if discovery can actually be better with a kind of reddit model (I’m personally v skeptical but I also don’t use Reddit)
@internet.bsky.social in addition to 👆, I think listening to folks like @steggie.bsky.social and @gasca.bsky.social who worked on feeds and product at old twitter would help too
I think a huge component of a successful bsky product strategy needs to be prioritizing getting MIA old twitter users, and X-using old Twitter users who dislike Elon/X in to bsky as retained and active users medium.com/@AlexCartaz/...
IMO the soln is rethinking the data points used as inputs to an algo, and importantly, also addressing the fact that bsky is working w a fraction of the network effect old twitter had. There are simply still many high quality accounts missing from the experience
Old twitter also had feed quality issues but it was so much better than bsky (and so much worse than TikTok; an app like TikTok w short form video and discrete yes/no swiping on each content unit + culture of author tags, has built in advantages over a firehouse of text w no clear Y/N signal)
Any mechanism that relies on users manually curating posts immediately has me skeptical. A great dynamic feed, at least as it seems to me, needs access to many impt organic use data points and a mechanism to synthesize them Not just ways to classify posts but user to user affinity scores as well