This is a pretty great, long form post about the structure of Bluesky, and how it’s largely kinda pretending to be decentralized at the moment. I’m not trying to make a dig at it. I’ve enjoyed the platform myself for a while, but it’s good to learn more about how it actually works.
This article was shared on Mastodon via its author here.
People on Reddit do circlejerks about their feeling of “actually discussing real things”, except it’s only a feeling.
It’s a bit like with printed media in societies that saw rapid growth of literacy, people literate in the first generation would trust anything printed as if it were solid fact. And many people still trust anything printed and kinda official as if it were fact and think that being critical of that is backwards and worth irony. It’s really impossible to talk to such.
In this case - the Web has mostly moved to formats disadvantaging any exchange of normal texts, and things like Reddit (or Lemmy) seem, for people not used to that, automatically better for nuanced opinions. They are not.
Just like you can print any text, My Struggle and Elders of Sion and The Capital included, you can make any bullshit look appealing on Reddit with sufficiently eloquent or smart-looking text.
FFS, people actually reading books and writing something knew this since before Gutenberg. How did we even come to this miserable situation.
Reddit was hated and still is hated because people actually challenged eachothers views (mostly) constructively while also organizing and fighting for change when possible. Upvoting, downvoting, commenting, and engaging all equally mattered. Until one day spez and all the reddit mods decided to let their platform eat shit.
There were places that circlejerked, no doubt about it, but what everyone fails to realize is that reddit was a place for pretty much everyone. So if you thought that subreddit was a circlejerk, feel free to join or make a different one. Like open source software getting forked.
All these different social medias want us to be trapped in some sort of bubble through the illusion of choice. The short character limit is also what causes these sites to always be inferior to places like reddit and lemmy whether they like it or not. No one has a chance to fully expand on what they actually think or cite sources instead of being blasted immediately after their first post by getting blocked, cancelled, or moderated to oblivion.
No, like I said, it’s an illusion among Redditors.
Both actively harmful due to the way human brains are wired. Putting pressure onto people actually having a spine, and provoking ape behavior from the rest.
It wasn’t one day. Soft censorship in favor of China and Democratic party and what not became a thing much earlier.
They all very circlejerks of some kind. The paradigm works this way.
Length of text and softness of moderation are good, but do not change the fact that any fool can write a long elaborate smart-looking text, that has nothing to do with honest discussion.