I don't understand how Bluesky is going to continue to exist past 2026, based on the sharply declining usage, their headcount, and the amount of funding they've taken.
It has apparent value propositions past the social network, but none of those use cases are visibly taking off and none of them appear to be monetizable. The social network itself is what will be evaluated when they go out for more funding. And I don't see how you can raise at all for a social network in 2026 with flat numbers, let alone the declining numbers Bluesky actually has.
I've been dual-wielding Twitter and Bluesky for about a year (after a year off Twitter where I was mostly Mastodon), and, anecdatally, we've hit a point where the engagement and volume of stuff I see in Bluesky is lower than what I was getting even on Mastodon. Earlier on, there was some truth to the idea that Twitter had a much larger audience, but you'd get better engagement on Bluesky. I now get better engagement on Twitter. I can see people I had followed into Bluesky moving back to Twitter.
I have no idea what's going to happen, but I'm curious to hear a coherent story about how Bluesky isn't cooked.
Usage has absolutely declined from peak switching periods where inevitibly some users won't stick around, but that's to be expected. Most stats seem to be leveling off (which isn't exactly stable growth either so the rest of your points stand).
Yeah, I think what you needed to do here is zoom out. That's a sharply declining chart.
I understand that as a Bluesky user the peak and dropoff doesn't hurt the experience. But investors are going to put money in with the expectation of a return and what they're going to look at are the derivatives of the adoption curve: how quickly is it gaining users, and is adoption accelerating?
I zoomed out. It looks like this:
"Usage has absolutely declined from peak switching periods where inevitibly some users won't stick around, but that's to be expected"
That just isn't a "sharp decline" no matter how much you seem to want to repeat those words.
I agree that it’s not a sharp decline but zooming out, what I see is absolutely no organic growth at all in the past couple of years. All the increases have been sharp spikes that immediately fall off dramatically, followed by longer, slower periods of decline. It looks like nobody is switching to Bluesky except in a handful of viral events, during which a tonne of people try it out but don’t keep using it. There’s only one upward slope on these graphs, and that stopped in late 2023 – about the time Threads went fully global. These look like very unhealthy stats.
Right, so the basic story you're telling investors there is that between August and September of 2024 they experienced a sharp spike, and then basically they stayed that way for over a year. That's not a dying platform, but it's not a growth story you take to investors either.
How does it compare to other social networks like Twitter? Can't compare because they don't offer granular data this detailed? That tells you something.
That doesn't matter! In fact, Twitter doing worse while Bluesky usage is dropping probably makes them significantly less investable.
I'm not rooting for them to fail. I use Bluesky. I find Twitter's ownership odious and the platform significantly worse than it was 4 years ago.
But if we're talking about scientific communicators talking about where the future of scientific communication is going to happen, it is relevant whether Bluesky has a long-term future. There's another non-Twitter social network that doesn't operate under this funding pressure!
Those are Jaz’s daily unique action counts (flows) from the Bluesky firehose; they’re anchored to the Nov ’24 spike, so the ‘decline’ is post-surge reversion. Meanwhile the user stock kept rising (~39M).
A presidential election spike is the baseline for tracking growth in a social media platform??
What’s “user stock”? Is that the number of registered accounts? Isn’t it basically impossible for that to do anything but go up? It’s the number of people actively using the network that’s the important figure, not the total number of people who ever used it.
Are these the figures you are reporting?
> We made a new Bluesky stats page to see how the platform is growing. Unfortunately it is currently shrinking.
> Last week the total number of users registered hit 36M, but actually only 13M of those showed any activity in the last 90 days.
See, that's a good question, but it has an answer: first, they took a priced round, and those investors will need to see a return, and second, when the funding runs out, someone is going to have to put more money in --- substantially more money --- to keep the lights on.
What's probably true is that if they found a stable source of revenue they wouldn't have to answer these kinds of questions. But this is just back to my original point, of "I don't see how this is going to work", because I don't see how they're going to do that.
I'd be happy if someone jumped in and set me straight with a clear and plausible plan. To me, though, from the information I've seen, it looks like the premise here is that they're going to raise again, and to do that they're going to need to demonstrate accelerating growth, which they starkly do not have right now.
What investors? It isn't a public company, and it's registered as a benefit corporation. Anybody who gives them money should have a clue that its priority is not shareholder returns.
What I've found is that most of the people I really want to follow are exclusively on bsky. BUT most of the people I'd prefer to casually follow either exclusively or mostly only posts on Twitter. And the 2nd group is a much larger pool than the first group.
I really dislike Mastodon so gave that up a while back. I know there are a few people I'd like to follow who only post there, but such is life.
I've found Bluesky does a really bad job at not showing me stuff I don't want to see. Furry p*rn on the "cute internet cats" feed? Yup. Heaps and heaps of political rage bait on the main discover feed? Yup.
I wanted to like BlueSky, but it's such a bizarre echo chamber of people who left Twitter for ideological reasons that it basically filters for people that I actively don't want to engage with.
Those types of people are still there on Twitter (mostly on the other side these days), but I don't see them because the algorithm filters them out.
You've got three tools, mutes, blocks, and lists. Yeah, there's no centralized algorithm that does it for you, it'll take a couple days of actual effort, but it's extremely easy to prune your main feed into looking how you want it to look. Which is pretty much like how it was to use Twitter a few years ago before everything got algorithmed.
> Yeah, there's no centralized algorithm that does it for you,
Bluesky doesn't really present it that way. The default "Discover" feed at least pretends to be exactly that.
> it'll take a couple days of actual effort, but it's extremely easy to prune your main feed into looking how you want it to look
I think this has changed recently. Months ago I tried to actually use Bluesky, and my Discover feed was awful. 90% of my time on the site was muting/blocking or thinking "show more/less like this" did something and it was an miserable experience which nothing seemed to improve except quitting it.
Checking it now, it's dramatically better. Still includes a lot of content I don't want, but less aggressively so, although that seems to largely be that I was gone so far it could be mostly content from accounts I follow.
> it'll take a couple days of actual effort, but it's extremely easy
If it takes a couple of days of actual effort, then it’s not extremely easy, especially for the average user who can just go to Threads with their existing Instagram account and not be bombarded with furry and diaper porn.
I never see that but on both sites I only ever look at the feed that only includes people I follow. I don’t understand why anyone would use a feed that includes other co the t
Yes. And I seeded my feed with people I already knew. Just like I did with Twitter back in 2008. And just like Twitter all those years ago, from seeing what they repost, I expanded my network.
People who are incapable of finding content without a "discovery" or "for you" feed get what they deserve.
They do really need to do something about this, I am not on regularly anymore but there was a period where i kept getting weird sexual posts of dudes in diapers, no matter how much i blocked or asked not to see that.
> I've found Bluesky does a really bad job at not showing me stuff I don't want to see. Furry p*rn on the "cute internet cats" feed? Yup. Heaps and heaps of political rage bait on the main discover feed? Yup.
Unlike X, blue sky defaults to simply showing you a feed of the people you follow, in chronological order.
> I don't understand how Bluesky is going going to continue to exist past 2026, based on the sharply declining usage, their headcount, and the amount of funding they've taken.
You can just Google these things. Nate Silver posted (grim looking) usage numbers --- followers and posters --- just a couple weeks ago. They very publicly raised a $15MM (priced) A round a year ago, after raising what I understood to be a comparable amount of seed funding. There was talk early this year of them raising again at a $700MM valuation, but I don't see a subsequent announcement that that happened.
You can generally take a headcount number and assign a fully loaded cost to it (say, $200k, conservatively) and just math it out. And of course that analysis assumes their infra expenditures round to zero.
So no, I'm not just making stuff up. I could be wrong! I feel like I was open about that.
I think you’re going to need to back that up in order for me to take your claim seriously. I’ve always found Nate Silver to be opinionated, sure, but with opinions based on data.
(To be clear, I’m not disputing that Silver thinks BlueSky is failing—I’ll take your word for that—I’m disputing that he’s doing so because he had an axe to grind rather than data backing him up.)
It doesn't matter, because nobody is taking Nate Silver's word for anything. That Nate Silver dunks on Bsky is of absolutely no probative value whatsoever.
Saying "you can google it" when the range of online information is massive is not a helpful thing to say. What numbers are you believing and why?
Nate Silver has basically zero juice on Bluesky, people go there to get away from that sort of "expert" that's got a huge profile already but is hard to escape if you are uninterested in his takes.
I mean he'll, take his own word on it, it's not the social network for him!
You didn't point to his numbers so that wasn't clear, but either way, Silver has beef with bsky because he isn't popular there and he likes to whine about it.
The usage numbers I've seen are down from their peak last November but have mostly stabilized at this point. The devs say they have multiple years of runway, and each time there is an exodus from twitter the numbers have a sharp increase and then decline to a stable number higher than they started.
13 months ago there were 200k daily likers and now there are 1.2 million. Yes, that is down from the highest peak directly after the election, but the 1.2 million has been fairly steady for the past ~4 months and if there's one thing you can count on it's Elon doing something stupid to piss off users and cause another user exodus. That one will cause another peak and slow decline but if it's like every other one he's caused the end result will be higher numbers for bsky than before.
They were linked in the thread by the person complaining about them in an ancestor of your comment.
> if there's one thing you can count on it's Elon doing something stupid to piss off users and cause another user exodus. That one will cause another peak and slow decline but if it's like every other one he's caused the end result will be higher numbers for bsky than before.
Only seeing growth when Musk does something stupid, and most of the new users not sticking around are strong signals it doesn’t have long-term value. Bluesky is the rebound social network.
> Only seeing growth when Musk does something stupid, and most of the new users not sticking around are strong signals it doesn’t have long-term value. Bluesky is the rebound social network.
One thing that often gets overlooked is that Twitter itself was on pretty shaky financial ground (and likely still is, though being private now makes that harder to know). Even if Bluesky managed to absorb the entirety of Twitter’s user base, it’s still unclear whether that translates into a strong business model.
Yes: Plenty of criticism has been aimed at how Twitter was run, and maybe Bluesky is managed more effectively right now, but there's no evidence to suggest Bluesky would be run significantly better at that scale.
I’ve noticed this anxiety on steam reviews too, people seem to stress out if there isn’t a continuous growth of a game’s player base, like there’s a totality that we all need to be striving for, even in a federated space, even in a game’s player base, otherwise any shrinking indicates a spiral. Not that they aren’t real (the spirals) but there’s an aspect of putting the cart before the horse here.
> I don't understand how Bluesky is going going to continue to exist past 2026, based on the sharply declining usage, their headcount, and the amount of funding they've taken.
Do you have any data to back this up?
Also famously twitter is losing value and advertisers and users still it’s not stopped twitter from existing
Regarding engagement doesn’t twitter have lot more low quality engagement vs Bkuesky
Also, linkedin says 53 people, though crazies like to say they're employed places. It does say 29 in the US so that's more likely real. Assuming that skews eng a bit, that's probably (225 fully loaded eng, 150 fully loaded the rest) $6m in payroll alone. Not to mention server expenses. That's tough.
The case for more funding: 1 - yolo; 2 - non-economic investments; 3 - Musk gonna Musk, so expect Twitter to further shed users. There may be a business to be built there if you can run significantly more efficiently than Twitter which was a shockingly poorly-operated business (Zuck was dead on re: the clown car. Except maybe more like a silver mine, not a gold mine.). Oh, and 4 - the EU is pretty hostile to Twitter and Threads, so maybe there's some there there. Dunno.
Yeah, this is basically where I'm coming from. There are ideologues and stans arguing both ways whether Bluesky is a moribund platform. I don't think it's intrinsically moribund. But I think that's the wrong question. The more important question is: is it succeeding to the point where it will attract another round of investment? That case is I think pretty hard to make based on the available public evidence --- but the Bsky people obviously know a lot more about this than I do!
No. Government should be using a self-hosted instance of something standard and federated (ie, an ActivityPub implementation such as Mastodon). That can be federated out to the walled gardens (Twitter), vulture-capital places (Bluesky), etc as needed.
I have the opposite problem. My Bluesky (and Mastodon) feeds have gotten so active that I have a hard time catching up these days. And Twitter seems to be mostly full of bloviating narcissists who are addicted to feeling like “influencers” of the unwashed masses, not co-equal participants of public discussion.
More broadly, Twitter’s problem is that it carpet bombed the bridge with a substantial portion of its intelligent population. I’m pretty sure half the tech, game dev, and research people I follow on Bluesky/Mastodon will not return under any circumstance, myself included.
I think platforms like that will survive on essentially rage and bitterness. People will always flock to platforms like X, Bluesky, iFunny, and others to vent and rage. There's so much anger in nearly every post that I don't see any of it as particularly useful, or a good use of one's time.
Social media is bad for you. Though I'm not sure that social media enjoyed a "social media is good for you" phase. There are certainly studies I'm sure that are out there, but the general consensus seems to be negative.
Oh, at least here in Brazil, people still find it strange if you say you don't have an Instagram account. There's this idea of being a bit weird for not following this trend.
Bluesky is a public benefit corp which at least nominally means they don't have to maximize shareholder value at the expense of everything else.
Decentralization is not a priority for most people. If anything, they actively want centralization, because it's easier. To get those people to decentralize, the solution will have to be dead easy and invisible. The AT Protocol being developed by the Bluesky people looks promising.
I don't work for Bluesky, I'm not on Bluesky, and I don't particularly care, but I found your comment unfair after reading about ATProto on HN literally yesterday.
Opening an account on Mastodon was a pain even for me, a long-time Internet user and a nerd. I'm confronted with a choice of servers, but if I love cheese and golf, do I open my account on the cheese server or the golf server? What will be the disadvantages of choosing one over the other? Instant blocker right in the sign up process that made me actually give up several times. If it was like that for me, imagine how it could be for an average user.
The Fediverse will only be popular if someone releases a client that makes it as easy to use as X and Bluesky. Not sure if it's technically feasible (I don't know much about the innards of the protocol) but it doesn't seem to have happened at the moment.
> Opening an account on Mastodon was a pain even for me, a long-time Internet user and a nerd.
I was in the same boat as you, and my experience was completely different. Mastodon's federation model reminded me of IRC, except nowhere near as balkanized.
So how did I wrangle the supposed complexity? I started out on one of the main instances and just started people-watching. Over time, I took note of which server contained users whose content I enjoyed over time, then I just joined the server.
Joining the server got me a slower federated feed that was both more pertinent to my interests that also functioned as a de-facto community space. I also found the moderation to be more to my own preferences. But the bigger server wasn't _bad_, I just preferred the smaller server because it was more personable.
I don't use Mastodon much anymore, but that's more because a good chunk of my social circle left for BlueSky than any gripes I had with the platform. I don't know where they will go if BlueSky goes belly up, but I can tell you that it won't be back to Twitter.
I did sign up for a mastodon account, but the server I used simply disappeared a couple of months later. I haven't worked up the motivation to bother doing it again.
This is the reason why it was a pain. You or I might think "this is a decentralized platform, I should look at all the servers and find the best one for me" and immediately get choice paralysis looking at who has what rules, who federates with who, who runs which one, etc. An average user will probably stick to the main instance and not even think about it.
As for another data point, opening a Mastodon account for me was as trivial as choosing one random link from a webpage, choosing a username, password, and entering my email. If you get frozen on the choice of instance, that has more to do with your mental process than with an effective difficulty for the average user.
If you really cannot go beyond your inclination, and since you are a a long-time Internet user and a nerd, why not host your own instance?
There's already way more stuff on Mastodon for the hashtags I follow than I can possibly consume. If this is "unpopular", I'm happy with the way things are.
Maybe it _should_ be a little tougher to sign up for than the other mainstream options.
This. I still don't understand why there's so much consternation over choosing a Mastodon server. It doesn't limit who you can follow. I suppose if you're the sort of person who actually likes seeing random content from people you don't explicitly follow it could matter, but that's not for me.
That's simply not true. All servers maintain blacklists of other servers they don't like and won't federate with, including mastodon.social: https://mastodon.social/about (last section, "Moderated servers")
You could argue that it's normal to block problematic servers, but it's not you the user who gets to define what is problematic, it's your server. Therefore your choice of server may very well prevent you from seeing content you'd like to see.
Because IRCs aren't social media platforms? Creating an "account" on an IRC server is trivial, and you don't have a permanent profile or friend lists, etc
Sure, and I did almost mention that. This is an outlier though. When people normally discuss this they act as if their choice of server has a huge impact on whom they can follow. Except for degenerate cases this isn’t true
I see that now the website shows a simpler choice - join mastodon.social or choose another server. I don't think it was like that when I joined (maybe 2 or 3 years ago), you were just given a list of servers or a search and told to choose.
This is an improvement for average user onboarding - although if almost everyone clicks mastodon.social, you kind of lose the value of decentralization, right?
The time to have an opinion on which servers are cool and which host the fun people you follow is not the instant you go to sign up. Over time, you can notice which servers have buzz for bad moderation vs good, or where half your follow-list lives, and consider moving then
Having it take longer to form an opinion isn't exactly a negative either. The longer you take to pick a new server, the longer that server will have been around, and the longer it'll likely continue to be around.
I think there’s still value to having a long tail of independent instances, which can readily become more dominant if something happens to compromise the primary mastodon.social instance.
No, because the point is that not everyone is forced to use the same instance.
When I started on Mastodon I created an account for each instance I wanted to post to, which was slightly annoying but not much more complicated than signing up for different subreddits. Now I have my own hosted account and follow whomever I like from there. Of course you can follow any account from any account (if the admin hasn't blocked it.)
We’re talking about the average user. They’re not going to be particularly passionate about federation. The point, to them, is to have a functioning Twitter-like social network.
I'll be completely honest, as someone who remembers the internet before social networks, I have started caring less and less about being crammed into a single shared social space with every other person on earth.
The average user starts caring about censorship, AFAIK. And Bluesky has done very nasty ToS changes that only federation would have helped fight against.
But this is off-topic, because the ToS changes are mostly about porn, while this HN submission is about the professional use of Bluesky.
The only thing that would help with running sadly illegal in increasing parts of the world (including US) adult content servers would be not having a corporate entity.
It's difficult to fund rapid development at the scale needed, with that hobble.
Because Threads is Meta's attempt at bullshitting Mastodon users in welcoming a wolf among the herd. Search for "Fedipact": Meta is de facto cut off from many Mastodon instances.
Except the largest Mastodon instance, mastodon.social, does federate with Threads. I'm not even sure if the list you provided even covers most of the top instances either.
It really feels like an "eating your cake and having it too" kinda situation: you get the engagement and interaction with millions of Threads users but you don't have to count them in your decentralization metrics.
They aren't exactly equal evils... and if a federated replacement for Xitter were going to win, I think it already would have. Ease of use (and comprehensibility) are both pretty important in this business, and nobody seems to get that.
The Twitter buyout should have made this obvious. When one company runs the whole thing, then some rich twat can wreck it on a whim, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
> Trading one corporate overlord for another is not the smartest play.
Only if you expect to be there for ever even as they inevitably enshittify. Be under no illusion that although BlueSky is having its "first they are good to their users" phase now, it is temporary.
So make the most of it now while it's good, but be prepared to move on when that changes. Embracing impermanence is a smarter play. This is nothing new, thus passes all social media.
X still appears above the fold in a special section on Google with custom previews.
Eg. searching 'Anthony Albanese Bluesky' for Australia's leader has a link to X, with custom integrated previews, above the Bluesky link of the PM despite the search explicitly stating Bluesky and despite the account posting to Bluesky.
It's hard for anyone to move over since the lack of engagement is rigged like this.
Btw if you set your browser default search to anything other than Google searching for people works much better. No customized bumping of X based links over other options when searching for people.
Duckduckgo and Bing put the bluesky link as #1 for the above. Seems straightforward to make the switch to me. If you haven't changed your browsers default search engine in the past 5 years now's a good time to do so. Much better results await.
At least the AI stuff can be disabled. Duckduckgo allows you to store settings in the URL too, if you're the type of person who disables cookies and localstorage. Edit your search URL to: https://duckduckgo.com/?k5=1&kbe=0&kbj=1&kbg=-1&q=%s
kagi.com is a superior search engine compared with all three, to the point where I pay for a license for everyone in my company to use it.
The kagi assistant is also nice, only responding with AI when you add a question mark to your query, with the option of opening the query in a separate web search RAG w/the LLM of your choice
Interesting, maybe it also shows quality of search. I know that these are barely relevant compared to google, but Bing, Ecosia, etc. are showing Bluesky link.
Most of my hard science contacts (physics, biology etc) from my days in student government have moved to Bluesky. Newer academics seem to be starting out there and skipping Twitter entirely.
If you have heard of Metcalfe's Law, you'll understand why this is not good for Twitter long term.
It's like internet media is reaching a new level of maturity in that it is bifurcating into the tabloids and the serious magazines, like printed media was before.
Since covid much of the biological academic people on twitter were getting violent threats from anti-vaxxers and anyone angry about science contradicting the proclamations of their deal leader Trump.
Why would anyone with half a brain stay to experience that?
Most scientists don't have a professional profile on Twitter or Bluesky. It's the most self-aggrandizing ones who tend to do that.
The rest of us are just writing papers, presenting at conferences, collaborating with other research groups without any interest in putting it all out there on social media.
This whole X versus Bluesky thing is basically irrelevant. Neither of these platforms are good venues for dissemination of scientific research.
"Neither of these platforms are good venues for dissemination of scientific research."
These "platforms", i.e. other peoples' gigantic websites, are fantasy worlds that cater to self-aggrandisement where relevance requires a presence in that world
The outside world, aka the real world, is under represented and thus ignored
Total activity across the entire site doesn't meaningfully affect users as long as the activity they actually care about is still there, "Bluesky's aggregate metrics are down" and "Bluesky is the best place to talk science" can both be true at the same time. The website you're reading right now has abysmal metrics compared to Facebook and TikTok, but that's not really the point, is it?
yep. This feels like a feature to me, not a bug. As a mostly reader/follower on these platforms I'm surprised when others compare their engagement metrics, rather than the quality of the engagement on these platforms. Obviously their goals and incentives are different than mine, but the more time I spend on the internet the more I value the smaller communities due to the correlation with quality and topical focus.
I think the interesting part of that article was "distributed to 813... who had used bluesky and X". That seems a little misleading. What if you just picked 813 at random and asked how many had even used bluesky at all?
My academic twitter migrated to Mastodon. Most my colleagues from different universities who used to be on Twitter are there now and I do not miss not being on X. There are even servers run by organizations like ACM (Association of Computer Machinery).
"A new study published in Integrative and Comparative Biology suggests that scientists are leaving X (formerly known as Twitter) in significant numbers due to its declining professional value."
Wow, imagine that, 99% of academia is left-wing and they're afraid to have a presence on X because the the "tolerant" left calls it a "Nazi echo chamber" and will come after their careers. BlueSky is totally winning, you guys!
This are just the last three Social Media I subscribed in the past and range from Stagnant to Pretty Much Dead.
I suppose that the problem is that if you already have 1000+ followers on, say, Twitter or IG you try posting the same stuff in parallel on both... after 1 month of doubled effort you notice that your followers on the new platform is an order of magnitude smaller... you want to stop double posting because it is too time consuming. Guess which one you will opt out of?
As a light user who bounced around X, BlueSky, Mastodon, and Threads, I completely believe that scientists are weary of X. It’s increasingly toxic and driven by engagement bait posting (“shitposting” as they call it) where the loudest accounts continuously post provocative takes not because they believe it but because they know it will trigger their followers into debating it. Even the levels.io guy that everyone idolizes as the indie hacker hero is now posting a non-stop stream of factually inaccurate claims and taking swipes at contentious issues like burnout because he knows it gets people talking in his replies.
X seems to know this is a problem. They hired Nikita Bier who is posting claims that the algorithm is being improved to favor people sharing best in class knowledge every day, but the current meta appears to be posting controversial hot takes that are easily argued or debunked. Tricking your followers into fact checking you is a game in itself because it generates engagement and therefore extends reach. This is why some accounts are deliberate exaggerating facts or posting known misinformation now.
That said, I have a hard time believing everyone is migrating to BlueSky instead of simply leaving this type of social media. Bluesky feels relatively dead except for the few accounts playing the BlueSky meta game, which is largely about infighting and creating hyper cliques from what I see.
One account I follow went to BlueSky but then returned to X because he couldn’t stand it. He described BlueSky as the place to go if you wanted to be constantly attacked by people who 98% agree with you. My impression is that it’s a smaller pond where the people who were previously small fish on X see it as their opportunity to fight their way to the top of a smaller food chain. It just feels ugly and mean half the time. I’ve had to unfollow a lot of people on BlueSky who I previously enjoyed on X because they got sucked into the BlueSky toxicity competition and now they’re just taking swipes at other people on BlueSky all day instead of posting info I wanted to see.
I am constantly surprised by the amount of people who enjoy drivel, but this has always been like this. Only we used to also have printed media that held itself to higher ideals than tabloids and worked as a counter weight to them. What is different atm is that for a long time there haven't been social media that shoot for higher ideals. Maybe bsky is that?
The market for tabloid social media is already saturated by meta, tiktok, x, snapchat, and the like. It would be interesting if bsky could find their own market with the more "serious" end of the media spectrum.
> people who enjoy drivel, but this has always been like this.
It's much more visible now, though. In the past it was quite easy to ignore the entire existence of someone like Rupert Murdoch but now the entire world knows what Musk is. He just appeared in last week at a rally of 100,000 people encouraging them to violently overthrowing the government. He appeared in the oval office giving speeches. Murdoch usually kept to himself.
Most likely this is due to political bias of the group that was surveyed [1]. Liberals in general dislike X because of the owner. It's the same reason that the average Hacker News reader favors Bluesky over X.
Bluesky is filled with biased, politicized garbage from all corners.
It's only made me realize the 'professionals' are mostly political hacks that will abandon commonb sense and the truth, if it makes their political opponents look bad.
If you go against left-wing ideals on Bluesky, you will be censored or banned.
I bet they’ll follow the sports media and, my personal taste in sports media, has recently started to migrate (e.g., Defector editors and contributors).
In my experience, the change has been positive. I rarely see feuds on Bluesky and when they happen I find them especially embarrassing because it’s so unusual.
I stopped posting on Twitter around the acquisition but kept my account. When I do randomly check my timeline I’m genuinely disturbed by the disinformation and pseudo-science, especially in machine learning.
In general that's true, but it's because on Bluesky, blocking causes the blocked person's replies to be hidden from everyone who views the original post. It's much easier to block than to engage with a contradictory reply (especially if the reply is correct and you're wrong), so disagreement tends to result in a block.
This behavior is common enough that it creates a chilling effect for anyone who disagrees. Why take the time to craft a reply correcting the poster if it will likely be hidden from everyone? And so you end up with echo chambers.
The effect is quite stunning on some topics. For example: Quite a few people on Bluesky believe the Trump assassination attempt in Pennsylvania was staged[1], that the Charlie Kirk assassin's text messages are fake[2][3], and that the recent ICE shooter was a false flag.[4][5][6] Notice the amount of engagement these posts have. Thousands of likes, with little to no disagreement in the replies. The lack of feuding is what allows people to believe these falsehoods.
And the issue is bigger than it looks since blocking is public, so blocking gets you on lists of users to block so you'll be blocked by people you never interacted with for blocking/disagreeing with someone.
I don't know that I really want to interact with anyone who uses a block list like that, but it definitely would make echo chambers worse.
I've seen the same thing happen in smaller discussions among experts on Bluesky, but I didn't link to those because: 1. It's harder for non-experts in that field to judge whether my claims are true. 2. It might reveal my identity.
The incentive structure is the same as larger discussions. If anything, a smaller community makes it easier to create echo chambers, as you need to block fewer people before reaching epistemic closure.
"Motivated political partisans say platform owned by political opponent bad, platform catering to their own political leaning good, pinky promise they're the pinnacle of neutrality and honesty and would never ever allow their public declarations to be influenced by their own partisan politics"
It would be nice if scientists started being just scientists again instead of activists. Hopefully being cloistered on bluesky will bring the old vibes back
X is not politically neutral, Elon openly talks about recalibrating Grok whenever it says something too liberal like recent discussions about gun violence.
Scientists should embrace decentralization and use Mastodon in my opinion. Bluesky will meet the same fate as Twitter and X one day
The typical political axis is liberty/freedom on one end vs. safety/security on the other end. And this is exactly one of those cases where having the liberty to bear arms reduces safety.
Well, in Europe you get stabbed. Or hit deliberately by a car. Or just thrown before an incoming train.
Shit happens everywhere... what's the difference?
And we also have school shootings in Europe. Less than USA, granted! But they exist.
Words have never had stable definitions in politics. Thucydides wrote about that over two thousand years ago, and nothing has charged or will change in that regard.
It’s basically impossible to make a career as a scientist these days without constantly promoting yourself and your work unfortunately. It’s very tiring and makes it difficult to focus on science. This is one of the reasons I changed careers.
Unfortunately science is unavoidably a political hot topic. Climate change denialism is the norm in the United States, we've somehow decided Tylenol causes autism in the past week, etc.
If you think either of those represent any meaningful portion of science you need to re-evaluate your understanding of science because it’s based on a layman’s perspective.
If you’re not actually involved in science you only see the scientists making news, which disproportionately selects for politically intersecting areas of research.
When I was working at a major US research university in the early 2000s, it was a big deal if the scientific publications got any mainstream press at all.
Countless papers push the boundaries of science in major journals and conferences every year and you never hear about them because they have no political implications and usually no immediate practical applications.
That's true, but the other professions don't tend to be associated with (or clearly vindicate) the “above-the-crowd/holier-than-thou” attitude – and I say that as an ex-scientist, for the same reason (among others) as the poster above.
It is 100% allowed, I just don't think it's really helpful or beneficial for them or society
Especially when they try to lean on their status as scientists in order to try and have their opinions be more influential.
The cdc for example saying it's ok to disregard their previous guidance in order to protest for black lives matter is one of these credibility damaging moments that is hard to undo.
So nobody is allowed to use their notoriety to amplify their posts?
No more athletes, musicians, artists, whatever. Everyone must be anonymous. Or is it strictly scientists who are not allowed to post if their profession is known?
> The cdc for example saying it's ok to disregard their previous guidance in order to protest for black lives matter
That’s… not what they said? They said it was probably relatively safe to attend a protest because it was happening outdoors and Covid spread mostly through accumulated aerosols. It turned out to be good guidance: practically no one gets Covid that way unless a sick person is actively coughing on them.
The “I am an expert, so listen to me drone about some political topic that’s vaguely related to my expertise” has been a thing for years now. And it’s usually some controversial thing that doesn’t have to do with science anyway.
In general, it makes scientists look really naive and makes them lose credibility when they talk about actual science.
If a person is an expert on a topic then it makes sense for them to have a higher probability of being correct.
>And it’s usually some controversial thing that doesn’t have to do with science anyway.
What evidence do you have that most scientists are giving opinions about things unrelated to their expertise and then stating you should trust them more due to their expertise or position?
Yes, that’s the typical argument but the problem is that they veer way out of their lane. And their lane is in reality very narrow and academically focused.
When these experts go into politics and activism, their biases show and consequently the credibility of them and their unfortunate colleagues who don’t go into politics get lowered.
> What evidence do you have that most scientists are giving opinions about things unrelated to their expertise and then stating you should trust them more due to their expertise or position?
> When these experts go into politics and activism
What if the issue is related to their expertise?
Veering out of the lane implies they start offering their opinion about a topic that has nothing to do with their field after discussing one that does without making a clear disclaimer
>credibility of them and their unfortunate colleague
It's wrong to judge all due to the actions of some. This is a huge flaw of people in general but I wanted to mention it.
NTA but I think one example which deserves far more scrutiny than it gets is all the public health experts[1] in the early months of COVID who were telling people to stay inside, don't gather in groups even if you're outside, don't go to church etc only to suddenly change their minds and say that gathering in large groups is actually very safe as soon as the protests surrounding the murder of george floyd happened. This is a topic they have expertise on (or at least they claim to) so it's certainly within their lane, but the abrupt change in policy was obviously motivated by their political leanings and it did *a lot* to hurt their personal credibility as well as perceptions of the pandemic in general.
[1] IDK how many of them should actually be considered 'experts' as this is not a field I follow, but they were presented as such in the media and so that is how they are perceived.
>but the abrupt change in policy was obviously motivated by their political leanings
The CDC published guidelines on mass gathering in March “Interim Guidance: Get Your Mass Gatherings or Large Community Events Ready for COVID-19”
The CDC director warned that the George Floyd protests could be a seeding event for Covid in June.
The CDC published updated guidelines "Considerations for events and gatherings" on June 12th 2020.
1. The protests started May 26th and were already occuring when the CDC added updates guidelines 16 days later.
2. The CDC has no power to stop the protests and there goal is to reduce the spread of Covis
3. The director specifically stated that the protests only increased the possibility of Covid spreading.
4. It wasn't an abrupt change since they previously published guidelines.
5. In my opinion the protests were very emotional and I don't think the threat of COVID would have stopped them.
Your argument that they changed their mind abruptly and that it was for the political benefit of the protests (as in implying it's somehow safe to protest) is not supported by the evidence. You said it was obvious.
[1]“I do think there is a potential, unfortunately, for this to be a seeding event" [referring to the protests]
Robert Redfield, House Appropriations hearing, June 4th 2020
>at least they claim to) so it's certainly within their lane
Yes. Which is what this discussion I replied to was about. The claim was experts using their status to claim expertise in opinions unrelated to their field.
Not whether they changed their opinions on subjects they are experts at.
Here's an example of what you are claiming. A chemist publicly states his opinion on the current illegal immigrant crackdown and implies or directly states that his opinion has more value because he is a chemist.
Alternative example the chemist is interviewed for his opinion on immigration by the news (except as a bystander when they want random people to chime in).
For example CNN is discussing Trump's crackdown and says "here to talk about what Trump is doing is Harvard professor of Chemistry and (other titles) Chemist John Bismuth"
Jordan Peterson comes to my mind. Although I have no respect for his opinions at all, I still think that, in the end, scientists have their political views and should be allowed to talk about them. What they shouldn't be allowed is to insinuate that these views are anything other than their personal views. Hate speech and political extremism should also not be allowed because these damage the reputation of their university.
Other than that, I don't think it's right to tell them not to use their status to influence politics and society towards what they perceive as making the world better. On the contrary, they might have some duty to do just that.
> The cdc for example saying it's ok to disregard their previous guidance in order to protest for black lives matter is one of these credibility damaging moments that is hard to undo.
Yep, there it is. You’re just upset that they don’t have your opinions.
> The cdc for example saying it's ok to disregard their previous guidance in order to protest for black lives matter is one of these credibility damaging moments that is hard to undo.
AFAIK, the CDC itself made no such official statement, but many prominent figures in public health, including a former CDC director [0], said just that.
Maybe the parent is lamenting how some people post a lot of interesting scientific content, but also a whole lot of other content on topics that they are not interested in, and unfortunately most social networks require following all aspects of a person and not just the parts that interest you.
Google+ had it right where you can follow just a community, and also you can selectively make your participation in certain communities visible in your public profile. I am not sure if Bluesky or Mastodon have something similar.
Ok but if I'm a radiologist opining about social media, I'm no longer practicing science. I'm just some guy with an opinion.
"Scientists say..." is becoming just another "studies show...". You can always find a scientist or a study or an "expert" to push whatever agenda the media outlet has.
Literally true, perhaps. But have you ever noticed how reluctant non-scientist professionals are to voice opinions in their chosen fields? Lawyers preface everything with "not your lawyer", "not my area of practice...", "I'd have to look into the details of that case...", etc. Accountants similarly. Doctors similarly. Engineers similarly. Vs. it seems to be accepted practice for a nuclear physicist to speak ex cathedra about epidemiology, climatology, etc.
Lack of self control or awareness. People make the mistake of thinking that because they are informed on one topic that happens to be political that their opinions on other political topics are relevant.
I’m fine seeing scientists arguing for the importance of science on social media. I don’t want to hear rants about LGBTQ+ people from geologists.
Why don't scientists publish anonymously? We already have double-blind peer review. This seems like such an obvious idea, there must be some issue.
Authors can still get reputation, recognition, and compensation for their papers, without people knowing who wrote what paper, via public/private keys and blockchain. Every time an author publishes a paper, they generate a new address and attach the public key to it. Judges send awards (NFTs) and compensation to the key without knowing who holds it, and if the same award type is given to multiple papers, authors can display it without anyone knowing which paper is theirs.
With LLMs even writing style can be erased (and as a side effect, the paper can be written in different formats for different audiences). Judges can use objective criteria so they can't be bribed without others noticing; in cases where the paper is an algorithm and the criteria is a formal proof, the "judge" can be a smart contract (in practice I think that would be a small minority of papers, but it would still be hard for a judge to nominate an undeserving paper while avoiding skeptics, because a deserving paper would match the not-fully-objective criteria according to a wide audience). Any other potential flaws?
1. It's a very small community and peer review is even hard. Think about it this way: what do you think two physicist colleagues talk about at a conference? How do you know who to talk to to collaborate on a problem? (Yes, people still talk voice about problems.)
2. Labs are specialized. You choose a lab to work at based on what they're working on. How are you going to choose where to spend your Ph.D or postdoc if you don't know what the lab is working on and how productive it is?
3. We are all still humans. We are wired to know the social systems around us. This would be an entire charade.
Ok, then scientists can form groups where they know each other, but publish anonymously outside those groups.
It doesn't solve all the issues, but it at least allows scientists to be "activists" (really just share their opinions like any other human) without affecting their credibility. Even if they're doxxed, they can eventually regain anonymity, because eventually other scientists with different views will publish papers on the same subject, and people can only distinguish who published what by its content.
Right now, scientists can share their opinions anonymously. This works well enough, except they can't share them in-person except to others they trust; and if they get doxxed, they can't remove their old posts from the name on their papers.
Those may not be the solutions, but the problem certainly exists. I'm in academia and even I'll admit it has a lot of nepotism. People who are famous or infamous are identified despite peer-review (stylometry and subject) and the reviewers are biased for or against them. Also see comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45396377#45396617: "It’s basically impossible to make a career as a scientist these days without constantly promoting yourself and your work unfortunately". If attaching your name to a paper becomes taboo, perhaps promotion will be less important, and if results can be judged algorithmically, definitely so.
So firstly most scientists already aren't really activists in any meaningful way, it seems like you're implying most are on twitter/bluesky doing activism and the vast majority aren't really. Secondly I'm confused who people think should be able to be activists in a democracy? Scientists seem like a good candidate for people that should do activism in a healthy democracy.
I feel like scientists should be explaining to us how the world is, and then other people should use those explanations to try and improve it.
Right now I feel like there are a scientists who would hide or discard results if they contradicted their advocacy beliefs,which is a dangerous place to be imo.
That's how it works. I think people for some reason don't understand policy making. The CDC conducts research and studies, pulls data, performs analysis, and then provides guidance based on it.
It enacts no rules, laws, or regulations. That's done by policy makers who can listen to or ignore the guidance and data from the CDC at their discretion.
It's because the left-wing that largely captures academia believes in the "rule of law" and more importantly, "policy by experts". Essentially when we boil it down, we're talking about an ideology that can justify anything if it's what "the science says". Of course, we are all aware that inconvenient studies can be prevented from running, inconvenient results can be discarded, and results themselves can be manipulated for the 'correct' result.
COVID was an example where unelected expert committees were given power to decide policy, and as a result schools were shut down at the detriment of education, hospitals were shut down at the detriment of the sick, and the economy was shut down at the detriment of the taxpayers. The COVID committees were singular issue task force: 'reduce COVID deaths by any means', and they achieved that task. A politician on the other hand is responsible for balancing several issues against one another.
Singular issue people/groups in general are quite dangerous and should be kept away from politics. We know, for example, that single issue AI is likely going to be a problem in the future, i.e. The Stamp Collecting Device [1] that destroys the world trying to achieve the singular issue of collecting stamps. Whilst the singular issue expert scientist is well meaning, a well-rounded politician should be considering the various trade-offs.
No, it's not. Good science requires objective thinking and evidence-based reasoning. Claims must be proven, not accepted based on authority or prima facie evidence.
Unfortunately, social media or whatever has changed science communication. A scientist can do amazing science, have total evidence based reasoning and then be completely ignored because some quack tells a good story on Rogan.
That doesn’t matter and it’s not any different than 20 years ago. New findings could be published in medical journals that nobody in the public hears about and some quack on Howard Stern could spew to millions.
You might be confusing activists with volunteers. Those who donate their time and money are not necessarily vocal about their pet projects. I'm part of the latter and do not consider myself an activist.
Absolutely not. A scientist is expected to change their mind when new, counterfactual evidence is presented. Activists push for positions regardless of whether any evidence exists to support their position, and seem to maintain their position even when presented with counterfactual evidence. That is not science. We have a name for it: dogma.
Wait a second, if you’re saying that this is not a feature of good activism, are you implying you are more convinced by activists who practice dogma over objective thinking?
What is a scientist to do when they discover a vaccine or cure for something; say fuck it who cares if we change behavior? Are you saying a good vaccine advocate is someone who ignores the underlying science and acts dogmatically?
It just feels like you want to demonize this action of activism for… why? Just because there are lots of bad activists? There are a lot of bad scientists as well, to be honest the view of “good scientist” and “bad activist” feels dogmatic.
I have yet to observe an activist practice objective thinking. That was the root of the argument. Activists sometimes do back the correct argument, but not because they are practising scientific reasoning. Most activists are swayed by rhetoric, a good story. That's an emotional response, not a logical one.
To answer your second point, science has a process for disseminating new findings. It's not perfect, but it works. Organizations that scientists work for do pay attention to those sources, discoveries do get patented and productionized. I encourage you to conduct some research: See how many people were talking about mRNA vaccines and gain-of-function research on social media before COVID vs after. The lack of social media coverage didn't affect the science or the scientists, who had spent the past decade conducting research on the subject.
I will maintain that Twitter/X/Bluesky are not part of the scientific process, nor should they be. These platforms do not encourage objective thought or reasoned arguments.
Maybe the problem is with our funding model. Necessarily the whole grant system is based on being able to argue a narrative as to why your scientific inquiry deserves money. Combine that with a system that includes incentives towards or away from social values, and scientists are necessarily activists.
And then that’s just to get money in your specific direction, getting money in your general direction requires more broad activism.
When one political party is explicitly anti-science in its goals and aims and actions (RFK, global warming as a hoax, anti-vaxx, COVID as a hoax), Nature endorsing the person who is pro-science isn't political; it's existential. This is not "no reason". It's just not the reason you like because for some reason.
How so? It seems obvious that you can do science (that is: attempt to advance the understanding of how the natural world works) without being an activist for any cause.
Oh I mean I don’t care if the teacher is for or against school shootings, I just find it interesting to have subject matter experts share their knowledge and give their opinions on things that impact their field. Some people just don’t take it well when those opinions don’t line up with their own on contentious topics.
How is it "interesting" for an elementary school teacher to be against school shootings? I'd bet I can find some carpenters who are against smashing thumbs with hammers, but why bother?
Are you calling it "Activism" when someone shares the opinion of 99.9% of the population, and spends 0 time advocating for that opinion?
Auto mechanic: Consumer advocacy, business regulation, labor issues, safety, etc.
Professor of Medieval history: Lots of political discourse makes claims about history or things like "the dark ages" that turn out to be mis-interpretations or false. Note that I have a friend in that field who often writes gentle corrections to false historical claims in online discourse.
The job of science is to discover facts and produce new knowledge from those facts. Activism is the marketing of an ideology. They couldn't be more opposite.
Simply expressing the fact that climate change is happening is considered “activism” by some folks (and especially on X).
Asking them to “not be activists” is really a request for them to self police their speech in a way that fits their worldview.
This is not restricted to scientists by the way. Just look at the different response to how the NFL handled Charlie Kirk’s death with official moments of silence vs. Colin Kaepernick kneeing for police brutality. One is supported, one is suppressed.
Exact opposite. Science is under attack by politics and we need authoritative voices explaining how dangerous this is. Why would scientists not be allowed to offer opinions on their observations? That's basically the same thing as science.
When would that be? Needs to be after science stops being politicized by the Republican party. Scientists must be activists when anti-science is de jour.
I think you're assuming that dichotomy. There was an observation that Trump supporters derided liberals for loving biden. The observation pointed out a false equivalence, "the other side is doing the same thing", we love Trump, so they must love their leader too.
Or, do you some sort of systematic evidence that evaluates the politics across all of bluesky in comparison to X? I don't think there is such evidence to know that bluesy is the polar opposite of Twitter.
I don't understand how Bluesky is going to continue to exist past 2026, based on the sharply declining usage, their headcount, and the amount of funding they've taken.
It has apparent value propositions past the social network, but none of those use cases are visibly taking off and none of them appear to be monetizable. The social network itself is what will be evaluated when they go out for more funding. And I don't see how you can raise at all for a social network in 2026 with flat numbers, let alone the declining numbers Bluesky actually has.
I've been dual-wielding Twitter and Bluesky for about a year (after a year off Twitter where I was mostly Mastodon), and, anecdatally, we've hit a point where the engagement and volume of stuff I see in Bluesky is lower than what I was getting even on Mastodon. Earlier on, there was some truth to the idea that Twitter had a much larger audience, but you'd get better engagement on Bluesky. I now get better engagement on Twitter. I can see people I had followed into Bluesky moving back to Twitter.
I have no idea what's going to happen, but I'm curious to hear a coherent story about how Bluesky isn't cooked.
Sharply declining usage? I don't see the stats to back that up on https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
Usage has absolutely declined from peak switching periods where inevitibly some users won't stick around, but that's to be expected. Most stats seem to be leveling off (which isn't exactly stable growth either so the rest of your points stand).
Yeah, I think what you needed to do here is zoom out. That's a sharply declining chart.
I understand that as a Bluesky user the peak and dropoff doesn't hurt the experience. But investors are going to put money in with the expectation of a return and what they're going to look at are the derivatives of the adoption curve: how quickly is it gaining users, and is adoption accelerating?
I zoomed out. It looks like this: "Usage has absolutely declined from peak switching periods where inevitibly some users won't stick around, but that's to be expected"
That just isn't a "sharp decline" no matter how much you seem to want to repeat those words.
I agree that it’s not a sharp decline but zooming out, what I see is absolutely no organic growth at all in the past couple of years. All the increases have been sharp spikes that immediately fall off dramatically, followed by longer, slower periods of decline. It looks like nobody is switching to Bluesky except in a handful of viral events, during which a tonne of people try it out but don’t keep using it. There’s only one upward slope on these graphs, and that stopped in late 2023 – about the time Threads went fully global. These look like very unhealthy stats.
Last year in November they had around 2.7MM likers. Today it's 1.2MM.
Last year in November they had around 1.3MM posters. Today, 0.65MM.
Followers: 3MM, to 0.4MM today.
Last year in August they had 200k likers. Today it's 1.2MM.
Last year in August they had 150k posters. Today they have 650k.
Followers: 50k to 400k today
Right, so the basic story you're telling investors there is that between August and September of 2024 they experienced a sharp spike, and then basically they stayed that way for over a year. That's not a dying platform, but it's not a growth story you take to investors either.
How does it compare to other social networks like Twitter? Can't compare because they don't offer granular data this detailed? That tells you something.
That doesn't matter! In fact, Twitter doing worse while Bluesky usage is dropping probably makes them significantly less investable.
I'm not rooting for them to fail. I use Bluesky. I find Twitter's ownership odious and the platform significantly worse than it was 4 years ago.
But if we're talking about scientific communicators talking about where the future of scientific communication is going to happen, it is relevant whether Bluesky has a long-term future. There's another non-Twitter social network that doesn't operate under this funding pressure!
Those are Jaz’s daily unique action counts (flows) from the Bluesky firehose; they’re anchored to the Nov ’24 spike, so the ‘decline’ is post-surge reversion. Meanwhile the user stock kept rising (~39M).
A presidential election spike is the baseline for tracking growth in a social media platform??
> Meanwhile the user stock kept rising (~39M).
What’s “user stock”? Is that the number of registered accounts? Isn’t it basically impossible for that to do anything but go up? It’s the number of people actively using the network that’s the important figure, not the total number of people who ever used it.
Are these the figures you are reporting?
> We made a new Bluesky stats page to see how the platform is growing. Unfortunately it is currently shrinking.
> Last week the total number of users registered hit 36M, but actually only 13M of those showed any activity in the last 90 days.
> Bluesky User Stats/Growth: https://bluefacts.app/bluesky-user-growth
— https://www.reddit.com/r/BlueskySocial/comments/1kxib89/blue...
Right now that shows 5.6M MAUs.
> The number of active users (posting, liking or following) is down by 6.3% compared to 12 weeks ago.
> The number of unique accounts posting at least once a day is down by 5.6% compared to 12 weeks ago.
> The number of posts created each day is down by 4.3% compared to 12 weeks ago.
> The number of likes given each day is up by 0.3% compared to 12 weeks ago.
> The number of users liking posts each day is down by 6.1% compared to 12 weeks ago.
> The number of new follows each day is down by 19.3% compared to 12 weeks ago.
Also check the account age stats:
https://bluefacts.app/bluesky-account-age
> 32.1K New accounts per day since the beginning
> 23.7K New accounts per day in the last 30 days
> 14K New accounts per day in the last 7 days
New accounts per day appears to be getting much worse over time.
To be fair, also last year in November they had 850K likers, 500K posters, and 400K followers.
Last year in November, the co-president just banned a bunch of guys from X for not liking him.
After the spike rose and fell, it continues to decline fairly quickly. I have no horse in this race but it looks sharp to me!
Why does anyone need to invest at all? Why can't Jack Dorsey just run it instead of needing it be a hockey stick start up?
Jack Dorsey is in no way involved with bsky today. In fact he hates it
Dorsey left may 2024: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/07/j...
See, that's a good question, but it has an answer: first, they took a priced round, and those investors will need to see a return, and second, when the funding runs out, someone is going to have to put more money in --- substantially more money --- to keep the lights on.
What's probably true is that if they found a stable source of revenue they wouldn't have to answer these kinds of questions. But this is just back to my original point, of "I don't see how this is going to work", because I don't see how they're going to do that.
I'd be happy if someone jumped in and set me straight with a clear and plausible plan. To me, though, from the information I've seen, it looks like the premise here is that they're going to raise again, and to do that they're going to need to demonstrate accelerating growth, which they starkly do not have right now.
What investors? It isn't a public company, and it's registered as a benefit corporation. Anybody who gives them money should have a clue that its priority is not shareholder returns.
Your argument here reduces to "wealthy donors will fund it out of charity", which is not I think a claim Bluesky itself is making.
My argument is any investors should already know what they're getting into.
I'm not expressing a concern for the existing investors!
That curve has clearly leveled out, and some of them look like they've increased slightly...
[dead]
https://imgur.com/a/GLkSLkY
It looks like Bluesky is going to be shedding active for the near future, probably settling around a million users active per day.
What I've found is that most of the people I really want to follow are exclusively on bsky. BUT most of the people I'd prefer to casually follow either exclusively or mostly only posts on Twitter. And the 2nd group is a much larger pool than the first group.
I really dislike Mastodon so gave that up a while back. I know there are a few people I'd like to follow who only post there, but such is life.
I've found Bluesky does a really bad job at not showing me stuff I don't want to see. Furry p*rn on the "cute internet cats" feed? Yup. Heaps and heaps of political rage bait on the main discover feed? Yup.
I wanted to like BlueSky, but it's such a bizarre echo chamber of people who left Twitter for ideological reasons that it basically filters for people that I actively don't want to engage with.
Those types of people are still there on Twitter (mostly on the other side these days), but I don't see them because the algorithm filters them out.
You've got three tools, mutes, blocks, and lists. Yeah, there's no centralized algorithm that does it for you, it'll take a couple days of actual effort, but it's extremely easy to prune your main feed into looking how you want it to look. Which is pretty much like how it was to use Twitter a few years ago before everything got algorithmed.
> Yeah, there's no centralized algorithm that does it for you,
Bluesky doesn't really present it that way. The default "Discover" feed at least pretends to be exactly that.
> it'll take a couple days of actual effort, but it's extremely easy to prune your main feed into looking how you want it to look
I think this has changed recently. Months ago I tried to actually use Bluesky, and my Discover feed was awful. 90% of my time on the site was muting/blocking or thinking "show more/less like this" did something and it was an miserable experience which nothing seemed to improve except quitting it.
Checking it now, it's dramatically better. Still includes a lot of content I don't want, but less aggressively so, although that seems to largely be that I was gone so far it could be mostly content from accounts I follow.
> it'll take a couple days of actual effort, but it's extremely easy
If it takes a couple of days of actual effort, then it’s not extremely easy, especially for the average user who can just go to Threads with their existing Instagram account and not be bombarded with furry and diaper porn.
It actually takes effort to see furry and diaper porn. I'm pretty sure Adult Content is disabled by default and needs to be enabled.
For what it's worth, I've never seen anything like this either.
Bluesky is centralized, despite the constant protests that it isn't. https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/
I never see that but on both sites I only ever look at the feed that only includes people I follow. I don’t understand why anyone would use a feed that includes other co the t
New users follow zero people on Bluesky.
Yes. And I seeded my feed with people I already knew. Just like I did with Twitter back in 2008. And just like Twitter all those years ago, from seeing what they repost, I expanded my network.
People who are incapable of finding content without a "discovery" or "for you" feed get what they deserve.
They do really need to do something about this, I am not on regularly anymore but there was a period where i kept getting weird sexual posts of dudes in diapers, no matter how much i blocked or asked not to see that.
> or asked not to see that
That's part of the problem, I'm not sure that actually does anything.
> I've found Bluesky does a really bad job at not showing me stuff I don't want to see. Furry p*rn on the "cute internet cats" feed? Yup. Heaps and heaps of political rage bait on the main discover feed? Yup.
Unlike X, blue sky defaults to simply showing you a feed of the people you follow, in chronological order.
This is the best way to use the app
> I don't understand how Bluesky is going going to continue to exist past 2026, based on the sharply declining usage, their headcount, and the amount of funding they've taken.
Are you an insider? Where are the numbers?
how_long_can_bluesky_exists = f(usage, headcount, funding)
Three parameters and you supplied zero of them.
It does sound like you just randomly picked a number 2026 and proceeded to rant on how little engagement you received on Bluesky.
You can just Google these things. Nate Silver posted (grim looking) usage numbers --- followers and posters --- just a couple weeks ago. They very publicly raised a $15MM (priced) A round a year ago, after raising what I understood to be a comparable amount of seed funding. There was talk early this year of them raising again at a $700MM valuation, but I don't see a subsequent announcement that that happened.
You can generally take a headcount number and assign a fully loaded cost to it (say, $200k, conservatively) and just math it out. And of course that analysis assumes their infra expenditures round to zero.
So no, I'm not just making stuff up. I could be wrong! I feel like I was open about that.
Nate Silver is an ideologue who deeply wants BlueSky to be failing.
I think you’re going to need to back that up in order for me to take your claim seriously. I’ve always found Nate Silver to be opinionated, sure, but with opinions based on data.
(To be clear, I’m not disputing that Silver thinks BlueSky is failing—I’ll take your word for that—I’m disputing that he’s doing so because he had an axe to grind rather than data backing him up.)
It doesn't matter, because nobody is taking Nate Silver's word for anything. That Nate Silver dunks on Bsky is of absolutely no probative value whatsoever.
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Saying "you can google it" when the range of online information is massive is not a helpful thing to say. What numbers are you believing and why?
Nate Silver has basically zero juice on Bluesky, people go there to get away from that sort of "expert" that's got a huge profile already but is hard to escape if you are uninterested in his takes.
I mean he'll, take his own word on it, it's not the social network for him!
https://www.natesilver.net/p/what-is-blueskyism
What does it matter how much "juice" he has on Bluesky? The numbers are the numbers.
His numbers may be bad because people on the website don't like him, not because of something inherent about bsky (other than better taste)
Plenty of big accounts have anecdotally said they have much better engagement on bsky than twitter
They're not his numbers. He's just pointing to them!
You didn't point to his numbers so that wasn't clear, but either way, Silver has beef with bsky because he isn't popular there and he likes to whine about it.
The usage numbers I've seen are down from their peak last November but have mostly stabilized at this point. The devs say they have multiple years of runway, and each time there is an exodus from twitter the numbers have a sharp increase and then decline to a stable number higher than they started.
13 months ago there were 200k daily likers and now there are 1.2 million. Yes, that is down from the highest peak directly after the election, but the 1.2 million has been fairly steady for the past ~4 months and if there's one thing you can count on it's Elon doing something stupid to piss off users and cause another user exodus. That one will cause another peak and slow decline but if it's like every other one he's caused the end result will be higher numbers for bsky than before.
> You didn't point to his numbers
They were linked in the thread by the person complaining about them in an ancestor of your comment.
> if there's one thing you can count on it's Elon doing something stupid to piss off users and cause another user exodus. That one will cause another peak and slow decline but if it's like every other one he's caused the end result will be higher numbers for bsky than before.
Only seeing growth when Musk does something stupid, and most of the new users not sticking around are strong signals it doesn’t have long-term value. Bluesky is the rebound social network.
> Only seeing growth when Musk does something stupid, and most of the new users not sticking around are strong signals it doesn’t have long-term value. Bluesky is the rebound social network.
One thing that often gets overlooked is that Twitter itself was on pretty shaky financial ground (and likely still is, though being private now makes that harder to know). Even if Bluesky managed to absorb the entirety of Twitter’s user base, it’s still unclear whether that translates into a strong business model.
Yes: Plenty of criticism has been aimed at how Twitter was run, and maybe Bluesky is managed more effectively right now, but there's no evidence to suggest Bluesky would be run significantly better at that scale.
We have multiple years of runway
Sure, but if you’re on a downward trend for growth and don’t have viable paths to change that, runway is just stopping distance.
I’ve noticed this anxiety on steam reviews too, people seem to stress out if there isn’t a continuous growth of a game’s player base, like there’s a totality that we all need to be striving for, even in a federated space, even in a game’s player base, otherwise any shrinking indicates a spiral. Not that they aren’t real (the spirals) but there’s an aspect of putting the cart before the horse here.
A video game and a social network are pretty massively different things.
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> I don't understand how Bluesky is going going to continue to exist past 2026, based on the sharply declining usage, their headcount, and the amount of funding they've taken.
Do you have any data to back this up?
Also famously twitter is losing value and advertisers and users still it’s not stopped twitter from existing
Regarding engagement doesn’t twitter have lot more low quality engagement vs Bkuesky
I wouldn't invest in Twitter either!
People are overlooking the fact that Twitter’s situation wasn’t exactly great even before it was taken private.
If it's in a stronger financial position today, it's almost entirely because of the merger with xAI.
I googled: $23m raised (8 seed, 15 A in Oct 24).
Also, linkedin says 53 people, though crazies like to say they're employed places. It does say 29 in the US so that's more likely real. Assuming that skews eng a bit, that's probably (225 fully loaded eng, 150 fully loaded the rest) $6m in payroll alone. Not to mention server expenses. That's tough.
The case for more funding: 1 - yolo; 2 - non-economic investments; 3 - Musk gonna Musk, so expect Twitter to further shed users. There may be a business to be built there if you can run significantly more efficiently than Twitter which was a shockingly poorly-operated business (Zuck was dead on re: the clown car. Except maybe more like a silver mine, not a gold mine.). Oh, and 4 - the EU is pretty hostile to Twitter and Threads, so maybe there's some there there. Dunno.
Yeah, this is basically where I'm coming from. There are ideologues and stans arguing both ways whether Bluesky is a moribund platform. I don't think it's intrinsically moribund. But I think that's the wrong question. The more important question is: is it succeeding to the point where it will attract another round of investment? That case is I think pretty hard to make based on the available public evidence --- but the Bsky people obviously know a lot more about this than I do!
Try lobbying the government or the opposition party to make Bluesky the official platform for all their communications.
No. Government should be using a self-hosted instance of something standard and federated (ie, an ActivityPub implementation such as Mastodon). That can be federated out to the walled gardens (Twitter), vulture-capital places (Bluesky), etc as needed.
I have the opposite problem. My Bluesky (and Mastodon) feeds have gotten so active that I have a hard time catching up these days. And Twitter seems to be mostly full of bloviating narcissists who are addicted to feeling like “influencers” of the unwashed masses, not co-equal participants of public discussion.
More broadly, Twitter’s problem is that it carpet bombed the bridge with a substantial portion of its intelligent population. I’m pretty sure half the tech, game dev, and research people I follow on Bluesky/Mastodon will not return under any circumstance, myself included.
I think platforms like that will survive on essentially rage and bitterness. People will always flock to platforms like X, Bluesky, iFunny, and others to vent and rage. There's so much anger in nearly every post that I don't see any of it as particularly useful, or a good use of one's time.
I'm rather reminded of the ads from the early 20th century for "More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette!" [1]
[1] - https://tobacco.stanford.edu/cigarettes/doctors-smoking/more...
In what sense?
Social media is bad for you. Though I'm not sure that social media enjoyed a "social media is good for you" phase. There are certainly studies I'm sure that are out there, but the general consensus seems to be negative.
Oh, at least here in Brazil, people still find it strange if you say you don't have an Instagram account. There's this idea of being a bit weird for not following this trend.
Brazil is an exception, though! Did you know we are the third country in the world with the largest number of Instagram users? [0]
Social media is very cultural here, so I'm not sure that we are representative of a larger trend in social media acceptance worldwide.
[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/578364/countries-with-mo...
Not surprised given the high cultural pressure for vanity there.
The edu-only era of Facebook was good, as well as the preceding livejournal era.
Scientists aren't all health practitioners.
They did, 2006 to 2008-2010, when LinkedIn was considered hot and useful.
In the same sense that "More scientists hang out with Neo Nazis and White Supremacists than with any other political party."
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If only Bluesky could be as decentralised as the Fediverse [0] Trading one corporate overlord for another is not the smartest play.
[0] https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/
Bluesky is a public benefit corp which at least nominally means they don't have to maximize shareholder value at the expense of everything else.
Decentralization is not a priority for most people. If anything, they actively want centralization, because it's easier. To get those people to decentralize, the solution will have to be dead easy and invisible. The AT Protocol being developed by the Bluesky people looks promising.
I don't work for Bluesky, I'm not on Bluesky, and I don't particularly care, but I found your comment unfair after reading about ATProto on HN literally yesterday.
How is this different than what OpenAI was structured as...until they weren't?
Opening an account on Mastodon was a pain even for me, a long-time Internet user and a nerd. I'm confronted with a choice of servers, but if I love cheese and golf, do I open my account on the cheese server or the golf server? What will be the disadvantages of choosing one over the other? Instant blocker right in the sign up process that made me actually give up several times. If it was like that for me, imagine how it could be for an average user.
The Fediverse will only be popular if someone releases a client that makes it as easy to use as X and Bluesky. Not sure if it's technically feasible (I don't know much about the innards of the protocol) but it doesn't seem to have happened at the moment.
> Opening an account on Mastodon was a pain even for me, a long-time Internet user and a nerd.
I was in the same boat as you, and my experience was completely different. Mastodon's federation model reminded me of IRC, except nowhere near as balkanized.
So how did I wrangle the supposed complexity? I started out on one of the main instances and just started people-watching. Over time, I took note of which server contained users whose content I enjoyed over time, then I just joined the server.
Joining the server got me a slower federated feed that was both more pertinent to my interests that also functioned as a de-facto community space. I also found the moderation to be more to my own preferences. But the bigger server wasn't _bad_, I just preferred the smaller server because it was more personable.
I don't use Mastodon much anymore, but that's more because a good chunk of my social circle left for BlueSky than any gripes I had with the platform. I don't know where they will go if BlueSky goes belly up, but I can tell you that it won't be back to Twitter.
I did sign up for a mastodon account, but the server I used simply disappeared a couple of months later. I haven't worked up the motivation to bother doing it again.
> a long-time Internet user and a nerd
This is the reason why it was a pain. You or I might think "this is a decentralized platform, I should look at all the servers and find the best one for me" and immediately get choice paralysis looking at who has what rules, who federates with who, who runs which one, etc. An average user will probably stick to the main instance and not even think about it.
As for another data point, opening a Mastodon account for me was as trivial as choosing one random link from a webpage, choosing a username, password, and entering my email. If you get frozen on the choice of instance, that has more to do with your mental process than with an effective difficulty for the average user.
If you really cannot go beyond your inclination, and since you are a a long-time Internet user and a nerd, why not host your own instance?
> The Fediverse will only be popular if
There's already way more stuff on Mastodon for the hashtags I follow than I can possibly consume. If this is "unpopular", I'm happy with the way things are.
Maybe it _should_ be a little tougher to sign up for than the other mainstream options.
How is it a pain when you can just skip the server selection process and use mastodon.social like pretty much everyone else?
This. I still don't understand why there's so much consternation over choosing a Mastodon server. It doesn't limit who you can follow. I suppose if you're the sort of person who actually likes seeing random content from people you don't explicitly follow it could matter, but that's not for me.
> It doesn't limit who you can follow.
That's simply not true. All servers maintain blacklists of other servers they don't like and won't federate with, including mastodon.social: https://mastodon.social/about (last section, "Moderated servers")
You could argue that it's normal to block problematic servers, but it's not you the user who gets to define what is problematic, it's your server. Therefore your choice of server may very well prevent you from seeing content you'd like to see.
> Therefore your choice of server may very well prevent you from seeing content you'd like to see.
How is this any different than users of different IRC networks being unable to communicate with each other?
If I'm on OFTC, I certainly don't complain about not being able to talk to people on Libera.chat. I just....join the server and start talking.
Because IRCs aren't social media platforms? Creating an "account" on an IRC server is trivial, and you don't have a permanent profile or friend lists, etc
Sure, and I did almost mention that. This is an outlier though. When people normally discuss this they act as if their choice of server has a huge impact on whom they can follow. Except for degenerate cases this isn’t true
I see that now the website shows a simpler choice - join mastodon.social or choose another server. I don't think it was like that when I joined (maybe 2 or 3 years ago), you were just given a list of servers or a search and told to choose.
This is an improvement for average user onboarding - although if almost everyone clicks mastodon.social, you kind of lose the value of decentralization, right?
The time to have an opinion on which servers are cool and which host the fun people you follow is not the instant you go to sign up. Over time, you can notice which servers have buzz for bad moderation vs good, or where half your follow-list lives, and consider moving then
Having it take longer to form an opinion isn't exactly a negative either. The longer you take to pick a new server, the longer that server will have been around, and the longer it'll likely continue to be around.
I think there’s still value to having a long tail of independent instances, which can readily become more dominant if something happens to compromise the primary mastodon.social instance.
Doesn't pretty much everyone using the same instance pretty much defeat the point?
No, because the point is that not everyone is forced to use the same instance.
When I started on Mastodon I created an account for each instance I wanted to post to, which was slightly annoying but not much more complicated than signing up for different subreddits. Now I have my own hosted account and follow whomever I like from there. Of course you can follow any account from any account (if the admin hasn't blocked it.)
We’re talking about the average user. They’re not going to be particularly passionate about federation. The point, to them, is to have a functioning Twitter-like social network.
I'll be completely honest, as someone who remembers the internet before social networks, I have started caring less and less about being crammed into a single shared social space with every other person on earth.
The average user starts caring about censorship, AFAIK. And Bluesky has done very nasty ToS changes that only federation would have helped fight against.
But this is off-topic, because the ToS changes are mostly about porn, while this HN submission is about the professional use of Bluesky.
The only thing that would help with running sadly illegal in increasing parts of the world (including US) adult content servers would be not having a corporate entity.
It's difficult to fund rapid development at the scale needed, with that hobble.
Then why would the average user bother signing up for mastodon over something else
I wonder why the Fediverse metrics don't count Threads, the single largest AP instance by several orders of magnitude?
Because Threads is Meta's attempt at bullshitting Mastodon users in welcoming a wolf among the herd. Search for "Fedipact": Meta is de facto cut off from many Mastodon instances.
Except the largest Mastodon instance, mastodon.social, does federate with Threads. I'm not even sure if the list you provided even covers most of the top instances either.
It really feels like an "eating your cake and having it too" kinda situation: you get the engagement and interaction with millions of Threads users but you don't have to count them in your decentralization metrics.
It's like when AOL was allowed onto USENET
They aren't exactly equal evils... and if a federated replacement for Xitter were going to win, I think it already would have. Ease of use (and comprehensibility) are both pretty important in this business, and nobody seems to get that.
The Twitter buyout should have made this obvious. When one company runs the whole thing, then some rich twat can wreck it on a whim, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
> Trading one corporate overlord for another is not the smartest play.
Only if you expect to be there for ever even as they inevitably enshittify. Be under no illusion that although BlueSky is having its "first they are good to their users" phase now, it is temporary.
So make the most of it now while it's good, but be prepared to move on when that changes. Embracing impermanence is a smarter play. This is nothing new, thus passes all social media.
X still appears above the fold in a special section on Google with custom previews.
Eg. searching 'Anthony Albanese Bluesky' for Australia's leader has a link to X, with custom integrated previews, above the Bluesky link of the PM despite the search explicitly stating Bluesky and despite the account posting to Bluesky.
It's hard for anyone to move over since the lack of engagement is rigged like this.
Btw if you set your browser default search to anything other than Google searching for people works much better. No customized bumping of X based links over other options when searching for people.
Duckduckgo and Bing put the bluesky link as #1 for the above. Seems straightforward to make the switch to me. If you haven't changed your browsers default search engine in the past 5 years now's a good time to do so. Much better results await.
I had to switch to DuckDuckGo for work, AI stuff was too annoying
At least the AI stuff can be disabled. Duckduckgo allows you to store settings in the URL too, if you're the type of person who disables cookies and localstorage. Edit your search URL to: https://duckduckgo.com/?k5=1&kbe=0&kbj=1&kbg=-1&q=%s
kagi.com is a superior search engine compared with all three, to the point where I pay for a license for everyone in my company to use it.
The kagi assistant is also nice, only responding with AI when you add a question mark to your query, with the option of opening the query in a separate web search RAG w/the LLM of your choice
We need the "scientists find X less useful" study for Google.
Interesting, maybe it also shows quality of search. I know that these are barely relevant compared to google, but Bing, Ecosia, etc. are showing Bluesky link.
Most of my hard science contacts (physics, biology etc) from my days in student government have moved to Bluesky. Newer academics seem to be starting out there and skipping Twitter entirely.
If you have heard of Metcalfe's Law, you'll understand why this is not good for Twitter long term.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe's_law
So Bluesky for academia and X for tech and everyone else. I don’t think X is in trouble.
Scientist tend to form their own closed communities anyway.
It's like internet media is reaching a new level of maturity in that it is bifurcating into the tabloids and the serious magazines, like printed media was before.
In your analogy I suppose bluesky is the serious one? Have you spent any amount of time there?
They have the scientific community, so that's the direction they could be trending. But this is of course not settled yet.
>Scientist tend to form their own closed communities anyway.
Do you have a source for that?
Well, they don’t like being challenged.
>Well, they don’t like being challenged.
who is "they"
The BlueSky “scientific” community.
If they can’t withstand the pressure of actual public interaction, their research isn’t worth legitimizing.
Thankfully X isn't any more of an indicator of the "actual public" than bluesky
Unfortunately, when the silent majority stay... silent, their opinions go unmeasured and the vocal minority becomes "the public".
> X for tech
SaaS, maybe. Tech, absolutely not.
So they have nothing to say except that they like to be in a hugbox.
That said, such individuals will have to venture outside their safe space when their research is implemented on the public at large.
No, it’s because they’d rather talk to intelligent humans. X is populated by idiots and bots these days
This reads like a flippant comment, but I believe it is actually entirely accurate. It could be stated less harshly, but it's true.
So basically the usual BlueSky hugbox refrain.
Since covid much of the biological academic people on twitter were getting violent threats from anti-vaxxers and anyone angry about science contradicting the proclamations of their deal leader Trump.
Why would anyone with half a brain stay to experience that?
Most scientists don't have a professional profile on Twitter or Bluesky. It's the most self-aggrandizing ones who tend to do that.
The rest of us are just writing papers, presenting at conferences, collaborating with other research groups without any interest in putting it all out there on social media.
This whole X versus Bluesky thing is basically irrelevant. Neither of these platforms are good venues for dissemination of scientific research.
"Neither of these platforms are good venues for dissemination of scientific research."
These "platforms", i.e. other peoples' gigantic websites, are fantasy worlds that cater to self-aggrandisement where relevance requires a presence in that world
The outside world, aka the real world, is under represented and thus ignored
According to Bluesky API data, it peaked in November 2024 (for obvious reasons...).
[1]: https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
Total activity across the entire site doesn't meaningfully affect users as long as the activity they actually care about is still there, "Bluesky's aggregate metrics are down" and "Bluesky is the best place to talk science" can both be true at the same time. The website you're reading right now has abysmal metrics compared to Facebook and TikTok, but that's not really the point, is it?
yep. This feels like a feature to me, not a bug. As a mostly reader/follower on these platforms I'm surprised when others compare their engagement metrics, rather than the quality of the engagement on these platforms. Obviously their goals and incentives are different than mine, but the more time I spend on the internet the more I value the smaller communities due to the correlation with quality and topical focus.
It’s performing way better than I thought. Peak is only ~ x2 today’s baseline activity of 1.2M daily likers!
I think the interesting part of that article was "distributed to 813... who had used bluesky and X". That seems a little misleading. What if you just picked 813 at random and asked how many had even used bluesky at all?
My academic twitter migrated to Mastodon. Most my colleagues from different universities who used to be on Twitter are there now and I do not miss not being on X. There are even servers run by organizations like ACM (Association of Computer Machinery).
This and the recent HN entry on "open social" smells to me like an astroturfing campaign from BlueSky.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45388021
Protip: BlueSky is "decentralized" only in name. Don't. With all their drawbacks, ActivityPub and Nostr are way better.
We've seen this very topic posted in another article/post.
The comments took issue with the conclusion
"A new study published in Integrative and Comparative Biology suggests that scientists are leaving X (formerly known as Twitter) in significant numbers due to its declining professional value."
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40637733/
See also: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02554-0
Co-author Shiffman recommended Twitter in 2012 and 2013
https://davidshiffmancv.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Shiff...
https://arxiv.org/abs/1305.0435
He even required his students at ASU to use Twitter as recently as 2023
https://davidshiffmancv.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Shiff...
Wow, imagine that, 99% of academia is left-wing and they're afraid to have a presence on X because the the "tolerant" left calls it a "Nazi echo chamber" and will come after their careers. BlueSky is totally winning, you guys!
Bluesky is far from professional.
Im sorry, twitter had a professional edge!?!?!?!!??
Twitter played a major role in internal scientific communication for several years (for better or worse).
Personal opinion: Bluesky is "fedi-washing". Better Mastodon or Nostr.
https://gagliardoni.net/#20250818_battle_of_socials
What about Cara, Vero and MeWe?
This are just the last three Social Media I subscribed in the past and range from Stagnant to Pretty Much Dead.
I suppose that the problem is that if you already have 1000+ followers on, say, Twitter or IG you try posting the same stuff in parallel on both... after 1 month of doubled effort you notice that your followers on the new platform is an order of magnitude smaller... you want to stop double posting because it is too time consuming. Guess which one you will opt out of?
IMO even Bluesky borders on “dead”. Not from an activity standpoint, but from the standpoint of “what the hell are people posting here”.
There are studies of how twitter affects academic citations[1]. Why not make a similar study of bluesky and compare the results?
[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016517652...
Only for people that want hermetically sealed hug boxes as their form of discourse.
For those that actually want discussion, BlueSky does not work.
I've had trouble finding interesting content on Bluesky that's not politics. Any recommendations?
As a light user who bounced around X, BlueSky, Mastodon, and Threads, I completely believe that scientists are weary of X. It’s increasingly toxic and driven by engagement bait posting (“shitposting” as they call it) where the loudest accounts continuously post provocative takes not because they believe it but because they know it will trigger their followers into debating it. Even the levels.io guy that everyone idolizes as the indie hacker hero is now posting a non-stop stream of factually inaccurate claims and taking swipes at contentious issues like burnout because he knows it gets people talking in his replies.
X seems to know this is a problem. They hired Nikita Bier who is posting claims that the algorithm is being improved to favor people sharing best in class knowledge every day, but the current meta appears to be posting controversial hot takes that are easily argued or debunked. Tricking your followers into fact checking you is a game in itself because it generates engagement and therefore extends reach. This is why some accounts are deliberate exaggerating facts or posting known misinformation now.
That said, I have a hard time believing everyone is migrating to BlueSky instead of simply leaving this type of social media. Bluesky feels relatively dead except for the few accounts playing the BlueSky meta game, which is largely about infighting and creating hyper cliques from what I see.
One account I follow went to BlueSky but then returned to X because he couldn’t stand it. He described BlueSky as the place to go if you wanted to be constantly attacked by people who 98% agree with you. My impression is that it’s a smaller pond where the people who were previously small fish on X see it as their opportunity to fight their way to the top of a smaller food chain. It just feels ugly and mean half the time. I’ve had to unfollow a lot of people on BlueSky who I previously enjoyed on X because they got sucked into the BlueSky toxicity competition and now they’re just taking swipes at other people on BlueSky all day instead of posting info I wanted to see.
What are the best current third-party estimates for X's profit and active user figures?
Except for AI research
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Agreed. Who in good conscience would use a site where the owner regularly posts hateful, trivially-debunked BS?
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1970336290148434391
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1969087195798475263
https://x.com/Rightanglenews/status/1971546061169987846
Everyone who reads a Rubert Murdoch tabloid.
I am constantly surprised by the amount of people who enjoy drivel, but this has always been like this. Only we used to also have printed media that held itself to higher ideals than tabloids and worked as a counter weight to them. What is different atm is that for a long time there haven't been social media that shoot for higher ideals. Maybe bsky is that?
The market for tabloid social media is already saturated by meta, tiktok, x, snapchat, and the like. It would be interesting if bsky could find their own market with the more "serious" end of the media spectrum.
> people who enjoy drivel, but this has always been like this.
It's much more visible now, though. In the past it was quite easy to ignore the entire existence of someone like Rupert Murdoch but now the entire world knows what Musk is. He just appeared in last week at a rally of 100,000 people encouraging them to violently overthrowing the government. He appeared in the oval office giving speeches. Murdoch usually kept to himself.
Heard this all year, including a number of stories recently.
Related:
Bluesky now platform of choice for science community
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45039397
Scientists No Longer Find X Professionally Useful, and Have Switched to Bluesky
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44978815
Science research gets more engagement on Bluesky than X, study finds
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45092672
Why on earth is this flagged?
Is discussing alternative platforms to Elon Musk's X now too "political" for HN?
I miss the olden days when all fucking around on the internet was considered unprofessional and we read books and shit.
Most likely this is due to political bias of the group that was surveyed [1]. Liberals in general dislike X because of the owner. It's the same reason that the average Hacker News reader favors Bluesky over X.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01382-3
That place that erupted in celebration a couple weeks ago. Surprising to see it there and on LinkedIn.
Why is this scientific post?
I wonder why they didn't move to Tumblr instead. It has more features.
Bluesky is filled with biased, politicized garbage from all corners.
It's only made me realize the 'professionals' are mostly political hacks that will abandon commonb sense and the truth, if it makes their political opponents look bad.
If you go against left-wing ideals on Bluesky, you will be censored or banned.
This doesn't bode well for actual science.
This all true for Twitter ? Plus one giant egomaniac who will silence anyone he wants.
You aren’t wrong. The filtersets are made to aid left leaning causes and to inhibit right leaning ones.
Biggest difference is that one can read thread on Bluesky without account while X has login-wall (like most corporate 'social' media).
xcancel.com gets around Twitter's login-wall.
browsing bluesky for astronomy/astrophysics is fantastic stuff
only thing that seems to be missing from bluesky migration is athletes and that's probably because it cannot be monetized (well not easily)
I bet they’ll follow the sports media and, my personal taste in sports media, has recently started to migrate (e.g., Defector editors and contributors).
In my experience, the change has been positive. I rarely see feuds on Bluesky and when they happen I find them especially embarrassing because it’s so unusual.
I stopped posting on Twitter around the acquisition but kept my account. When I do randomly check my timeline I’m genuinely disturbed by the disinformation and pseudo-science, especially in machine learning.
In general that's true, but it's because on Bluesky, blocking causes the blocked person's replies to be hidden from everyone who views the original post. It's much easier to block than to engage with a contradictory reply (especially if the reply is correct and you're wrong), so disagreement tends to result in a block.
This behavior is common enough that it creates a chilling effect for anyone who disagrees. Why take the time to craft a reply correcting the poster if it will likely be hidden from everyone? And so you end up with echo chambers.
The effect is quite stunning on some topics. For example: Quite a few people on Bluesky believe the Trump assassination attempt in Pennsylvania was staged[1], that the Charlie Kirk assassin's text messages are fake[2][3], and that the recent ICE shooter was a false flag.[4][5][6] Notice the amount of engagement these posts have. Thousands of likes, with little to no disagreement in the replies. The lack of feuding is what allows people to believe these falsehoods.
1. https://bsky.app/profile/jlyncochran.bsky.social/post/3ldy2f...
2. https://bsky.app/profile/cwebbonline.com/post/3lyzvxijtmc2f
3. https://bsky.app/profile/cwebbonline.com/post/3lyz22btupk2k
4. https://bsky.app/profile/junlper.beer/post/3lzlxfrqguc2k
5. https://bsky.app/profile/realtexaspaul.com/post/3lzlwg2ueic2...
6. https://bsky.app/profile/gilmored85.bsky.social/post/3lzm53d...
> so disagreement tends to result in a block
And the issue is bigger than it looks since blocking is public, so blocking gets you on lists of users to block so you'll be blocked by people you never interacted with for blocking/disagreeing with someone.
I don't know that I really want to interact with anyone who uses a block list like that, but it definitely would make echo chambers worse.
None of these are related to what the OP is about, scientists communicating with other scientists.
I've seen the same thing happen in smaller discussions among experts on Bluesky, but I didn't link to those because: 1. It's harder for non-experts in that field to judge whether my claims are true. 2. It might reveal my identity.
The incentive structure is the same as larger discussions. If anything, a smaller community makes it easier to create echo chambers, as you need to block fewer people before reaching epistemic closure.
"Motivated political partisans say platform owned by political opponent bad, platform catering to their own political leaning good, pinky promise they're the pinnacle of neutrality and honesty and would never ever allow their public declarations to be influenced by their own partisan politics"
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Can we do bluesky a favor and stop mentioning it.
It would be nice if scientists started being just scientists again instead of activists. Hopefully being cloistered on bluesky will bring the old vibes back
X is not politically neutral, Elon openly talks about recalibrating Grok whenever it says something too liberal like recent discussions about gun violence.
Scientists should embrace decentralization and use Mastodon in my opinion. Bluesky will meet the same fate as Twitter and X one day
Yeah x is a mess. When scientists say it's nice to just post about science on bluesky without being called slurs or harassed, I believe them.
Can't you fork Bluesky whenever you'd want too? I thought that was the idea? That the data and connections and accounts are all transferable.
X/Twitter has never been politically neutral. It's just that the pendulum has swung the other way.
The pendulum has broken out of the clock and is clattering on the floor.
Indeed, every action has an equal and opposite reaction
> Scientist should...
Have you seen the state of scientific "computing".
On a side note, I still can't get used to how wanting to restrict access to guns is considered a "liberal" stance.
The freedom to not have to fear death when going to school comes to mind. You know, like everywhere else in the western world.
The typical political axis is liberty/freedom on one end vs. safety/security on the other end. And this is exactly one of those cases where having the liberty to bear arms reduces safety.
Well, in Europe you get stabbed. Or hit deliberately by a car. Or just thrown before an incoming train. Shit happens everywhere... what's the difference? And we also have school shootings in Europe. Less than USA, granted! But they exist.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-homicide-rates-in-t...
Words have never had stable definitions in politics. Thucydides wrote about that over two thousand years ago, and nothing has charged or will change in that regard.
Two-party system only offers two buckets to put issues in.
It’s basically impossible to make a career as a scientist these days without constantly promoting yourself and your work unfortunately. It’s very tiring and makes it difficult to focus on science. This is one of the reasons I changed careers.
That's bad, too, but true in many professions I think.
But I think what the GP means is let's do science, let's not do hot-political-topics-as-science.
Unfortunately science is unavoidably a political hot topic. Climate change denialism is the norm in the United States, we've somehow decided Tylenol causes autism in the past week, etc.
If you think either of those represent any meaningful portion of science you need to re-evaluate your understanding of science because it’s based on a layman’s perspective.
If you’re not actually involved in science you only see the scientists making news, which disproportionately selects for politically intersecting areas of research.
When I was working at a major US research university in the early 2000s, it was a big deal if the scientific publications got any mainstream press at all.
Countless papers push the boundaries of science in major journals and conferences every year and you never hear about them because they have no political implications and usually no immediate practical applications.
> but true in many professions I think.
That's true, but the other professions don't tend to be associated with (or clearly vindicate) the “above-the-crowd/holier-than-thou” attitude – and I say that as an ex-scientist, for the same reason (among others) as the poster above.
I feel the same way about software, what career did you switch to?
Scientists are allowed to have opinions outside of their work and share them.
It is 100% allowed, I just don't think it's really helpful or beneficial for them or society
Especially when they try to lean on their status as scientists in order to try and have their opinions be more influential.
The cdc for example saying it's ok to disregard their previous guidance in order to protest for black lives matter is one of these credibility damaging moments that is hard to undo.
So nobody is allowed to use their notoriety to amplify their posts?
No more athletes, musicians, artists, whatever. Everyone must be anonymous. Or is it strictly scientists who are not allowed to post if their profession is known?
so you would prefer to hear opinions from marketers and influencers?
> The cdc for example saying it's ok to disregard their previous guidance in order to protest for black lives matter
That’s… not what they said? They said it was probably relatively safe to attend a protest because it was happening outdoors and Covid spread mostly through accumulated aerosols. It turned out to be good guidance: practically no one gets Covid that way unless a sick person is actively coughing on them.
>Especially when they try to lean on their status as scientists in order to try and have their opinions be more influential.
How do they do that?
The “I am an expert, so listen to me drone about some political topic that’s vaguely related to my expertise” has been a thing for years now. And it’s usually some controversial thing that doesn’t have to do with science anyway.
In general, it makes scientists look really naive and makes them lose credibility when they talk about actual science.
If a person is an expert on a topic then it makes sense for them to have a higher probability of being correct.
>And it’s usually some controversial thing that doesn’t have to do with science anyway.
What evidence do you have that most scientists are giving opinions about things unrelated to their expertise and then stating you should trust them more due to their expertise or position?
Yes, that’s the typical argument but the problem is that they veer way out of their lane. And their lane is in reality very narrow and academically focused.
When these experts go into politics and activism, their biases show and consequently the credibility of them and their unfortunate colleagues who don’t go into politics get lowered.
> What evidence do you have that most scientists are giving opinions about things unrelated to their expertise and then stating you should trust them more due to their expertise or position?
I don’t live under a rock.
> When these experts go into politics and activism
What if the issue is related to their expertise?
Veering out of the lane implies they start offering their opinion about a topic that has nothing to do with their field after discussing one that does without making a clear disclaimer
>credibility of them and their unfortunate colleague
It's wrong to judge all due to the actions of some. This is a huge flaw of people in general but I wanted to mention it.
>What if the issue is related to their expertise?
NTA but I think one example which deserves far more scrutiny than it gets is all the public health experts[1] in the early months of COVID who were telling people to stay inside, don't gather in groups even if you're outside, don't go to church etc only to suddenly change their minds and say that gathering in large groups is actually very safe as soon as the protests surrounding the murder of george floyd happened. This is a topic they have expertise on (or at least they claim to) so it's certainly within their lane, but the abrupt change in policy was obviously motivated by their political leanings and it did *a lot* to hurt their personal credibility as well as perceptions of the pandemic in general.
[1] IDK how many of them should actually be considered 'experts' as this is not a field I follow, but they were presented as such in the media and so that is how they are perceived.
>but the abrupt change in policy was obviously motivated by their political leanings
The CDC published guidelines on mass gathering in March “Interim Guidance: Get Your Mass Gatherings or Large Community Events Ready for COVID-19”
The CDC director warned that the George Floyd protests could be a seeding event for Covid in June.
The CDC published updated guidelines "Considerations for events and gatherings" on June 12th 2020.
1. The protests started May 26th and were already occuring when the CDC added updates guidelines 16 days later.
2. The CDC has no power to stop the protests and there goal is to reduce the spread of Covis
3. The director specifically stated that the protests only increased the possibility of Covid spreading.
4. It wasn't an abrupt change since they previously published guidelines.
5. In my opinion the protests were very emotional and I don't think the threat of COVID would have stopped them.
Your argument that they changed their mind abruptly and that it was for the political benefit of the protests (as in implying it's somehow safe to protest) is not supported by the evidence. You said it was obvious.
[1]“I do think there is a potential, unfortunately, for this to be a seeding event" [referring to the protests] Robert Redfield, House Appropriations hearing, June 4th 2020
>at least they claim to) so it's certainly within their lane
Yes. Which is what this discussion I replied to was about. The claim was experts using their status to claim expertise in opinions unrelated to their field.
Not whether they changed their opinions on subjects they are experts at.
That's a unrelated debate.
>I don’t live under a rock.
Here's an example of what you are claiming. A chemist publicly states his opinion on the current illegal immigrant crackdown and implies or directly states that his opinion has more value because he is a chemist.
Alternative example the chemist is interviewed for his opinion on immigration by the news (except as a bystander when they want random people to chime in).
For example CNN is discussing Trump's crackdown and says "here to talk about what Trump is doing is Harvard professor of Chemistry and (other titles) Chemist John Bismuth"
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Can you provide an example of this?
So it's "political" to disagree about Tylenol causing autism, or injecting disinfectant curing Covid?
You are making a classic motte and bailey argument.
What makes something "political"?
Do they have any real influence? I’m about a million times more concerned about politicians who act like they have worthwhile opinions about science.
Jordan Peterson comes to my mind. Although I have no respect for his opinions at all, I still think that, in the end, scientists have their political views and should be allowed to talk about them. What they shouldn't be allowed is to insinuate that these views are anything other than their personal views. Hate speech and political extremism should also not be allowed because these damage the reputation of their university.
Other than that, I don't think it's right to tell them not to use their status to influence politics and society towards what they perceive as making the world better. On the contrary, they might have some duty to do just that.
> The cdc for example saying it's ok to disregard their previous guidance in order to protest for black lives matter is one of these credibility damaging moments that is hard to undo.
Yep, there it is. You’re just upset that they don’t have your opinions.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/04/public-hea... I supported blm and still do. The CDC should have stayed out of it.
The one mention of the CDC in that article doesn't mention anything about it changing guidlines for BLM. So you're lying.
You are right, public health officials instead of cdc would be the better way to phrase it.
How about instead of scientists staying out of politics, lying concern trolls like hdlothia stay out of politics?
> The cdc for example saying it's ok to disregard their previous guidance in order to protest for black lives matter is one of these credibility damaging moments that is hard to undo.
When did this happen?
AFAIK, the CDC itself made no such official statement, but many prominent figures in public health, including a former CDC director [0], said just that.
[0] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/04/public-hea...
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CDC never said it, a lot of prominent heath officials did though.
you are lying; this did not happen.
So why is it beneficial for you to have and express political opinions but not them? Or are you deliberately doing something harmful here?
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Maybe the parent is lamenting how some people post a lot of interesting scientific content, but also a whole lot of other content on topics that they are not interested in, and unfortunately most social networks require following all aspects of a person and not just the parts that interest you.
Google+ had it right where you can follow just a community, and also you can selectively make your participation in certain communities visible in your public profile. I am not sure if Bluesky or Mastodon have something similar.
Reddit, pseudo-anonymously, is mostly where I do that, not where I've set up my professional presence.
Unless is a opinion not shared by their colleagues
Ok but if I'm a radiologist opining about social media, I'm no longer practicing science. I'm just some guy with an opinion.
"Scientists say..." is becoming just another "studies show...". You can always find a scientist or a study or an "expert" to push whatever agenda the media outlet has.
Nothing about this is remotely scientific.
> Scientists are allowed...
Literally true, perhaps. But have you ever noticed how reluctant non-scientist professionals are to voice opinions in their chosen fields? Lawyers preface everything with "not your lawyer", "not my area of practice...", "I'd have to look into the details of that case...", etc. Accountants similarly. Doctors similarly. Engineers similarly. Vs. it seems to be accepted practice for a nuclear physicist to speak ex cathedra about epidemiology, climatology, etc.
Maybe when activists stop pretending to be scientists the scientists can stop being activists.
I doubt it. Most scientists are not activists. Yet, any scientist who achieves anything notable, has to be trained on how to deal with the media.
Science, and facts themselves, are political now.
Science was defunded by politics, and sometimes is political due to existing interests. Why shouldn't scientists talk about politics?
(most) science was also funded by politics.
Hello legacy of ww2. Yup.
Lack of self control or awareness. People make the mistake of thinking that because they are informed on one topic that happens to be political that their opinions on other political topics are relevant.
I’m fine seeing scientists arguing for the importance of science on social media. I don’t want to hear rants about LGBTQ+ people from geologists.
"I don’t want to hear rants about LGBTQ+ people from geologists."
Build the filter bubble you want, not the one you've got.
This attitude of "let's leave politics out of this" is a major contributing factor to this mess we're in.
When the government (or the public) starts asserting basic facts aren't true, scientists become activists against their will
Why don't scientists publish anonymously? We already have double-blind peer review. This seems like such an obvious idea, there must be some issue.
Authors can still get reputation, recognition, and compensation for their papers, without people knowing who wrote what paper, via public/private keys and blockchain. Every time an author publishes a paper, they generate a new address and attach the public key to it. Judges send awards (NFTs) and compensation to the key without knowing who holds it, and if the same award type is given to multiple papers, authors can display it without anyone knowing which paper is theirs.
With LLMs even writing style can be erased (and as a side effect, the paper can be written in different formats for different audiences). Judges can use objective criteria so they can't be bribed without others noticing; in cases where the paper is an algorithm and the criteria is a formal proof, the "judge" can be a smart contract (in practice I think that would be a small minority of papers, but it would still be hard for a judge to nominate an undeserving paper while avoiding skeptics, because a deserving paper would match the not-fully-objective criteria according to a wide audience). Any other potential flaws?
1. It's a very small community and peer review is even hard. Think about it this way: what do you think two physicist colleagues talk about at a conference? How do you know who to talk to to collaborate on a problem? (Yes, people still talk voice about problems.)
2. Labs are specialized. You choose a lab to work at based on what they're working on. How are you going to choose where to spend your Ph.D or postdoc if you don't know what the lab is working on and how productive it is?
3. We are all still humans. We are wired to know the social systems around us. This would be an entire charade.
Ok, then scientists can form groups where they know each other, but publish anonymously outside those groups.
It doesn't solve all the issues, but it at least allows scientists to be "activists" (really just share their opinions like any other human) without affecting their credibility. Even if they're doxxed, they can eventually regain anonymity, because eventually other scientists with different views will publish papers on the same subject, and people can only distinguish who published what by its content.
Right now, scientists can share their opinions anonymously. This works well enough, except they can't share them in-person except to others they trust; and if they get doxxed, they can't remove their old posts from the name on their papers.
How to force not only one, but three solutions into a non-existing problem. This must be a parody of cryto bros/AI bros, right.
Those may not be the solutions, but the problem certainly exists. I'm in academia and even I'll admit it has a lot of nepotism. People who are famous or infamous are identified despite peer-review (stylometry and subject) and the reviewers are biased for or against them. Also see comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45396377#45396617: "It’s basically impossible to make a career as a scientist these days without constantly promoting yourself and your work unfortunately". If attaching your name to a paper becomes taboo, perhaps promotion will be less important, and if results can be judged algorithmically, definitely so.
Rose colored glasses. Science from the start has challenged status quo of churches and god kings
You're not interested in science but kowtowing to perceived authority
So firstly most scientists already aren't really activists in any meaningful way, it seems like you're implying most are on twitter/bluesky doing activism and the vast majority aren't really. Secondly I'm confused who people think should be able to be activists in a democracy? Scientists seem like a good candidate for people that should do activism in a healthy democracy.
It would be nice if some politicians/media outlets didn't subvert or misrepresent science for their own gains. Yet here we are.
Actual quote: "Twitter, once considered the central gathering place for scientists on social media...".
What do you mean? Activism is an essential part of science but maybe I’m misunderstanding your use of “activist.”
I feel like scientists should be explaining to us how the world is, and then other people should use those explanations to try and improve it.
Right now I feel like there are a scientists who would hide or discard results if they contradicted their advocacy beliefs,which is a dangerous place to be imo.
That's how it works. I think people for some reason don't understand policy making. The CDC conducts research and studies, pulls data, performs analysis, and then provides guidance based on it.
It enacts no rules, laws, or regulations. That's done by policy makers who can listen to or ignore the guidance and data from the CDC at their discretion.
You are correct.
It's because the left-wing that largely captures academia believes in the "rule of law" and more importantly, "policy by experts". Essentially when we boil it down, we're talking about an ideology that can justify anything if it's what "the science says". Of course, we are all aware that inconvenient studies can be prevented from running, inconvenient results can be discarded, and results themselves can be manipulated for the 'correct' result.
COVID was an example where unelected expert committees were given power to decide policy, and as a result schools were shut down at the detriment of education, hospitals were shut down at the detriment of the sick, and the economy was shut down at the detriment of the taxpayers. The COVID committees were singular issue task force: 'reduce COVID deaths by any means', and they achieved that task. A politician on the other hand is responsible for balancing several issues against one another.
Singular issue people/groups in general are quite dangerous and should be kept away from politics. We know, for example, that single issue AI is likely going to be a problem in the future, i.e. The Stamp Collecting Device [1] that destroys the world trying to achieve the singular issue of collecting stamps. Whilst the singular issue expert scientist is well meaning, a well-rounded politician should be considering the various trade-offs.
[1] http://www.singinst.org/blog/2007/06/11/the-stamp-collecting... (archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20120617191319/http://www.singin... )
What you say is just false. Politicians made and still make policies, that's how it works.
No, it's not. Good science requires objective thinking and evidence-based reasoning. Claims must be proven, not accepted based on authority or prima facie evidence.
Unfortunately, social media or whatever has changed science communication. A scientist can do amazing science, have total evidence based reasoning and then be completely ignored because some quack tells a good story on Rogan.
That speaks more to society than science. We should not expect scientists to fix this problem. It's outside their domain.
That doesn’t matter and it’s not any different than 20 years ago. New findings could be published in medical journals that nobody in the public hears about and some quack on Howard Stern could spew to millions.
This is also the definition of good activism.
There are no true activists anymore, what a tragedy.
90% of activists probably do good boring unseen work, you only see the 10% who make a stink on social media or protest on the streets.
You might be confusing activists with volunteers. Those who donate their time and money are not necessarily vocal about their pet projects. I'm part of the latter and do not consider myself an activist.
Absolutely not. A scientist is expected to change their mind when new, counterfactual evidence is presented. Activists push for positions regardless of whether any evidence exists to support their position, and seem to maintain their position even when presented with counterfactual evidence. That is not science. We have a name for it: dogma.
Wait a second, if you’re saying that this is not a feature of good activism, are you implying you are more convinced by activists who practice dogma over objective thinking?
What is a scientist to do when they discover a vaccine or cure for something; say fuck it who cares if we change behavior? Are you saying a good vaccine advocate is someone who ignores the underlying science and acts dogmatically?
It just feels like you want to demonize this action of activism for… why? Just because there are lots of bad activists? There are a lot of bad scientists as well, to be honest the view of “good scientist” and “bad activist” feels dogmatic.
I have yet to observe an activist practice objective thinking. That was the root of the argument. Activists sometimes do back the correct argument, but not because they are practising scientific reasoning. Most activists are swayed by rhetoric, a good story. That's an emotional response, not a logical one.
To answer your second point, science has a process for disseminating new findings. It's not perfect, but it works. Organizations that scientists work for do pay attention to those sources, discoveries do get patented and productionized. I encourage you to conduct some research: See how many people were talking about mRNA vaccines and gain-of-function research on social media before COVID vs after. The lack of social media coverage didn't affect the science or the scientists, who had spent the past decade conducting research on the subject.
I will maintain that Twitter/X/Bluesky are not part of the scientific process, nor should they be. These platforms do not encourage objective thought or reasoned arguments.
> I have yet to observe an activist practice objective thinking
It would be a sampling bias fallacy to draw conclusions based on your lack of observations.
Eg: "mountains, never seen them, they don't exist."
It is funny then for a geologist to be considered an activist when they say the mountains most certainly do exist.
Your first paragraph is unfounded. (Fwiw, The other two I found interesting. )
Maybe the problem is with our funding model. Necessarily the whole grant system is based on being able to argue a narrative as to why your scientific inquiry deserves money. Combine that with a system that includes incentives towards or away from social values, and scientists are necessarily activists.
And then that’s just to get money in your specific direction, getting money in your general direction requires more broad activism.
So Jonas Salk advocating for getting your child vaccinated against Polio wasn't a scientist? Just a dogmatist? Your definition of activism is foolish
And what does this have to do with activism?
I mean things like nature starting to make endorsements for president. Overly political for no reason.
They are planning on de-orbiting weather satellites because the administration doesn't believe in climate change. Nature was maybe on to something.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01537-5. One study says the endorsement had little effect on voting intention but damaged credibility and perception of scientists.
Then why is it that YOU are working so hard to damage the credibility and perception of scientists?
climate researchers don't need any help from a HN commenter ruining their credibility, they have done that all on their own
When one political party is explicitly anti-science in its goals and aims and actions (RFK, global warming as a hoax, anti-vaxx, COVID as a hoax), Nature endorsing the person who is pro-science isn't political; it's existential. This is not "no reason". It's just not the reason you like because for some reason.
> Activism is an essential part of science
How so? It seems obvious that you can do science (that is: attempt to advance the understanding of how the natural world works) without being an activist for any cause.
> ...an essential part...
Why? Which of these other jobs would you call "Activism" an essential part of:
- Fire fighter
- Elementary school teacher
- Auto mechanic
- ER nurse
- Professor of Medieval History
- Climate change
- School shootings
- Sure, they can shut up
- COVID
- Is this one serious?
Ah I see. So you want to use "science" to push particular political remedies to your pet issues.
Oh I mean I don’t care if the teacher is for or against school shootings, I just find it interesting to have subject matter experts share their knowledge and give their opinions on things that impact their field. Some people just don’t take it well when those opinions don’t line up with their own on contentious topics.
How is it "interesting" for an elementary school teacher to be against school shootings? I'd bet I can find some carpenters who are against smashing thumbs with hammers, but why bother?
Are you calling it "Activism" when someone shares the opinion of 99.9% of the population, and spends 0 time advocating for that opinion?
Um, yes. Science is the best epistemology that humanity has discovered, best being as the most effective way to discover truth.
Auto mechanic: Consumer advocacy, business regulation, labor issues, safety, etc.
Professor of Medieval history: Lots of political discourse makes claims about history or things like "the dark ages" that turn out to be mis-interpretations or false. Note that I have a friend in that field who often writes gentle corrections to false historical claims in online discourse.
The job of science is to discover facts and produce new knowledge from those facts. Activism is the marketing of an ideology. They couldn't be more opposite.
my dad was an ecologist in the 70s, and did a lot of early climate change stuff (getting ground truth for LandSat, etc.)
that's always been a fun conversation
That does sound super interesting.He probably had a real fun time doing science in the 70s.
If you’re gonna cut science funding on a massive scale, scientists will become activists.
Simply expressing the fact that climate change is happening is considered “activism” by some folks (and especially on X).
Asking them to “not be activists” is really a request for them to self police their speech in a way that fits their worldview.
This is not restricted to scientists by the way. Just look at the different response to how the NFL handled Charlie Kirk’s death with official moments of silence vs. Colin Kaepernick kneeing for police brutality. One is supported, one is suppressed.
If science results on sane topics like vaccines weren't attacked for not being in-line with loony politics then they wouldn't have to be "activists".
Exact opposite. Science is under attack by politics and we need authoritative voices explaining how dangerous this is. Why would scientists not be allowed to offer opinions on their observations? That's basically the same thing as science.
It would be nice if scientists started being just scientists again instead of activists
So you've found a way to say "My job isn't at risk from a vindictive POTUS" in 14 words instead of 9. Great.
What does this even mean?
“Sure all the research shows X, but you can also believe y or even z because nothing really matters”
When would that be? Needs to be after science stops being politicized by the Republican party. Scientists must be activists when anti-science is de jour.
They can be scientists on both platforms.
Bluesky is just the ideological opposite of whatever X is today, but with more blocking and censorship than even what Twitter had under Dorsey.
I think you're assuming that dichotomy. There was an observation that Trump supporters derided liberals for loving biden. The observation pointed out a false equivalence, "the other side is doing the same thing", we love Trump, so they must love their leader too.
Or, do you some sort of systematic evidence that evaluates the politics across all of bluesky in comparison to X? I don't think there is such evidence to know that bluesy is the polar opposite of Twitter.
You don’t need to conduct a systematic study, just lurk on Bluesky for a week, nay, a day.
If you express an opinion, you’ll be blocked, and Bluesky has layers of blocking, and they love it.