Is Bluesky the remedy for Twitter ruined by Musk?

I hope Bluesky will finally be on par with and rivaling Twitter.

It should have 18M users by now (2011-11-17).

We have had Gettr, Truth Social, Threads, Mastodon all of which have limited relevance. Threads reached 100M users quickly but Zuckerburg failed to ride the momentum. 

Bluesky needs superb TRANSPARENT algorithms to succeed. If Bluesky can create a community mirroring the physical free world, it will likely succeed.

In the physical world, there are no massive trolls harassing people and spewing out trash, and no constant promotion of grifters, haters, or jerks. 

The imminent risk for Bluesky is becoming another echo chamber like Truth Social and Gettr, but for the left.

Twitter has a lot of good things. Ideally, Bluesky should have all the good stuff of Twitter and avoid its bad stuff.  The best thing of Twitter is its community notes. It also has many other good technical features.

The bad things brought to Twitter by Musk:

1. Removing the gov label for accounts doing gov propaganda work. Can you imagine a guy singing praises of a pill on a TV network like an expert and the network does not disclose he is a drug company's rep?

2. Making Twitter's API effectively unavailable to data enthusiasts who used to provide highly informative work to enhance Twitter's transparency and reveal fascinating patterns (e.g., those about trolls). One would need to pay Musk $5k per month to access X API to do any meaningful analysis of these trolls and bots. Most likely, half a million dollars are needed to do any publishable work. Musk probably does not want ppl to do this.

3. Argubal algorithm bias. I observed the unbearable bias in early October 2024 when pro-Trump tweets with videos from accounts I do not follow were pushed to the top of my timeline constantly. Many others have similar observations.

4. Uncontrolled thriving of bots and trolls. It should be a piece of cake for Twitter to develop an algorithm to suppress these trolls and bots if they really want to do it.

Again, algorithms are the key. It needs to be TRANSPARENT, but it should not seek communist-style equity. Some posts should be promoted and some posts need to be aggressively demoted.

Developing an excellent algorithm is neither easy nor cheap. BlueSky raised $15M in series A this month. If BlueSky keeps improving its algorithms to make users feel like they are living in a decent world and have easy access to the most relevant information, the growing user base will take care of all other things.

The worst possible outcome of the competition between Bluesky and Twitter:

  1. Most progressives exit Twitter to make it an echo chamber on steroids for the right, grifters, trolls, and bots. 
  2. BlueSky becomes an echo chamber for the left. 
The best possible outcome:
BleySky becomes pre-Musk Twitter but is much better in transparency, protecting free speech, and combatting trolls, bots, and grifters. Bluesky needs to use algorithms to promote a culture of political tolerance and civility, but zero tolerance for bots, trolls, and grifters.

My Bluesky account created on 2024-11-16


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