Bluesky

[StillStunned]

I faked them out by using an old profile pic. Got to stay ahead of the game, you know...

I remember that pic.

 

[Erozetta]

I faked them out by using an old profile pic. Got to stay ahead of the game, you know...

Mine had my actual picture on it when I first started. Took that down real fast!

 

[Bazzle]

I'd like to be on the starter pack. Do I find it on the app?

Find the friend of this parish Emily Miller...she has built one

 

[NoTalentHack]

I love how people say Twitter got nastier when the reality is, the former owner censored 50% of the political discussion, and the new owner changed that.

But if nasty is hearing actual free speech, as opposed to "just speech I agree with" Sure, quite nasty.

I agree with @TheLobster if is the site is more moderated it means more eventual trouble for adult content. "Oh, well that story is okay, but this one too extreme" and who decides extreme? Them or some moralist who finds it and is offended by it.

That's not even slightly true. Musk promised he'd offer up evidence of this by opening up the code when he took over and... nobody found anything. There was no "anti-right-wing bias," it was just that nobody wanted to engage with them. The right-wingers (actually alt-right, not just right) that got kicked off the site were actively harassing people and/or breaking site rules about content.

Since he took over, he's created a new class of users, pay ones, that get priority in the algorithm; unsurprisingly, right-wingers bought memberships. That's why people are seeing more right-wing content.

He's allowed people who got kicked off for "their political views" (when actually they got kicked off for harassment campaigns, i.e., telling other users to kill themselves) back on the site. His moderation team has stopped moderating damn near anything except literal death threats; you can easily find users on their with racial slurs in their nicknames posting heinous content, and reporting them does nothing.

On the flip side, they've started banning accounts for discussing things like trans issues, claiming they're "not within community standards," shadowbanning erotica accounts, etc. Musk's takeover was never about free speech; that's just what he sold it as. It was always about having a platform that he could control and push the things he wanted.

I mentioned that pay-for-play aspect, but he also got rid of blocking. Or, rather, he got rid of half of blocking; previously, if you blocked someone, they couldn't see your posts either. Now, they still can, which makes brigading accounts (directing followers towards things that speak ill of you) extremely easy. You don't even have to wait for a follower to tell you about it or switch to your alternate lurker account, you can still watch out for people talking about stuff you don't like and try to shut them down when they do.

Ignoring all the political stuff, though, he's run it into the ground in a bunch of other ways. Bot usage has gone WAY up; I'm not talking AI usage, but the kind of bots you could see all the way back at the beginning where fake accounts with sexy girl avatars add users and message them. I have a personal account and an NTH one, and I saw a huge upswing on both, but especially on NTH. Every time I got back (I haven't posted there in months), I've got at least one new "follower" of this kind for every day I've been away, usually more.

Why? Probably to prop up numbers as people leave the site. They used to block the vast majority of these, but post-Elon, they don't bother. Pretty much everyone who monitors social media on the tech side agrees that real users are dwindling and have been for the couple of years since Musk took over. Rather than address that loss of users the right way, i.e., admitting maybe some of his changes weren't great and fixing them, he band-aided over it like he usually does with a half-assed fix.

He killed free API access to "prevent bots," but what it's mostly done is to make it harder to determine which accounts are and are not bots by analyzing activity. I'm sure that's just a coincidence, though.

Oh, and he's also added to the EULA that any content placed on the site can and will be used for training AI, and that you can't opt out. That was the most recent mass exodus before the election, as artists and authors killed their accounts and bailed to other sites, mostly Bluesky. Then, after the election (in the weeks leading up to it, actually, but especially after), the next wave happened.

I've never been a huge fan of microblogging sites. If they all went away, I'd shrug my shoulders and get back to writing gigantic paragraphs-long screeds like this one, as I usually do anyways. I don't have a dog in this fight, or at least not a particularly large one. But they've been hemhorraging real users since he took over for a bunch of different reasons, and most of them can be laid at the feet of Musk.

 

[AG31]

oooh lets find you!

Edit...

Found you.

How do you find him? I'm just about as social-media illiterate as @StillStunned claims to be. I'd made an account yesterday, and today I searched for StillStunned and got no hits. ??????

 

[StillStunned]

How do you find him? I'm just about as social-media illiterate as @StillStunned claims to be. I'd made an account yesterday, and today I searched for StillStunned and got no hits. ??????

I found Shelby just by searching for "ShelbyDawn".

I only opened my account a couple of hours ago, though, so perhaps when you looked I didn't exist yet.

 

[MrPixel]

Not that I'm interested in social media ("Whatever, Boomer"), but what is "shadowbanning"?

EDIT: Never mind. I knew it as "stealth banning".

 

[AlinaX]

I found Shelby just by searching for "ShelbyDawn".

I only opened my account a couple of hours ago, though, so perhaps when you looked I didn't exist yet.

I searched for you twice after you said you joined, only finding you the second time, so clearly there was some lag in the servers.

 

[NoTalentHack]

Not that I'm interested in social media ("Whatever, Boomer"), but what is "shadowbanning"?

The account still exists, you can still post... but no one sees what you post. It's usually used to deal with known bad actors without cluing them in that the moderators have taken action against them, because once they know, they can just create a new account and start causing trouble again.

 

[NoTalentHack]

Oh, and if anyone wants to come looking for me, I'm @notalenthack.bsky.social on there. Emily is @emilymillerlit.bsky.social‬. The guy running the general erotica authors one is @qblueheart.bsky.social

 

[Erozetta]

Y'all make sure you have "allow adult content" on in your settings to actually see each other's posts in the feeds.

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

I found Shelby just by searching for "ShelbyDawn".

I only opened my account a couple of hours ago, though, so perhaps when you looked I didn't exist yet.

I'm still not convinced you're real. I mean come on, a panic stricken animated cat that can type. I'm not buying it.

 

[MrHereWriting]

Why? Probably to prop up numbers as people leave the site. They used to block the vast majority of these, but post-Elon, they don't bother. Pretty much everyone who monitors social media on the tech side agrees that real users are dwindling and have been for the couple of years since Musk took over.

Yet those dwindling numbers were still enough to sway the election by posting the full story of what the media edited instead of the edited stories the media told, even though, as everybody knows, the full story is always the most toxic story, especially when truthful.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see if Twitter/X continues to influence people in the future in order to determine how many users are real and how many are bots.

 

[StillStunned]

I'm still not convinced you're real. I mean come on, a panic stricken animated cat that can type. I'm not buying it.

I was generated by the internet to save you all. Then I got sidetracked by writing dirty stories.

 

[AG31]

I found Shelby just by searching for "ShelbyDawn".

I only opened my account a couple of hours ago, though, so perhaps when you looked I didn't exist yet.

I found you. It happened when I clicked a second time in the search field. Dunno what was actually the secret. I see you're not a chatter over there, just a marketer. Do you expect to stay that way? I'm following my daughter and she seems to mostly re-post snippets from other people that seem neither important nor entertaining. I just don't get this social-media environment.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

That's not even slightly true. Musk promised he'd offer up evidence of this by opening up the code when he took over and... nobody found anything. There was no "anti-right-wing bias," it was just that nobody wanted to engage with them. The right-wingers (actually alt-right, not just right) that got kicked off the site were actively harassing people and/or breaking site rules about content.

Since he took over, he's created a new class of users, pay ones, that get priority in the algorithm; unsurprisingly, right-wingers bought memberships. That's why people are seeing more right-wing content.

He's allowed people who got kicked off for "their political views" (when actually they got kicked off for harassment campaigns, i.e., telling other users to kill themselves) back on the site. His moderation team has stopped moderating damn near anything except literal death threats; you can easily find users on their with racial slurs in their nicknames posting heinous content, and reporting them does nothing.

On the flip side, they've started banning accounts for discussing things like trans issues, claiming they're "not within community standards," shadowbanning erotica accounts, etc. Musk's takeover was never about free speech; that's just what he sold it as. It was always about having a platform that he could control and push the things he wanted.

I mentioned that pay-for-play aspect, but he also got rid of blocking. Or, rather, he got rid of half of blocking; previously, if you blocked someone, they couldn't see your posts either. Now, they still can, which makes brigading accounts (directing followers towards things that speak ill of you) extremely easy. You don't even have to wait for a follower to tell you about it or switch to your alternate lurker account, you can still watch out for people talking about stuff you don't like and try to shut them down when they do.

Ignoring all the political stuff, though, he's run it into the ground in a bunch of other ways. Bot usage has gone WAY up; I'm not talking AI usage, but the kind of bots you could see all the way back at the beginning where fake accounts with sexy girl avatars add users and message them. I have a personal account and an NTH one, and I saw a huge upswing on both, but especially on NTH. Every time I got back (I haven't posted there in months), I've got at least one new "follower" of this kind for every day I've been away, usually more.

Why? Probably to prop up numbers as people leave the site. They used to block the vast majority of these, but post-Elon, they don't bother. Pretty much everyone who monitors social media on the tech side agrees that real users are dwindling and have been for the couple of years since Musk took over. Rather than address that loss of users the right way, i.e., admitting maybe some of his changes weren't great and fixing them, he band-aided over it like he usually does with a half-assed fix.

He killed free API access to "prevent bots," but what it's mostly done is to make it harder to determine which accounts are and are not bots by analyzing activity. I'm sure that's just a coincidence, though.

Oh, and he's also added to the EULA that any content placed on the site can and will be used for training AI, and that you can't opt out. That was the most recent mass exodus before the election, as artists and authors killed their accounts and bailed to other sites, mostly Bluesky. Then, after the election (in the weeks leading up to it, actually, but especially after), the next wave happened.

I've never been a huge fan of microblogging sites. If they all went away, I'd shrug my shoulders and get back to writing gigantic paragraphs-long screeds like this one, as I usually do anyways. I don't have a dog in this fight, or at least not a particularly large one. But they've been hemhorraging real users since he took over for a bunch of different reasons, and most of them can be laid at the feet of Musk.

Just curious, are all these "experts" in the industry who know what's really happening the same "experts" who claimed the whole site would crash and burn when Musk slashed staff?

 

[StillStunned]

I see you're not a chatter over there, just a marketer. Do you expect to stay that way?

Uhhhh... I really have no idea.

I'm following my daughter and she seems to mostly re-post snippets from other people that seem neither important nor entertaining. I just don't get this social-media environment.

That makes two of us. I thought this was just something to draw attention to our stories.

 

[StillStunned]

I found you. It happened when I clicked a second time in the search field.

Are you one of my new followers? If so, what's your username there?

 

[Plathfan]

[Politics and trolling prohibited per our AH Forum Rules]

 

[StillStunned]

---

I find it adorable how you try to have a serious discussion with these people—the same ones who spent months insisting Kamala was leading in the polls and shamelessly weaponized the justice system. They’ve long been adrift from the mothership of reality.

We can only hope Elon and the others succeed in fighting the Deep State and purging the cancer from the academy.

As for them? Social media will always be their domain—it’s all they have left.

How about we keep the politics to the appropriate forum?

 

[AG31]

Are you one of my new followers? If so, what's your username there?

Sorry, can't tell you. It might lead to outing me as having erotic interests.

 

[lovecraft68]

All I know is under Twitter my account was shadow banned for promoting erotica content. On BlueSky it's not.

I think though that Bluesky being fairly new, they're going to do what many sites do early on and allow many things to help build the platform. They grow to a good size the opposite happens and they begin to worry if anything on there could turn people off. The exact story of kindle was it was built by indy authors with erotica a hot as fuck seller, then when it blew up and the big publishers wanted in....well those pesky indies and their dirty stories needed to be banned or buried.

I could be wrong, but I've seen a lot of the grass is always greener and it turns out not to be. If I'm not mistaken I heard all about how Wattpad was going to be the next big thing in erotica and free story publishing then....not so much.

But it never hurts to try.

But "Hey, here's a new venue that has possibilities" is far more professional than needing to make snide remarks about nastiness which is a veiled political dig because last week left a lot of people butthurt.

 

[Erozetta]

I think though that Bluesky being fairly new, they're going to do what many sites do early on and allow many things to help build the platform. They grow to a good size the opposite happens and they begin to worry if anything on there could turn people off. The exact story of kindle was it was built by indy authors with erotica a hot as fuck seller, then when it blew up and the big publishers wanted in....well those pesky indies and their dirty stories needed to be banned or buried.

I could be wrong, but I've seen a lot of the grass is always greener and it turns out not to be. If I'm not mistaken I heard all about how Wattpad was going to be the next big thing in erotica and free story publishing then....not so much.

But it never hurts to try.

But "Hey, here's a new venue that has possibilities" is far more professional than needing to make snide remarks about nastiness which is a veiled political dig because last week left a lot of people butthurt.

There would be a possibility of that happening, but that's always a possibility and it's already in action on X. Engagement wise ten months on Bluesky has built up 3x the engagement with peers (not bots) that X gave me in 3 years. Conversations are actually happening instead of replies with video clips trying to get engagement to their own pages by hitching up to viral posts.

I don't agree with everything everyone says there,but I'm also not being bombarded with ads every three posts by a person.

They've already made a policy claim that they won't allow AI training to happen on the work of artists and writers who post on Bluesky where X has made it mandatory with having an account.

Nothing is perfect, nothing stays one way forever, but so far, this is the better option of the two if interactions with peers is the goal.

How long that lasts? Who fuckin' knows. But for now, it works.

 

[AllenWoody]

May I please be added to the starter pack? I’m on Bluesky with my same handle here.

 

[Bazzle]

May I please be added to the starter pack? I’m on Bluesky with my same handle here.

Emily Miller is in charge of it...or was!