Bluesky adds 700,000 new users in a week

[halfmanhalfbronco]

On 11/18/2024 at 1:56 PM, happycamper said:

I mean. we are, from grocery stores to tech. And it's allowed for extreme market disruptions.

Corporate price gouging is not a factor in inflation.  Nor the housing market.  Is big tech responsible for decreased life expectancy or quality of life?  Nope.

Facebook is not a monopoly, nor is Alphabet, Tesla, Nvidia etc....

 

[AztecAlien]

On 11/18/2024 at 2:00 PM, halfmanhalfbronco said:

Corporate price gouging is not a factor in inflation.  Nor the housing market.  Is big tech responsible for decreased life expectancy or quality of life?  Nope.

Facebook is not a monopoly, nor is Alphabet, Tesla, Nvidia etc....

 

 

A federal judge disagreed recently about Alphabet and Google not being a monopoly and declared the company, including Google, which it owns, as one. The ruling was that Alphabet/Google violated section two of the Sherman Act. What all that means as far as its stock, or the effects of the ruling for other big tech companies, and what happens next, is yet to be seen.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/aug/14/google-antitrust-monopoly-ruling

"Federal antitrust regulators have sued Meta Platforms, Amazon.com and Apple in the past four years, claiming the companies illegally maintained monopolies."

https://www.mrllp.com/google-is-a-monopoly-declares-federal-judge-implications-for-big-tech-and-digital-markets/

 

 

[SalinasSpartan]

When I see Bluesky I keep pronouncing it like “blueskee” in my head. Nothing else to add but that. I don’t use social media so I have no opinions on X or Blueskee.

[Billings]

On 11/12/2024 at 8:38 PM, retrofade said:

Since I moved over to Bluesky, I pretty much haven't bothered with TwiX outside of seeing posts embedded here and elsewhere. I might just private my accounts there and log them out. 

I did a blue sky account.   Go tired of political crap sliding into my mostly sports X followings.  Most of it was far right gop.  Suspect ELON was responsible for that

[happycamper]

On 11/18/2024 at 4:00 PM, halfmanhalfbronco said:

Corporate price gouging is not a factor in inflation. 

it was explicitly a factor in inflation. Kroger's own quarterly reports call it out lol. 

On 11/18/2024 at 4:00 PM, halfmanhalfbronco said:

Nor the housing market. 

never said it was. but the housing market is worse than 18 years ago mostly because of poor regulation that has not been touched for the most part. 

On 11/18/2024 at 4:00 PM, halfmanhalfbronco said:

Is big tech responsible for decreased life expectancy or quality of life?  Nope.

I mean.. yes. Look at teen mental health surveys. Look at how many fewer close friends especially younger people have. Look at stuff like the Myanmar genocide which is primarily fueled by social media.

On 11/18/2024 at 4:00 PM, halfmanhalfbronco said:

Facebook is not a monopoly

Facebook is a monopoly. 

On 11/18/2024 at 4:00 PM, halfmanhalfbronco said:

, nor is Alphabet,

Alphabet is a monopoly. They are so monopolistic that they have systematically created an internet advertisement ecosystem that they always win forever and they can make their product shitty so it doesn't matter. they pay tens of billions to other companies to be the default search option. Their own documents state they need to be a monopoly to keep spending money like a drunken sailor on non-search stuff. 

On 11/18/2024 at 4:00 PM, halfmanhalfbronco said:

Tesla,

Tesla is a car company. tech is stretching it. 

unless they get fsd going. but if they do.... it will be one of those "we'll deal with it when we deal with it" monopolies because true self driving will be such a huge boost to the economy and just overall life that it will make things almost unrecognizable. 

On 11/18/2024 at 4:00 PM, halfmanhalfbronco said:

Nvidia etc....

 

I don't care about Nvidia! that's a hardware company. Hardware companies aren't really as invested in the rot economy. 

[retrofade]

On 11/19/2024 at 4:04 AM, happycamper said:

it was explicitly a factor in inflation. Kroger's own quarterly reports call it out lol. 

never said it was. but the housing market is worse than 18 years ago mostly because of poor regulation that has not been touched for the most part. 

I mean.. yes. Look at teen mental health surveys. Look at how many fewer close friends especially younger people have. Look at stuff like the Myanmar genocide which is primarily fueled by social media.

Facebook is a monopoly. 

Alphabet is a monopoly. They are so monopolistic that they have systematically created an internet advertisement ecosystem that they always win forever and they can make their product shitty so it doesn't matter. they pay tens of billions to other companies to be the default search option. Their own documents state they need to be a monopoly to keep spending money like a drunken sailor on non-search stuff. 

Tesla is a car company. tech is stretching it. 

unless they get fsd going. but if they do.... it will be one of those "we'll deal with it when we deal with it" monopolies because true self driving will be such a huge boost to the economy and just overall life that it will make things almost unrecognizable. 

I don't care about Nvidia! that's a hardware company. Hardware companies aren't really as invested in the rot economy. 

I agree with you on some points, and not on others. 

In what way is Meta (not Facebook) a monopoly? Because they own Facebook, Instagram (and Threads), and WhatsApp? There are competitors in all of those spaces, and they even compete with each other in some respects. 

You can argue that Alphabet is a monopoly, and I personally think that it should be split into separate companies. They are even effectively separate companies at this point, with Search, Cloud, Android, and YouTube. The problem is that they all (except for Android) share a codebase, which would make things a lot more difficult as they're designed to work in a shared ecosystem, much like Microsoft today. GCP would likely have issues existing on their own because of how integrated they are with search/ads. 

Tesla is a car company that has diverged into solar and consumer battery tech, making it more of a tech company than a car company. Nvidia is more than a hardware company, and you can even argue that they aren't technically hardware because they're fabless and outsource all of their manufacturing to external vendors. They're a tech company that designs hardware and software. You talk about Tesla and FSD impacting the economy, well wait until we get to Level 4 AI, likely by 2026. 

[happycamper]

On 11/19/2024 at 10:15 AM, retrofade said:

I agree with you on some points, and not on others. 

In what way is Meta (not Facebook) a monopoly? Because they own Facebook, Instagram (and Threads), and WhatsApp? There are competitors in all of those spaces, and they even compete with each other in some respects. 

Facebook is effectively an information monopoly in many parts of the world. Meta's "you get a free internet phone that can only access facebook" makes it that way. 

On 11/19/2024 at 10:15 AM, retrofade said:

You can argue that Alphabet is a monopoly, and I personally think that it should be split into separate companies. They are even effectively separate companies at this point, with Search, Cloud, Android, and YouTube. The problem is that they all (except for Android) share a codebase, which would make things a lot more difficult as they're designed to work in a shared ecosystem, much like Microsoft today. GCP would likely have issues existing on their own because of how integrated they are with search/ads. 

They own the search market as a monopoly, they engage in monopolistic practices to maintain that search market. They own internet ads as a monopoly and use their search monopoly to maintain it. They use monopolistic practices to maintain this as well. I mean... when they bid out ads, and a competitor wins, they give themselves the right of first refusal to underbid their competitor and just award the ad to themselves anyway. 

They document their own monopolistic practices, and they have more power over internet commerce than pretty much any regulatory agency. 

 

[azgreg]

Over 20 million users now. Crazy.

 

[retrofade]

On 11/19/2024 at 8:51 AM, azgreg said:

Over 20 million users now. Crazy.

 

I have three accounts to keep my feeds distinct, and I'm loving it. One lets me follow people interested in and posting about politics and current events, another is more professional with my tech interests, and the third is gaming and sports. Doing the same on TwiX frustrated me because the politics --- mostly right-wing stuff that I wasn't following --- bled into the tech and sports/gaming, and I wanted to get away from that. I've also noticed that since there's no algorithm to game to get clout/notoriety, there are not as many people saying ridiculous shit to get engagement for their monetization aims. 

[thehowlin]

I'm in the process of migrating to Blue Sky. I haven't deleted my Twitter account yet but it's coming. I had no problem with the people on the platform as a whole, even the most right-wing accounts. Still, when you combine the weird, unhinged shit Elon has been posting for the last 24 months or so, plus how integrated into the Trump administration he's becoming - it's starting to feel like an oligarch's state media apparatus. 

So far, Blue Sky feels like Twitter circa 2012. 

[azgreg]

Paul Krugman on Bluesky:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/18/opinion/columnists/elon-musk-twitter-bluesky.html

Pre-Elon Musk, Twitter was the place people in my business had to be. I know different people used it for different purposes — nothing against Katy Perry, but not all of her nearly 106 million followers are on social media platforms for the same reasons I am. What I used Twitter for was to learn from and interact with people possessing real expertise, sometimes in areas I know pretty well, sometimes in areas I don’t, like international relations and climate policy.

I won’t go through the litany of ways the platform has changed for the worse under Musk’s leadership, but from my point of view it has become basically unusable, overrun by bots, trolls, cranks and extremists.

But where could you go instead? In the past couple of years, there have been several attempts to promote alternatives to X, but none of them really caught on. To some extent this may have reflected flaws in their designs, but a lot of it was simply lack of critical mass: Not enough of the people you wanted to interact with could be found on the alternative sites.

Then came this year’s presidential election, which seems to have sparked an exodus (“Xodus”?) from Muskland. From my point of view, Bluesky, in particular — a site that functions a lot like pre-Musk Twitter — quite suddenly has reached critical mass, in the sense that most of the people I want to hear from are now posting there. The raw number of users is still far smaller than X’s, but as far as I can tell, Bluesky is now the place to find smart, useful analysis.

And yes, most of the new Bluesky posters I find useful are liberal, but that reflects the modern right’s anti-intellectualism rather than political bias on the part of the site.

I have no idea what this means for X’s financials, and I don’t care. What I see is that you can indeed ruin a network if you try hard enough. And it’s starting to look as if Musk has managed to pull it off.

[Bison]

So you need to be on X if you are a Trumper and Blue Sky if you are for Democracy…and that is going to be social media going forward…I’ll just revert back to reading & watching the news for my news.

Social media such as this forum is fantastic until politics creeps in.

[halfmanhalfbronco]

On 11/19/2024 at 5:04 AM, happycamper said:

it was explicitly a factor in inflation. Kroger's own quarterly reports call it out lol. 

never said it was. but the housing market is worse than 18 years ago mostly because of poor regulation that has not been touched for the most part. 

I mean.. yes. Look at teen mental health surveys. Look at how many fewer close friends especially younger people have. Look at stuff like the Myanmar genocide which is primarily fueled by social media.

Facebook is a monopoly. 

Alphabet is a monopoly. They are so monopolistic that they have systematically created an internet advertisement ecosystem that they always win forever and they can make their product shitty so it doesn't matter. they pay tens of billions to other companies to be the default search option. Their own documents state they need to be a monopoly to keep spending money like a drunken sailor on non-search stuff. 

Tesla is a car company. tech is stretching it. 

unless they get fsd going. but if they do.... it will be one of those "we'll deal with it when we deal with it" monopolies because true self driving will be such a huge boost to the economy and just overall life that it will make things almost unrecognizable. 

I don't care about Nvidia! that's a hardware company. Hardware companies aren't really as invested in the rot economy. 

https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/corporate-greed-not-blame-price-pressures-fed-study-shows-2024-05-13/

Literally was not a in any way a significant player in inflation.

 

We disagree on tech.  Shit, this thread is proof Meta is not a monopoly.

We have hashed the "monopoly" boogeyman with tech to death on MWCboard.  I had my mind changed by @smltwnrckr but that's a loosing dialog.

Let's revisit after football season.

 

[SWspartan]

Thank you @retrofade.

I just closed my X account and signed on with Bluesky. Adios Elon. 

 

[happycamper]

On 11/19/2024 at 8:28 PM, halfmanhalfbronco said:

https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/corporate-greed-not-blame-price-pressures-fed-study-shows-2024-05-13/

Literally was not a in any way a significant player in inflation.

 

We disagree on tech.  Shit, this thread is proof Meta is not a monopoly.

We have hashed the "monopoly" boogeyman with tech to death on MWCboard.  I had my mind changed by @smltwnrckr but that's a loosing dialog.

Let's revisit after football season.

 

How is this thread "proof meta is not a monopoly" lol? you scrolling on mwcboard for new journalism?

The whole pivot to video collapse was 100% caused by Facebook. It's a monopoly. 

[modestobulldog]

I’ll stick to Truth Social 

[retrofade]

I suppose I should post mine here if people are interested. 

@retroskiesfading.bsky.social

I have two others, but I won't be posting them here, as one would doxx me, and the other one is a gaming interests one tailored for specific communities. 

[modestobulldog]

Is Parler still around?

[retrofade]

On 11/20/2024 at 8:03 AM, modestobulldog said:

Is Parler still around?

It's still a cesspool, but yes it is. 

[renoskier]

nice NPR article today:

https://www.npr.org/2024/11/19/g-s1-34898/bluesky-traffic-surge-after-election

Putting more control in the hands of users is what distinguishes Bluesky from X, formerly Twitter, and other rival social media sites.

Rather than having one "master algorithm," Bluesky allows for a more personalized experience. By default, there are three main feeds: One shows accounts you follow, another shows what your friends follow and a "discover" feed surfaces posts linked to your interests.

Bluesky allows users to reach beyond these three by developing their own customized algorithm for, say, just content about cats, or only posts about a sports team or type of music. Because of this customization, Graber says there are more than 50,000 different Bluesky feeds available.

And Bluesky, she argues, is "billionaire-proof," since the company is not one centralized feed of content, but rather a "protocol" from which endless feeds can be created. Think of a protocol like email, or the internet itself, Graber says. It would be difficult for a single person or company to control it, since the underlying technology is open-sourced and maintained by many contributors, like Wikipedia.