Engagement will always be better on new platforms, because they a) have no bots and b) haven't been growth hacked to death, since the strategies that work haven't been figured out yet.
These start at 0, then increase. When both of those trends grow strong enough, people start to leave in droves.
I know I did. On X, I used it a lot, then left when the bad algo content era began. On Insta, the engagement bait was bad enough when I joined that it deterred me from ever seriously using it.
I would expect these to become more of a problem over time, though I'm optimistic Bluesky can do better at beating them than other platforms have.
This one surprised me personally, because we really don't do anything special. We treat posts with links the same as any other kind of post. I would guess there's a kind of high "density" of focus from people right now; the general buzz of the moment. Also I figure our focus on the reverse-chron following feed helps with this.
We're pro open-web, pro people using Bluesky to find other interesting things. We're working on subscriptions right now (not ads) so we've got no incentive to keep people in our app. We'd rather be the lobby to an interesting world.
Also, tbh, every user has a domain name. The web -- and websites -- seems like a really valuable part of the atproto ecosystem. We're going to keep developing in that direction. See this blog comments integration[1] for instance.
There is a general vibe of mute/block, don't engage with trolls, in the hopes we don't end up with the same toxicity found on other platforms, or as Kelsey Hightower put it
"What pushed me off X was just watching good people behave badly" [1]
Every single social media platform of note charges accounts for “reach”. Your post gets seen by 1-15% of your followers unless you “promote” it with a marketing spend.
Bluesky has no mechanism for artificially limiting the reach of legitimate messaging, and no business impulse to build one. It really is something new under the sun.
julianeon ·7 days ago
Engagement will always be better on new platforms, because they a) have no bots and b) haven't been growth hacked to death, since the strategies that work haven't been figured out yet.
These start at 0, then increase. When both of those trends grow strong enough, people start to leave in droves.
I know I did. On X, I used it a lot, then left when the bad algo content era began. On Insta, the engagement bait was bad enough when I joined that it deterred me from ever seriously using it.
I would expect these to become more of a problem over time, though I'm optimistic Bluesky can do better at beating them than other platforms have.
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pfraze ·7 days ago
We're pro open-web, pro people using Bluesky to find other interesting things. We're working on subscriptions right now (not ads) so we've got no incentive to keep people in our app. We'd rather be the lobby to an interesting world.
Also, tbh, every user has a domain name. The web -- and websites -- seems like a really valuable part of the atproto ecosystem. We're going to keep developing in that direction. See this blog comments integration[1] for instance.
1 https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3lbq7swe7d22b
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verdverm ·7 days ago
https://bsky.app/profile/mcuban.bsky.social/post/3lbx7p3vdgs...
There is a general vibe of mute/block, don't engage with trolls, in the hopes we don't end up with the same toxicity found on other platforms, or as Kelsey Hightower put it
"What pushed me off X was just watching good people behave badly" [1]
[1] https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/kelsey-hightower-...
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arghandugh ·7 days ago
Bluesky has no mechanism for artificially limiting the reach of legitimate messaging, and no business impulse to build one. It really is something new under the sun.
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underyx ·7 days ago
https://bsky.app/profile/gergely.pragmaticengineer.com/post/...
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