Bluesky Repeats Most of Twitter's Mistakes

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Back in 2018, while looking at the monster he helped create, Jack Dorsey started thinking out loud: What was wrong with Twitter? Why were people so cruel to each other? Why did it foster such divisiveness? Why did hate go viral?

The company put out a request for proposal for anyone who had smart ideas on tackling these issues. Dorsey focused on learning the principles of “healthy” conversations. He came to understand that the hard-coded mechanics of Twitter were a major contributing factor in how we behaved. The “hellsite,” as people half-jokingly call it, was by design.

“Right now we have a big Like button with a heart on it and we're incentivizing people to want it to go up,” he told an event hosted by tech magazine Wired. He pondered removing the “like” function as well as other aspects of social validation, such as follower counts. Others pointed out that the “quote tweet,” where you could comment on someone else's post and bring it to the attention of the frothing masses, was another highly-flammable feature. Dorsey pledged to do better.

How dispiriting it has been, then, to use Bluesky. 

The new app backed by Dorsey that launched in February has been ordained by some as the post-Elon Musk Twitter alternative we have been waiting for. Rolling Stone magazine last week called it the “hottest club online.” There are more than 1 million people on its waiting list, and this weekend saw some Twitter heavy-hitters join the platform, such as US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the comedian Dril.

Bluesky was spun out of an R&D project set up by Dorsey when he was CEO at Twitter to look at the potential for a decentralized social network. The concept is that by creating an open protocol, you can stop any single app or