The visualization looks absolutely fantastic. Great work. Would love to dive deeper into the tech behind it.
I'll just share some irony. They say X/Twitter is full of people spreading hate speech. I just logged in into my old BlueSky account. My entire feed is full of people saying how much they _hate_ X/Twitter.
Hate speech or not, there is nothing pleasant about it.
The irony is that the 'holier-than-thou' crowd, who are against hate and for love all over the world, overwhelmingly post negative political comments and are rooting for X/Twitter to collapse.
This ^ is a good problem to solve in social networks.
> This ^ is a good problem to solve in social networks.
What, that people are mean about a very special website sometimes? Seems a rather niche problem, tbh.
There is nothing inherently wrong with people being negative. If you had a social network where people could only be positive about things… now, that would be unhealthy.
It was about "hate speech" though, not "unpleasant speech", then you'd be right.
Stop thinking in us/them, everybody hates someone or something and that's fine. That's not what hate speech is I think. Take one example from the Canadian govmnt:
> The bill defines “hate speech” as the content of a communication that expresses detestation or vilification of an individual or group of individuals on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.
> These grounds of discrimination are race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, family status, genetic characteristics, disability, or conviction for an offence for which a pardon has been granted or in respect of which a record suspension has been ordered.
Sure, there are clear differences between hate speech and unpleasant speech. I can't disagree on the definition. But I’m seeing a lot of hateful anti-Trump posts on BlueSky, and on X/Twitter, there’s plenty of pro-Trump content. These two groups have polarized views, so they naturally clash.
What I find ironic is that BlueSky has many openly anti-Trump posts, while X/Twitter tends to have a significant amount of pro-Trump content. Because many minority and marginalized groups lean anti-Trump, again, these opposing viewpoints naturally clash, often leading to Twitter being labeled as a "hate speech platform". Yet on BlueSky, there’s no problem with people openly criticizing or spreading negativity about pro-Trump people. Since Trump supporters don’t typically fall into minority categories, it seems BlueSky users have the "privilege" to freely bash the Twitter crowd without facing the same scrutiny. Essentially, BlueSky is shielded from the hate speech label despite fostering a different kind of polarized environment.
Good news is you can create your own labeling service that people can subscribe and report posts to and you can have a feed completely devoid of hate speech against the government.
Also, if you're in a group of people that trumps policies target (immigrants with undocumented family members, women and trans people who want bodily autonomy, Arabs with family in Palestine) then all that pro-trump positivity starts to feel pretty hateful too, just in case you haven't looked at it from that angle.
It isn’t ironic to dislike intolerant people or to voice it. It is an individual’s prerogative to imagine that tolerance must be completely uniform, but that doesn’t reflect the reality of groups or systems made up of actual humans.
Social networks require drama in order to stay relevant, this is baked in and by design. Capitalist love this feature. Also you'll never get 100's of millions of people to agree on anything.
Is it really fare to compare a political cartoon to the garbage twitter is allowing? I might still visit twitter if it wasn't so out of control.
… So, wait, two political cartoons (the first one’s been on the go for years; it’s pretty much a classic at this point) and a cat? Like, unless you’re going to claim that ol’ minihands is a marginalised group of one, very hard to read any of these as hate speech. Actually, even if one _was_ to accept that obviously silly premise, still probably not. Maybe the cat, at a serious push.
That's a current wave going through. There's a bit of discourse going on where some users were rage baiting by constantly posting twitter screenshots over to bluesky and people who left bluesky are pushing back about how they don't want to see that content.
That discourse comes in waves each time a major migration happens from twitter to bluesky but it settles down fairly soon after each time. Give it a few days and people will have moved on to the new topic of the day.
Also it's worth noting that the "Discover" feed is trained specifically per person so while the defaults aren't great, if you use the "show more like this" and "show less like this" options on posts (under the triple dot) then pretty quickly it tunes in towards content you care about vs content you don't.
> Also it's worth noting that the "Discover" feed is trained specifically per person so while the defaults aren't great, if you use the "show more like this" and "show less like this" options on posts (under the triple dot) then pretty quickly it tunes in towards content you care about vs content you don't.
This is the first time I clicked "Discover". I haven't logged into BlueSky for almost two years.
While I don't think it's technically hate speech, but yeah bluesky is either just unanimous negativity or positivity for different things, and it feels like groupthink. There is no middle ground.
It hasn't avoided that fate. If you doubt me, go into a thread about US politics and praise Donald Trump and watch as your comments get not just downvoted, but flagged so that they are hidden. This will happen no matter how good your arguments are.
Make no mistake, this site is ideologically polarized just like all the others. The only saving grace is that the vast majority of topics are about tech, not politics, so the polarization is usually hidden.
Even in tech, there are various repeated themes you can see here, which are much more prevalent than say general tech spheres like the hate against AI, VCs, MongoDB or the love for Rust, privacy, open source, postgres etc.
> They say X/Twitter is full of people spreading hate speech.
I've recently created a brand new account on X for a project. Looking at what was being recommended to the brand-new account with no interactions or likes or anything, they are not wrong.
Within the first 15 recommended posts or so there was
- a post about how Canada is overrun by Indians
- a post about how Melbourne is overrun by n-worders (they replaced the Gs with £s)
- a post about how a trans person is ugly
- 2 "nudes in bio" bot posts. This was not hate speech, and arguably the most positive posts I got.
This is not counting the Elon posts and the Trump posts, which were the first and second thing that got recommended. Nor the posts from Elon Musk imitators, who I assume are trying to take advantage of the fact that Elon Musk gets special treatment from the algorithm.
When you create a new account, X asks you to follow an account to determine what your interests are. I picked NASA. I did not get recommended a single space photo.
I'll just share some irony. They say X/Twitter is full of people spreading hate speech. I just logged in into my old BlueSky account. My entire feed is full of people saying how much they _hate_ X/Twitter.