alt Hacker NewsSorry but you sound exactly like that comic. "Our blessed homeland, their barbarous waters"
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/our-blessed-homeland-their-ba...
More seriously, I have seen similar exchanges many times on this social media where one party tries to exempt what is clearly a social media from his anti-social media agenda because he finds it personally more palatable. Usually he tries to exempt Reddit or HN but in this case it is Bluesky, which has the same features as Twitter ten years ago and is notorious for being always politically charged. It makes me think whatever criticisms he may have against social media are actually less about social media but about people he does not like being on social media. Like a driver complaining about all the other cars causing a congestion while he sits in his own car.
But fear not, because our blessed regulators (totally different from their tyrannical censors) will save us from the Big Bad. Never mind when Nepal blocked WhatsApp in its social media ban or when UK came after Wikipedia!
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Disagree, that's reductive and beside the point.
It's useful to have words that distinguish major classes of activity online, even if several types are combined on a given platform. "Messaging", "Chat Rooms", "Streaming", "Forums", "Social Networking", and "Social Media" are all different things. You can quibble about what constitutes the edges of the definitions but they all have different key activities they enable.
If you lump everything together, you fail to understand the necessary nuances to identify the problems let alone solve them.
The key to understanding any given social platform is to understand the proportion of which activity that platform enables. This tells you things like the incentives, constraints, externalities, etc of the platform. Different designs have different effects.
Block lists, starter packs, and quote detaching did not exist on Twitter ten years ago. Person-scale moderation is simply more effective on Bluesky, and that leads to a better experience.