alt Hacker NewsJust to say the obvious: the new CEO is a VC partner and former CEO of Automattic. That seems very bad, no matter how "committed" they are to the vision of Bluesky.
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Transitioning to an interim CEO is never a good look. Should have waited until conclusion of the executive search.
He's only meant to be filling in temporarily per the Wired article, but we'll see.
Apologies, I'm probably under a rock, but why is that bad? I see they're behind WordPress but am not sure what the 1:1 is. The WP Engine stuff?
The vision of Bluesky isnt compatible with it existing in a capitalistic society.
To be honest, I was never entirely on board with Jay's almost exclusively cryptocurrency background. I think she's done an acceptable job as CEO, but I have also felt that leadership at Bluesky was never good enough to see legitimate success.
Today, Bluesky remains largely undermoderated and they have managed to bake in more toxic features Twitter ever did in such a short timespan. Its success is largely driven by having a UI closer to Twitter's original UI than any other alternative, and taking a stronger stance against far-right rhetoric than Twitter.
The only technical saving grace is the broad control you can take over the algorithm to avoid the content you don't want to see, but Bluesky is generally covered with more calls for violence than their nascent content team could ever actually deal with.
And I have yet to actually see a real use of ATproto that isn't just immediately blown out of the water by ActivityPub.
But I digress, the new CEO pretty much hammers that final nail in the coffin for me. I have zero belief in Bluesky to be anything but another awful corporate corner of the web that I should avoid.
Why is that bad?
thats not a good sign
Ultimately the goal "build a nice community where people can enjoy social interactions" is fully incompatible with "build the next Everything For Everyone Social Website like twitter/facebook/instagram/youtube/tiktok/etc so that we can get 5 billion users and start pushing ads at people". Unfortunately once you take VC funding, you no longer have the option of doing the former.
From an actual content perspective Bluesky is fine, but there's no investor who would take a look at the site's user statistics[0] and say "oh yeah things are going great." There needs to be drastic changes if investors hope to have any return on investment.
[0] https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats