Post

hi Bluesky! 🦋 i’ve been chosen as the new head of product here at Bluesky HQ! and i couldn’t be more excited to hack with this incredibly talented team on making this site better for everyone.

Welcome to the network, Alex. My strongest possible request/recommendation is to integrate Reddit-style subcommunities into Bluesky in a "native" way. I was on Reddit *before* subreddits and it was just HN, not appealing to most. Without subreddits, they would never have reached 1 billion MAUs.

Jake Gold@jacob.gold

This is The Schizophrenic Problem that Twitter never solved but Reddit did. People have moods and the algorithm has no way of knowing your *current* one is. No one is going *ever* in the mood for everything. There needs to be a way to select into specific kinds of content and *avoid* other kinds.

The important thing is to *truly* learn from Reddit's example and not just copy some aspects superficially, which will absolutely not work. Each community needs to be like its own Bluesky, with its own vibe, its own rules, its own moderators, and the rest. Hard to nail it but very possible.

Moderation is a very tricky subject. A big part of the issue on Reddit was people who were moderators of hundreds of subs giving them effectively sitewide control with no accountability or transparency, plus all the normal problems that power brings.

0 reposts11 likes

Yeah it is but giving people power and letting users opt-in to succumbing to that power within a specified scope seems unavoidable if you want real and unique communities.

Yeah there are social problems that can't be fixed with technology but product choices can have a huge impact in minimizing them. For example, if I'm not in the mood to talk politics I can go hang out in r/raspberrypi or whatever and have a good time. That is technology/product solving a problem.

Could we use an LLM for this? Ex prompt: use five words to categorize this post. Return the five words as an array. Next make feeds that only contain these keywords. An AI usecase could get Bluesky a huge next round of funding, since investors are desperate to burn GPUs right now.

With how atproto does moderation and user choice, I think we can do better (1) community default moderation is reddit style (2) users can decide if they want to use it or swap it out But to your point, communities should be deciding if this is possible for their community. Some want privacy too

Maybe. I'd have to think about it a lot more. But I'd default to doing something very close to Reddit and letting people simply leave subcommunities and fork them if they don't like how the exiting one is being run.