As a dev/architect in my 50s who has been on the sidelines for a few years, thank you for sharing. I'm on a long sabbatical of sorts and I appreciate hearing that getting back into the game is still possible.
Hell yes! You have seen a lot, and that's the most valuable contribution you can provide. Newer career people get caught up in the drama and can't find a good way out. You've seen this play out hundreds of times. You can provide the calming perspective.
I've been wondering if BlueSky has been growing too slowly, doling out invite codes too cautiously as people move onto other platforms and sort of give up on it.
Looks like I'm wrong. Other platforms don't seem to be scratching that twitter river-of-news itch for me.
How has BlueSky been for you? It's just been such a have & have-nots situation to me (from the outside). I have no real idea if people are enjoying how it works other than just having it.
It’s wild. I’m not a habitual social media user/checker, so my thoughts should be interpreted within that context.
Anyway, I don’t think anyone can fairly say they’re artificially growing the platform. I’ve watched them fight bots that attempt to autofollow everyone on the entire platform and engineer solutions for blatantly NSFW content filtering (but not blocking as that’s not a direct concern of theirs). They’re thinking really critically about giving users tools to give them the ability to see only the content they want to see. The coolest feature I’ve seen so far is custom feeds, which lets any user create a custom feed using whatever criteria they want to filter posts that any other user can then subsequently discover and add to their own list of feeds as an optional way to view content. For example, there’s a feed that (I presume) uses CV to include every post that includes a cat photo (no hashtags needed). It’s pretty cool.
They’re really on top of it, and when I say that I mean crazy passionate, bordering on burnout levels of on top of it. Throughout all of it they’ve been really authentically engaged, and even playful, with users.
As for users themselves, I’d say at the moment there are still really tight demographic bubbles of users on there, and everyone is an early-adopter, so the 80/20 rule doesn’t apply yet. Although it’s slowly changing, at least back in late May/April there were no lurkers. Everyone seemed to be posting and replying to everything. I find it interesting that they’ve managed to pierce beyond our techno-bubble. Not everyone on there has a technical background. I’d say they trend that direction, but they have writers and artists too, for example.
Lastly, I’ve seen some pretty neat experimenal web apps and chrome extensions being built around it. It’s all very exciting. That being said, this is early days, so it’s to be expected. I have a hunch they’re going to win this space because they seem to be making a concerted effort not to alienate users who are used to the idea of a centralized platform by not overwhelming said users with concerns that extend beyond engagement.
My concern also hinges on that, however, because it can very justly be argued that this is federation-lite or d(i)e(t)-centralization. The underlying foundation of the AT-protocol will be expensive to run. It’s the push/pull dilemma. They’re not shy about this, but they’re not exactly shouting it from the rooftops either, if you catch my drift.
Consider the data connections from Arecibo or Ice Cube (which has many of the same problems).
From Wikipedia:
> Observational data were recorded on 2-terabyte SATA hard disk drives fed from the Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico, each holding about 2.5 days of observations, which were then sent to Berkeley. Arecibo does not have a broadband Internet connection, so data must go by postal mail to Berkeley.
> This 2.5-MHz band is recorded continuously onto 35 Gbyte DLT tapes using 2-bit complex samples. Each tape holds about 15.5 hours of data. The entire sky survey is expected to require 1,100 tapes, for a total of 39 Tbytes of data.
> The recorded tapes are shipped to Berkeley, where we subdivide them into small work units on four splitter workstations. ...
You are spot on on UI changes. My octogenarian father called last year telling me his bank account had been hacked. Long story short, his bank had put an interstitial ad for loans showing a vacation beach scene between the login page & the account summary page he was used to. With his eyesight and patience level he didn't notice to scroll down for the "continue to your accounts" link. Ergo, only explanation was that he'd been hacked.
This took way too long to diagnose now that I live hundreds of miles away.
I wish UX designers would slow their roll on things like this in sensitive applications like online banking. There are times for ads and times for when ads should not be present.
Most of the time, it is not UX designers that are the problem here. There aren't UX designers who are like, "yeah let's make a shitty experience where you have to click through for no reason". It's someone on the business side forcing them to do it.
