I want a button on each user (that opts in) that allows me to see their feed just as they do. A read-only impersonation. When I see a take that I wildly disagree with I frequently wonder what set of views of the world they are operating from. This feature would help look at the world from behind the eyes of those I need to learn from the most: those that seem to live in a different one.
A starter pack in comparison is a one-click embubbler. We need better bubble explorers and comparers. Like "Grok, me and @joe disagree on <topic-x>. Compare the relevant items in each of our feeds and summarize the difference in values, facts and sources that we consume."
_Algernon_ · 3h ago
I (and I assume this is probably true for most people) don't want you to have access to this kind of information about me. It's as if you'd want to know every book on my bookshelf. I'm not letting strangers into my home to get that information.
mostlysimilar · 3h ago
Follows are already public information.
slg · 2h ago
So is one's location while in public. It doesn't mean I want someone tracking my location every time I leave the house. The aggregation of public data can end up being an invasion of perceived privacy.
righthand · 4h ago
Personal tracking? What is stopping you from building a bot that uses this feature to view other peoples personal taste and building a shadow profile that then is used to manipulate them?
You can already do this by scraping their follows list and building a pseudo display of what a person looked at.
tokyolights2 · 4h ago
You are just describing what advertisers actually do in practice. Maybe if everyone had the same access people would realize how invasive it is.
bombcar · 1h ago
Advertisers less track you and more decide what demographic bucket to stick you in.
It’s a subtle but important (and hard to admit) difference; because it relies on realizing that we’re not special snowflakes, but we have a whole group of people we’re like.
s1mplicissimus · 37m ago
It seems that the most effective method of sticking people in buckets is actually track them, so I don't see the practical difference for this discussion.
> because it relies on realizing that we’re not special snowflakes, but we have a whole group of people we’re like
yet buckets become more valuable the more specific they are (for example "dad of 3" is more valuable than "male"). it's not hard to see how that would scale into "every detail about the person would allow maximally manipulative advertising = most valuable", just think about any vulnerable position you might find yourself in that can now be used to manipulate you
sorcerer-mar · 34m ago
Is that true? Pretty sure everything is way, way fuzzier and ultra-high dimensionality now. Not placing people in discrete buckets.
pitched · 34m ago
I’d love to meet more of the people in my bucket. I think we’d get along well.
righthand · 2h ago
So we give everyone single click access and people become bigger monsters or people wake up finally? Make it a separate tool.
Dilettante_ · 4h ago
Yeah! The only people who should be allowed to see my own feed are me and the malevolent corporate entity that owns the platform!
righthand · 3h ago
I said this was already possible by anyone.
AlienRobot · 3h ago
Funny. I want the opposite. I want people to stop posting their opinions on the Internet.
Every time I go to Youtube and I see "the X situation is insane!" I'm like "what is even X? Why are you showing me this?"
The whole social media landscape is engineered toward drama and people arguing over pointless things they have no control over, being controversial all for "engagement." It's pretty depressing.
saagarjha · 13m ago
Sometimes. Sometimes people actually do care about things and wish to express their opinions on it.
mosura · 3h ago
> I want people to stop posting their opinions on the Internet.
Interesting that you do not feel the need to lead by example.
Ironically this comment is doing the exact thing the comic is criticizing because it is a subtle bastardization of what the comic says.
The comic is about not criticizing people who want to see improvement in something in which they participate. It isn't saying hypocrisy can't be criticized, just that we shouldn't misidentify hypocrisy. Notice the characters aren't saying that no one should buy an Apple product/car or participate in society. The replies are tangential to their original complaints. In order to see hypocrisy, the replier needs to view any participation as a full fledge endorsement, which is a silly thing to do.
Meanwhile, OP genuinely is acting hypocritically because they are doing the exact thing they are criticizing, posting an option to the Internet. The original replier is therefore not the one embodying this comic, it's you.
pitched · 20m ago
There is an interesting other layer here where the posting of an opinion is triggered by the way the content is presented. “The medium is the message.” The opinion posted didn’t itself exist before the content was consumed, making it all self-fulfilling and a positive feedback loop.
The interesting thing about HN in that context is it doesn’t fine-tune its algorithm per-user, it presents a consistent view to all users. Content should be much less positive-feedback-loop because of that.
And so OP might not be hypocritical if that consistent-view is the change we need to better our society.
MangoToupe · 2h ago
They're right, though. So many problems are caused by thinking that opinions matter.
AlienRobot · 2h ago
I do lead by example, but comment replies don't count ;)
MangoToupe · 2h ago
> Compare the relevant items in each of our feeds and summarize the difference in values, facts and sources that we consume."
Surely it'd be easier to just view the delta? Once you have an algorithm in there summarizing things that value is lost.
pnw · 3h ago
I thought Bluesky usage was declining? Sites like https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats show a 10 to 20% drop across most metrics in the last year.
giingyui · 1h ago
It talks about rapid growth because bluesky really did have rapid growth in the past. It doesn’t anymore though.
Ferret7446 · 1h ago
These facts are related. "starter packs" only work if you're cultivating a very narrow social bubble of users, which is the same reason bluesky is declining now.
Unbubbled people have a wide range of interests and preferences that cannot be captured in a few "starter packs".
paradox460 · 2h ago
Never let the truth get in the way of a good story
ujkhsjkdhf234 · 1h ago
As I said in another comment, all of these statements are true. Blue Sky blew up very quickly and starter parks were a key part of that. Blue Sky is also losing users which I find to be expected. Threads is quickly gaining users because of network effects. If you have an Instagram account, you have a Threads account.
PaulKeeble · 4h ago
The bluesky transfer extension helps a lot as well, helps you find the same users you follow on twitter on bluesky. https://www.sky-follower-bridge.dev/
hombre_fatal · 4h ago
It's a great idea.
I make a new Twitter account every time I realize I'm stuck in the same thought loops every day with the same timeline. And every time it's pretty annoying to restart from scratch.
I'll pick a couple accounts to start off the timeline and then autofollow Twitter's "follow these 7 ppl too" recommendation, but I often start following the similar accounts every time.
I'd like an easy way to try out completely different feeds without having to know ahead of time who I want to seed it with.
WJW · 2h ago
> Be OP
> Get stuck in the same thought loops every time on twitter, remake your account in slightly different ways every time until the algorithm catches you again.
> Still don't realize it's twitter itself which is the problem.
It really sounds you would be better off by just deleting it altogether.
zzzeek · 1h ago
Sorry we were just told that Threads is quickly catching up to X in terms of users and that Bluesky is a flat line at the bottom of the graph compared to them [1]
All of these are true. Bluesky blew up because it was the first large "not Twitter" social media and it has solid communities. Threads has blown past them because of network effects. If you have an instagram account, you have a Threads account just waiting to be activated. It's very easy transition.
The great thing about decentralized social network is that you can easily push to all of those accounts and if I were Bluesky, I would make it easy to link Threads and Mastodon to Bluesky so you can push messages to all 3.
moomoo11 · 3h ago
Cool.
OT but I must be a weirdo because I just don’t get any satisfaction out of these apps.
I just don’t give that much of a shit about what other people think or say.
HN is enough for me lol.
AlienRobot · 3h ago
The only social media app I can stomach is Tumblr, because people share lots of cool photos and art there.
It's weird because on Tumblr you can post posts of any size, place images anywhere you want, edit posts, edit tags afterwards, and all this cool stuff... but no, people WANT to use the character-limited immutable post with embedded hashtags thing for some reason. I don't get it.
kgwxd · 3h ago
i give a shit about what some people think and say about some things, but there's no one who's every thought i want to know. don't care how anyone feels about anyone else, if that level of sharing doesn't get annoying eventually, you're still in the honeymoon phase, or you're just lying to yourself.
moomoo11 · 2h ago
More that I don’t care to “follow” and “like” people. Just being honest like I said
I don’t give a crap what people think or say for the most part.
A starter pack in comparison is a one-click embubbler. We need better bubble explorers and comparers. Like "Grok, me and @joe disagree on <topic-x>. Compare the relevant items in each of our feeds and summarize the difference in values, facts and sources that we consume."
You can already do this by scraping their follows list and building a pseudo display of what a person looked at.
It’s a subtle but important (and hard to admit) difference; because it relies on realizing that we’re not special snowflakes, but we have a whole group of people we’re like.
> because it relies on realizing that we’re not special snowflakes, but we have a whole group of people we’re like
yet buckets become more valuable the more specific they are (for example "dad of 3" is more valuable than "male"). it's not hard to see how that would scale into "every detail about the person would allow maximally manipulative advertising = most valuable", just think about any vulnerable position you might find yourself in that can now be used to manipulate you
Every time I go to Youtube and I see "the X situation is insane!" I'm like "what is even X? Why are you showing me this?"
The whole social media landscape is engineered toward drama and people arguing over pointless things they have no control over, being controversial all for "engagement." It's pretty depressing.
Interesting that you do not feel the need to lead by example.
https://imgur.com/sl3fXat
The comic is about not criticizing people who want to see improvement in something in which they participate. It isn't saying hypocrisy can't be criticized, just that we shouldn't misidentify hypocrisy. Notice the characters aren't saying that no one should buy an Apple product/car or participate in society. The replies are tangential to their original complaints. In order to see hypocrisy, the replier needs to view any participation as a full fledge endorsement, which is a silly thing to do.
Meanwhile, OP genuinely is acting hypocritically because they are doing the exact thing they are criticizing, posting an option to the Internet. The original replier is therefore not the one embodying this comic, it's you.
The interesting thing about HN in that context is it doesn’t fine-tune its algorithm per-user, it presents a consistent view to all users. Content should be much less positive-feedback-loop because of that.
And so OP might not be hypocritical if that consistent-view is the change we need to better our society.
Surely it'd be easier to just view the delta? Once you have an algorithm in there summarizing things that value is lost.
Unbubbled people have a wide range of interests and preferences that cannot be captured in a few "starter packs".
I make a new Twitter account every time I realize I'm stuck in the same thought loops every day with the same timeline. And every time it's pretty annoying to restart from scratch.
I'll pick a couple accounts to start off the timeline and then autofollow Twitter's "follow these 7 ppl too" recommendation, but I often start following the similar accounts every time.
I'd like an easy way to try out completely different feeds without having to know ahead of time who I want to seed it with.
> Get stuck in the same thought loops every time on twitter, remake your account in slightly different ways every time until the algorithm catches you again.
> Still don't realize it's twitter itself which is the problem.
It really sounds you would be better off by just deleting it altogether.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/07/threads-is-nearing-xs-dail...
The great thing about decentralized social network is that you can easily push to all of those accounts and if I were Bluesky, I would make it easy to link Threads and Mastodon to Bluesky so you can push messages to all 3.
OT but I must be a weirdo because I just don’t get any satisfaction out of these apps.
I just don’t give that much of a shit about what other people think or say.
HN is enough for me lol.
It's weird because on Tumblr you can post posts of any size, place images anywhere you want, edit posts, edit tags afterwards, and all this cool stuff... but no, people WANT to use the character-limited immutable post with embedded hashtags thing for some reason. I don't get it.