Show HN: A livestream of all image descriptions (alt text) on Bluesky
3 bobbiechen 1 9/7/2025, 5:29:59 PM bobbiec.github.io ↗
In 2019, an academic paper by Gleason et al. found that only 0.1% of Twitter image posts had any form of image description (alt text) [1].
I wanted to see the analogous number for Bluesky today - my full blog post is here [2], but I found looking at the live stream was illuminating and fun too:
* Bluesky image posts are frequent enough to keep moving, but not so frequent that it's an unreadable blur.
* There's lots of bot content for things like ADS-B feeds (planes nearby), radio station "Now playing", and good old-fashioned affiliate link spam.
* There is a lot of detailed descriptions for sexual content. This was a surprise to me!
[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3308558.3313605 [2] https://digitalseams.com/blog/image-descriptions-on-bluesky
Comments (1)
threecheese · 1h ago
I may be wrong, but my understanding of the firehose is it is pre-moderation; don’t you worry that your workload may read horrific image content?