Adobe deletes Bluesky posts after backlash
695 comments
·April 11, 202555555
mk89
Out of curiosity I went to their website to understand how they sell it, because it wasn't clear...
https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/plans.html
I am not sure why this should face FTC or any similar mechanism to prevent "deception".
It's written right there:
US$22.99/mo Annual, billed monthly
And if you slightly scroll down the very first question is how much it costs:
> There are several Creative Cloud plans that include Photoshop. You can purchase it as a standalone app for US$22.99/mo. for the annual billed monthly plan or opt for annual billing at US$263.88/yr.
Buying it with the annual billing would save you 1$ per month.
I have seen this model used elsewhere: if you opt in for the yearly subscription, you still pay per month but you save X% over the monthly subscription.
Not sure what could they do to make it more obvious, besides writing big: we only offer yearly subscriptions, although you can pay monthly..
Edit: if you click on buy it, it leads to another option too, the monthly one. Is this the scam one? Because it says you cancel any time...
Edit again: it seems that they did quite some nasty stuff in the past and then US sued them, so now they are more transparent about their subscriptions.
God bless such organizations that sue the hell out of such bad actors until they behave well.
devsda
> actually an "annual plan, billed monthly" and thus that if they cancel after one month (for example) they'll be billed for the remaining 11 immediately
I don't know if this is a recent policy change, but it is not the complete amount but only 50% of the remaining annual amount as per their website[1].
If it were something involving physical goods or services I can understand, but 50% penalty is still a crazy amount for a hosted software service.
r33b33
That's why you always use throwaway cards for this.
reisse
Of course it's highly unlikely they'll go in court for a single user, but if everyone starts doing this, they'll sue. It doesn't matter the payment failed, you still legally owe Adobe (or any other service) money.
akudha
Or better, just avoid companies like Adobe as much as possible. It is not like they are the only game in town anymore, right?
fc417fc802
I would be too lazy to bother with a throwaway in almost all circumstances, but I would 100% attempt a charge back in anger. I'm uncertain how my bank would ultimately respond though.
ajxs
I posted elsewhere in this thread that when I tried to cancel, and discovered that I was actually paying for an annual plan on a monthly basis, I told their support person I'd be speaking with the local consumer affairs regulator[1]. They instantly waived the cancellation fee. I'm tempted to think they've had some trouble with regulators on this issue before.
sethammons
We successfully stopped paying for a collection of Adobe products that were for a student license last year. We randomly were charged again in January and February of this year and when I called they couldn't find any records of charges. They recommended contesting the charges on the card and we've not been charged since. Still, crazy that they couldn't even verify they charged my card.
liendolucas
I will never do subscriptions. As you mentioned, the fact that you you have to "successfully stop an automatic payment" is an experience that I'm not willing to go through.
dharmab
Capital One has a feature where you can generate temporary card numbers. Each one can be authorized for "a single charge" or "repeating charges at one merchant". And you have a toggle switch in the latter case to dis/enable payments. Really handy for subscriptions.
maccard
I don’t get it, honestly. It’s very clear. You get a discount for an annual commitment and they let you pay monthly. It’s super clear which you’re signing up for when you do it. I’m in the UK, and there’s a 14 day cooling off period on the plans too, unless you buy the full blown annual one.
I’m no adobe supporter generally, and sure they could do more, but they take an awful lot of flak for people who won’t read two lines of text and then scream bloody murder.
Symbiote
Shown by the video embedded in [1] (which has a screenshot at 2:00), Adobe changed their sign-up process and added those clear options after being sued by the US for deceptive subscription fees.
https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/adobe-sued-over-subscription-f...
maccard
ok so the problem is they _used_ to do this.
I’m not suggesting we just forgive and forget, but warning people against abusive billing practices that aren’t in place any more is a bit silly. If your argument is we shouldnt support a corporation who requires being taken to court to treat their users fairly then there’s probably a very long list of companies that fail that test much harder than adobe do, especially now.
throwaway48476
Non dark pattern sites show the total price for the annual subscription and the lower /month discount below.
basisword
For me the scummy part is that you can't cancel the recurring subscription in advance. If my renewal date is 2 months from now and I try to cancel they will charge me a fee immediately and end the subscription. The only way to cancel without charge is to come back right as the rebill is about to occur. There is no excuse for that other than they want to fuck over as many people as possible.
maccard
Yep, that’s shitty. So let’s give them flak for that, not for something they don’t do anymore.
gcau
When I tried to cancel a regular monthly subscription, they tried to force me to pay a fee to be able to cancel the subscription, and they don't let you disconnect your payment methods. Luckily, I used paypal so I could unauthorise them on paypal. If this happened again to me I would be contacting the consumer rights organisation my country has.
throwaway48476
Contact them anyways.
mjmas
It seems like this would/should be covered under Australia's unfair contracts law, which requires the term to have a legitimate interest as well as being transparent (which I dont think would be met if they are charging 50% of the remainder, when they would have been happy for you to get a monthly subscription and cancel after a month, only having spent a fifth of what they would charge for termination)
ziml77
I looked at their plans a few years back and it was very clear that they had 3 payment options: Monthly, Annual, and Annual billed Monthly. Of course if you get the third option, getting out of the contract is going to cost you. Otherwise what would ever be the point of choosing the Monthly plan when both Annual options have a discount for going with a longer subscription period?
mk89
I only see annual and annual billed monthly in photoshop pricing plans. Where do you see the monthly one?
Edit: I just clicked on buy, and it leads to what you said. Apparently the monthly one is not mentioned in the front page. Weird.
adzm
Adobe is the one major company trying to be ethical with its AI training data and no one seems to even care. The AI features in Photoshop are the best around in my experience and come in handy constantly for all sorts of touchup work.
Anyway I don't really think they deserve a lot of the hate they get, but I do hope this encourages development of viable alternatives to their products. Photoshop is still pretty much peerless. Illustrator has a ton of competitors catching up. After Effects and Premiere for video editing are getting overtaken by Davinci Resolve -- though for motion graphics it is still hard to beat After Effects. Though I do love that Adobe simply uses JavaScript for its expression and scripting language.
AnthonyMouse
> Adobe is the one major company trying to be ethical with its AI training data and no one seems to even care.
It's because nobody actually wants that.
Artists don't like AI image generators because they have to compete with them, not because of how they were trained. How they were trained is just the the most plausible claim they can make against them if they want to sue OpenAI et al over it, or to make a moral argument that some kind of misappropriation is occurring.
From the perspective of an artist, a corporation training an AI image generator in a way that isn't susceptible to moral or legal assault is worse, because then it exists and they have to compete with it and there is no visible path for them to make it go away.
PaulHoule
I went through a phase of using the A.I. tools to touch up photos and thought they were helpful. If I needed to add another row of bricks to a wall or remove something they get it done. I haven’t used it in a few months because I’m taking different photos than I was back then.
davidee
We used that particular feature quite heavily. A lot of our clients often have poorly cropped photos or something with branding that needed removal and the context-aware generative fill was quite good.
But we decided to drop Adobe after some of their recent shenanigans and moved to a set of tools that didn't have this ability and, frankly, we didn't really miss it that much. Certainly not enough to ever give Adobe another cent.
timewizard
> or to make a moral argument that some kind of misappropriation is occurring.
They can also make a legal argument that the training set will fully reproduce copyrighted work. Which is just an actual crime as well as being completely amoral.
> because then it exists and they have to compete with it
The entire point of copyright law is: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
Individual artists should not have to "compete" against a billion dollar corporation which freely engages in copyright violations that these same artists have to abide by.
mjmsmith
Most artists would prefer not to compete with an AI image generator that has been trained on their own artwork without their permission, for obvious reasons.
AnthonyMouse
That's exactly the moral argument Adobe is taking away from them, and the same argument has minimal economic relevance because it's so rare that a customer requires a specific individual artist's style.
unethical_ban
He's arguing that artists are so scared of Adobe and AI that they actually want Adobe to be more evil so artists have more to complain about.
Sir_Twist
I'd say that is a bit of an ungenerous characterization. Is it possible that it could be both? That while artists maybe do feel under attack in terms of competition, that there is a genuine ethical dilemma at hand?
If I were an artist, and I made a painting and published it to a site which was then used to train an LLM, I would feel as though the AI company treated me disingenuously, regardless of competition or not. Intellectual property laws aside, I think there is a social contract being broken when a publicly shared work is then used without the artist's direct, explicit permission.
AnthonyMouse
> Is it possible that it could be both? That while artists maybe do feel under attack in terms of competition, that there is a genuine ethical dilemma at hand?
The rights artists have over their work are economic rights. The most important fair use factor is how the use affects the market for the original work. If Disney is lobbying for copyright term extensions and you want to make art showing Mickey Mouse in a cage with the CEO of Disney as the jailer, that's allowed even though you're not allowed to open a movie theater and show Fantasia without paying for it, and even though (even because!) Disney would not approve of you using Mickey to oppose their lobbying position. And once the copyright expires you can do as you like.
So the ethical argument against AI training is that the AI is going to compete with them and make it harder for them to make a living. But substantially the same thing happens if the AI is trained on some other artist's work instead. Whose work it was has minimal impact on the economic consequences for artists in general. And being one of the artists who got a pittance for the training data is little consolation either.
The real ethical question is whether it's okay to put artists out of business by providing AI-generated images at negligible cost. If the answer is no, it doesn't really matter which artists were in the training data. If the answer is yes, it doesn't really matter which artists were in the training data.
furyofantares
I've never seen anyone make the complaint about image classifiers or image segmentation. It's only for generative models and only once they got good enough to be useful.
kmeisthax
Artists do not want to get paid micropennies for use-of-training-data licenses for something that destroys the market for new art. And that's the only claim Adobe Firefly makes for being ethical. Adobe used a EULA Roofie to make all their Adobe Stock contributors consent to getting monthly payments for images trained on in Firefly.
scarface_74
Adobe only trains its AI on properly licensed images that the artists have explicitly signed a contract with Adobe to train on.
squigz
I don't think all artists are treating this tool as such an existential threat.
stafferxrr
Of course not. People who are actually creative will use new tools creatively.
Adobe AI tools are pretty shit though if you want to use them to do something creative. Shockingly bad really.
They are probably good if you want to add a few elements to an instagram photo but terrible for actual digital art.
bbarnett
I don't think all artists are treating this tool as such an existential threat.
You cannot find any group, where "all" is true in such context. There's always an element of outlier.
That said, you're not really an artist if you direct someone else to paint. Imagine a scenario where you sit back, and ask someone to paint an oil painting for you. During the event, you sit in an easy chair, watch them with easel and brush, and provide direction "I want clouds", "I want a dark background". The person does so.
You're not the artist.
All this AI blather is the same. At best, you're a fashion designer. Arranging things in a pleasant way.
f33d5173
Adobe isn't trying to be ethical, they are trying to be more legally compliant, because they see that as a market opportunity. Otoh, artists complain about legal compliance of AIs not because that is what they care about, but because they see that as their only possible redress against a phenomenon they find distasteful. A legal reality where you can only train AI on content you've licensed would be the worst for everybody bar massive companies, legacy artists included.
_bin_
Right, but "distaste" isn't grounds for trying to ban something. There are all kinds of things people and companies do which I dislike but for which there's no just basis for regulating. If Adobe properly licenses all their training data artists don't have a right to say "well i think this is bad for creativity and puts my job at risk, ban it!!!" Or more precisely, they have a right to say that, but no moral justification for trying to ban/regulate/sue over it.
I hate Adobe's subscription model as much as the next guy and that's a good reason to get annoyed at them. Adobe building AI features is not.
TeMPOraL
> Right, but "distaste" isn't grounds for trying to ban something.
It isn't, but it doesn't stop people from trying and hoping for a miracle. That's pretty much all there is to the arguments of image models, as well as LLMs, being trained in violation of copyright - it's distaste and greed[0], with a slice of basic legalese on top to confuse people into believing the law says what it doesn't (at least yet) on top.
> If Adobe properly licenses all their training data artists don't have a right to say "well i think this is bad for creativity and puts my job at risk, ban it!!!" Or more precisely, they have a right to say that, but no moral justification for trying to ban/regulate/sue over it.
I'd say they have plenty of moral / ethical justification for trying to ban/regulate/sue over it, they just don't have much of a legal one at this point. But that's why they should be trying[1] - they have a legitimate argument that this is an unexpected, undeserved, unfair calamity for them, threatening to derail their lives, and lives of their dependents, across the entire sector - and therefore that laws should be changed to shield them, or compensate them for the loss. After all, that's what laws are for.
(Let's not forget that the entire legal edifice around recognizing and protecting "intellectual property" is an entirely artificial construct that goes against the nature of information and knowledge, forcing information to behave like physical goods, so it's not unfair to the creators in an economy that's built around trading physical goods. IP laws were built on moral arguments, so it's only fair to change them on moral grounds too.)
--
[0] - Greed is more visible in the LLM theatre of this conflict, because with textual content there's vastly more people who believe that they're entitled to compensation just because some comments they wrote on the Internet may have been part of the training dataset, and are appalled to see LLM providers get paid for the service while they are not. This Dog in the Manger mentality is distinct from that of people whose output was used in training a model that now directly competes with them for their job; the latter have legitimate ethical reasons to complain.
[1] - Even though myself I am for treating training datasets to generative AI as exempt from copyright. I think it'll be better for society in general - but I recognize it's easy for me to say it, because I'm not the one being rugpulled out of a career path by GenAI, watching it going from 0 to being half of the way towards automating away visual arts, in just ~5 years.
weregiraffe
>Right, but "distaste" isn't grounds for trying to ban something.
cratermoon
> Right, but "distaste" isn't grounds for trying to ban something
I disagree. There are many laws on the books codifying social distastes. They keep your local vice squad busy.
skywhopper
In the context of encouraging art, it totally is! Copyright and patents are 100% artificial and invented legal concepts that are based solely on the distaste for others profiting off a creator’s ideas. The reason for them is to encourage creativity by allowing creators to profit off new ideas.
So there’s no reason why “distaste” about AI abuse of human artists’ work shouldn’t be a valid reason to regulate or ban it. If society values the creation of new art and inventions, then it will create artificial barriers to encourage their creation.
computerthings
[dead]
no_wizard
> A legal reality where you can only train AI on content you've licensed would be the worst for everybody bar massive companies, legacy artists included.
Quite an assertion. Why exactly would this be true?
drilbo
who else has would ever have a significantly large store of licensed material?
spoaceman7777
> Adobe isn't trying to be ethical, they are trying to be more legally compliant
Is the implication of this statement that using AI for image editing and creation is inherently unethical?
Is that really how people feel?
mtndew4brkfst
For creation, yes, because of the provenance of the training data that got us here. It was acquired unethically in the overwhelming majority of cases. Using models derived from that training is laundering and anonymizing the existing creativity of other humans and then still staking the claim "I made this", like the stick figure comic. It's ghoulish.
zmmmmm
The ship has sailed, but I can understand artists feeling that no matter how any AI is trained prospectively, it was only made possible because the methods to do so were learned through unethical means - we now know the exact model architectures, efficient training methods and types of training data needed so that companies like Adobe can recreate it with a fraction of the cost.
We obviously can never unscramble that egg, which is sad because it probably means there will never be a way to make such people feel OK about AI.
tbrownaw
> Adobe isn't trying to be ethical, they are trying to be more legally compliant,
Ethics (as opposed to morals) is about codified rules.
The law is a set of codified rules.
So are these really that different (beyond how the law is a hodge-podge and usually a minimum requirement rather than an ideal to reach for)?
Riverheart
“A legal reality where you can only train AI on content you've licensed would be the worst for everybody bar massive companies, legacy artists included.”
Care to elaborate?
Also, saying artists only concern themselves with the legality of art used in AI because of distaste when there are legal cases where their art has been appropriated seems like a bold position to take.
It’s a practice founded on scooping everything up without care for origin or attribution and it’s not like it’s a transparent process. There are people that literally go out of their way to let artists know they’re training on their art and taunt them about it online. Is it unusual they would assume bad faith from those purporting to train their AI legally when participation up till now has either been involuntary or opt out? Rolling out AI features when your customers are artists is tone deaf at best and trolling at worst.
Workaccount2
There is no "scooping up", the models aren't massive archives of copied art. People either don't understand how these models work or they purposely misrepresent it (or purposely refuse to understand it).
Showing the model an picture doesn't create a copy of that picture in it's "brain". It moves a bunch of vectors around that captures an "essence" of what the image is. The next image shown from a totally different artist with a totally different style may well move around many of those same vectors again. But suffice to say, there is no copy of the picture anywhere inside of it.
This also why these models hallucinate so much, they are not drawing from a bank of copies, they are working off of a fuzzy memory.
dinkumthinkum
I'm curious why you think it would be worse for everybody? This argument seems to depend on the assumption that if something makes AI less viable then the situation for human beings is worse overall. I don't think many actual people would accept that premise.
crimony
It's worse only if AI turns out to be of high value.
In that case only large companies that can afford to license training data will be dominant.
crest
> Adobe is the one major company trying to be ethical with its AI training data and no one seems to even care.
It's sad that it's funny that you think Adobe is motivated by ethical consideration.
jfengel
They don't have to be motivated by ethics. I'm fine with them grudgingly doing ethical things because their customer base is all artists, many of whom would look for an alternative product.
djeastm
You are fine with it, of course, because you're reasonable. But OP's claim was that Adobe is "trying to be ethical with its AI training data and no one seems to even care" as if we're meant to give special consideration to a company for doing the only economically sensible thing when most of its customers are artists.
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ahartmetz
Probably want to look good to their customer base - artists
XorNot
Where did the poster say they think Adobe is motivated by that? They said Adobe is operating that way.
bolognafairy
A strawman argument so you can condescendingly and snarkily lecture someone? I can see you were among those mouthing off at Adobe on Bluesky.
eloisius
“Mouthing off” is always uttered by someone with an undeserved sense of authority over the other party, like a mall cop yelling at a teenager for skateboarding
CursedSilicon
[flagged]
nitwit005
While I agree about Adobe behaving more ethically, I suspect they simply talked to their customers, and decided they didn't have much choice. CELSYS, who makes Clip Studio, suffered a backlash and pulled their initial AI features: https://www.clipstudio.net/en/news/202212/02_01/
mubou
Probably didn't help that Clip Studio is predominantly used by Japanese artists, and virtually all models capable of producing anime-style images were trained on a dataset of their own, stolen pixiv art.
paulddraper
Talking to customers is a good thing.
Let's normalize it.
nonchalantsui
For their pricing and subscription practices alone, they deserve far more backlash than they get.
fxtentacle
I would describe my business relationship with Adobe as:
"hostage"
They annually harass me with licensing checks and questionnaires because they really hate you if you run Photoshop inside a VM (my daily driver is Linux), although it is explicitly allowed. Luckily, I don't need the Adobe software that often. But they hold a lot of important old company documents hostage in their proprietary file formats. So I can't cancel the subscription, no matter how much I'd like to.
xeonmc
Have you seen the recently posted video "For Profit (Creative) Software"?
sureIy
> proprietary file formats
Gimp can't handle them?
Lammy
I am so happy that my Win32 CS3 Master Collection still works fully-offline and will continue to do so for as long as I care to keep using it :)
dylan604
Does it work on modern hardware running modern OS? Specifically, wondering if this was a Mac version. I could see WinX versions still running, but the Mac arch has changed significantly: 32bit -> 64bit, mactel -> AppleSI
cosmic_cheese
Even if they’re “trying”, it’s moot if the result isn’t clearly more ethical, and with the proliferation of stolen imagery on their stock image service (which they use to train their models), the ethics of their models are very much not clear.
If I saw news of a huge purge of stolen content on their stock image service with continued periodic purges afterwards (and subsequent retraining of their models to exclude said content), I might take the claim more seriously.
giancarlostoro
I will forever miss Fireworks. I dont do much with graphics but Fireworks was the best thing I ever used. Now I do zero with graphics.
Spooky23
End of the day, the hate is: “The software is great, but these jerks expect me to pay for it!”
Their sales went crazy because everyone was relentlessly pirating their software.
gs17
I've never heard anyone (at least not anyone who wasn't already using GIMP) complain about the concept of paying for it, it's always been the way Adobe tries to squeeze extra money out of you. First it was bundles where you'd have to buy software you didn't need to get what you do. Then it was a subscription. Also, each CS version seemed to add very little for the price.
simonw
Yeah, they posted this:
> Hey, we're Adobe! We're here to connect with the artists, designers, and storytellers who bring ideas to life. What's fueling your creativity right now?
> Drop a reply, tag a creator, or share your latest work—we'd love to see what inspires you!
That's such a bland, corporate message. It feels totally inauthentic. Do Adobe (a corporation) really "love to see what inspires you" or do they just want engagement for their new account?
I'm not surprised in the slightest that it triggered a pile-on.
EasyMark
I'm not surprised but disheartened that people have so little going on in their life they thing trying to boycott a bsky corporate account is a good use of their time.
drdaeman
I think it's rather the opposite - there's way too much going on in their life, specifically stuff that they have no control over, so they vent all that stress wherever they can.
s3p
Disagree. I think when people are that busy they don't have time to find and attack a corporation on BlueSky.
anoldperson
Takes two seconds to call somebody a wanker.
jrflowers
I’m pretty sure the amount of time and energy it took you to write this post is more or less equal to the amount of time and energy energy it took somebody else to write a post making fun of the Adobe account
bigyabai
So what did you do this friday?
Arn_Thor
Much like you leaving this comment?
magicmicah85
They want engagement for their new account, it's what anyone who posts on social media wants.
masswerk
Yes, but it's not what social media users want. How about posting tips, small micro courses, behind the scene stories about what motivated some choices in the app, anything useful or endearing? Not just harvesting likes and account names?
magicmicah85
I’m talking about when anyone post on social media. It’s all about engagement. People don’t post on social media in the hopes that no one sees or replies to them. So I find it silly that people are upset at Adobe for having the most generic “hey we joined, show us what you’re working on” versus the useless engagement posts that are templates of “most people can’t figure out what the answer is” when the image is “two plus two equals ?”.
To your point of useful info, I’m sure Adobe would get there. They just joined the site and got bullied off. I doubt they’re going to care about the site now, but it’d be funny if they tried a second post and just trudged through it.
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simonw
Right, but you need to be a whole lot less obvious about it. Adobe's message here is a case study in what NOT to do.
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zarathustreal
[flagged]
hammock
I don’t disagree, but what are they supposed to post otherwise?
simonw
Post something interesting!
A profile of an up and coming artist doing cool stuff with Adobe software.
A video interview with an interesting team lead at Adobe.
Or just stick to product announcements like various other brand accounts to.
Pretty much anything that doesn't come across as fake engagement bait would probably have been fine.
thiht
It gives "how do you do fellow kids" vibes
WatchDog
It’s so bland I don’t understand why it elicited any response at all.
philipmnel
The general mood on Bluesky is very opposed to AI, especially AI art. Since Adobe now has AI integrated into their products, people on Bluesky hate them.
dlivingston
There is an off-putting sort of attitude on BlueSky ("sneering mockery", I guess?). Same attitude was present on Twitter during the pre-Musk era and seems to have migrated over.
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tstrimple
It's likely both. In most large organizations I've worked with, there is a split between true believers and cynics. And often the true believers are so bought in they have trouble recognizing the cynics. There are likely earnest folks behind every bland social media post. Doesn't mean their product is worth anything either way.
lysace
Meh. Adobe is a large corp. You'd want want them to masquerade as something they are not? Why would that be better?
I am so over pile-ons by people who see themselves as being SO important.
Also: it feels really weird to defend Adobe.
jimbob45
The left has spent the last decade proudly bullying everyone for wrongthink, including going after employment and family members. It should come as no surprise then that corporations wouldn’t participate above the bare minimum on a predominantly leftist forum.
megaman821
As a lurker on both Bluesky and Twitter, I find Bluesky is a much more hostile place. Twitter is much more absurd but there is not as much anger.
jsight
Yeah, I'm surprised by how many here are responding with weird Adobe rants. They posted fairly innocuous stuff, were attacked, and ultimately chose to abandon the platform as a result.
This sounds like a bigger indictment of the platform than anything to do with Adobe.
rchaud
Since when did a damn website have to be a "platform"? Did anyone ask to chat with Time Warner on the public AOL chatrooms of the 90s? Were Digg users interested in hearing from Blockbuster in the 2000s?
Adobe could try to offer virtual "office hours" with employees helping people learn to use the software, give something back to their users. Instead they immediately treated it like another marketing channel with a formulaic and lazy engagement bait question that I'm sure they thought would work the same way it does on Twitter and Instagram.
scarab92
Platforms which drive away normal users with unwarranted hate become increasingly concentrated with toxic people over time.
If bluesky don’t find a way to escape this spiral of driving away normal people and attracting toxic people it’s going to become a sort of left-wing 4chan.
TremendousJudge
Maybe the people on the platform don't want it to get filled by bland corporate accounts like twitter did
pembrook
Twitter/X doesn’t have a problem with corporate accounts. They murdered reach on brand accounts in the algorithm loooong ago (mid 2010s), you basically will never see company tweets in the feed even if you follow them.
I think it’s more the fact that bluesky’s core demographic are angry political obsessives (who are angry enough about politics to join a new social network over said politics). I can’t think of a worse way to create a community of people than filtering by “I’m angry about political stuff.”
Turns out the old social norm of “don’t talk politics with neighbors” was an example of a good Chestertons fence.
bakugo
Yes, they want it to be an echo chamber for one-sided political rants instead. Which is what it is now.
Molitor5901
I'm pretty left leaning and I don't like Bluesky. For me, it's too hostile and too much of an angry echo chamber. X is scattered wildly but I with muting I have been able to shape to get a more reasonable feed.
jghn
I don't understand why people struggle with either site. Follow only people you want to see. Both sites allow you to only see posts from those accounts. Problem solved.
lyjackal
It's more the content creators who bear the brunt of toxic rage. Who you follow doesn't solve that problem
spiderice
Unless you want to follow Adobe, who were just driven out by a mob of angry people
maw
And what about the people who sometimes post interesting things and sometimes post distilled insanity? They're incentivized to do so.
sph
X is a cesspit. Bluesky is a cult and echo chamber. Both should be avoided if you care about your mental sanity.
Social media was a catastrophic mistake.
_bin_
As is the case with most ideological echo chambers, they devolve into struggle sessions. You find the same thing happening in the niche right-wing movement sections of twitter, it's just "this person is secretly indian/jewish" instead of "this person is secretly a racist/xyzphobe".
Twitter has the advantage of a broader range so you can escape that while bluesky is almost exclusively used based on strong ideological motivation. It's raison d'etre at this point is basically and highly political so this was bound to happen.
lukev
This is a weird argument because Bluesky doesn't have a "feed"... by default you see only the people you follow unless you subscribe to specific other feeds.
So you followed a bunch of people you didn't like? That says more about you than the platform...
gs17
There's a default feed, and it's awful. Part of why I gave up on the site, it never seemed to "get" me, their features for tuning it don't work, and the alternative feeds weren't what I wanted at all.
vitorgrs
There is a Discovery feed by default for sure.
ChocolateGod
Likewise here, the amount of just pure made up crap/misinformation on X has definitely increased (perhaps because accounts get paid for views/engagement now) or the algorithm seems to push it more, but it's not an echo chamber.
I have at least 100 words on my X muted word list and it's just about usable.
nailer
Same here. I'd agree with many of the political positions on Bluesky but it looks like the left equivalent of what Truth Social is on the right - Bluesky recently started publishing home addresses of DOGE employees, with the intent seeming to be to target them with violence.
9283409232
Conservatives have been posting home addresses of judges and doxxing activist much longer than that. I'm not condoning it but lets not pretend both sides aren't a shitstorm.
piyuv
[flagged]
karn97
I got an extension to hide every blue check user, twitter is wonderful nkw
jeroenhd
So far, Bluesky hasn't been inserting alt-right nutjobs into my feed like Twitter has.
Bluesky seems to focus on curating your own feed, to the point where mass blocklists will block hundreds or thousands of accounts, and not every blocklist is reliable. The "block first, ask questions later" approach is very freeing and I've been practicing it on social media long before it gained traction on Bluesky.
I expect the platform will be very painful for people who believe everyone should be subjected to their opinion (the people who will cry censorship because Reddit shadow-banned them). Good riddance, I'd say; they can be happy on Twitter with the rest of their kind.
On average, my experience has been a lot better. I'm guessing that's mostly because I had to fight and subdue Twitter to exclusively show me content from the people I follow, combined with social media's general attraction to alt-right nutjobs (and of course, Twitter's owner being an alt-right nutjob doesn't help either).
63
I find that the extremes of hostility are worse on bluesky, but the average skeet is much less hostile. And there's just straight up fewer skeets to be angry about.
lastofthemojito
Being familiar only with the street slang for "skeet" and not Bluesky's relatively recent adoption of "skeet" to mean "Bluesky post", my parser really had to do some work to try to understand this sentence.
chongli
That’s deliberate. BlueSky did not want the term “skeet” being adopted but it happened anyway.
65
Hello username neighbor
nitwit005
I didn't get much negativity on Twitter, and after moving the Bluesky the same is true.
The experience of a person following fantasy football stuff, and another person following politics, will be totally different, regardless of website.
cosmic_cheese
I don’t use either lately because I’ve found that to be better for mental health overall, but to me it seemed that Bluesky was generally better about staying “on track” when it comes to showing relevant things, once trained. Xitter really, really likes to veer off course and so much as stopping scrolling for a second while an undesired post is on screen is enough for it to start showing more of the same type.
Bsky doesn’t have blue check replies which is a major point in its favor too. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a worthwhile blue check reply, it’s like if one purposefully dredged up the worst YouTube video comments they could find and pinned them at the top.
gs17
> but to me it seemed that Bluesky was generally better about staying “on track” when it comes to showing relevant things, once trained. Xitter really, really likes to veer off course and so much as stopping scrolling for a second while an undesired post is on screen is enough for it to start showing more of the same type.
What is your "track"? Bluesky seemed to be behaving exactly like you described Twitter, and the only explanation I could come up with was that the process of clicking on a post to block/mute the account (which is what I was told to do to curate my feed) was considered enough engagement that my feed should be more and more of what I don't want any of.
throwme_123
Yes, the elephant in the room is Bluesky itself. In my experience, it's way more toxic than Twitter/X.
rcleveng
I just looked at twitter and it seems the sentiment is similar across both platforms. I think this was more of an adobe think than a bluesky thing.
Funes-
It figures. One's knee-deep in censorship and the other one is more or less free-for-all, so you get high levels of hostility and an extreme range of ideas respectively from the get go.
hliyan
The phenomenon at work here is: if product being produced by a profit-seeking enterprise can be rented instead of being sold, said enterprise will eventually find a way to do it, then over time, rather than a single bill, it will attempt to rent out individual aspects of the now product-turned-service, followed by cost cutting that degrades the default service level while introducing additional service levels for which the consumer will have to pay additional fees, and finally making switching away to competitors progressively difficult for the consumer. This is a natural outcome of profit-maximization.
__loam
This is the primary reason why creatives despise Adobe despite some people here arguing that it's for the AI art generation. They hate that too but the biggest pain point by far is the toxic business relation you have to maintain to continue to use industry standard tooling.
illegally
Single bill for modern software doesn't make sense economically anymore.
Do you want updates? You want new versions? New features? Support?
Single bill it's like buying an IPhone once and then you expect to get a new one for free each year.
_Algernon_
>Do you want updates? You want new versions? New features? Support?
No. This was a solved problem decades ago. Purchase includes minor version updates, then you keep it for life without updates. Upgrading to the next version is a choice.
Why did we collectively agree that customer choice does not matter?
jspdown
All the digital artists I know don't use and want new features in Photophop. And more generally, most non-tech businesses values more stability than having new features.
Single bill makes a lot of sense for many users.
tofof
It depends, what are you charging for the new features in the update/version? Twenty years ago, you'd put out a new version and I could go find what new features it had and decide for myself whether those were worth the price you ask to get them. If the answer is yes, I pay and I get the new features. If the answer is no, I don't pay and I keep using the program I already bought.
Why do you think the company is automatically entitlted to rent seeking and the removal of user choice just because they tweaked the ui?
valiant55
Does a JetBrains style license not address this exactly? You buy the current version and one year of updates. If you want updates after that you have to renew.
jeffwask
You don't get to play cute, fun, friend to creators and have the most odious licensing terms in the history of software.
ikanreed
Actually if you'll read the fine print, you're obligated to be friends.
teruakohatu
And you cannot stop being friends until the end of the billing year, even if you are on a monthly plan.
ajxs
I discovered this for myself while trying to cancel my plan. I told them I'd contact my state's consumer affairs regulator, and they instantly buckled. They ended up saving us both the trouble, and waived my 'cancellation fee'. For what it's worth, the previous time I tried to cancel their support offered me a 50% discount, which I accepted. Once that discount expired I was out. Adobe aren't earning their keep. Their costs are exorbitant when compared to the quality of the software. I mostly used Premiere (on Windows), which seems to get slower with each release. Media Encoder crashes constantly, and Photoshop is as slow as molasses.
mtndew4brkfst
Autodesk is at least boxing in the same weight class, but I do think Adobe is worse.
pndy
All big companies do that for few years now - either with used language or graphics (namely Corporate Memphis and its various uncanny variants) or with both. It's enough to look at patch notes for mobile apps: these are exactly cutesy, fake friendly. 99% of the time you won't learn what was changed or fixed but instead you get these unrelated comments trying to show how cool company xyz is. It's unironic "hello fellow kids" meme approach.
fracus
I think this is a great one sentence encapsulation of the situation.
haswell
As a photographer, I have a love/hate relationship with Adobe. I’m not a fan of many aspects of their business, but Lightroom is a (sometimes) excellent product.
On the one hand, I don’t have much sympathy for Adobe. On the other hand, this whole situation is why I am not on social media these days with the exception of HN and niche subreddits.
Even if much of the criticism they receive is warranted, the social media climate is just so incredibly toxic that I want no part of it.
Feels like there has to be a better way to be social on the Internet, but as time goes on I’m increasingly not sure if humans can handle it once a certain scale is reached.
sbszllr
Yup, I prefer Lightroom to Capture One, especially for film-related workflows.
But I just can't go back to their predatory pricing practices, and the absolute malware of a programme that creative cloud is.
kjkjadksj
I switched to capture 1 due to how poorly adobe handles fujifilm raw file even today. Workflow wise it is basically the same functions just in different places. Doesn’t take long to get up and running.
scarab92
Online communities have an inherent death spiral dynamic, unless you actively moderate away toxic people.
These people drive away normal folks creating an ever more distilled community of unpleasant folks.
How many normal people are going to hang around places like reddit and bluesky that are seemingly now filled with hate and conspiracy theories.
bigyabai
[dead]
delfugal
Adobe has perfected digital blackmail.
After using and promoting their products for years to create our work, the switch off access to view or print any of it unless we keep paying blackmail monthly fees.
I don't want to edit my old work, but to lock me out of viewing it is nothing short of BLACKMAIL. As people change jobs or retire, they lose all access to their work. Sick.
shaky-carrousel
What a great idea, scaring companies probing bluesky. That surely won't backfire and will cement bluesky as a Xitter alternative.
teraflop
Maybe, just maybe, the platforms that we use to engage socially with other human beings don't also have to be organized around engaging commercially with brands.
ryandrake
Thank you. I would not accept a corporate brand sending me text messages. I don't want to "engage" with brands. The less of this garbage on the Internet, the better.
null
Workaccount2
The platforms should be paid then.
Its a fools errand to go on a "free" platform and complain about corporate presence. If you are not paying, then those corporate bodies are.
RugnirViking
this is just not true?
I have (and I imagine most people over 25 have) used plenty of forums, wikis, and other social medias that are free as in beer, hosted by some guy with a computer in his garage, with technology from decades ago
The better ones of them asked you to pay if you wanted to be able to post video/large images. In most of those spaces, corporate was nowhere to be seen. Sometimes they used banner ads, but often, nothing at all but a single person's internet bill was the entire cost of the site. Such places still exist, and are good.
The internet is getting worse by the day. It's been getting worse for so long, that people are starting to wax lyrical about how it can't possibly work any other way, this is just the natural state of things.
Of course, if you absolutely must mindlessly go to the dopamine trough and get your fix of algorithmic profit engagement, then yes, you will end up in places that relentlessly seek profit via one form of another. But if you filter even a little bit for quality, you'll end up somewhere else.
cma
Bluesky itself is a commercial brand
pndy
Wish we could separate all that corporate entities on the internet in their own walled social network world. Where they could have all these weird marketing convos like, mcdonald being angry because pepsi "unhahaed" nestle post /s
llm_nerd
Then don't follow or engage with their content? You understand that's your option, right?
I actually enjoy Bsky as a replacement for Twitter mostly to keep on top of news (tech and otherwise, the tech often coming from the source), along with a small selection of high profile figures. So I follow those sources and venues.
It is absolutely pathetic that a small mob attacked Adobe -- primarily a super aggressive anti-AI contingent that runs around like a sad torch mob on bsky -- and I hope Adobe return to the platform. It would be nice for people like me, who chose to follow these brands, to see the news from Adobe, OpenAI, Microsoft, etc, and my choice shouldn't be limited by those people.
scheeseman486
If they can't take the heat from their customers, that's their problem.
And you can always subscribe to Adobe's email list.
cmrdporcupine
If you don't own the platform, you don't get to control the reception.
Post on an open forum, get open forum results.
They could host a web page. That's a thing still. What's that? They want an audience? A megaphone into someone else's auditorium?
There's a cost to that.
JKCalhoun
So you think Adobe would get a resoundingly warm welcome on X?
Pretty sure they trashed their own brand with their subscription model. They're finding that out now.
I jumped to Affinity apps years ago when Adobe required a subscription — never looked back.
thih9
No, the moral is different: if you’re a company notoriously hostile to creatives, don’t ask in a post “What’s fueling your creativity right now?” - and if you do then don’t be surprised when you get honest answers.
Retr0id
The presence of obnoxious brand accounts is very far down my list of desires from a social network.
fracus
Maybe the Bluesky selects the community they want and that is why people are enjoying it.
miohtama
Bluesky audience is certain kind, more left leaning, finding corporations evil. Adobe's experiment shows that it is unlikely any big corp could go there any time until the audience is more diverse, less cancel culture.
rsynnott
Adobe is special. They have a pretty narrow specific audience who are kinda stuck with them, and who they’ve spent the last decade industriously pissing off.
Bluesky _is_ less tolerant than Twitter of “hello, we’re a brand, aren’t we wonderful/funny”, but I think this particular reaction is more about it being Adobe than anything else.
pm90
The reaction seems specific to Adobe which has (probably) not been a good steward of its role as a tool for creatives. I don’t think other big corps would get that reaction.
jsheard
Exactly, compare and contrast how bsky users engage with an Adobe peer that creatives are on good terms with.
0xEF
> more diverse, less cancel culture
I love when people use this to mean "more white and conservative."
Bluesky users lean toward hating corporate greed. Adobe is greedy as fuck. Simple as. They and companies like them can stay off.
ChocolateGod
Are you claiming cancel culture isn't real?
pessimizer
Bluesky is far whiter than Twitter. So diverse here would mean "less white."
skybrian
My guess is that most Bluesky users are doing their own thing and never noticed this until after it was over and appeared in the news. But it does seem like there is a large crowd of nasty people in Bluesky, and that seems like a bad sign.
drooopy
I don't know if I would refer to Adobe as being evil, but they're definitely one of the shittiest software companies in existence. And I'm 100% convinced that they would receive the same type of welcome if they made a xshitter account today.
phillipcarter
My dude have you not been on twitter ever?
DrillShopper
Not particularly. What they do seem to have is a more artist-heavy community, and that community has been fucked over by Adobe over the last decade or so.
samlinnfer
The most artist heavy platform is twitter.
netsharc
[flagged]
mayneack
I personally am more likely to use a social media site without brands.
null
JKCalhoun
> “What’s fueling your creativity right now?”
Hilarious thin marketspeak. But sure, blame the social platform.
gradientsrneat
I've become so disenchanted with internet vitriol that it's surreal seeing these trolls attack a social media presence that's geniunely deserving. Still, I wouldn't invite any of these people to my house.
d0gsg0w00f
> Still, I wouldn't invite any of these people to my house.
I think this is one of the most profound statements I've read all year. Perfectly sums up all the quiet backlash by middle America against the trolls that have pulled the party into extremes.
It's not that they're bad people, they just get over excited and nobody wants to deal with the headache right now.
I see it at work in the lunch room conversations where someone starts spewing passive aggressive hate and it really kills the vibe.
energy123
Negative people should be terminated after a few days of confirmation that they are negative. The dose makes the poison so you have to get them out quickly.
bobjordan
I had to call it a day and cancel this year. Yearly sub approaching $700 per year just to open photoshop files a few times per year and maybe edit a pdf file? Fk it I’ll find another way.
misswaterfairy
Affinity Photo is excellent, indeed Designer (Illustrator alternative) and Publisher (InDesign alternative) are excellent as well.
Qoppa PDF Studio is a great alternative to Adobe Acrobat.
Both offer perpetual licences.
modzu
krita is the way
Adobe runs what must be one of the largest deceptive rebills. The vast majority of users signing up for a monthly plan do not realize that it is actually an "annual plan, billed monthly" and thus that if they cancel after one month (for example) they'll be billed for the remaining 11 immediately. I honestly don't know how they haven't faced FTC action for this, as it's been their primary model for 5-10 years now.