There are several new stories circulating today about Bluesky and all of them describe it as an unpleasant place, including the one written by two Bluesky fans at Slate. We’ll get back to Slate in a moment but first the Washington Post’s Megan McArdle may have kick started this trend at the start of this week when she wrote a column pointing out that Bluesky isn’t doing so well.
A recent Pew Research Center analysis found that many news influencers have Bluesky accounts (I’m one of them) but that, like me, two-thirds post irregularly. By contrast, more than 80 percent still post to X on most days. Engagement on Bluesky appears to have peaked in mid-November. It’s now down about 50 percent, and the decline shows no sign of leveling out…
The people who have migrated to Bluesky tend to be those who feel the most visceral disgust for Musk and Trump, plus a smattering of those who are merely curious and another smattering who are tired of the AI slop and unregenerate racism that increasingly pollutes their X feeds. Because the Musk and Trump haters are the largest and most passionate group, the result is something of an echo chamber where it’s hard to get positive engagement unless you’re saying things progressives want to hear — and where the negative engagement on things they don’t want to hear can be intense. That’s true even for content that isn’t obviously political: Ethan Mollick, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School who studies AI, recently announced that he’ll be limiting his Bluesky posting because AI discussions on the platform are too “fraught.”
All this is pretty off-putting for folks who aren’t already rather progressive, and that creates a threefold problem for the ones who dream of getting the old band back together. Most obviously, it makes it hard for the platform to build a large enough userbase for the company to become financially self-sustaining, or for liberals to amass the influence they wielded on old Twitter. There, they accumulated power by shaping the contours of a conversation that included a lot of non-progressives. On Bluesky, they’re mostly talking among themselves.
Her conclusion is that living in a left-wing bubble (or any bubble) isn’t healthy. In any case, her article prompted a response from Marc Cuban.
Mark Cuban says Bluesky has “grown ruder and more hateful” and warned that a “lack of diversity of thought” on the platform is pushing users back to Elon Musk’s X, the social network formerly known as Twitter…
“Engagement went from great convos on many topics, to agree with me or you are a nazi fascist,” Cuban wrote. “We are forcing posts to X.”…
“Even if you agree with 95% of what a person is saying on a topic, if there is one point that you might call out as being more of a grey area, they will call you a fascist etc.,” Cuban wrote.
Some of the Bluesky denizens sought to rebut his points with articulate positions of their own.
In response to his concerns, one user wrote, “Go wipe your crocodile tears with a wad of hundreds you tw-t. People are over the idea of ‘cool’ billionaires.”…
Yet another post, which Cuban also reposted, read: “It’s like you, as a billionaire, are a despicable bastard and we want you to stop pushing AI and big business here and just Go Away.”
But the most surprising take comes from a writer at Slate in a piece titled “Blue Scold.”
…X isn’t a very nice place to hang out on the internet anymore. It was inevitable that the liberal mainstream—exiled into the wilderness—would try to regroup with a version of the Twitter they knew and loved. Done correctly, this place could overcome Musk’s terrible vision in a far more hygienic environment and, if nurtured properly, could be the opening of a new front in the culture war—something to rival the vise grip Republican-aligned media has on digital airwaves.
Unfortunately, but perhaps unsurprisingly, the social media service liberals came up with was even worse. Yes, I’m talking about Bluesky…
I do not want to be unfair to the many people horrified about the second Trump administration. There are lots of indignities to be angry about, and more of them mount every day. That said, I would hope that one of the major lessons rank-and-file liberals internalized after two defeats at the hands of the Republicans is that there is a certain school of internet posting that is perceived—by a growing majority—to be laughably ineffective in stemming the globe’s authoritarian drift and, worse than that, extremely annoying. I’ve struggled for years to articulate the distinct contours of the structure, but, thankfully, Bluesky endlessly blooms with perfect examples. Here is one, from a 444,000-follower-strong account belonging to “Anonymous.” It is a crudely A.I.–generated mockup of Trump bowing at the feet of Vladimir Putin, solemnly captioned “Reality.” Here is another, from Harry Dunn, who has 256,000 followers on the platform and hosts a podcast called Cleanup on Aisle 45. “Donald Trump is an orange idiot,” he writes. “Anyone who votes for his tax bill is an oranger idiot.”…
Bluesky’s preservation of Obama-era liberalism has brought with it some of the coalition’s most unsavory tendencies: the exasperating pedantry, the god-awful reaction GIFs, the ridiculous instinct to audit the ideological purity of every one of its users. Earlier this week, the pseudonymous shitposter @dril—responsible for some of the most canonical tweets of all time—showcased the baffled, scolding responses that billow up in his replies whenever he makes one of his characteristically hallucinogenic jokes on Bluesky. All humor is reflexively punished. @Dril described the experience thusly: “Blue sky is supreme because every time you post you get 100 school principals in the replies asking to see you in their office.”
That’s so good it almost makes me want to read Slate. Almost.
There’s another take at Slate being offered today by two authors who moved their because they really hated X. But even they don’t sound too enthusiastic.
It can certainly be exhausting; I know people who’ve dropped out after finding that none of their nonpolitics articles or posts ever really take off (much as I’ve tried to help out). And it hasn’t yet become the Live experience that was so essential to old Twitter. Things did get poppin’ during the Jake Paul–Mike Tyson fight, the GNX drop, and the Super Bowl, especially the halftime show. But it’s few and far between, and it’s not yet been enough to distract from the more grating aspects of the feed…
I’ve overall appreciated Bluesky and still think there’s potential here, but I also understand why people have dropped off, and that doesn’t feel great. But I’m curious about your thoughts…
But, even though it’s less algorithm-centric than so many other platforms, it falls into the rage-bait trap that comes for all social media. The most engaged users are also the ones likeliest to boost and reshare the same bad news you heard just hours ago, to ask why you’re not weighing in on every little injustice that lands hour after hour, and to repost up a storm of the most depressing shit you’ve ever seen—and they’re also the least likely to converse with you when you just wanna talk about Shoreline Mafia’s return.
Social media incentives, man. Elon Musk started literally paying people to post on X, proportional to how often their posts got seen. Bluesky does nothing like that, but because it’s a platform full of people who are either sad, angry, or desperate about the state of the world, the kinds of posts that proliferate around that platform are mostly not fun posts. There’s no Bluesky virality for quote-posting a pic of Timothée Chalamet and the Jenners at a Knicks game. And I don’t know if a million screenshots of executive orders have made me a better citizen.
I am cherry-picking here but it really does sound like they don’t think it’s that great except that everyone basically agrees with them on everything and that matters most because everyone on X is a racist, antisemitic phobe of some kind. That’s nonsense of course but it’s what they tell themselves to make the Bluesky math work.
Less motivated reasoning probably leads to the take offered by Marc Cuban and the other Slate author, i.e. it’s a tiresome place to hang out full of scoldy progressives whose only joy in life is making someone else as miserable as they are.,
