Bluesky is the Last Thing America Needs
What fresh woke hell is this?
Like many people, I think Twitter is getting worse. Many left-leaning posters have jumped ship, which has tilted the platform right, and the amount of batshit right-wing stuff in my feed has increased. Elon has throttled links to competing websites, which is bad news for humble, Mom & Pop content creators like me. Community notes — the one Elon-era innovation that really seemed to work — is under threat because Elon doesn’t like his avalanche of conspiracy-addled bullshit being fact checked. Plus, it’s insane that you can’t mute Elon on the “for you” feed — he is literally doing the modern equivalent of a Mr. Burns scheme:
In theory, Twitter should be in a precarious spot. Mass social media migrations are rare, but they do happen; if you don’t believe me, go to Skid Row, figure out which hobo in fingerless gloves warming his hands over a trash can fire is Tom from Myspace, and have him tell you his tale. Erratic leadership plus shaky user numbers plus nervousness from advertisers should open the door for another platform to become Google to Twitter’s Ask Jeeves.
But it hasn’t happened — not yet, anyway. Threads imploded, and Substack Notes is still small compared to Twitter (and I’m trusting Substack’s brass to not smite me with algorithmic death for pointing out that Notes is relatively small). What did happen is that a substantial number of progressives fled to Bluesky after the election, making Bluesky the main Twitter alternative. And that bothers me, because in my opinion, Bluesky is not a viable Twitter alternative; it is the tenth circle of Progressive Hell, and it will only exacerbate the left-wing pathologies that empower people like Trump.
Bluesky is like if you downed a bottle of absinthe with your most obnoxious progressive friends on the night Trump was elected in 2016. If you fed a chatbot nothing but MSNBC transcripts and Huffington Post articles for a hundred years, gave it the prompt “what OUTRAGES you?”, and put yourself in a Clockwork Orange-style forced viewing setup to read what the bot spits out, that would approximate the Bluesky experience. Bluesky is a firehose of progressive talking points sprayed straight into your eyeballs; if the platform was drugs instead of political content, it would be fentanyl mixed with meth mixed with an extra-potent version of NyQuil that you can only buy in Uruguay. That’s my impression after lurking on Bluesky while feeding it no algorithmic breadcrumbs that would suggest that I want to read stuff that sounds like Keith Olbermann after a handful of Ambien.