A Prayer for The Dying: Bluesky Sticks the Landing Via Personalized Moderation
And watches its user-base explode, while X withers on the vine.
Being harassed online can have a negative impact on our mental health. It's certainly been unpleasant for me! I wrote an article a little while back about a jokey use case for the Apple Vision Pro, which was just to edit out the people you didn't want to see from your field of vision. The real-world version of this is Bluesky Social.
The metamorphosis of the deeply flawed Twitter into the more deeply flawed X has been a real bummer for people who found that sort of social media helpful in their lives. Some people used Twitter—I speak specifically about doctors and colleagues for professional and polite back and forth. We wanted to debate NEJM biomedical science articles! You can probably find the subgenre for you as well, filled with those who wish to debate about the things that matter to you.
On Twitter, this was #MedTwitter for doctors. We want to communicate, we want to educate our colleagues, we want to share ideas, we wanted debate back and forth, and we don't want to be in the middle of some giant public square constantly having a debate with nitwits.
“Debate Me, Bro”
—no thanks.
This is not what we're looking for. We are looking for community and collegial discussion. I’m proud of my wife, who created #medsky on Bluesky Social, as its successor.
Another cohort, trolls, are looking for something a bit different. These are the individuals for whom 4Chan was an excellent choice. Incels, hateful bigots, and other nasty individuals who just wanted to dunk—this is slang for “insult”— on someone else so that their audience of unpleasant friends could laugh at somebody, as opposed to laughing with them.
Many people enjoy trolling, but others very much do not. I did a fine podcast on the topic a while back:
Unfortunately, the king of the trolls bought Twitter and turned it into XChan:
As Jay, the CEO of Bluesky, points out, there's a difference between free speech and reach. Your ability to say something is not the same as your ability to have your voice carry infinitely far.
Twitter introduced concepts like being “ratioed”— a deeply unpleasant comment that gets multiples of the number of likes of the original post.
You made a post, somebody else said a nasty thing, and their nasty thing got 10 times as many likes as your original post. Ratio-ing someone was a real badge of honor for trolls. But in our daily lives, that sort of barrage of hatefulness isn't what we would choose for ourselves. No one wakes up and says, “I'd like to have a multiple of the number of people who love me think I'm a fool and perhaps send me a bomb threat?”
That's the world of Internet trolls, and Bluesky was built to limit their ability to do that trolling thing that they do. And I have to tell you, it's been remarkably successful. One of the reasons it's been so successful is because it's both easy and, frankly, hilarious. They built an open-source architecture that allows you to control who gets to troll you with breathtaking ease. It also allows enterprising individuals to build tools that increase the platform's flexibility in ways amusing, functional, and absurd. For example, somebody built a tool that automatically blocks screenshots from X. Here's what it looks like in action:
The top is what XBlock does, the bottom is the “Twitter” screenshot absent XBlock installed, and you can choose whether you'd like to deploy Xblock or not.
The sort of harassment power user behavior I’ve described has been a feature of my life for years, which I will now present an example of— but not comment on further due to active litigation:
The ability to make your experience more pleasant and less full of the kind of harassment that you don't want? It's awesome. Bluesky allows users to detach a post they were being quote-insulted about!
It turns out that the personal moderation tools are creating a flood of users at the pace of around 1 million a day over at Bluesky. It’s lapping Threads. Another user-generated tool is a counter that lets you see how many users Bluesky has at any given moment! Right now, it’s:
If you're a media or organization or a “power user,” these are exactly the kinds of tools that let you know where you should be spending your time and how you can customize your experience to the things you would like.
Under its new management, X limited the ability for links to outside news sources to generate previews and generally futzed with the ability for people to leave the platform. It turns out that's not what people who work at outside media sources want, and it meant that they became evermore dissatisfied with a platform that served itself and not their interests. Although it's still a fraction of the user metrics of X, it's already outpacing the former king of short-form Internet content when it comes to driving traffic to other news sites, as reported today.
If you're a publisher or journalist working somewhere other than X, you really want the social media site you participate in to drive traffic to your day job! That is precisely what BlueSky is doing, and that's why it will get more journalist users and more breaking news. That will accelerate the death of what was a global town square.
The editor, Dave Earley, added that Bluesky successor had also delivered at least twice as many visits as Meta’s microblogging platform Threads.
The Guardian joined Bluesky a week after it announced it would no longer post to X, which it said had become “a toxic social media platform” that played “a diminished role in promoting our work” under current owner
The town Square can turn into downtown San Francisco a lot faster than one could imagine with poor governance, as a certain billionaire will be happy to tell you;
Early Thursday morning, Musk replied to a Twitter thread discussing Nordstrom's closure of two stores in San Francisco at the Westfield Mall. The mall's owner, Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, said in a statement major stores like Nordstrom, Whole Foods and Walgreens have fled the downtown area because of "unsafe conditions" caused by "lack of enforcement against rampant criminal activity."
"So many stores shuttered in downtown SF. Feels post-apocalyptic," Musk tweeted.
In a completely unrelated comment, I opened an X account and provided it with no guidance as to what I wanted to see, and this was presented as the first post when I opened it today:
If only there were an X-blocker plug-in for Substack! Places that are lawless and nasty do become a post-apocalyptic ghost-town pretty quickly, huh?
It’s Black Friday—feel free to gift my ebook!
I also have some upcoming events to promote…
RAMHT—co-founded with Grady Hannah—continues this year in SF on January 12th, 2025.
We also have two events co-created with my dear friend Kari Groff, M.D., of the Brooklyn and Beyond Mental Health Group Community. These are classes for health professionals on health insurance. The first will focus on working in-network on December 4th, on Zoom at 11 am.
The second is for working out-of-network on December 9th, on Zoom, at 11 am.
These interactive workshops are designed to be fun and casual and answer your questions that you can't ask anywhere else.