Some key excerpts:
Since Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and subsequently turned it into X, disaffected users have talked about leaving once and for all
For the most part, X has held up as the closest thing to a central platform for political and cultural discourse.
After Trump’s election victory, more people appear to have gotten serious about leaving. According to Similarweb, a social-media analytics company, the week after the election corresponded with the biggest spike in account deactivations on X since Musk’s takeover of the site. Many of these users have fled to Bluesky: The Twitter-like microblogging platform has added about 10 million new accounts since October.
In a sense, this is a victory for conservatives: As the left flees and X loses broader relevance, it becomes a more overtly right-wing site. But the right needs liberals on X.
As each wave departs X, the site gradually becomes less valuable to those who stay, prompting a cycle that slowly but surely diminishes X’s relevance.
Of course, if X becomes more explicitly right wing, it will be a far bigger conservative echo chamber than either Gab or Truth Social.
Still, the right successfully completing a Gab-ification of X doesn’t mean that moderates and everyone to the left of them would have to live on a platform dominated by the right and mainline conservative perspectives. It would just mean that even more people with moderate and liberal sympathies will get disgusted and leave the platform, and that the right will lose the ability to shape wider discourse.
The conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who has successfully seeded moral panics around critical race theory and DEI hiring practices, has directly pointed to X as a tool that has let him reach a general audience.
This utility becomes diminished when most of the people looking at X are just other right-wingers who already agree with them. The fringier, vanguard segments of the online right seem to understand this and are trying to follow the libs to Bluesky.
Liberals and the left do not need the right to be online in the way that the right needs liberals and the left. The nature of reactionary politics demands constant confrontations—literal reactions—to the left. People like Rufo would have a substantially harder time trying to influence opinions on a platform without liberals. “Triggering the libs” sounds like a joke, but it is often essential for segments of the right. This explains the popularity of some X accounts with millions of followers, such as Libs of TikTok, whose purpose is to troll liberals.
The more liberals leave X, the less value it offers to the right, both in terms of cultural relevance and in opportunities for trolling.
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All of these stories I feel the same way: moving to another centralized privately owned platform is stupid.
Eh, I’ll take it. Bluesky’s learned some lessons from the past, for what it’s worth. It has more than a few features that make the network lock-in less intense, so while I fully expect it to enshittify, I do think it’ll be less severe of an affair than it was for Twitter.
What I’m more upset about is Threads. I can’t think of anything redeeming about that place.
Bluesky is supposedly working on decentralisation, but yeah, I agree, especially since Mastodon is already there. Normies are just somehow very turned off by too much Linux talk, even though free software is part of the answer to keeping our society free and stopping monopolies from forming.
Is the right getting mad because they have no one fun left to yell at on X now? They can always yell at each other. They’re good at eating their own.
The right has an abuse problem. They don’t want to understand consent.
They see power as a means to an end. Is it a surprise they support rape when rape is about power?
Abusers never see themselves at fault and some will follow their abused victims to the ends of the earth to be able to pile on more abuse that they see as deserved. They aren’t going to stop and self-reflect on this behavior. They will either become bored or they will double down and do whatever they can to continue harassing and abusing those who are different than themselves.
They will DARVO us until the very end. This is how it has always been with those who dole out abuse.
I really do worry about Trumps 1A speech. He may very well go after Blue Sky in a the ways he promised, under the premise of 1A. Now these same bullies have the President in their corner, possibly wielding the DOJ on it.
He may very well go after Blue Sky in a the ways he promised, under the premise of 1A.
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
― Jean-Paul Sartre
They know they’re abusing the idea of free speech to control others’ speech and they don’t really care how we feel about it.
This ties into the age-old debate about platforming bigotry in the name of free speech. Bigots don’t care that much about talking with like-minded people — they want to subject others to their beliefs and to feel as though they are a righteous majority. Without their hapless victims they become like a bully standing alone in the schoolyard, impotently yearning for somebody to punch down on.
There’s a reason Proud Boys and southern Oregon neo nazis show up to large Portland OR protests. The rationale is no different than what The Atlantic discusses here, even the context is the same, only shifted away from the keyboard.
Very good callout. It’s the same reason why they’re bigots - they have to feel bigger than someone. They always have to feel superior in every way. There’s a reason that immigrants and “the other” are always demonized and belittled by them, and it’s because they have to feel bigger than them. If they didn’t well, let’s look at where the majority of them actually fall on the societal ladder. The bottom. The vast majority of them are on the bottom rung of the societal ladder. Not having the others to make fun of/belittle/feel superior to would cause them to actually realize where they are and how much they’ve been screwed in life, and I think that actually terrifies them.
Liberals just actualized and realized where most people are in society. I think the vast majority of conservatives are just manifesting pure denial.
If they didn’t well, let’s look at where the majority of them actually fall on the societal ladder. The bottom.
…but that’s not true. The evidence bore out that Trump voters were largely white middle class. The kind of people who would have a big stupid truck, a boat, a generator, and any other number of things that take fuel, which is why they care so stupid fuck much about the price of gas. (Not enough to do anything like use less gas of course, because that’s not FREEDOM)
They were white uneducated middle class, but middle class nonetheless. Middle managers and “small business” owners.
They already do have power over other people, and they like it that way. What they’re fighting against is anyone who wants to take away from their fake meritocracy where they can continue to control and abuse the lives of the people who are under their thumbs in the workplace. It’s why they hate the poor. It’s why they hate academia and intellectuals. It’s why they hate democracy, because they’re allowed to be a petty dictator in the feifdom of whatever shithole business they work at/own.
The biggest reason Office Space is a fantasy is because the Bobs do their job and remove the actual waste in the company. That almost never happens in real life. In real life Lumberg and all the other bosses would be safe and every low level employee would get the shaft. Trump voters are Lumberg and the other middle managers who take great joy in micromanaging. It’s half the reason they want people back in the office, too (the other half the reason being a stealth layoff). They don’t actually care about efficiency, it’s about control.
Let’s stop pretending that all Trump voters are uneducated yokels. They’re uneducated and they’re yokels, but they’re more than that. They’re every shitty fucking boss you’ve ever had, which is why Elon Musk walks amongst them. We don’t need to make excuses for these people who are sorry excuses anyway.
They already do have power over other people, and they like it that way. What they’re fighting against is anyone who wants to take away from their fake meritocracy where they can continue to control and abuse the lives of the people who are under their thumbs in the workplace.
This is the part that needs to get repeated over, and over again. What we’re fighting against is a group that wants to maintain the status quo because it advantages them. Nothing more, nothing less. If we want to win, we need them to see that cooperation is in their greater interest. Unfortunately, the left-most available political parties have failed to show them that time and time again, so they’re turning the other direction.
It seems like Twitter may have passed the thermocline and now seems to be hemorrhaging left leaning users.
What I found interesting about this article was how the right leaning users are likely to follow them because they need the left leaning users for engagement. I suppose on some level it’s common sense. Truth Social and Gab never took off for a reason; but it’s still interesting to think about.
Remember voat?
It will be interesting to see what happens as they follow their victims over. Right now, people seem to be experiencing Bluesky as a breath of fresh air, and are attributing it to things like block lists (which, yeah, that’s a good idea, and one that we’ve been asking for for a long while), but a big part of it is just that the ratio of trolls to liberals is way lower right now. They’ll figure out how to break through the algorithm eventually, and around the block lists.
And when that happens, Twitter’s going to bleed out rapidly as the fashy mouth breathers show up to flex over how they cannot be stopped. Because, yeah, there’s nothing keeping them on Twitter once their victims are gone.
I think (/hope) trolls are going to have a pretty hard time gaining traction on Bluesky. As you’ve mentioned, the block lists are quite effective; but also the lack of algorithm helps too. No matter how many likes/reskeets an offensive skeet gets, I will never see it unless someone I follow specifically reskeets it themselves.
With this in mind, most people seeing the trolls’ posts will likely only be the trolls themselves. Of course they can hop into the comments of a popular skeet; but once they are blocked by the original poster, their skeet becomes removed for everybody.
From what I can tell, the enhanced moderation tools combined with the followed-only feed should make being a troll on Bluesky much harder…
Are they really using the term “reskeet?”
It certainly paints a very specific mental image.
That’s somehow worse than Mastodon’s toots.
That is really the term. Of course, every time a new wave of users join, they always say they’ll never call them “skeets,” but they usually change their mind in time.
In my personal opinion, I actually really appreciate them being called “skeets.” It kind of serves as a reminder that they are not to be taken seriously. I also appreciate that calling them “skeets” will help deter large corporations from joining for some time. (What company wants to be associated with a social media site where the posts are a tongue-in-cheek reference to ejaculate?)
It just reminds me of this… One of Killer Mike’s best, imho. Frisky Dingo died too soon.
…but for real that’s a weird thing to call it.
The shared block lists need to keep up with bad faith signups, which will stop happening once the trolls are actually trying, though. So, it’s going to be on the shoulders of the subscriber feed.
Which was something that Twitter augmented long before they were bought by Elon. And is something that will probably show up once the shareholders start pushing the company towards an IPO, which will happen eventually.
But maybe they’ll add other interesting safety features before then.
I’m wondering when the bot armies of sign-ups will come out in force to a point where blocklists can’t keep up…
A lot if left leaving journalism can get annoying, but The Atlantic is solid. I’d believe them.
Good.
Obligatory relevant link: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moderation-is-different-from-censorship
