Nate touches on this a little bit, but I’d hypothesize that Covid was rocket fuel for Blueskyism.
Suddenly there was massive demand for just the kind of “expertise”, extreme takes, doomerism the current Bluesky folks specialize in.
Even if you didn’t follow Taylor Lorenz, one of your overnight-sensation public health “expert” follows was probably retweeting her into your feed. Massive amplification ensued.
I'd agree but I suspect the seeds of this came out of the 2016 election and the first election of Trump. I think the elite Left was trying to figure out how Trump could have won and decided unfettered social media was the problem which caused them to create disinformation studies and embrace European style content controls as a solution. This certain came to a head during COVID (remember Biden saying Facebook was killing people by not censoring hard enough and Kerry expressing frustration that the First Amendment limited the gov't ability to control content?). This pushed a lot of people that were nominally on the Left over toward the political right or just moved them into the non voter / undecided voter column. The Blueskyists don't get that a lot of American's favor free speech, even speech that's not to their liking, and embracing this made them appear similarly authoritarian as the folks on the right they are nominally against. Nate has I think a small part of On The Edge that discusses that.
I think the left’s threat to free speech and other Americans commitment to free speech has been overblown. Especially considering Americans elected an administration that is explicitly expelling green card holders for holding views they don’t like, illegally withholding funds from colleges for having politics they don’t like, and blacklisting law firms for taking cases they don’t like.
I'm not defending what the right is doing I'm just pointing out that the Left's embrace of disinformation studies and 'we need to censor the commons to protect people' turns off a lot of people. And it undermines their moral authority to stand on the issue. Basically for people that don't live and breathe politics it looks like it's either one type of authoritarianism versus another. People are complicated, everyone seems to have some speech they want to censor so it ends up like this. I suspect Trumps heavy hand on the issue will cost him in the midterms just like the Left's heavy hand cost them in 2024.
Ultimately if the argument is 'they are worse' that's not exactly an inspiring endorsement.
“They are worse” unfortunately is the default operating mode of American politics with a two party system.
And to not give a sense of scale to anything actually dilutes the morality. Even in your own comment comparing the “heavy-hand ness” of Trump to democrats does this when one hand landed with the weight of stone and the other with the weight of a boulder. This types of both-sidesism just paints everything in the same moral grey.
And I don’t think very many voters actually “punished” Democrats for supposed heavy-handness in free speech. At least according to their own words, it was mostly inflation and immigration.
I find leftist academic and media censorship to be in the same category of offense as what the right is doing but I certainly admit two smart people could look at the data and conclude otherwise. Perhaps it doesn't bother you. Everyone seems to have speech they wouldn't mind being censored. Clearly what the Blueskists want to censor doesn't bother you that much. That's certainly your right. I have no way of knowing how much this impacted the election but it didn't help. Certainly it was one of the things that pushed people like Musk over to the right. He might have gone anyway, no real way to know.
You seem to have a need for me to say 'the right is way worse'. Right now they have the power and they are certainly abusing it. That fact alone doesn't make the left look all the much better to my eyes. Maybe it does to you.
I have no need for you to say anything. My disagreement with you isn’t trying to force you to say anything.
And I never said censorship of any topic doesn’t bother me. It’s not quite fair to place words in my mouth after claiming I’m trying to force you to say something.
All I’m saying is placing “leftist academics” in the same category as deporting people because of their political views bothers me a lot more. And I think is a bigger part of how we got here than leftists being annoying online.
Am I the only one in America who has never used X/Twitter, Bluesky, or God forbid, Truth Social? Nate should do a poll of Silver Bulletin readers!!! I have also never used Facebook or Instagram but do watch and subscribe to some YouTube channels.
You're probably a lot happier for it lol. There are troubling studies that show social media has terrible effects on people's happiness relative to their time on these platforms. Not only that, but the social media companies are trying to increase everyone's screen time by making them as addictive as possible.
Never is impressive. I spent at least a little time on Twitter and hated it. I used Facebook for a long time but got off three years ago and don’t miss it much.
I too am on no social media, I felt like I was the only one. I did try Facebook years ago, but found i just liked other people less - including long time friends.
I was on Twitter, but basically followed only John Cook and some other math people. Avoided everything else, and posted maybe twice, total. I quit when it became X. I've never been on Bluesky, Facebook, or any of the others mentioned in Nate's post.
So I had no idea what "Blueskyism" meant until reading this post.
One reason for Twitter’s resilience is that I suspect a lot of early users- like me- never used the algorithmic feed, and only used the follower chronological feed. Sure, some of the left wing craziness drifted in, depending on who you followed- but we never saw the really gross racism stuff pushed by the algorithm, so didn’t feel pushed out. And as the ultra lefts departed for Blue Sky, we saw even less left wing craziness drift in. For me, it’s been a steady improvement, but I’m sure that is only because I never use the algorithmic feed.
This is a good point. As a fellow followers only user, my feed is almost entirely curated to my liking, so it's generally a great experience when I get on.
It also helps that Twitter can just be hilarious some days, i.e. the Coldplay/CEO day, in ways other platforms aren't set up to do.
I also think that the experience is different for small vs large accounts. So a lot of duscussion is the proverbial blind people describing an elephant.
I recently made a mild joke at one Bluesky post suggesting it was “ultimate Bluesky” (for UK users) as it was criticism of PM Kier Starmer designed, and effective, in generating an endless trail of enthusiastic agreement comments.
I hadn’t even challenged the content of the post, but in response to my comment I was accused of being in support of genocide! I now realise my experience included all three elements of Blueskyism. Thanks for giving it a name.
P.S. Would love to see the demographics of Substack users.
IDK, it's definitely a real thing. You see it on Reddit, too. If you don't like the term, suggest a different one. But it is a cluster of behaviors/expressed beliefs that are useful to differentiate from terms like "leftist", "woke", and "liberal".
This total post just seems to be an excuse to apply a label to people that Nate finds annoying online.
I say this because he calls out Michael Hobbes as the “high priest of Blueskyism.” I’m a particular fan of Michael Hobbes, have listened to a lot of his podcasts, and I don’t see how any of Nate’s 3 “tenets of Blueskyism” apply to him.
For example number 2, appeals to authority. Michael Hobbes explicitly says often that he is not an expert. He just reads a lot of stuff written by experts. And then the conclusions he comes to are usually pretty obvious because it becomes clear that one side is lying and one side is not. These are fact based arguments and not just blind appeals to authority.
I am well aware of the critiques of his work. Being open about your political perspective isn’t “bad faith.” If anything it’s more honest than pretending that centrism is equivalent to neutrality.
1 Reading experts while not being an expert is fairly dangerous. How do you know the quality of the work besides authority? Do you know the relative biases of journal editors or standards of reproducability?
2 My experience is that experts generally disagree among themselves and fairly little of interest is obvious.
3 The presumption that of there is disagreement, someone must be lying is a small tent attitude.
4 This particular group of small tent leftists have trashed the left of center opposition party (aka the Democrats) and is completely out of touch with middle America who are skeptical of experts, not purists and kind if like normie living. Naming and blaming seems appropriate.
1. He doesn’t just read experts he also engages with them.
2. Experts do disagree. But a lot of public discourse is surprisingly not the same as expert disagreement. For example, experts disagree about the exact effects of climate change but the consensus is that it’s happening, it’s man made, and it will have massive negative effects. If you just listened to US public discourse you’d think there was a massive debate over climate change even happening or if it’s bad. That’s the side that’s lying
3. Sometimes a side is just lying. To think otherwise is value centrism above truth.
4. Reactionary centrists are just as out of touch with Americans as leftists. Being “middle” does not make you representative. Being skeptical of experts is not a virtue. And devoting 1000 word essay to describe your name calling feels more small tent energy than anything else.
Like barely a step above middle-school level gossip and shit-talking, which i guess is somewhat appropriate when discussing social media, but my goodness just a bit of self-absorbtion on display:
"it means you’re the main character of the day, the person that other people have decided to dogpile upon."
The main character of the entire internet (oh, well, Trump and LeBron-level celebs aside)! And they're all being mean to me! I can't say i've ever felt that level of simultanenous level self-importance and victimization as a grown adult.
Elections are popularity contests and obviously Dems need to be much more popular, but i don't think this navel-gazing backwards looking (i think this was the first i'd heard/thought of Bluesky in about 8 months) analysis gets us there at all- laser focus on pocketbook issues and generally being personable and relatable seems to work pretty well though!
I’ve only looked at Bluesky a few times and that was enough. But I’m glad it exists and I hope it sticks around. Josh Barro had a piece on it earlier this year, but I think Bluesky serves a good purpose for keeping away the worst people on the left. It’s effectively a containment zone for left wing awfulness. Since Bluesky has little to no influence on reporters and Democratic elected officials it won’t have the effect on them that twitter had in the crazy days of 2019-20. Among other reasons, that’s why I don’t expect the lunacy from the 2020 primary to repeat in 2028.
Try out some catastrophic headlines and see what your engagement is. Something like "Blueskyism: what I learned shocked me" or "Blueskyism: Elon Musk can't believe his luck!" Then have a photo of you looking shocked with the Bluesky logo in the background.
Not sure "I'm happier on this site now that all the people who objected strenuously to it becoming nazi-fied and Elon putting his finger on the algo to firehose spray everyone with right wing dogshit have left it" is quite the dunk you think it is...
I have a similar critique here as I did the last time Nate wrote about Twitter-likes. I think he dismisses Threads too quickly. It got a single sentence here about having "failed to gain traction," along with Mastodon.
Exact monthly active user numbers are impossible to pin down, but patching together summer '25 reports, a ballpark comparison would be:
- X...somewhere in the 500M-600M range
- Threads...about 400M, according to Zuck and Mosseri
- Blueskey...somewhere in the 15M-30M range
By this metric, it seems pretty clear that Threads is *the* X alternative, and does have at least some traction.
I get the pushback that Meta got a lot of "free traction" from building Threads on top of Instagram. But it's worth noting that Threads hasn't just been bleeding monthly actives since the initial Instagram-fueled launch. It's been growing steadily over the last year.
You might say, "Okay fine...400M people might log in to Threads once a month, but that's mostly to discuss Taylor Swift's engagement or farm likes with reused jokes." And...I kind of agree! I would just prefer that Nate would clarify he is dismissing Threads because it lacks political influence, not because it has zero "traction."
I'd go further to say, the kind of people you need to win elections are precisely the ones on Threads: AKA the general public, mostly happy with their personal life, center-right/left but not extreme, masses.
Nate I'm glad you gave this type of thinking a name and defined it. It's not just limited to Bluesky in social media though. As someone who spends more time on Reddit than I'd like to admit, that platform has been trending more and more towards this exact line of thinking. A lot of the largest subs - especially those that cover anything related to politics - have the same atmosphere of shutting down dissent. The latest trend I've seen in politics (and music?) subs is that if someone has EVER visited Israel (not just in the last two years) then they are a supporter of apartheid.
After Elon did that weird right wing salute, Reddit decided he and X were both actual Nazi spreading Nazi propaganda. Users bombarded mods with demands to remove the ability to link to X, and yelled at them for being literal Nazis themselves if they didn't immediatedly comply. Now if any sports journalists want to get their content on Reddit they basically have to go double post on Bluesky as that is the only "approved" platform.
I vote Democrat myself but it's exhausting seeing the most extreme possible parts of the left take over previously normal online spaces and make them their echo chamber. I've found myself spending more time on X lately because even with its deep flaws it at least doesn't take itself so damn seriously.
Dan I gave you a like for this reply because I agree with most of what you have to say here but I think the part missing or maybe just unaddressed is that this type of behavior is not limited to just the left. Intolerance and the tactics described to push ideas by vilifying those even just outside your echo chamber has been a leading strategy for the extreme right for many years and been a very effective recently by some measures. I think the main difference is "blueskiers" tried to AstroTurf that kind of a movement. Well it was very successful initially it only works when you have a real groundswell behind you. That kind of an army took 30 years for the right to build and isn't the solution to this cultural problem anyway even if it works it causes a lot of other issues. Tolerance of and interest in the ideas of others that disagree with us makes us better people and I hope were starting to figure that out... Thank you.
Interesting, but the Yglesias hate is from original 2016 Bernie leftists while Bluesky is more identity politics deadenders. It’s funny that you don’t find the kind of Twitter anti-monopoly obsessives or anitzionists leftists on bluesky, BlueSky is just identity politics deadenders.
Nate touches on this a little bit, but I’d hypothesize that Covid was rocket fuel for Blueskyism.
Suddenly there was massive demand for just the kind of “expertise”, extreme takes, doomerism the current Bluesky folks specialize in.
Even if you didn’t follow Taylor Lorenz, one of your overnight-sensation public health “expert” follows was probably retweeting her into your feed. Massive amplification ensued.
I'd agree but I suspect the seeds of this came out of the 2016 election and the first election of Trump. I think the elite Left was trying to figure out how Trump could have won and decided unfettered social media was the problem which caused them to create disinformation studies and embrace European style content controls as a solution. This certain came to a head during COVID (remember Biden saying Facebook was killing people by not censoring hard enough and Kerry expressing frustration that the First Amendment limited the gov't ability to control content?). This pushed a lot of people that were nominally on the Left over toward the political right or just moved them into the non voter / undecided voter column. The Blueskyists don't get that a lot of American's favor free speech, even speech that's not to their liking, and embracing this made them appear similarly authoritarian as the folks on the right they are nominally against. Nate has I think a small part of On The Edge that discusses that.
I think the left’s threat to free speech and other Americans commitment to free speech has been overblown. Especially considering Americans elected an administration that is explicitly expelling green card holders for holding views they don’t like, illegally withholding funds from colleges for having politics they don’t like, and blacklisting law firms for taking cases they don’t like.
I'm not defending what the right is doing I'm just pointing out that the Left's embrace of disinformation studies and 'we need to censor the commons to protect people' turns off a lot of people. And it undermines their moral authority to stand on the issue. Basically for people that don't live and breathe politics it looks like it's either one type of authoritarianism versus another. People are complicated, everyone seems to have some speech they want to censor so it ends up like this. I suspect Trumps heavy hand on the issue will cost him in the midterms just like the Left's heavy hand cost them in 2024.
Ultimately if the argument is 'they are worse' that's not exactly an inspiring endorsement.
“They are worse” unfortunately is the default operating mode of American politics with a two party system.
And to not give a sense of scale to anything actually dilutes the morality. Even in your own comment comparing the “heavy-hand ness” of Trump to democrats does this when one hand landed with the weight of stone and the other with the weight of a boulder. This types of both-sidesism just paints everything in the same moral grey.
And I don’t think very many voters actually “punished” Democrats for supposed heavy-handness in free speech. At least according to their own words, it was mostly inflation and immigration.
I find leftist academic and media censorship to be in the same category of offense as what the right is doing but I certainly admit two smart people could look at the data and conclude otherwise. Perhaps it doesn't bother you. Everyone seems to have speech they wouldn't mind being censored. Clearly what the Blueskists want to censor doesn't bother you that much. That's certainly your right. I have no way of knowing how much this impacted the election but it didn't help. Certainly it was one of the things that pushed people like Musk over to the right. He might have gone anyway, no real way to know.
You seem to have a need for me to say 'the right is way worse'. Right now they have the power and they are certainly abusing it. That fact alone doesn't make the left look all the much better to my eyes. Maybe it does to you.
I have no need for you to say anything. My disagreement with you isn’t trying to force you to say anything.
And I never said censorship of any topic doesn’t bother me. It’s not quite fair to place words in my mouth after claiming I’m trying to force you to say something.
All I’m saying is placing “leftist academics” in the same category as deporting people because of their political views bothers me a lot more. And I think is a bigger part of how we got here than leftists being annoying online.
I think it was more directly that the most neurotic people were getting cred for being as neurotic as possible and now can't walk it back.
And all of the "expertise" wrong, as we have since come to realize. [Sigh]
John Oliver’s show is Blueskyism in television form (albeit with some genuinely funny humor sprinkled in)
My tour guide in Krakow clearly watched John Oliver to learn his English, because he used his exact same syntax and punch line delivery.
Am I the only one in America who has never used X/Twitter, Bluesky, or God forbid, Truth Social? Nate should do a poll of Silver Bulletin readers!!! I have also never used Facebook or Instagram but do watch and subscribe to some YouTube channels.
Amen. 🙏 I eschew almost all social media and I’m confident my life is better for it.
You’re in danger of triggering an anti-social-media virtue signalling war. 😉
You're probably a lot happier for it lol. There are troubling studies that show social media has terrible effects on people's happiness relative to their time on these platforms. Not only that, but the social media companies are trying to increase everyone's screen time by making them as addictive as possible.
Never is impressive. I spent at least a little time on Twitter and hated it. I used Facebook for a long time but got off three years ago and don’t miss it much.
I too am on no social media, I felt like I was the only one. I did try Facebook years ago, but found i just liked other people less - including long time friends.
Yeah, same here. Just too many people! Especially ones I didn't know, demanding my attention. I was gone.
Some of us have used them and quit, as well. I had a Twitter account to vote for a friend's beard in a contest.
May I join you under the rock you live under? BS is my final social media that I check often and I'm trying to figure out how to stop.
I was on Twitter, but basically followed only John Cook and some other math people. Avoided everything else, and posted maybe twice, total. I quit when it became X. I've never been on Bluesky, Facebook, or any of the others mentioned in Nate's post.
So I had no idea what "Blueskyism" meant until reading this post.
One reason for Twitter’s resilience is that I suspect a lot of early users- like me- never used the algorithmic feed, and only used the follower chronological feed. Sure, some of the left wing craziness drifted in, depending on who you followed- but we never saw the really gross racism stuff pushed by the algorithm, so didn’t feel pushed out. And as the ultra lefts departed for Blue Sky, we saw even less left wing craziness drift in. For me, it’s been a steady improvement, but I’m sure that is only because I never use the algorithmic feed.
This is a good point. As a fellow followers only user, my feed is almost entirely curated to my liking, so it's generally a great experience when I get on.
It also helps that Twitter can just be hilarious some days, i.e. the Coldplay/CEO day, in ways other platforms aren't set up to do.
I also think that the experience is different for small vs large accounts. So a lot of duscussion is the proverbial blind people describing an elephant.
I recently made a mild joke at one Bluesky post suggesting it was “ultimate Bluesky” (for UK users) as it was criticism of PM Kier Starmer designed, and effective, in generating an endless trail of enthusiastic agreement comments.
I hadn’t even challenged the content of the post, but in response to my comment I was accused of being in support of genocide! I now realise my experience included all three elements of Blueskyism. Thanks for giving it a name.
P.S. Would love to see the demographics of Substack users.
Wait someone was mean and irrational online? Not sure we needed a special term for that
Culture War BS…. Broad sweeping generalizations about people who rather not use X.
It’s a very long post just to justify a new term for people you find annoying online
IDK, it's definitely a real thing. You see it on Reddit, too. If you don't like the term, suggest a different one. But it is a cluster of behaviors/expressed beliefs that are useful to differentiate from terms like "leftist", "woke", and "liberal".
I never said people being annoying online in left circles wasn’t real. I just don’t think it needs a thousand word essay to describe it.
The term is “people that annoy me.”
If all we want to do is group people we disagree with using broad generalizations, well, you know….
naggers?
I don’t think the mississippi thing is fair , I legit think they can’t do age verification given the the architecture of the site
100%
This total post just seems to be an excuse to apply a label to people that Nate finds annoying online.
I say this because he calls out Michael Hobbes as the “high priest of Blueskyism.” I’m a particular fan of Michael Hobbes, have listened to a lot of his podcasts, and I don’t see how any of Nate’s 3 “tenets of Blueskyism” apply to him.
For example number 2, appeals to authority. Michael Hobbes explicitly says often that he is not an expert. He just reads a lot of stuff written by experts. And then the conclusions he comes to are usually pretty obvious because it becomes clear that one side is lying and one side is not. These are fact based arguments and not just blind appeals to authority.
Michael Hobbes is incredibly bad faith and I’d recommend you look into some critiques of his work.
I am well aware of the critiques of his work. Being open about your political perspective isn’t “bad faith.” If anything it’s more honest than pretending that centrism is equivalent to neutrality.
Few points:
1 Reading experts while not being an expert is fairly dangerous. How do you know the quality of the work besides authority? Do you know the relative biases of journal editors or standards of reproducability?
2 My experience is that experts generally disagree among themselves and fairly little of interest is obvious.
3 The presumption that of there is disagreement, someone must be lying is a small tent attitude.
4 This particular group of small tent leftists have trashed the left of center opposition party (aka the Democrats) and is completely out of touch with middle America who are skeptical of experts, not purists and kind if like normie living. Naming and blaming seems appropriate.
1. He doesn’t just read experts he also engages with them.
2. Experts do disagree. But a lot of public discourse is surprisingly not the same as expert disagreement. For example, experts disagree about the exact effects of climate change but the consensus is that it’s happening, it’s man made, and it will have massive negative effects. If you just listened to US public discourse you’d think there was a massive debate over climate change even happening or if it’s bad. That’s the side that’s lying
3. Sometimes a side is just lying. To think otherwise is value centrism above truth.
4. Reactionary centrists are just as out of touch with Americans as leftists. Being “middle” does not make you representative. Being skeptical of experts is not a virtue. And devoting 1000 word essay to describe your name calling feels more small tent energy than anything else.
This was bordeline unreadable for me tbh.
Like barely a step above middle-school level gossip and shit-talking, which i guess is somewhat appropriate when discussing social media, but my goodness just a bit of self-absorbtion on display:
"it means you’re the main character of the day, the person that other people have decided to dogpile upon."
The main character of the entire internet (oh, well, Trump and LeBron-level celebs aside)! And they're all being mean to me! I can't say i've ever felt that level of simultanenous level self-importance and victimization as a grown adult.
Elections are popularity contests and obviously Dems need to be much more popular, but i don't think this navel-gazing backwards looking (i think this was the first i'd heard/thought of Bluesky in about 8 months) analysis gets us there at all- laser focus on pocketbook issues and generally being personable and relatable seems to work pretty well though!
I’ve only looked at Bluesky a few times and that was enough. But I’m glad it exists and I hope it sticks around. Josh Barro had a piece on it earlier this year, but I think Bluesky serves a good purpose for keeping away the worst people on the left. It’s effectively a containment zone for left wing awfulness. Since Bluesky has little to no influence on reporters and Democratic elected officials it won’t have the effect on them that twitter had in the crazy days of 2019-20. Among other reasons, that’s why I don’t expect the lunacy from the 2020 primary to repeat in 2028.
Try out some catastrophic headlines and see what your engagement is. Something like "Blueskyism: what I learned shocked me" or "Blueskyism: Elon Musk can't believe his luck!" Then have a photo of you looking shocked with the Bluesky logo in the background.
Don't hate the player, hate the game.
Not sure "I'm happier on this site now that all the people who objected strenuously to it becoming nazi-fied and Elon putting his finger on the algo to firehose spray everyone with right wing dogshit have left it" is quite the dunk you think it is...
I have a similar critique here as I did the last time Nate wrote about Twitter-likes. I think he dismisses Threads too quickly. It got a single sentence here about having "failed to gain traction," along with Mastodon.
Exact monthly active user numbers are impossible to pin down, but patching together summer '25 reports, a ballpark comparison would be:
- X...somewhere in the 500M-600M range
- Threads...about 400M, according to Zuck and Mosseri
- Blueskey...somewhere in the 15M-30M range
By this metric, it seems pretty clear that Threads is *the* X alternative, and does have at least some traction.
I get the pushback that Meta got a lot of "free traction" from building Threads on top of Instagram. But it's worth noting that Threads hasn't just been bleeding monthly actives since the initial Instagram-fueled launch. It's been growing steadily over the last year.
You might say, "Okay fine...400M people might log in to Threads once a month, but that's mostly to discuss Taylor Swift's engagement or farm likes with reused jokes." And...I kind of agree! I would just prefer that Nate would clarify he is dismissing Threads because it lacks political influence, not because it has zero "traction."
I'd go further to say, the kind of people you need to win elections are precisely the ones on Threads: AKA the general public, mostly happy with their personal life, center-right/left but not extreme, masses.
Huh. Nice post, helpful. Maybe I'll try Threads.
Yeah that's largely my take on Threads also. The network definitely seems to be less intellectual and political but much more aggressively "normie".
Nate I'm glad you gave this type of thinking a name and defined it. It's not just limited to Bluesky in social media though. As someone who spends more time on Reddit than I'd like to admit, that platform has been trending more and more towards this exact line of thinking. A lot of the largest subs - especially those that cover anything related to politics - have the same atmosphere of shutting down dissent. The latest trend I've seen in politics (and music?) subs is that if someone has EVER visited Israel (not just in the last two years) then they are a supporter of apartheid.
After Elon did that weird right wing salute, Reddit decided he and X were both actual Nazi spreading Nazi propaganda. Users bombarded mods with demands to remove the ability to link to X, and yelled at them for being literal Nazis themselves if they didn't immediatedly comply. Now if any sports journalists want to get their content on Reddit they basically have to go double post on Bluesky as that is the only "approved" platform.
I vote Democrat myself but it's exhausting seeing the most extreme possible parts of the left take over previously normal online spaces and make them their echo chamber. I've found myself spending more time on X lately because even with its deep flaws it at least doesn't take itself so damn seriously.
Dan I gave you a like for this reply because I agree with most of what you have to say here but I think the part missing or maybe just unaddressed is that this type of behavior is not limited to just the left. Intolerance and the tactics described to push ideas by vilifying those even just outside your echo chamber has been a leading strategy for the extreme right for many years and been a very effective recently by some measures. I think the main difference is "blueskiers" tried to AstroTurf that kind of a movement. Well it was very successful initially it only works when you have a real groundswell behind you. That kind of an army took 30 years for the right to build and isn't the solution to this cultural problem anyway even if it works it causes a lot of other issues. Tolerance of and interest in the ideas of others that disagree with us makes us better people and I hope were starting to figure that out... Thank you.
Interesting, but the Yglesias hate is from original 2016 Bernie leftists while Bluesky is more identity politics deadenders. It’s funny that you don’t find the kind of Twitter anti-monopoly obsessives or anitzionists leftists on bluesky, BlueSky is just identity politics deadenders.
Pity this is a subscriber-only post.
I have a list of people—yep, they're all on Bluesky!—I'd like to send it to.