I think there are a few distinctions to draw out here. One is that the people who are anti-Bluesky on Twitter (like Silver) are mostly not trying to get the attention of Musk or really enamored of the current state of Twitter (Silver recently posted that Twitter was just good for shitposting now). The other is that Twitter continues to have a lot of stuff that isn't "about" the things at the center of Bluesky/Twitter conflict, ranging from sports to celebrity gossip to AI to porn. Bluesky vs Twitter is mostly about internecine left/liberal conflict, but that's most of Bluesky and not as much of Twitter.
I think that is completely fair. My criticisms of Silver have more to do with his lumping together a lot of things he dislikes about the left, while being remarkably blithe about the pathologies of the alternative complex he identifies with. Also, probably I should be clear that when I was dissing people whose brains are curdled by poasting multiple times a week, this was not a side-dig at Silver. It's sub-Stacking (? word? acceptable neologism?) someone else entirely
Even if I think that the River shtick is misconceived, and the political science attacks driven by the narcissism of minor differences, a quite large amount of what Silver writes is interesting, which is more than I can say for many, many others.
Like Matt Yglasias, someone he resembles more each day, Nate Silver understands his job is to crank out contrarian content, the content of the content is mostly irrelevant as long as it is contrarian to some conventional wisdom somewhere. Their writing skills and intelligence make it palatable, and even a blind pig finds an acorn if they just keep digging.
If you think Yglesias just cranks out contrarian content day after day, you either only read Matt's social media posts or smply don't appreciate interesting writing. Matt is remarkable in his ability to write four interesting pieces every week (plus a usually fascinating Q&A) that not only are better written than almost anything else you read online that week but also more insightful and interesting. Some of it is somewhat contrarian but most of it is not.
Nate, Noah Smith, and Krugman are the only folks who I think are close to comparable in terms of being able to combine insight, volume, and quality, but Nate doesn't write as much as has much narrower aperture of things he covers, Noah is not nearly as good a writer, and Krugman (remarkably, probably the best writer of them all) has actually become a little shrill and less interesting since transitioning to Substack (though still a must read).
The problem with Mastodon and the larger concept of federation is they require a higher level of expertise and effort to engage with that simpler platforms like X and Bluesky, something the vast majority of computer users violently reject, and that Microsoft and Apple have spend decades trying to kill.
I must admit, I'm a new subscriber and I was skeptical about this piece's title and lede. But I think you make good points. I won't be so kind to Silver: I think his over bloated sense of ego and "I did my own research" ethos is almost as dangerous as Ezra Klein's (and that IS me being polite). At any rate, if one wanted to research this the broader Fediverse, as accessed by portals like Mastodon might act as a control group of sorts. Or maybe not. I personally left all social media about a year ago and came back to...promote my hyper local news/photography business. LOL. My zero name recognition plus my disdain for social media (for, basically reasons you mention for both the bluesky and the sewer) certainly doesn't help me. Anyway, interesting analysis, I appreciate you posting it.
"Bluesky indeed often feels like academia and traditional authority on holiday. [...] There is a tangible Village Consensus, which is deeply respectful of traditional expertise and professional knowledge"
Well that's one way of putting it. It isn't entirely wrong, but it's a bit flattering to the likes of Silver, for a reason pointed out by Dan Davies (I think, "your friend Dan Davies"?):
'It is the same social phenomenon as "people who write for the Express read the Guardian". Everyone wants cachet from the liberal intelligentsia. It's specifically bluesky users they want to be read by. Talking to the audience they get on Twitter is killing them.'
For Silver, it isn't enough to have the privilege of publishing whatever he wants to say with little in the way of sensible editing. He wants the right to be read by everybody. But nobody has that right.
There’s a bit of moral hazard in Nate Silver’s takes. With Peter Thiel as a financial backer and three million followers on Twitter, he has every reason to want Twitter to remain the center of conversation.
"The self-satisfied ignorance of the Village helps perpetuate the morass of scam and thwarted opportunities that many, perhaps most Americans are trapped in." I enjoyed your essay. Am baffled by that sentence, however. I did not read anything leading up to it that supported your point. Like WTF?
I’m guessing that Mastodon is too diffuse and decentralized for similar generalizations to be made about it. The complete lack of an algorithm means your Mastodon experience is what you make of it (though be sure to put ALT text on any images), since you build your own community.
Sometimes I wonder if creating Silicon Valley was an example of government overreach. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the AI is going to rule us all people were a fringe more at home with science fiction than with the actual developments in the field. Now, they're directing trillions of dollars into a sterile technological approach. I suppose all those NVIDIA cards mean that weather forecasting will be much better in the 2030s than it is now, but that's only if Silicon Valley can be stopped from dismantling the weather forecasting institutions.
AI is Silicon Valley's Last Stand as it imagines itself to be, creator of a technology that Changes Everything and puts them in the center of culture and civilization (and makes boatloads of money for the people with boatloads of money). Look on the bright side, AI cannot and will not do what is promised, and absolutely no one knows what it can and will do yet. Some people are making what look like pretty good high-level guesses, but very, very high level. Once the river of money fueling the AI furnace runs out, what's possible will start to take shape. Until then, its all about the Hype.
While you accurately describe the three ways that Musk has made Twitter worse since taking over, you're not recognizing how awful (in terms of its impact on society and particularly politics) Twitter was pre-Musk.
The fundamental problem with Twitter (and the reason why BlueSky is inevitably just as corrosive) is the basic structure of the platforms: Messaging platforms built on short messages and replies; that can thread in any different direction; allow unlimited, immediate posting; and support anonymity are inevitably going to descend into snark, incivility, and tribalism no matter who owns or runs them.
To return to your great analogy in the piece cited above, Twitter and BlueSky are to politics what porn is to sex and relationships. While harmless and fun as an occasional guilty pleasure, they are fundamentally distorting and corrosive if they become more than that.
Fully in the tank for Bluesky: it actually reminds me of when Something Awful had a subforum for dumping libertarians that over time became a left-wing hive. It is at least capable of being a 'third space', being what I understand to be the most widely understood formal term for a chill time for most people. A lot of the complaints about Bluesky are (to borrow a Sewer type of term) a skill issue, where people are basically objecting to the basis of their relative privilege. This is where bloggers and DailyKos would figure in if you were taking a more lineage-based take on Bluesky.
This essay is also participating in the comparison of two poles where one is led by people who fit diagnosable psychiatric conditions, which is kind of shitty. You're comparing the equivalent of a small spiritual community (perhaps Christian Scientists, if you want to plead fairness regarding the extent of our delusions) with a circular firing squad of David Koreshes.
And yet, that's fine, in terms of shitting on Bluesky, in the sense that "on this path effort never goes to waste, and there is no failure."
Thanks, I need that. I sometimes post with links to Silver either because I think he has something that is useful and sometimes just to expose it for others to look at it. I agree with your analysis and criticism of him.
I genuinely like Ezra Klein although I don't always agree with him and I remember when he was a "blogger".
I love Bluesky, but wonder if I shouldn't also be posting elsewhere on social media to reach a different audience other than those with similar views to mine and preaching to the choir. There's the rub.
Will be going door to door to get out the vote here in California for Prop 50 on reapportionment probably targeted to like minded Democrats but occasionally having to speak to some who have drunk the Kool Aid of the middle or the right.
I laughed as I read your piece and enjoyed your use of language such as "digested by the intestinal apparatus of algorithm." It was fun and insightful (not inciteful)
A couple of thoughts. First, the hierarchies in Bluesky (and elsewhere) largely reflect power law dynamics, where small initial differences generate ever large ones in a network context. In itself this is inevitable, and the only way to offset it is to have some process that propels new resources/foci into the system. What would that mean for Bluesky?
And I agree about the lettered professional smugness one can encounter on Bluesky, but it mirrors the same phenomenon in the, um, phenomenal world. I've had more than my fill of it in academia. The solution here is clear: simply ignore the self-importance and look for interesting ideas and especially careful sifting of evidence. The objective reality (and there are reasons for this) is that these are far more abundant in the "expert institutions" than in business, even entrepreneurial businesses. If you can't see the difference between what coders write about political science and credentialed political scientists write -- on average -- that's a big problem. A different way to put this is, how much do you learn by responding to arguments from the other side? If the other side is at least somewhat nuanced and itself cognizant of differing views, typically a lot. Otherwise not much.
Bluesky evolved into a closed liberal refuge because of the pressure the X algorithm (via its owner) put on its liberal users, along with the greater pressure coverage of Trump elsewhere put on them. So it has the pathologies any closed system will develop, though crucially they are enforced by the users, not the algorithm or owners. "Activist" liberals are desparate for a space safe from the propaganda and sanewashing most media offers them, and a space they can "control" would feel like a lifeline. Though from the outside it feels like that old academic politics joke, the fights are so vicious because the stakes are so small. How much power does Bluesky as a platform wield in the "real" world, or even the media ecosystem? Twitter built its influence as a global broadcast medium for local reporting on crisis, and a way to pretend to engage with famous people. The non-hustle portion of X runs on the fumes of that reputation, while Bluesky is liberals talking to each other. What makes Blueskyism special, or worth criticizing? Free speech, with its ever-changing definition and boundaries? One more norm that only applies to liberals.
I think there are a few distinctions to draw out here. One is that the people who are anti-Bluesky on Twitter (like Silver) are mostly not trying to get the attention of Musk or really enamored of the current state of Twitter (Silver recently posted that Twitter was just good for shitposting now). The other is that Twitter continues to have a lot of stuff that isn't "about" the things at the center of Bluesky/Twitter conflict, ranging from sports to celebrity gossip to AI to porn. Bluesky vs Twitter is mostly about internecine left/liberal conflict, but that's most of Bluesky and not as much of Twitter.
I think that is completely fair. My criticisms of Silver have more to do with his lumping together a lot of things he dislikes about the left, while being remarkably blithe about the pathologies of the alternative complex he identifies with. Also, probably I should be clear that when I was dissing people whose brains are curdled by poasting multiple times a week, this was not a side-dig at Silver. It's sub-Stacking (? word? acceptable neologism?) someone else entirely
Even if I think that the River shtick is misconceived, and the political science attacks driven by the narcissism of minor differences, a quite large amount of what Silver writes is interesting, which is more than I can say for many, many others.
Like Matt Yglasias, someone he resembles more each day, Nate Silver understands his job is to crank out contrarian content, the content of the content is mostly irrelevant as long as it is contrarian to some conventional wisdom somewhere. Their writing skills and intelligence make it palatable, and even a blind pig finds an acorn if they just keep digging.
If you think Yglesias just cranks out contrarian content day after day, you either only read Matt's social media posts or smply don't appreciate interesting writing. Matt is remarkable in his ability to write four interesting pieces every week (plus a usually fascinating Q&A) that not only are better written than almost anything else you read online that week but also more insightful and interesting. Some of it is somewhat contrarian but most of it is not.
Nate, Noah Smith, and Krugman are the only folks who I think are close to comparable in terms of being able to combine insight, volume, and quality, but Nate doesn't write as much as has much narrower aperture of things he covers, Noah is not nearly as good a writer, and Krugman (remarkably, probably the best writer of them all) has actually become a little shrill and less interesting since transitioning to Substack (though still a must read).
When I read that description of the "insult" restaurant, I couldn't help but think of Yglesias.
The problem with Mastodon and the larger concept of federation is they require a higher level of expertise and effort to engage with that simpler platforms like X and Bluesky, something the vast majority of computer users violently reject, and that Microsoft and Apple have spend decades trying to kill.
It is literally the same “go to a website and make an account” process as anywhere else unless you want to run your own instance.
I must admit, I'm a new subscriber and I was skeptical about this piece's title and lede. But I think you make good points. I won't be so kind to Silver: I think his over bloated sense of ego and "I did my own research" ethos is almost as dangerous as Ezra Klein's (and that IS me being polite). At any rate, if one wanted to research this the broader Fediverse, as accessed by portals like Mastodon might act as a control group of sorts. Or maybe not. I personally left all social media about a year ago and came back to...promote my hyper local news/photography business. LOL. My zero name recognition plus my disdain for social media (for, basically reasons you mention for both the bluesky and the sewer) certainly doesn't help me. Anyway, interesting analysis, I appreciate you posting it.
"Bluesky indeed often feels like academia and traditional authority on holiday. [...] There is a tangible Village Consensus, which is deeply respectful of traditional expertise and professional knowledge"
Well that's one way of putting it. It isn't entirely wrong, but it's a bit flattering to the likes of Silver, for a reason pointed out by Dan Davies (I think, "your friend Dan Davies"?):
'It is the same social phenomenon as "people who write for the Express read the Guardian". Everyone wants cachet from the liberal intelligentsia. It's specifically bluesky users they want to be read by. Talking to the audience they get on Twitter is killing them.'
For Silver, it isn't enough to have the privilege of publishing whatever he wants to say with little in the way of sensible editing. He wants the right to be read by everybody. But nobody has that right.
There’s a bit of moral hazard in Nate Silver’s takes. With Peter Thiel as a financial backer and three million followers on Twitter, he has every reason to want Twitter to remain the center of conversation.
"The self-satisfied ignorance of the Village helps perpetuate the morass of scam and thwarted opportunities that many, perhaps most Americans are trapped in." I enjoyed your essay. Am baffled by that sentence, however. I did not read anything leading up to it that supported your point. Like WTF?
I’m guessing that Mastodon is too diffuse and decentralized for similar generalizations to be made about it. The complete lack of an algorithm means your Mastodon experience is what you make of it (though be sure to put ALT text on any images), since you build your own community.
Sometimes I wonder if creating Silicon Valley was an example of government overreach. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the AI is going to rule us all people were a fringe more at home with science fiction than with the actual developments in the field. Now, they're directing trillions of dollars into a sterile technological approach. I suppose all those NVIDIA cards mean that weather forecasting will be much better in the 2030s than it is now, but that's only if Silicon Valley can be stopped from dismantling the weather forecasting institutions.
AI is Silicon Valley's Last Stand as it imagines itself to be, creator of a technology that Changes Everything and puts them in the center of culture and civilization (and makes boatloads of money for the people with boatloads of money). Look on the bright side, AI cannot and will not do what is promised, and absolutely no one knows what it can and will do yet. Some people are making what look like pretty good high-level guesses, but very, very high level. Once the river of money fueling the AI furnace runs out, what's possible will start to take shape. Until then, its all about the Hype.
Exactly!
How does this substack community behaviour compare to those of X and BlueSky?
@PaulMusgrave's description of Substack Notes as what would have happened if the Ferengi had discovered culture is imo unbeatable.
I'm going to reprise a comment made before (https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/were-getting-the-social-media-crisis/comment/84944849) on your excellent post about "we're getting the social media crisis wrong" Henry, because I think you still don't understand where the real problem lies.
While you accurately describe the three ways that Musk has made Twitter worse since taking over, you're not recognizing how awful (in terms of its impact on society and particularly politics) Twitter was pre-Musk.
The fundamental problem with Twitter (and the reason why BlueSky is inevitably just as corrosive) is the basic structure of the platforms: Messaging platforms built on short messages and replies; that can thread in any different direction; allow unlimited, immediate posting; and support anonymity are inevitably going to descend into snark, incivility, and tribalism no matter who owns or runs them.
To return to your great analogy in the piece cited above, Twitter and BlueSky are to politics what porn is to sex and relationships. While harmless and fun as an occasional guilty pleasure, they are fundamentally distorting and corrosive if they become more than that.
Burn it all down and go back to pseudonymous independent forums, that’s what I say.
Fully in the tank for Bluesky: it actually reminds me of when Something Awful had a subforum for dumping libertarians that over time became a left-wing hive. It is at least capable of being a 'third space', being what I understand to be the most widely understood formal term for a chill time for most people. A lot of the complaints about Bluesky are (to borrow a Sewer type of term) a skill issue, where people are basically objecting to the basis of their relative privilege. This is where bloggers and DailyKos would figure in if you were taking a more lineage-based take on Bluesky.
This essay is also participating in the comparison of two poles where one is led by people who fit diagnosable psychiatric conditions, which is kind of shitty. You're comparing the equivalent of a small spiritual community (perhaps Christian Scientists, if you want to plead fairness regarding the extent of our delusions) with a circular firing squad of David Koreshes.
And yet, that's fine, in terms of shitting on Bluesky, in the sense that "on this path effort never goes to waste, and there is no failure."
Thanks, I need that. I sometimes post with links to Silver either because I think he has something that is useful and sometimes just to expose it for others to look at it. I agree with your analysis and criticism of him.
I genuinely like Ezra Klein although I don't always agree with him and I remember when he was a "blogger".
I love Bluesky, but wonder if I shouldn't also be posting elsewhere on social media to reach a different audience other than those with similar views to mine and preaching to the choir. There's the rub.
Will be going door to door to get out the vote here in California for Prop 50 on reapportionment probably targeted to like minded Democrats but occasionally having to speak to some who have drunk the Kool Aid of the middle or the right.
I laughed as I read your piece and enjoyed your use of language such as "digested by the intestinal apparatus of algorithm." It was fun and insightful (not inciteful)
A couple of thoughts. First, the hierarchies in Bluesky (and elsewhere) largely reflect power law dynamics, where small initial differences generate ever large ones in a network context. In itself this is inevitable, and the only way to offset it is to have some process that propels new resources/foci into the system. What would that mean for Bluesky?
And I agree about the lettered professional smugness one can encounter on Bluesky, but it mirrors the same phenomenon in the, um, phenomenal world. I've had more than my fill of it in academia. The solution here is clear: simply ignore the self-importance and look for interesting ideas and especially careful sifting of evidence. The objective reality (and there are reasons for this) is that these are far more abundant in the "expert institutions" than in business, even entrepreneurial businesses. If you can't see the difference between what coders write about political science and credentialed political scientists write -- on average -- that's a big problem. A different way to put this is, how much do you learn by responding to arguments from the other side? If the other side is at least somewhat nuanced and itself cognizant of differing views, typically a lot. Otherwise not much.
Bluesky evolved into a closed liberal refuge because of the pressure the X algorithm (via its owner) put on its liberal users, along with the greater pressure coverage of Trump elsewhere put on them. So it has the pathologies any closed system will develop, though crucially they are enforced by the users, not the algorithm or owners. "Activist" liberals are desparate for a space safe from the propaganda and sanewashing most media offers them, and a space they can "control" would feel like a lifeline. Though from the outside it feels like that old academic politics joke, the fights are so vicious because the stakes are so small. How much power does Bluesky as a platform wield in the "real" world, or even the media ecosystem? Twitter built its influence as a global broadcast medium for local reporting on crisis, and a way to pretend to engage with famous people. The non-hustle portion of X runs on the fumes of that reputation, while Bluesky is liberals talking to each other. What makes Blueskyism special, or worth criticizing? Free speech, with its ever-changing definition and boundaries? One more norm that only applies to liberals.