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).
I've never found Matt Yglesias's articles particularly interesting, but I've also never read much of his work. I understand why some people enjoy Yglesias; I guess it depends on your politics, and of course, different people have different tastes.
Noah Smith is usually good. Smith is at his worst when he spends time on leftist/liberal internecine fights, which is obviously even more the case for Yglesias.
The great thing about Krugman is that when he's not writing about economics or having conversations with interesting people, he writes political takes from a normie liberal Democrat point of view, and he basically spends zero time fighting leftists or liberals. I just find the vast majority of content about leftist/liberal fights very silly, whether the author comes from the leftist or centrist camp.
The left v. liberal content is vital Paulo because it's important to get things right. The main reason we have Trump back is because the Left got so many important things wrong. They include:
- Encouraging and/or allowing regulations (particularly in the environmental and housing domains) that have driven up energy and housing costs.
- Failing to address the abuse of the asylum system until it was too late.
- Not being aggressive enough on fighting inflation (though I would acknowledge the centrists got this one wrong too).
- The whole anti-police movement.
- Woke language policing and cancel culture.
- Transgender athletes in women sports and letting trans activists dictate what views are welcome about trans issues
It's these mistakes that allowed Trump to return (and made our country a generally worse place to live). Matt and Noah play a vital role when they talk about correcting these mistakes because without a correction, the Republicans will retain power even after Trump.
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.
"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.
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.
It occurs to me that the focus on social media platforms obscures where the actual conversation among power elites is happening: group chats. I think we've seen enough over the last few years (everyone remember hegseth's first scandal, or the silicon valley bank run brigade?) to know that the CEOs and big investors are getting their pathologies from a third source of social proof entirely.
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."
"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 not sure how to explain it directly, but this reminds me of the description of McCarthyism as "the revenge of the noses that for twenty years of fancy parties were pressed against the outside window pane," if that helps
That is a tasty and entertaining morsel, Sam, thank you for sharing it. It does not actually help, alas. The stated position–that the Village is ignorant, self-satisfied, and (for reasons never explained) helps perpetuate scams and thwarted opportunities–is itself a rather pompous perspective with no underlying foundation in view. I, too, am guilty of vast generalizations from time to time. But ouch, that is a rather large one.
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.
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.
This feels needlessly hostile and extremely overfitted. Like the mere framework of "village vs sewer" is extreme and the insinuation that you HAVE to be on X to think Bluesky is miserable is just wildly incorrect.
Bluesky is "trust the experts" in that someone who has a nice degree can say the sky is green and you'd get dumpstered for having the AUDACITY to second-guess the Experts. I work in local government. I present to the Village in real life on a regular basis. The comparison between the two could not be further from reality.
I found you from an interview that you did with Paul Krugman, and since I connected, I've enjoyed reading your SubStack posts. I have never been a Twitter (X) user and never tried BlueSky. Why is this? I have more information to read and digest with materials that I want to learn about and stay informed about than to wander into social media cat fights that waste time. I'd prefer to use that time to read a book. I read this post and kept thinking, who gives a shit what these guys think or say? They have too much spare time on their hands.
I'm surprised at the emphasis on AI, rather than Trump. I don't perceive a Bluesky party line on AI, other than what follows from the fact that the prominent techbros are all Trumpists, so anything they say will be viewed with hostility.
Different parts of Bluesky are different I guess, but the dominant theme where I am (and mentioned derisively by Silver in the chat with Cowan) is "Trump is Hitler and this is 1938, why is the NY Times going on as if this is normal".
To be clear, I'm not trying parody here, this is also my own view, though I try to avoid the topic because the US is a lost cause.
There's another counterargument against Nate Silver's bloody awful model of the Village and the River. "Nate, m'lad - not all of us live in the United States. Did you ever consider why lots of foreigners are also on Bluesky? Not in a million years."
Yes, Bluesky people tend to have anti-Trump politics, but for the same reasons that Bluesky people tend to have anti-"E. Coli in drinking water" politics. It's not that there are a lot of privileged people and organizations on Bluesky that are against Trump, but being anti-Trump is pretty much the default position outside of the United States, with the odd exception like Israel.
I just miss the Jeet Heer Twitter threads about Kubrick’s appropriation (in a great way!) of the Looney Tunes in The Shining and the incomprehensible threads calling for game theory!
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.
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.
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).
I've never found Matt Yglesias's articles particularly interesting, but I've also never read much of his work. I understand why some people enjoy Yglesias; I guess it depends on your politics, and of course, different people have different tastes.
Noah Smith is usually good. Smith is at his worst when he spends time on leftist/liberal internecine fights, which is obviously even more the case for Yglesias.
The great thing about Krugman is that when he's not writing about economics or having conversations with interesting people, he writes political takes from a normie liberal Democrat point of view, and he basically spends zero time fighting leftists or liberals. I just find the vast majority of content about leftist/liberal fights very silly, whether the author comes from the leftist or centrist camp.
The left v. liberal content is vital Paulo because it's important to get things right. The main reason we have Trump back is because the Left got so many important things wrong. They include:
- Encouraging and/or allowing regulations (particularly in the environmental and housing domains) that have driven up energy and housing costs.
- Failing to address the abuse of the asylum system until it was too late.
- Not being aggressive enough on fighting inflation (though I would acknowledge the centrists got this one wrong too).
- The whole anti-police movement.
- Woke language policing and cancel culture.
- Transgender athletes in women sports and letting trans activists dictate what views are welcome about trans issues
It's these mistakes that allowed Trump to return (and made our country a generally worse place to live). Matt and Noah play a vital role when they talk about correcting these mistakes because without a correction, the Republicans will retain power even after Trump.
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.
What website? https:///mastadon.com sends me in CA to a website promising "you will see nude pictures" Already too complicated for most "users".
You've just nailed down their business model, 卐itter, Bluesky, Microsoft and Apple I mean.
"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.
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.
I appreciated the Hot Fuzz reference.
It occurs to me that the focus on social media platforms obscures where the actual conversation among power elites is happening: group chats. I think we've seen enough over the last few years (everyone remember hegseth's first scandal, or the silicon valley bank run brigade?) to know that the CEOs and big investors are getting their pathologies from a third source of social proof entirely.
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."
Shorter version: good start, but rewrite this now that we know that Elon's dad is an incest guy and stepdaughter-impregnator
(allegedly)
"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 not sure how to explain it directly, but this reminds me of the description of McCarthyism as "the revenge of the noses that for twenty years of fancy parties were pressed against the outside window pane," if that helps
That is a tasty and entertaining morsel, Sam, thank you for sharing it. It does not actually help, alas. The stated position–that the Village is ignorant, self-satisfied, and (for reasons never explained) helps perpetuate scams and thwarted opportunities–is itself a rather pompous perspective with no underlying foundation in view. I, too, am guilty of vast generalizations from time to time. But ouch, that is a rather large one.
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.
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!
This feels needlessly hostile and extremely overfitted. Like the mere framework of "village vs sewer" is extreme and the insinuation that you HAVE to be on X to think Bluesky is miserable is just wildly incorrect.
Bluesky is "trust the experts" in that someone who has a nice degree can say the sky is green and you'd get dumpstered for having the AUDACITY to second-guess the Experts. I work in local government. I present to the Village in real life on a regular basis. The comparison between the two could not be further from reality.
I found you from an interview that you did with Paul Krugman, and since I connected, I've enjoyed reading your SubStack posts. I have never been a Twitter (X) user and never tried BlueSky. Why is this? I have more information to read and digest with materials that I want to learn about and stay informed about than to wander into social media cat fights that waste time. I'd prefer to use that time to read a book. I read this post and kept thinking, who gives a shit what these guys think or say? They have too much spare time on their hands.
I'm surprised at the emphasis on AI, rather than Trump. I don't perceive a Bluesky party line on AI, other than what follows from the fact that the prominent techbros are all Trumpists, so anything they say will be viewed with hostility.
Different parts of Bluesky are different I guess, but the dominant theme where I am (and mentioned derisively by Silver in the chat with Cowan) is "Trump is Hitler and this is 1938, why is the NY Times going on as if this is normal".
To be clear, I'm not trying parody here, this is also my own view, though I try to avoid the topic because the US is a lost cause.
There's another counterargument against Nate Silver's bloody awful model of the Village and the River. "Nate, m'lad - not all of us live in the United States. Did you ever consider why lots of foreigners are also on Bluesky? Not in a million years."
Yes, Bluesky people tend to have anti-Trump politics, but for the same reasons that Bluesky people tend to have anti-"E. Coli in drinking water" politics. It's not that there are a lot of privileged people and organizations on Bluesky that are against Trump, but being anti-Trump is pretty much the default position outside of the United States, with the odd exception like Israel.
I just miss the Jeet Heer Twitter threads about Kubrick’s appropriation (in a great way!) of the Looney Tunes in The Shining and the incomprehensible threads calling for game theory!
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.
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.