Does Bluesky have the juice?

PLUS: YouTube's two primary intellectual values

Greetings from Read Max HQ! In this issue:

• An examination of Bluesky’s recent surge in popularity, and the test it needs to pass to truly replace Twitter; and

• exploring the two primary intellectual values of YouTube, and what it can tell us about politics.

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Does Bluesky have the juice?

In the same manner by which DSA now experiences membership surges immediately following Republican election victories, the semi-decentralized Twitter clone Bluesky is having a “post-election moment”: It surpassed 15 million users on Wednesday, a million of whom joined the site over the past week, and six million of whom have joined since September. Many of these users are presumably former users of “X.com” who’ve been driven away its increasingly broken and intolerable website as well as its owner’s new role as the Donald Trump’s personal Bez/Bosstone.

The millions of people who have arrived on Bluesky’s shores over the last few weeks (not to mention the many users who’ve re-activated dormant accounts to greet a larger user base) have been hoping fervently that Bluesky can recreate pre-Musk Twitter, or at least a close facsimile. And I will say, for the first time since I’ve started intermittently checking the website, it feels reasonably well-populated, if still not reaching the level of endless cascade that Twitter offers.

But can Bluesky actually replace Twitter? Does it have the juice? In absolute terms, 15 million is not really very many users--for context, Threads has 275 million and Twitter claims to have 600 million. But, as was the case on Twitter, demographics matter. From what I can tell, the users who’ve been joining Bluesky en masse recently are members of the big blob of liberal-to-left-wing journalists, academics, lawyers, and tech workers--politically engaged email-job types--who were early Twitter adopters and whose compulsive use of the site over the years was an important force in shaping its culture and norms. (Some of those users have been on the site for a while, valiantly attempting to change Bluesky’s culture from “toxically wack” to “tolerably wack.”)

I don’t want to understate the importance of this group’s defection to Bluesky. These are people with an absolute, almost pathological commitment to producing free content for short-form posting websites; they make up a significant portion of the legendary “Tweeting Tenth”--the 10 percent of Twitter users who at one point created 90 percent of the site’s activity--and their ability to generate mordant quote-tweets at scale is unmatched, even if the mordant quote-tweets are only funny, like, two times out of seven.

But are they enough? I would submit Bluesky to what I think of as the “Gatsby Party Test”: Could Bluesky, given its current size and demographic makeup, produce the following tweet?

It’s not that I think this is a “good tweet,” though I suppose it is. It’s that I think a good Twitter replacement should be able to produce posts like this--i.e. utterly anodyne and yet at the same time bafflingly alien to the journalists who think of themselves as the platform’s main characters--as a matter of course. It should have teenagers, and normies (or “locals,” in Twitter parlance), and millions of other people who are completely uninterested in the preoccupations of the Politically Engaged Email Job Blob, and yet who are fearlessly posting their own bullshit alongside them, every single day. What made Twitter Twitter wasn’t merely the presence of the celebrities and op-ed columnists and political staffers and television writers and adjunct professors, but the presence of “Karter Machen,” and the millions of other people implied by the existence of Karter Machen, flanking (and mostly ignoring) the elite underclass that gave the site an outsize importance.¹

Absent Gatsby Party tweets, Bluesky acts more like a particularly large Discord server--a place to socialize, bullshit, banter, and kill time--than it does like a proper Twitter replacement. For many people I think this is fine; I’m not sure how much the world needs a “Twitter replacement” anyway. But the distinction is still important. Part of what’s made Twitter so attractive to journalists is that it’s relatively easy to convince yourself that it’s a map of the world. Bluesky, smaller and more homogenous, is harder to mistake as a scrolling representation of the national or global psyche--which makes it much healthier for media junkies, but also much less attractive.

The intellectual values of YouTube

I thought this paragraph in John Ganz’s post-mortem of the election, published today in The Nation, was worth flagging:

A closer look at media dynamics reveals the futility of this strategy: The Democrats don’t need to program differently—they need to think differently. The main feature tying together the shows that young right-leaning men watch and listen to now is curiosity: They include discussions and debates; their hosts might not be particularly knowledgeable and they are open about it, so they ask what might seem like dumb questions without shame. Even when the discussion veers into pure propaganda, it comes wrapped in the appearance of open inquiry. If liberals want more organic intellectuals like the GOP seems to have, they need to be willing to be more organic—to actually hang and talk, not just hector from above. They need to reject their allergy to “debate bros” and learn how to argue and debate again; indeed, they need to recover the central challenge of politics—to persuade people.

Ganz here spotlights what are effectively the two intellectual values of YouTube as a culture, by which I mean the two virtues you have to display if you want to be taken seriously by the YouTube audience: (1) curiosity, of the kind demonstrated (or performed) by people like Joe Rogan and Theo Von, and (2) intellectual domination, of the kind sought by the “debate bros” Ganz references (among them, e.g., Destiny).

I mentioned the idea of curiosity in this weekend’s paywalled links roundup, in the context of Ian Williams’ excellent piece about the politics of his college students:

The second is that they really, really like podcasts. All of them listen to podcasts because they’re endlessly busy. Reading takes time and attention they don’t have. Or they don’t think they do. And when we discussed the appeal of podcasts, the performance of authenticity and truth-telling seemed to matter a lot more than the actuality. Joe Rogan may be a gigantic dumbass, but he performs that he’s curious, interested, and engaged. And, here’s the thing, he probably actually is those things. […] Rogan is some version of curious, but he performs as even more curious than he actually is. And that’s what matters to people.

Within the culture of YouTube and streamers, of you can’t, or don’t want to, display curiosity or pursue (the performance of) open intellectual inquiry, your other option is to pursue intellectual domination through open (“open”) debate. Kyndall Cunningham has a nice overview of the increasingly popular culture of “debate” at Vox:

It seems as though the country has been engaged in one long screaming match since 2016. Go on YouTube or scroll through X and that feeling gets a face. Videos claiming that someone “silenced” or “destroyed” another party in a discussion about politics abound on social media. There are now nearly unavoidable clips of conservative personalities like Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro arguing with college students at liberal universities or leftist commentators on their social platforms. Meanwhile, videos of random folks with polar-opposite political views sitting in a dark room arguing over hot-button issues — and often saying wildly offensive or misinformed things — are on the rise.

At the end of September, a YouTube video titled, “Can 1 Woke Teen Survive 25 Trump Supporters” went viral, drawing attention for its absurd, Battle Royale-like premise. In two weeks, it had accumulated 9.6 million views. The video sees 19-year-old liberal TikTok pundit Dean Withers (a.k.a. the “woke teen”) thrown into a lion’s den of young, zealous Trumpers eager to prove him wrong. One by one, he argues with his opponents across a table about reproductive rights and Kamala Harris’s bona fides. One clip where he appears to stump a woman during a discussion about abortion and IUDs garnered millions of views on X.

Why do people love earnest, curious dumbass podcasters and theatrical, confrontational streamers yelling at each other? I think the extent to which the largely young, largely male audience of these videos approaches YouTube or Twitch for the purpose of (self-)education (rather than as “mere” entertainment or even identity-formation) is probably underrated by those of us who think it’s all nonsense. These debates and podcast interviews are often (though not always) intellectually impoverished exercises, but they provide frameworks for political and social thinking that their audience clearly feels they’re not getting elsewhere.

To some extent, this should be cause for optimism. For reasons that I suspect are obvious to anyone reading this Substack I really hate “debate culture,” and don’t personally find theatrical fact-recitation to be an effective mode of persuasion. Nor, for that matter, am I particularly impressed with “curiosity” that lacks any intellectual resources to shape and direct the “open inquiry” it drives. But the popularity of these formats suggests that there’s a large audience of people with appetite for education, looking for new and more sophisticated ways to explain the world around them.² It’s possible, even likely, that many of those people are reactionaries by inclination and intuition, and merely seeking justification for views they already hold. But it seems like a failure of imagination for anyone who believes in democracy to write off a population of would-be autodidacts rather than attempting to marshal resources to help them, even if it means meeting them where they are.

1. Note that I think you really need both groups: With Threads, Meta has tried to build an entire social network out of Gatsby Party tweets, and has created something with the culture and coherency of a dementia ward cafeteria.

2. I am not and will likely never be a fan of Pete Buttigieg, but his appearance in a Jubilee video debating 25 undecided voters felt like a very canny media appearance.