Why are pundits obsessed with Bluesky?

And why is Bluesky obsessed with pundits?

Greetings from Read Max HQ! A somewhat shorter edition today, due to back-to-school schedule madness, on the subject of Bluesky, Twitter, and the bitter recriminations between them.

A reminder: You, too, can support Read Max for only $5 a month, allowing me to continue the independent writing, researching, hesitating, procrastinating, etc. that makes up this newsletter. This newsletter makes the bulk of its revenue from (which is a fancy way of saying “I pay for food and housing thanks to money from”) paying subscribers, who against all odds and logic find this newsletter entertaining, engaging, enlightening, educational, enraging, or some combination of all of the above.

Bluesky and the erotic thrill of the screenshot dunk

Among the many tragedies to unfold in the wake of Elon Musk’s 2022 purchase of Twitter has been the rise of Bluesky. I say this not because I think Bluesky itself is “bad,” whatever that would mean, but because its status as the post-Twitter destination for a particular type of email-job liberal has meant the endless unfolding of a frustrating and tedious argument across both sites about whether or not Bluesky is sufficiently welcoming, ideologically diverse, or deferential to a particular type of pundit.

One the one side of this argument is the mostly left-liberal, militantly anti-Republican, woke-sympathetic population of Bluesky, probably best understood as a sort of rump state or government-in-exile of circa-2017 Twitter. On the other side is a small group of heterodox-liberal, open-to-bipartisanship, woke-skeptic pundits, among them Matt Yglesias, Jesse Singal, Thomas Chatterton Williams, and Nate Silver. Silver, in fact, has written the latest sally in The Bluesky Discourse, a Substack newsletter entitled “What is Blueskyism?” published Friday:

Bluesky was initially popular with Twitter refugees who disliked Musk’s takeover of the platform, some of whom proclaimed that Elon had unleashed the “gates of hell” by restoring banned accounts or predicted that the platform would implode due to a shortage of engineering talent. […] this also self-selected for a certain type of user, adherents of an attitude that I call “Blueskyism”.

Blueskyism should not be mistaken for general left-of-center political views. […] It’s not a political movement so much as a tribal affiliation, a niche set of attitudes and style of discursive norms that almost seem designed in a lab to be as unappealing as possible to anyone outside the clique.

Silver lists three “essential qualities” to “Blueskyism”:

1. Smalltentism: “Aggressive policing of dissent… Censoriousness”

2. Credentialism: “Appeals to authority… Centering of the suitability of the speaker based on his or her credentials and/or identity characteristics”

3. Catastrophism: “Humorless, scoldy neuroticism”

I don’t think it’s a secret that, given the binary choice, my political sympathies lie more with the corny Bluesky crew than their pundit arch-haters. But I don’t think Silver is precisely wrong here, either: Bluesky is rife with humorless, condescending, point-missing incuriosity. It can be minorly unpleasant to have your tweet suddenly catapulted into the “Discover” or “Popular” tabs and suddenly subject to the commentary of hundreds or thousands of very annoying people. And Silver himself is the object of somewhat concerning preoccupation from a particularly dedicated sliver of the Bluesky universe, members of which are inclined to read his writing as ungenerously as possible, and to attribute its supposed inadequacies to various psychological-personal failings.

But … isn’t that the way Twitter is, too? Based on my own observations it’s abundant with aggressive dissent-policing, appeals to authority, and catastrophism, regardless of clique, tribe, party, or affiliation. The right(s) and the center(s) that still populate Twitter have their own moral micropanics and main characters (whenever a left-wing college professor tweets something radical, or when Taylor Lorenz tweets literally anything at all), their own legitimating credentials (being a venture capitalist or a longtime LessWrong poster or a Navy SEAL), their own catastrophisms (see Elon Musk’s feed sometime). It seems to me that going “viral” on Twitter is as unpleasant an experience as doing so on Bluesky, and likely much more so given how much open violent hate is permitted to travel unmoderated on the platform.

In some sense Silver’s “Blueskyism” is better thought of as “Twitterism,” given that the latter site is where these political-rhetorical tics emerged. But it’s also just a way of describing “the way people do politics online.” (Arguably even “the way people do politics, period.”)

Which makes me wonder: What is it about Bluesky that earns it so much negative attention from the heterodox-pundit crew? And, in fairness, we should ask: What is it about Silver and Yglesias and their fellows that makes them the objects of such compulsive contempt from the Bluesky? To some extent the answer is that the two sides are engaged in a kind of proxy factional warfare over the Democratic party, or at least believe themselves to be. But as Silver suggests, the endless war between these two sides made more sense when everyone was on the same website, competing for the attention of the same presumed audiences of elite political decision-makers. Now that short-form text posters have been ideologically sorted among two different apps, it’s less clear to me the point of (on the one hand) hounding Yglesias with brutal dunks on a platform neither he nor anyone who might listen to him will read, or (on the other) screenshotting some particularly over-woke Bluesky post about Long COVID or whatever, to share with jackals who never otherwise would have seen it.

I want to be clear that this is a self-incriminating question that I am posing in part to myself; I myself am absolutely not above the urge to spend mostly pointless time and attention on someone who’s on another platform somewhere. And I wouldn’t object to anyone who suggests that the motivation for this kind of endless cross-platform dunk and counter-dunk is strategic in a business sense: Picking fights with people who will fight back is always going to drive engagement, no matter how otherwise unproductive or embarrassing those fights might be.

But it’s my familiarity with the urge that leads me to think the operative dynamic here is not really political-factional or even cynically engagement-driving so much as emotional, or even erotic: They miss each other!¹ The “high priests of Bluesky” whose quirks Silver is lovingly documenting here miss having Silver and their other objects of hate-obsession close at hand. And, similarly, these figures, with their attentive fascination with the failures and inadequacies of a site they also consider un-influential, dwindling, and unimportant, miss the immediate presence and fawning contempt of their attentive haters. (This is why the exchanges between the pro- and anti-Bluesky camps tend to reek of the same consuming, overlong, I’m-actually-laughing bitterness as texts your friend sends you about an ex.)

As Silver says, “many people, myself included, find Twitter/X addicting — or not-so-secretly enjoy its drama […] Twitter is a platform designed for conflict, especially in the form of the quote-retweet, and Blueskyists love the drama.” The forced breakup of Twitter into competing, largely ideologically siloed platforms of “X” and “Bluesky” and “Substack” and “Mastodon” hasn’t eliminated the intoxicating power of drama and argument. It’s simply added friction to the process.

1. Maybe, to be fully self-incriminating, I should say: We miss each other!