Speaking as an aging millennial I think part of what's happening is that the Twitter vision of social media that millennials loved and that millennials are trying to reestablish on BlueSky is a dying old people thing and there's several layers of weird anxiety about aging and the world passing us by playing into all this. Like, that it's 40-plus year old Yglesias that's a particular point of obsession is kind of telling. This is a middle aged conflict.
This is absolutely it! Bluesky is middle aged millennials trying to force Bluesky to be an idealized version of Twitter circa 2010. The fact that 1. Millennials (and microblogging) aren’t cool anymore and 2. Enough of the user base is trying to control what it becomes rather than letting it develop naturally pretty much guarantee this isn’t going to happen.
Thank you for this. It clarifies/explains (along with Max's take) something that's been bothering me for at least a year .
I'm in my mid 60's and grew up with a much more distant connection to alternative political discourse, only printed media, like the Voice, the Nation, or the Atlantic. The same sort of interpersonal vitriol likely existed than but it was much less visible. Living in Iowa I was no where near close enough to either the factional disputes, or the cultural left world (basically NYC) where the more subtle/social context was visible to make reveal the interpersonal and factional disagreements.
I've been baffled by the level of vehemence to Yglesias and Silver. I can find plenty to disagree with from both, but both seem worth listening to and I believe I've learned from both. It deeply jars me to see the vitriol toward them from people are pretty much fellow travelers. It makes much more sense to ground at least some of that in both the parasocial aspect of Twitter (rough summary of Max's post) and the coming of story you just outlined.
Is it an aging millennial nostalgia thing to say old twitter used to be good before endgame algorithms nuked social media or is it just stating facts. Old twitter had real people and real conversations. Granted with the rise of woke, stuff got dumb and you had bad actor activists using ever more extreme dogma to propel their personal brand.
However now everything is rage bait, bots, and propaganda. Like the real conservatives were in private signal group chats that refined the message then got posted to twitter as if it were organic thought.
Lastly the shift from text to video with TikTok also shows a dumbing down of discourse. Text will always be more dense and better communicative than vids.
A couple of my more neurotic friends broke up a WhatsApp group after one too many meltdowns. Now we have those same squabbles across various one-to-one chats. Glad to hear Twitter's sons have adopted the same model!
I think it's also Nate (and others) being probably buttmad Blue Sky has a nuclear block option which means he gets deleted from existence from a lot of people's sight who'd otherwise have to see their lousy takes, and thus they get no traffic.
"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."
For what it's worth, I recall quite a lot of sniping between writers back when political blogs were taking off some 20 years ago, before Twitter brought everyone into the same website. And in most cases, the audience for, say, Think Progress was not the same as Daily Kos, which was not the same as The Atlantic's various blogs, and so forth. So I think this sniping was bound to continue whether people were all on X or not.
Silver doesn't understand the concept of good and evil. To him, it is antiquated and unscientific to talk about right and wrong. He prefers the world of takes and probability, the game of politics.
Right and wrong makes the game not fun anymore, because something difficult might be required of you.
I think we can stop calling the guy who mainstreamed the antitrans crusade, the guy who cut his teeth barking up the Iraq war and is otherwise famous for saying its fine, morally correct even, that brown people die in shirtwaist factory disasters, and a guy (as far as I'm aware, Chatterton marked himself out early as a rightwing prig so I keep him as far from my brain as possible) famous for pushing the Harpers letter.
Oh yea Nate Silver the 'stats guy' who was right exactly once, became a public covid truther and was last seen telling Tom Scocca that he was correct to pick a team that lost because his model said they would win, and infact was validated because the model later predicted they would lose once they were down by 20 in the 3rd. This guy who has been dining out for twenty years and looks set to be repeating James Carvilles career is gonna call people out for 'appeals to credentials'?!
We can come up with a better word for Career Right Winger doing a 'hello fellow kids' bit and fooling establishment dems with their 'liberal' act than Hererodox or Woke-Skeptic. I feel like everyone named has a very firm conviction about woke which they will defend beyond all reason in fact.
Not on any socials. Got off facebook in 11 never looked back.
I'm out here in the real world where I'd ask my friends where the nyt atlantic guardian and the entire center left got the idea trans people are rhe biggest threat possible.
Had to talk a center dem friend I used to run XC with down that they're not trying to make his daughter run against men. Just recently hung out and their son was fucking with Grok. They hadn't heard about Mecha Hitler or any of that.
Its cute you guys are having a cola war. And its cute one side has declared calling them out on being right wing lunatics and declaring their opinions beyond the pale, poisonous and disqualifying to be just some thing that the other side does cause we're all crazy on the internet.
A friend works in Journalism abroad and used to rant about US consultants telling them twitter is crucial. As he never tired of telling me something like 20% of Americans were on twitter at its height pre elon. And like 80% of its users were American. Twitter isn't real life in that any conversation you might have probably has nothing to do with twitter. It is real life unfortunately in that most of the people in the news/opinion industry this country are on it which makes them parasocial chummy with the worst people on earth.
It's not like taking a harder line on bluesky or ignoring the whiny rightwingers will take control of the major outlets, but I'm not about to countenance anyone, not even Max who I generally like, launder their reputations for them
Have your fucking slap fight and act too above it all, but if I have to deprogram my good friend and his wife while you guys act like its a fun dunkathon then we all touch gloves and go back to our corner, fuck off I'm going to talk about it.
And if you wanna try to innocuoate yourself against the argument by going "only CRAZY people will say <the most obvious and correct criticism possible>", great you can *say* that all you want but no one has to delcared themselves dunked on or beclowned.
I went to your bluesky account to comment on this, lend some support if necessary, and found you'd not posted it ;)
I know what you mean, although I will also concede I can be humor-impaired myself sometimes.
When Yglesias made what I thought were very cogent reasons why Shumur was wise to vote for the continuing resolution in the spring, I reposted a screencap of a couple, expressing my agreement. *O*M*G* did I get heapings of scorn! Through a 3rd-party Bluesky account maintenance app, I learned my account was quickly blocked a large number of times. One was shared blocklist called something like "Nazi Fascists." Yes, I was deemed a "Nazi" by someone for saying I thought the Democratic Senate Minority leader had good reasons for continuing to fund the operation of the US federal government!
I think what we ignore about Silver is that he is a game player, not an intellectual. Game players seek arenas with clear, consistent rules where effort to learn the rules leads to winning - poker, the markets, social media, but they tend to avoid real-world scenarios where context changes regularly.
Real intellectuals seek out shifting context because that is where opportunity for real insight lies.
Most people are neither, and seek the cozy certitude of fealty.
When we confuse what Silver and his ilk produce for real thinking, we give up on any real truth-seeking.
So, put another way: Everyone is a self-loathing moralist who can sleep at night only if they feel they have posted a sufficient take-down. And these platforms are designed to increase the velocity of this widening gyre rotating on it's moralizing-axis until it consumes us all.
It feels like there's a strain of tribalism that runs across these platforms, and if the decision to switch platforms has certain people, party and ideology behind a preset audience is nearly guaranteed.
And if you can add self victimization to this then you have a tribe you can direct to anyone who you think is THEM.
And THEM can be anyone you slightly disagree with.
I'm not on that platform, but it sounds exhausting to try to interact with anyone there, or to post an opinion about food without the post turning political.
Speaking as an aging millennial I think part of what's happening is that the Twitter vision of social media that millennials loved and that millennials are trying to reestablish on BlueSky is a dying old people thing and there's several layers of weird anxiety about aging and the world passing us by playing into all this. Like, that it's 40-plus year old Yglesias that's a particular point of obsession is kind of telling. This is a middle aged conflict.
This is absolutely it! Bluesky is middle aged millennials trying to force Bluesky to be an idealized version of Twitter circa 2010. The fact that 1. Millennials (and microblogging) aren’t cool anymore and 2. Enough of the user base is trying to control what it becomes rather than letting it develop naturally pretty much guarantee this isn’t going to happen.
Is microblogging not cool? Isn’t TikTok just vid form of blogging?
Thank you for this. It clarifies/explains (along with Max's take) something that's been bothering me for at least a year .
I'm in my mid 60's and grew up with a much more distant connection to alternative political discourse, only printed media, like the Voice, the Nation, or the Atlantic. The same sort of interpersonal vitriol likely existed than but it was much less visible. Living in Iowa I was no where near close enough to either the factional disputes, or the cultural left world (basically NYC) where the more subtle/social context was visible to make reveal the interpersonal and factional disagreements.
I've been baffled by the level of vehemence to Yglesias and Silver. I can find plenty to disagree with from both, but both seem worth listening to and I believe I've learned from both. It deeply jars me to see the vitriol toward them from people are pretty much fellow travelers. It makes much more sense to ground at least some of that in both the parasocial aspect of Twitter (rough summary of Max's post) and the coming of story you just outlined.
Thank you.
Is it an aging millennial nostalgia thing to say old twitter used to be good before endgame algorithms nuked social media or is it just stating facts. Old twitter had real people and real conversations. Granted with the rise of woke, stuff got dumb and you had bad actor activists using ever more extreme dogma to propel their personal brand.
However now everything is rage bait, bots, and propaganda. Like the real conservatives were in private signal group chats that refined the message then got posted to twitter as if it were organic thought.
Lastly the shift from text to video with TikTok also shows a dumbing down of discourse. Text will always be more dense and better communicative than vids.
A couple of my more neurotic friends broke up a WhatsApp group after one too many meltdowns. Now we have those same squabbles across various one-to-one chats. Glad to hear Twitter's sons have adopted the same model!
This was all foretold in the days of the messageboard. Time is a flat circle, etc.
I think it's also Nate (and others) being probably buttmad Blue Sky has a nuclear block option which means he gets deleted from existence from a lot of people's sight who'd otherwise have to see their lousy takes, and thus they get no traffic.
"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."
For what it's worth, I recall quite a lot of sniping between writers back when political blogs were taking off some 20 years ago, before Twitter brought everyone into the same website. And in most cases, the audience for, say, Think Progress was not the same as Daily Kos, which was not the same as The Atlantic's various blogs, and so forth. So I think this sniping was bound to continue whether people were all on X or not.
Silver doesn't understand the concept of good and evil. To him, it is antiquated and unscientific to talk about right and wrong. He prefers the world of takes and probability, the game of politics.
Right and wrong makes the game not fun anymore, because something difficult might be required of you.
Yes, obviously. Silver and Matty Y can't do that either.
what exactly are they "competently executing" lol
"morality-obsessed" lmao, I'll take it
"shrill" "henpecked" -- did you just get divorced or are you always awful to women for no reason?
It’s one part “narcissism of small differences,” and another part “crabs in a shrinking bucket”.
I think we can stop calling the guy who mainstreamed the antitrans crusade, the guy who cut his teeth barking up the Iraq war and is otherwise famous for saying its fine, morally correct even, that brown people die in shirtwaist factory disasters, and a guy (as far as I'm aware, Chatterton marked himself out early as a rightwing prig so I keep him as far from my brain as possible) famous for pushing the Harpers letter.
Oh yea Nate Silver the 'stats guy' who was right exactly once, became a public covid truther and was last seen telling Tom Scocca that he was correct to pick a team that lost because his model said they would win, and infact was validated because the model later predicted they would lose once they were down by 20 in the 3rd. This guy who has been dining out for twenty years and looks set to be repeating James Carvilles career is gonna call people out for 'appeals to credentials'?!
We can come up with a better word for Career Right Winger doing a 'hello fellow kids' bit and fooling establishment dems with their 'liberal' act than Hererodox or Woke-Skeptic. I feel like everyone named has a very firm conviction about woke which they will defend beyond all reason in fact.
This is such a perfect distillation of Max's point, I cannot help but wonder if it is satire (and yes, I know it's almost certainly not)
Not on any socials. Got off facebook in 11 never looked back.
I'm out here in the real world where I'd ask my friends where the nyt atlantic guardian and the entire center left got the idea trans people are rhe biggest threat possible.
Had to talk a center dem friend I used to run XC with down that they're not trying to make his daughter run against men. Just recently hung out and their son was fucking with Grok. They hadn't heard about Mecha Hitler or any of that.
Its cute you guys are having a cola war. And its cute one side has declared calling them out on being right wing lunatics and declaring their opinions beyond the pale, poisonous and disqualifying to be just some thing that the other side does cause we're all crazy on the internet.
A friend works in Journalism abroad and used to rant about US consultants telling them twitter is crucial. As he never tired of telling me something like 20% of Americans were on twitter at its height pre elon. And like 80% of its users were American. Twitter isn't real life in that any conversation you might have probably has nothing to do with twitter. It is real life unfortunately in that most of the people in the news/opinion industry this country are on it which makes them parasocial chummy with the worst people on earth.
It's not like taking a harder line on bluesky or ignoring the whiny rightwingers will take control of the major outlets, but I'm not about to countenance anyone, not even Max who I generally like, launder their reputations for them
Have your fucking slap fight and act too above it all, but if I have to deprogram my good friend and his wife while you guys act like its a fun dunkathon then we all touch gloves and go back to our corner, fuck off I'm going to talk about it.
And if you wanna try to innocuoate yourself against the argument by going "only CRAZY people will say <the most obvious and correct criticism possible>", great you can *say* that all you want but no one has to delcared themselves dunked on or beclowned.
Be more smug about it.
Lovely twitter circa 2021 thread.
I went to your bluesky account to comment on this, lend some support if necessary, and found you'd not posted it ;)
I know what you mean, although I will also concede I can be humor-impaired myself sometimes.
When Yglesias made what I thought were very cogent reasons why Shumur was wise to vote for the continuing resolution in the spring, I reposted a screencap of a couple, expressing my agreement. *O*M*G* did I get heapings of scorn! Through a 3rd-party Bluesky account maintenance app, I learned my account was quickly blocked a large number of times. One was shared blocklist called something like "Nazi Fascists." Yes, I was deemed a "Nazi" by someone for saying I thought the Democratic Senate Minority leader had good reasons for continuing to fund the operation of the US federal government!
"With friends like these, who needs enemies?"
You all were wrong. I wouldn't call you a Nazi fascist, though
I dunno man, I think Yglesias and Silver are just really annoying people
Doesn't mean they're always wrong, though
How dare you compare us noble Substackers to the filthy unwashed masses beyond the gates
Don't worry I smell PLENTY bad and I use neither platform
I think what we ignore about Silver is that he is a game player, not an intellectual. Game players seek arenas with clear, consistent rules where effort to learn the rules leads to winning - poker, the markets, social media, but they tend to avoid real-world scenarios where context changes regularly.
Real intellectuals seek out shifting context because that is where opportunity for real insight lies.
Most people are neither, and seek the cozy certitude of fealty.
When we confuse what Silver and his ilk produce for real thinking, we give up on any real truth-seeking.
Pundits are obsessed with any platform, online or otherwise, they can grab more attention, notoriety and traction from.
its cus they banned ME max
So, put another way: Everyone is a self-loathing moralist who can sleep at night only if they feel they have posted a sufficient take-down. And these platforms are designed to increase the velocity of this widening gyre rotating on it's moralizing-axis until it consumes us all.
Alex Balk's Second Law of the Internet: The worst thing is knowing what everyone thinks about anything.
(https://www.theawl.com/2016/11/the-spirit-of-the-internet)
It feels like there's a strain of tribalism that runs across these platforms, and if the decision to switch platforms has certain people, party and ideology behind a preset audience is nearly guaranteed.
And if you can add self victimization to this then you have a tribe you can direct to anyone who you think is THEM.
And THEM can be anyone you slightly disagree with.
I'm not on that platform, but it sounds exhausting to try to interact with anyone there, or to post an opinion about food without the post turning political.