Everything Is Content - Everything in Conversation: The Demise of X

Episode Date: November 20, 2024

Welcome back to the EIC news empire! First up: your bulletins. Why is the president in the forest? How's Channing T doing after his recent break-up? And Nicole Kidman said what? This week we caught up with you all about Twitter, Bluesky and the changing face of the internet. Are you clinging onto X, migrating to bluer pastures or giving up social media for good?As always, thank you so much for listening to us twice every single week. Let us know your thoughts on this new bonus episode- what are you loving? What would you like to hear more of? DMs are open round the clock on Instagram @everythingiscontentpod. And remember: butts not bots.-----------CBR - Danny DeVito at 80Sky News - 4 Year CruiseIrish Central - Paul Mescal to host SNLIndependent - Joe Biden appears to wander off into AmazonBBC - Beyoncé to star in NFL half-time on Xmas dayBBC - Baby red panda dies from firework stress Vogue - Molly Mae Rolling Stone - Timothée as Bob Dylan British GQ - Nicole Kidman still feels it allThe Cut - Channing Tatum Thirst-Trap StageSubstack - Garbage DaySubstack - ¡Hola Papi!The Standard - X's new terms of service Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I'm Beth, I'm Richera, and I'm Anoni, and this is Everything in Conversation. This is an extra episode we release every Wednesday where we give you an extra slice of content. We'll update you on the biggest and juiciest pop culture stories from this week before diving a little deeper into a topic you've helped us pick. This week, is X dead? And is Blue Sky, the internet's new utopia, taking its place? But first, here are the headlines from the EIC newsroom. A US cruise company is offering a four-year escape during Trump's presidency,

with prices starting at $160,000 per person. Icon legend, personal idol of mine, Danny DeVito, has celebrated his 80th birthday. Paul Mescal is set to host SNL on the 6th of December. Joe Biden becomes the first sitting US president to visit the Amazon rainforest. Beyonce reveals she's going to perform a halftime show on Netflix's NFL Christmas Day game. Edinburgh Zoo are calling for tighter

restrictions on fireworks after their tiny three-month-red panda Roxy, who was endangered, died from the stress caused by them. RIP Roxy. Molly May has opened up about her viral breakup with Tommy Fury in a Vogue profile. Elle Fanning says she teared up the first time she heard Timothée Chalamet sing as Bob Dylan in a piece for Rolling Stone. She said, all of us were kind of shaking because it was so surreal hearing someone do that. So perfectly done, but it wasn't a caricature. A Zendaya lookalike competition will be held on November the 20th in Oakland, California, following a string of events for male actors. Nicole Kidman has commented on her highly memed Odeon slash AMC advert saying I'll do anything for cinema so you can meme me as much as you want in a piece for GQ. New York

magazine has argued Channing Tatum has now reached the thirst trap stage of grief following his breakup from Zoe Kravitz. Oh my god haven't we all Channing? And that's all from the headlines this week. So this week, one topic seemed to dominate the DMs, and that was Twitter or X, and whether it's officially dead. I guess all year, it's kind of felt like a really long, long funeral for this site. And it feels as if this week, it's the closest we've got to saying, yes, it has died. Last week, The Guardian made the huge announcement that it was no longer going to publish on the social platform from its official accounts. In a statement, the news site said, this is something we have been considering for a while,

given the often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform, including far-right conspiracy theories and racism. The US presidential election campaign served only to underline what we have considered for a long time. That X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse. So, I mean, that's possibly the biggest thing that I've seen in this whole situation to suggest that people are no longer going to deal with X and they're no longer gonna support the site it comes after donald trump said that musk would head the new department of government efficiency which is an acronym for doge the dog internet meme which i guess suggests how serious and unserious this whole thing is

across my own timelines i've seen so many people saying that they're officially leaving twitter and they're now going to create blue sky accounts john paul brammer known as holy puppy one of my favorite writers wrote a newsletter called x out and detailed why x was destined to be shit from the beginning and why he's leaving blue sky since all of this kind of nonsense over the past year has amassed 16 million users including 1 million in the course of 24 hours last week which is astounding i want to know from you guys what are your thoughts when it comes to twitter are you gonna leave are you gonna stay is blue sky as exciting as people are making it out to be for you what do you think so we were taught we were just talking about this

about kind of our problematic relationships with twitter and i think anonia and i both use it i sent her a tweet earlier i was like where's your chair she's not on here lucky girl i am so tethered to it but now i have broken out and I have been starting to use blue sky I sort of feel like I'm cheating on the world's worst boyfriend and I'm kind of I feel really empowered by it I don't know where it's going to go but I am on both I'm sort of straddling the two worlds and I'm enjoying blue sky I have not yet downloaded blue sky but what I'm quite excited about is I am a lurker and a retweeter on twitter i very rarely share my original thoughts on there i literally just retweet i'm like a meme account

but for tweets and i was thinking maybe if i had blue sky i could reinvent as a yapper on there what do you even call if you tweet on blue sky do you call it a tweet what do you call it you call it a skeet but you're not allowed to call them that anymore because i am a blue sky elder and i was on there in march 2023 people were calling them skeets, which actually on reflection is very embarrassing. And now I just call them posts. But there was a time, okay, it was it was a different world. Oh, God, I don't know if I'm ever going to come off it. One in on a more serious note, I don't know, and I'm sure we'll come into this, what good it is for everyone to leave a platform that we feel is becoming very far right because then what happens is it just literally a cesspit for that kind of

information is it better to have a few naysayers just hanging around because if we leave them to it is that not worse I don't know I don't think I'll ever completely deactivate but I will give blue sky go see how that is and then I think I'll carry on lurking on twitter just out of pure curiosity so I I have a twitter account it's still active I haven't deletedking on Twitter just out of pure curiosity? So I have a Twitter account, it's still active, I haven't deleted it, but I just have stopped using it for like the past year, like I rarely go on, I go on now and again, it has the feeling of like going into school after hours, it feels weird, it makes me feel like I'm not meant to be there, I just like select a few things like you said and only and just like forward them on, but because I'm never on,

everyone always tells me they've already seen the tweet that I share on so it's kind of embarrassing but that's a side note can I get a dispatch of blue sky from the queen of blue sky which is you Beth like what what's the vibe what is it like so I'll contrast it with the now so blue sky I first got on it about a month after it opened for its beta testing so if anyone that doesn't know blue sky was actually a twitter product that was started I think it was a research initiative that started in 2019 when former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was in charge. I think Elon Musk took the helm when 2022 and then in early 2023, it severed all of its financial and legal ties with Blue Sky. Blue Sky as its own thing then launched in beta February of last year. February

of this year, it finally opened for the general public. So I was there when it was still very much a closed group. I didn't use it very much. It was all very quite twee, quite sweet, quite X-rated at times. People were just posting their butts. It was quite sweet. And then I vanished from it until last week when the Math Xs seems to have begun. And it does feel, like everyone's saying, it feels like an era of Twitter that is long since gone, a kind of sweeter time, maybe a Barack Obama 2012, 2013 time. People are posting their interests, people are finding their community. So it's fine. The vibe is good, but it just doesn't have the kind of meat and potatoes of Twitter at any point because there's not that many users. Eve,

I think it's about 20 million users or a few more. So I'm going to join it. But my reticence initially was because of threads on Instagram, which I thought was going to be the new platform that would be really great and everything would be together. But threads just was there's something about the culture and the language of Twitter. There's a way of speaking and acting on that platform that was really enjoyable it was quite smart it was quite snarky quite smarmy but it was sort of like a it was a bit of like an intelligent sparring platform it was very different from the saccharine sweet post you got on instagram whereas threads what happened was they tried to create a text only kind of platform and it just mirrored the very sort

of sickly sweet posts that we saw on instagram already that just didn't work and so i think i was thinking with blue sky again it's that language how do you replicate that hopefully I guess if all of the original Twitter users go over to there then I think it will take a long time to build up I always found Twitter was so singular and I it's always been like my favorite social media platform interesting you say about x-rated because that is one of my biggest problems with x is the amount of times I'm scrolling and it is just porn people sharing their only fans highly explicit videos just on my feed even actually instagram as well i don't know if you guys have noticed this but on reels there's all these very strange reels and no offences these women but often like quite a lot older women kind of posting really provocative videos and to go

back to our conversation about children not being on social media anymore every single platform is so highly sexed to the point where i get uncomfortable and kind of feel like oh my god I shouldn't be looking at this but yeah I am going to make the move to blue sky sad to hear that people are showing their butts there because I've had enough can I reassure you because you seem so alarmed about the butts you can actually very easily toggle on and off not suitable for work content I should have made that clear earlier it's very much opt-in had you opted into butts is that what happened I have turned it off now just because i wanted to use it in public but i think i might i think you can post shaft on there i think

you can post anything if you toggle on why do they but why does it need to be on every platform like porn hub is already the biggest platform like website in the world why do you need full pot like can you just for a minute can everything not be porn it's a great question for another episode i think it was when the community was small people quite enjoying being a bit provocative and also flirting lest we forget once upon a time on twitter you could you know find someone to jag them i just don't understand what blue sky is like i'm not any closer to understanding it from what you said it's like i read a newsletter from ryan broderick garbage day yeah garbage day it's really good online newsletter and he said that many people have likened Blue Sky to like theater camp energy. And it's like very

twee and very earnest. But what you've just said is like completely confused me. Like the dial is all over the place. I don't understand what this is. What I want to know is I am a million Russian dolls deep in Twitter jokes. Have they been transferred over? Because there is years worth of chronically online content that you can only really understand if you have been chronically online for like a decade are we starting from fresh or is there been some transference of people you know dragging it over a lot of the content on there at the moment is people just like bemoaning x talking shit about Elon Musk talking shit about kind of the reason they were pushed over there so I guess once that

clears and people are on there in its own right I think we'll need a few years for the law to build up. But I think at the moment, it is just a platform where people are talking shit about X because I don't know if you've seen the reasons that people are moving over, but there are so many. Elon Musk is now interwoven with Donald Trump cabinet that it's now it's kind of a protest move to get off it that the block feature is gone I think people are reaching their breaking point and then taking the grievances to blue sky which is not as fun I think one thing that is going to be really difficult is it kind of feels like you know when you have work colleagues and all you have in common is that you bitch about your workplace

but it's not a real relationship because you don't talk about any of your personal lives and it becomes quite toxic I feel like blue sky is reminding me a bit of that where it's like there needs to be an identity there needs to be kind of humor and fun and it has to have its own identity as a platform otherwise once everyone has you know gotten bored of bitching about x why are you on that platform well I'm hoping because also the other thing that's really killing me about x and I found it so dystopian and really upsetting and it makes for like a boomer is the amount of bot replies I'll be reading I love reading replies to like a big tweet and I'll be reading I go oh that's an interesting take and then the next tweet is just the same thing worded exactly the same apart from

one word and then 20 more and I'm like oh my god where are the people is there anyone even on there is it just me and 20 million bots like is there any real people but should we look to the audience that's you listeners um and hear why they're what they but should we look to the audience that's you listeners um and hear why they're what they're thinking if they're leaving yeah that's a really good shout so grace posted something that i thought was really interesting she said i'm staying as i refuse to be ousted by fascists and musk but i think twitter is the best platform to hear grassroots voices i actually asked on blue sky about this and got quite a few people echoing that sentiment someone in blue sky said it's frustrating that 14 plus years of tweeting

and all the connections that came with it can be blinked out fact that this is specifically due to the world's richest man's awkward attention star midlife crisis was just the cherry on top of it all so it's a fuck you to elon musk and it's also a kind of decision to hold on to the things that they worked for because it is hard work to build a community and to make friends across I don't know since like 2007 it's a long long time. Ellis also said that they left when Elon took over and they don't miss it and this was again a sentiment that's shared by quite a lot of people as some people said it was starting to affect their mental health and lots said they just don't want to support it anymore. It's interesting to hear about staying or leaving as political because automatically my feeling is leaving is political so it's really interesting

to hear from people who argue the opposite and they argue that you know staying is uh fighting back like you said Anoni that if we all leave does that just leave this platform to descend into even more terribleness it's confusing which way to go I also think just from a point of view out of like intrigue and morbid fascination post-election I saw so much more of Trump's campaign on x because of the way that the algorithms are aggregated and it pushes more of that content and I actually found that quite useful as opposed to Jeremy Corbyn twitter era where I would never have seen anything like that because it was literally just my super left-leaning liberal colleagues twitter colleagues colleagues of the internet so in a weird way I'm like actually maybe it is good to know what they're saying and what they're thinking it's really depressing but

there's something quite useful about that and I do think I understand people leaving and I do think there's that thing of voting with your wallet voting with your engagement voting with what you use there's so many of them and they love it and they love paying for x and also loads of make money now because you know you can make money on views and stuff i don't know that we'll ever be able to take it down by not using it i think it'll just become a rabid cesspit so i think there is something to be said for having a few moles in there i mean obviously not everyone on there's evil some people are just there for the butts yeah i think that the main criticism at the moment of blue sky from x users is that it is an echo chamber you can block people en masse you can select a list subscribe to it and it will block everyone in that list so i've done it so far with

just like trolls and like the worst maga supporters but for the rest of it like i i'm happy to see it like i don't believe it's an echo chamber but i do think because it has that many fewer users it still is valuable to stay on x if you can stand it and if you want sort of mass input from as many different people as possible I think there's value to that in response I was going to say because Laura one of our listeners also must have said niche and odd but I'm a UK based doctor and x is useful for career opportunities and bma i.e trade union stuff and I think that's true of lots of industries on that. I think what's happening is it's getting harder to wade through all of the kind of content that we don't necessarily want to see. Journalists use it, doctors. It's amazing for organizing. I think that's the problem is I'm sure you're right, Beth. I'm sure that at some point, blue sky could get to that point. But I think that might take

years before we reach that. So maybe we have to stay on Twitter until or X until that point but I think that might take years before we reach that so maybe we have to stay on Twitter until or X until that point that blue sky catches up and maybe we've got to straddle both it is really difficult one thing I'll say as a journalist X has been unusable for a while because after Elon removed the ability to kind of message anyone if I was putting together a piece and was you know tracking down somebody who had tweeted about it or somebody had shown interest in a topic I was investigating there would be no way to contact them. So TikTok has become actually one of the easiest ways and Instagram to be used as you know, like a research tool. So I think there are definitely uses as a journalist. But one thing I have been finding is that naturally,

I've kind of moved away from it anyway. I have a point that I think it's going to be a bit convoluted. I'm going to get to the point as quickly as possible that is on the back of that is I think will speak to anxieties that a lot of other journalists have about losing potentially the main text led platform. And it's it's based on what I read in Garbage Day, which you recommended earlier, the Ryan Project sub stack and the piece called Blue Skies, the new Twitter probably. And in it, he references an interview that he did with Hossein Darakshan, who is a Canadian-Iranian blogger, internet writer, who was imprisoned in Tehran for six years on suspicion of espionage,

often credited with kind of bringing blogging and internet culture to Iran. And after he got out of prison, he spoke to Ryan Broderick. And he was one of the first people to call about 10 years ago that the internet as we know it is dying and we need to do something about it and he talks to Ryan and says that his fears aren't only that we're losing text-based social media but also that we we're losing literacy along with it and as the internet and the kind of global news face becomes more video-led people also become quite illiterate they become very media illiterate they become very disconnected from news sources and kind of fact checking and things like that and I think I felt very uncomfortable with that pivot

away from Twitter because it was that kind of final frontier of pre-video everything was written you had to really engage with points you had to read you had to write just to use it I think to lose it I mean we already kind of have lost it but to lose it without a viable alternative as a journalist and as a writer, it makes me really nervous, especially as we know that global literacy levels are not picking up in the way that you'd expect. In 2022, I think it was like 21% of Americans 18 and older were illiterate and 54% of adults had illiteracy in America below sixth grade level. I agree with you. And I don't know if you both have noticed this, but I can see misinformation all the time on TikTok. Essentially, I was on TikTok at one point and I was going through just some of the videos on my For You page. And one of them was all of the celebrities who haven't stood in support of Palestine. And in the comments, unnamed celebrity had been cited and somebody queried it because they were really surprised. And then the person who had created the

video just replied back and said, oh, yeah, I don't actually know. I just heard this from a friend. And it's just I can see so many claims on this platform that are absolutely wild and just cannot be checked or moderated in the way that Twitter used to be. And even content moderation has been quite helpful in various scenarios on eggs, not perfect, but helpful to some degree. There's no kind of perfect solution. But I wonder if blue sky is a much better alternative in that sense. I kind of forgot just how good the golden days of Twitter were. Because there was even though we have community notes on X, which I do think actually can be really good. And people are very good at pulling people up for misinformation.

There was this other level of sort of like community in checking where people were often very verified journalists, people who really had credibility to their name and cared about what they were saying and cared about putting out the right information. People may be tweeting live about an event and would say, look, I'm not going to update you right now because I need to double check. I don't want to be saying X, Y, Z without verifying this information. And everyone was quite courteous and respectful of each other and also respectful of the need to make sure that any breaking news or any information was cited correctly and was correct. Whereas now the way that it works it's immediate views like you

said Richer a complete unsubstantiated claims the first person to post is the winner no one even cares if it's true videos are being posted from like different years to back up claims about something else we've had so many natural disasters happening that people will post videos of floods from like 10 years ago and it doesn't help because all it does is then when there is disinformation people then disbelieve the true stories and I kind of forgot that there was a time when that just wouldn't have run on Twitter because everyone held each other to quite a high standard I guess when any platform gets completely oversaturated that dissipates somewhat but when you look at how Twitter started it really was a platform for journalists. One small point that I would make about Twitter versus Blue Sky. At the moment, I think there

was a change in the terms on Twitter slash X, which meant either you couldn't opt out or maybe you can opt out if you're in Europe to AI being used on your post to train grok or whatever it is. But I don't know if that's the case. I don't know the laws. But I think a lot of people are saying that they don't want to stay there, knowing that their posts are now being used to train AI. Whereas on Blue Sky, they have committed, for the moment at least, they don't use AI, they don't train AI on your posts, and they said for the moment they have no plans to, which is sort of a breath of fresh air. And I think that is a really big selling point for artists and creators. And I don't think we can underestimate how important it is that their intellectual property is safe and that their work is safe and then they're not being like unwittingly used to

train bots and AI we really want to do a deep date deep Dave we're desperate to do a deep dive on a AI because there's so much to say on it but Ruchira I don't know if you saw this tweet because again I never know if you're on or off but Beth retweeted something where this teacher was marking a paper and they were like, this is a surefire way of knowing that this paper has been written by AI. And the word that they said was a complete tell was delve. Beth retweeted it being like,

we literally say delves thrice per episode. Maybe we're not even real, we're AI. Oh my God, but I'm real. Imagine if you guys were AI and I didn't realize for like a year. I know, but sometimes I use quite obnoxious words because I just really like vocab and now i'm thinking every time i do that i'm really self-conscious that people are going to be like oh she's put that into chat gpt the only good thing is that often i use the word in the wrong context so ai could never oh no chat

gpt would never do that do you know that we're actually on blue sky as of today as of this week wait what who is the the podcast are we oh stop it they're so excited guys can you hear we're eic podcast because i tried to do everything is content pod but it was everything is content pod dot blue sky dot social and it was too long they wouldn't let me have it so we're at eic podcast i'm gonna check now we had quite a few followers we have got did a little it's it's quite glitchy so it's taking quite a while to load this is not a good advert for blue sky we have got it's quite glitchy so it's taking quite a while to load this is not a good advert for blue sky we've got 22 followers for shira can you believe it oh my god is that an influencer status on blue sky we've got the blue tick we've got our mentions are full of butts it's so exciting

um so when we finish this we're gonna have to tell everyone follow us on blue sky if we post but we will get so many followers if we get a thousand followers one of us will post but no if we get a hundred thousand followers and it's beth it's absolutely gonna be beth yes my butt is on my friend's page he's an artist and it's on his page to like 150 000 people i don't care my butt can go it's not your naked butt it's in a red bathing costume isn't it love that i know that thanks so much for all of your comments and thoughts and for listening this week remember to give us a follow on everything is content pod on ig and tiktok and of course now blue sky we'll see you on friday as always. Bye! Bye! Also, guys, are you sure that the thing about Joe Biden is true and they're not pretending that he's gone to the jungle like on I'm a

Slab? No, it is real, but I saw someone be like, oh my god, he's being released back into the wild.