Front Burner - Can Bluesky take out X, aka Twitter?

Episode Date: December 11, 2024

Since the U.S. election last month, Bluesky – which describes itself as ‘social media as it should be’ – has gained a lot of traction. They now have more than 24 million users, and traffic on the site is up 500% in the United States in the last month.Many users have fled there from X (formerly Twitter) which has seen a sharp decline since Elon Musk bought the platform in 2022. The frequency of bots, partisan advertisements and harassment are often cited as reasons for leaving the social media platform.Ed Zitron is a tech journalist who hosts the podcast Better Offline, and writes the newsletter Where's Your Ed At.He talks to host Jayme Poisson about the rise of Bluesky, what differentiates it from X, and what this all means for the future of social media.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hey, I'm Jamie Poisson, and I spend way too much time on the internet. It's sort of part of the job, though increasingly, I'm not too sure that that's true. And I think it's becoming pretty obvious that X, aka Twitter, just isn't what it used to be. There was a time when I think you can legitimately say what happened

there moved politics and culture. But Twitter's decline has been particularly sharp following the Elon Musk takeover in 2022. Now, over the last month, a viable competitor to X called BlueSky has really picked up steam. They've racked up more than 24 million users. Traffic on the site is up 500% in the United States alone in the last month. Here with me today is Ed Zitron. He's a tech journalist who hosts the podcast Better Offline and writes the newsletter Where's Your Ed At? So I feel like he's a great person to ask about this massive wave of growth on Blue Sky and whether this platform is really poised to take off.

Ed, hi. Thanks so much for coming on to FrontBurner. My pleasure. So Blue Sky has been around for over a year now, but it's really, as I mentioned, taken off in popularity in the last few weeks. And why is it happening now? I could guess, but you tell me. It's a combination of things. So obviously Trump's election was a thing that started pushing people away from X just naturally.

But also X has been kind of cratering for a while. The experience has got worse. Elon Musk changes things at random. The algorithm is extremely aggressive and the destruction of the trust and safety team, which he has been working on for years, means that people will just say and do and act in certain ways that, well,

shouldn't be on social media at all. But on top of that, Blue Sky, on accepting people, created something called Starter Packs, where you can put together a group of people, Blue Sky on accepting people created something called starter packs, where you can put together a group of people, 10 people, 100 people, what have you, for particular subjects. So jumping over became much easier. You could look for NFL people. You could look for tech journalists. You could look for business journalists. You could look for whatever you're looking for and you just hit a button and you're there. And on top of that, they got block lists

as well. So it's very easy to spin up a new social presence and actually feel like you're part of it, as well as the fact that people, I think, just finally said, I am done with Twitter. I understand that Blue Sky has taken a pretty strong approach to moderation and allowing users, well, as you just said, you can block.

And so can you just tell me a little bit more about that? So blocking is interesting. One of the many terrible decisions Elon Musk recently made was that blocking no longer blocks someone on Twitter. You can still read their posts. They can still read your posts. On Blue Sky, it's the complete opposite. If you block someone on Blue Sky, they are gone. You stop existing to them. They can't look at your page. They can't even see your username. They can't go to your profile. And as a result, it's kind of hard to get the whole troll matrix going. But on top of that, they have something called detach quotes. So common thing on Twitter and many social networks is to quote post someone and say, look at this idiot, look at this person's

opinions and send all your followers after them. now you can hit detach quote so that person quote posting you well they're just quote posting ether at that point this is obviously just my own experience but i've just noticed that what twitter used to be for me was that i would see so much uh so many posts of people that i followed like that i enjoyed reading and and following and now I just see all these randoms, all these people, I don't even know who they are, a lot of these people in my feed. And so is blue sky very different from that? So Twitter has a few problems there. First of all, there is the extremely heavy handed algorithm, which has been tweaked specifically to show you more Elon Musk posts. I'm not being paranoid. On top of that, Twitter also suppresses links, meaning that if you, I don't know, share a

YouTube video you like or journalism you wrote or something, it will not be shown as much. But on top of that, their algorithm is just shoving crap everywhere. It's a very aggressive one. I don't think there's a better word for it. It is sending you stuff from a lot of right-wing people because, well, that's who's on there now, it seems. In Blue Sky's case, it isn't algorithmic at all. When you follow, you're on your following feed, you crazy idea, see a chronological feed of the people you follow and their posts. You can choose customized feeds that are more focused on different people. There's one that's like popular with your friends and it's exactly what it sounds like. It's's one that's like popular with your friends and it's exactly what it sounds like it's the things that they like and repost blue sky's

taking a far more simple approach to it because i think the team there realizes actually how bad twitter has got but also these are people who actually use social media i don't think people in the public realize that people that run Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and all of these social networks, they're not really users. They don't have practical exposure. And as a result, they don't really know how to run these bloody things. Can you tell me more about their CEO, Jay Graber? How is she different than Elon Musk? She's really interesting because her history was she soldered Bitcoin mining rigs and she worked within decentralized software with Zcash and stuff. And I know people have a generally bad

view of crypto, myself included, but Jay is a proper engineer. I've been working on decentralized social for years before and explaining the benefits of decentralization. Ultimately, you know, there's just a few very concrete things that it gives you. One is experimentation and open innovation and like parallel experimentation. And then another is resilience and anti-fragility. Blue Sky is several years old, actually. It was funded by Twitter to create, like the actual company, Twitter, to create a decentralized protocol for social media. So this started with someone who actually knows

how this stuff works and cares about it and was incentivized to make sure it was decentralized. Social and decentralized social is the same. It really needs to be built out for those moments when over the long course of history, there will be moments where political power and technological power become, there's sharp disruptions and you will want a communications infrastructure that is more distributed than one person, one billionaire, one autocratic entity being able to control all of it. How are these guys going to make money? I know that they're promising no ads. So where's the revenue? So they are a relatively small team. And I actually think this company isn't as expensive

to run as Twitter because they're not trying to grow at all costs. They're not trying to do everything for everyone. They are planning to monetize through premium memberships, longer videos, higher quality videos, I believe, and stuff like that. They have said they would consider ads at some point, but they've been very clear that they would not do so if it did anything to the experience. But I don't think people realize, because tech companies grow at all costs, they love growing, it's all they do. They don't realize that these companies don't have to make 100 billion dollars they don't have to well not that twitter did they don't have to make 100 billion dollars a year they have to make enough to keep the lights on and keep everyone paid

and i think that that's more the approach the blue sky is taking also they've raised a good amount of funding and they don't seem to be burning it aggressively In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is

confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. Just coming back to Twitter, I just want to talk to you a little bit more about how much you think it's changed under Musk. Because these issues with the algorithmic feed and the bots and the racism and the harassment, you know, that does predate Musk. So how much of this do you think is Musk's fault and how much do you think that he inherited? I've been on Twitter since 2008. There were issues of racism, issues of harassment. These happened. They are tiny compared to what Musk did. Musk fired most of the trust and safety people. He has allowed harassment on there. The way that people

speak on Twitter now is a symptom of a complete lack of moderation. There are words being said, actual slurs that you will see regularly on this platform. And the biggest thing is, is that if you remember back with the Twitter files and Matt Taibbi claimed to have some big secret thing on Twitter and all of the emails were the internal Twitter stuff saying, I don't know if we want to touch this because social networks they're extremely delicate creatures and the bigger they get the more delicate they get so the previous approach with twitter was to kind of have a hands-off but heavy-handed where necessary approach so they would ban nazis and racists and then elon decided they shouldn't do that quite as much or at all. And on top of that, when you encourage that kind of

activity and you have an aggressive algorithm that is likely tweaked to be based on engagement, yeah, what a surprise that's going to get raised. When you police a place in a way that is extremely capricious and selfish, you encourage the worst people to speak at loud volume in the worst way so while there were problems before there were there was nothing in comparison to how bad it is today sure the problems might have been there before but they were held in place or at least way more restrained than they are now and there were consequences for acting like a bad person elon musk unbanned someone who posts child pornography. Like this is like, if you want a difference, there it is.

What would you say to like a real fan of Elon Musk who thinks that what he has really done here is unleashed free speech and that what they are moderating, and I don't want to make you repeat yourself too much, is, you know, illegal hate speech. This is how Elon responds to these criticisms, right? If it's illegal, we'll take it down.

Yeah, I think the thing to say there is go to therapy. Just accept that you have something wrong inside you because you do if you look at twitter today there are people who conflate free speech with just aggression and hate and protecting your right to say a slur is not really protecting anything what you're actually doing there is suppressing someone else's free speech. By allowing a platform where trans people don't feel safe, where trans people get doxxed, when you run a platform where women get repeatedly harassed and attacked, how is that free speech, how is free speech making grounds hostile for other people?

This debate is not really a debate. It's a bad faith conversation around who can or cannot be oppressed. And it's disgusting that it gets humored as free speech because it isn't. It isn't at all. Trust and safety, moderation, those are the mechanisms that are used to make sure that people can feel safe to speak. Well, our goal is to give users an experience where they can have fun and feel safe. And so we've already always focused a lot on trust and safety, making sure that users have an ability to have an experience that's free from bots and harassment and spam. we should probably also talk about threads which is metas text-based oh gosh do we have to that's okay i don't know do we have to i i've never been on it um i mean i'm on blue sky now and i i will say it's it's much brighter over there. But where does Threads fit into this? And why do you not want to talk about it?

clean place for you to go and do nothing and not really know why you're there. The only reason that Threads had any strength of any kind is because Twitter was falling apart. But if you look at it, you can really see what the grand problem is with the tech industry at large, which is the people making these platforms do not understand why people use them. So Threads, heavily algorithmic. And the algorithm there is very blunt. It's just, what will get the most engagement? Even if it's, when I was on there earlier, there was anti-trans stuff. Immediately, it was all my algorithm was. And then it became beautiful Instagram influencers, or one news story from three days ago, or

like Adam Masseri, the head of threads, having to apologize for some small change he made. It's just, it's not a great experience. And it just feels empty, even, it's not a great experience and it just feels empty, even though it's full of people. And it's because all the Mark Zuckerberg did was he shoved everyone from Instagram in there. It's such a strange place and it's just, it isn't a great social network and it isn't fun to be there. I don't know anyone who likes threads. It's just weird. it's a weird place okay so let's end coming back to blue sky do you think that this platform can really put itself up

as a real rival to to x like do you think that it can attract enough people from around the world from different backgrounds of different ages um yeah so i think there's two things to think one yes i think blue sky is going to be the future of social i actually think it will take down twitter long term i think that they run the business better and i think the platform itself is great their big challenges are going to be foreign language japan in particular is going to be a challenging one. One of Twitter's largest audiences. I don't know how they're going to do it. I really don't. But I think that I think if anyone could, it's them. I also think symbolically blue sky is a sign that something is shifting against the tech industry. I don't think right now most journalists, most politicians, most... I think there is a

growing invisible war against the user where most apps are hostile. Twitter, Facebook, these are not experiences where you go and can just look at the things you want to. It's an algorithm. It's pushing stuff towards you. But it's even the apps we use today. Dating apps are full of microtransactions. We use our work apps and they're disparate and there's notifications everywhere. It doesn't feel like it was built for us. It's built like we're meant to do something for them. And I think Blue Sky, the refreshing nature of it is because it does not feel like it's inherently antagonistic to the user. A lot of the posts in the last few weeks have been people saying, wow, this is nice. I can see the things that I follow. I follow people. I can see their posts, which you can't on Facebook or's already educating people on how bad the rest of the stack is and I don't just mean

social networking so I think that it's not just the future of social networking I think companies like this could be the future of the tech industry We've been talking about how Twitter X, some of these other platforms as well, they're really grim places, right? They're nasty. They're mean. But I just want to ask you something i've been thinking a lot about recently is this kind of grimness also their appeal right is it what keeps people on them as an example i'm just thinking of like the torrent of jokes um and kind of i don't know shit posting for lack of a better word that spilled out of x after the shooting of that ceo in new york the the health care insurance ceo and do you think you know it appeals to like our worst qualities right we can't like help ourselves i think there's

two parts to it i think the united health care ceo and that murder what you are seeing with people taking pleasure in that is separate to the social media conversation it's a group catharsis around health insurance private health insurance specifically i think you are seeing at a time when everyone's quite depressed and quite angry. People are taking some joy in it because they feel like the powerful are having consequences when the powerful rarely have them. And this does lead into the second piece, which is the other thing people are realizing, the grimness you feel on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, everywhere else, is because people feel like they are bereft of power, bereft of industry or dignity. We don't go on social networks traditionally to get the things

we want to see. We go through them and have to smack away a bunch of ads and algorithmic nonsense and a whole thing that covers our screen. We go on mobile websites. There's bloody pop-ups everywhere. They want our email addresses and our phone numbers. They want everything from us. And so, yeah, I think people feel grim when they go online because being online is so regularly grim. I think that engagement-focused algorithms do push people to talk about the things that make them angry, that are frustrating them. And no, these things rarely, if ever, push anything happy. But then again, how would we feel happy? Most of the tools we use to connect with each other, both on and outside of social networking, a growth hack to

make us do things for the company rather than for ourselves. We are constantly at war with technology. So I think people feel grim with technology because it's got grim. It's got nasty. Yeah. Ed, that was great. Thank you. Really appreciate it. My pleasure. All right, that is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.