Twitter, eh?

The power of markets.
Of course Spud will go back to the bird, and it’ll be ok ‘cos Musk isn’t making any money from it. A way of saying that it’s a charity platform perhaps. Although he’ll have to reinstate that payment for the blue tick that he couldn’t recall paying for at one time although he obviously was.

No blue tick yet and he’s already wrong about the fall out from Trump’s bombing:

The US bombing of Iran could have massive consequences. Oil prices are rising. Stock markets are ignoring risk. And the Bank of England may react in all the wrong ways. This could spiral into inflation, recession, and even a political crisis.

Oil prices having fallen already and nearly back to 9 June price.

Ironman,

He can block people that means they can’t reply but you can read this posts.

Not sure that’s the right diagnosis. BSky doesn’t suffer fools, and absolutely resists people trying to sell bullshit. Not so much that there’s no-one there, but that the people who are there don’t sealion or blindly follow.

Which obviously makes it a bad place for anyone wanting a compliant audience.

Twitter on the other hand is great if your only audience is the peanut gallery.

Ironman
I left Twatter in disgust at the leftist bias. With BiND’s encouragement, I re-joined X and I follow a very select number of posters – including Douglas Murray (pbuh). Give it a try?

This guy didn’t think much of Bluesky:

However, as soon as I looked around Bluesky, I sensed it wouldn’t work. It didn’t yet feel like a desolate vale of inhabited sepulchres – it was more like a bad vegan café, full of humourless puritans with mouths like cats’ bottoms, eager to congratulate themselves on how much better and nobler they were than the awful centrists back on Twitter. (Right-wing people were, of course, beyond discussion – unmentionably evil). It wasn’t very inviting for people like me. And so, even then, I had the notion: Bluesky is going to fail.

And thus it is. As I write, Bluesky is dying – turning into the City of the Dead. On virtually all metrics it is sliding down a slope that threatens to become a cliff, as a reverse network effect kicks in. For example, in terms of unique daily posts, Bluesky peaked at 1.5 million posts per day in late 2024, but is now down to 700,000 – and the trend looks solid. Over the same period, daily ‘likes’ are down from 2.7m to 1.5m. And still it slides

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/bluesky-is-dying/

I never bothered trying it, the sort of people flouncing off X weren’t the ones I would read if paid.

Bluesky is famously a far left insane asylum where anyone not fully captured by the egregore is torn apart.

Famously?

My point is that it’s not Twitter 2.0. It doesn’t do “fan bases” in the way that Twitter does. It’s not immune to it, but it is certainly different. Every single person I’ve seen (both Right and Left wing and especially the media types) trying to go there and do the political bullshit thing have had their asses handed to them. Including Ritchie.

And he’s famously not Right wing, unless I missed a major memo?

Now the mainstream media is desperate for BlueSky to die, just as they were desperate for Twitter to die, but I doubt either are going anywhere anytime soon. People who’ve had their asses handed to them are also desperate for it to die “but no-one liked me! It’s obviously dying!”. It’s a bit pathetic.

So, meh to the left vs right thing. Yes there are loons on it. There are also loons on Twitter. It’s incredibly easy to block them and use it for other purposes. I think a lot of people underestimate how effective it is for organising communities. Understanding that is much more useful than just dismissing it, unless you’re so thin skinned that people having different opinions is a threat to you.

Not really…. It’s just that we, the people, who are not of a certain progressive political bent, can do the same just as easily , and relatively anonymously, on one of the outlets people have actually heard of, and are so commonplace they’ve become actual verbs.

The doublethink there is amazing. Let’s start with the verb thing… you Tweet on Twitter – which doesn’t exist, because Musk renamed it to X and now people don’t know what to call posting any more.

Then, “we the people” is implying a level of uniformity that simply doesn’t exist. Not in America and not in any Western democracy right now. Unless you live under a rock, the political consensus, and actual faith in national level political organisations has absolutely crashed. That’s not a Left vs Right thing, it’s that the sense of “we the people” being in any way a coherent voice or having shared cause has completely evaporated. Now it’s “I am angry!”, “I want to be heard!”, “Me, me me…. ” – and that applies across all social media platforms.

Finally, let’s talk about organising communities. It’s a shitshow on Twitter right now. I know people running large non political accounts (200K+ followers) and they’re struggling to get any engagement. It’s so bad that people are moving over to Instagram to try and get clout. And it’s showing in American politics. MAGA moved wholesale onto Twitter after the election (there are some great statistics on the shift), yet they’re struggling to support Trump. Meanwhile, we have protests of nearly five million people in a single weekend, and a complete collapse in the New York Mayoral elections.

Now, either you’re seeing something I’m not seeing, or you’re deluding yourself. Note I’m not on the side of the Dems here – they’re a disaster zone of their own making – I’m just observing that politics right now is not the old game of the good side and the bad side. It’s a collapse into chaos, with people desperately clinging on to the idea that there is some imagined nationwide community of people who all share the same political beliefs. Not on Twitter, and not on Bluesky either (though, yes, that big exodus after the election has made one particular community quite visible on that platform. They’re easily blocked.)