Bluesky is just methadone Twitter
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Today — November 13th, 2024; a day that shall live in infamy — the Guardian, Britain’s highest performing international newspaper, from a digital perspective, exited the Twittosphere. “This account has been archived,” @guardian now reads, ending (for now) a long relationship with the site that has seen the left-wing paper rack up 10.8m followers. That audience has played a significant role in turning The Grauniad (ask your grandpa) into the 6th biggest news website in the world, with 303.8m visitors this September alone.
Throwing away a direct line of communication to almost 11m people is no small decision, especially for a paper struggling with diminishing domestic influence (The Guardian no longer submits to the ABC print circulation figures, but the last time it did, in 2021, suggested it had 108,687 readers of the physical newspaper). “We think that the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives,” the publication said, in a statement that is now its pinned tweet, a sort-of digital tombstone. “X is a toxic media platform and its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse.”
Now, the Guardian is doing precisely what I’ve suggested that all the media should be doing: divesting themselves of a reliance on unreliable social media platforms. Back in August, I wrote a piece called “The Media Love Affair with Twitter Must End” and I stand by every word of that. Not because I think that Twitter/X has become a toxic sewer (though it has), or that the proliferation of bots and spammers makes the service all but unusable (though they have), but because it is now an intentionally anti-journalistic project.
For a long time, the relationship between Twitter and the media was symbiotic. Twitter became the essential forum for breaking news, precisely because of the proliferation of hacks on the platform. Rather than laboriously churning out a 500-word piece, sending it off to editors (then sub-editors), then publishing it and having the news spread, journalists realised that they could quickly stick their flag in a story by just… tweeting the news. And so, it became the fastest way to find out what was going on. Political journalists, in particular, would often surrender their scoops to the timeline Gods, all in service of building a following. Which they did — in huge numbers. And the media ecosystem responded by turning Twitter follower count into an important metric of journalistic success. Your number of followers became an valued factor when pitching stories, not to mention when interviewing for jobs.
Some context. There are basically two sources of traffic to an online publication: Google and social media. And journalism has spent a decade finessing both, turning SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and socials management into major parts of any news organisation. The former consists of trying to fluff Google’s slippery algorithm so that your links come top, or high, when people use obvious search terms (*cough* such as: IS BLUESKY BETTER THAN TWITTER?), while the latter is a game of managing the fickle preferences of different sites, and trying to use them to drive traffic away from them.
And this last bit is the key point to this first half of my piece. Twitter (or X) has decided that it is imperative that it keeps users on its site. It doesn’t want links to news publications, when it is pushing, heavily, a Premium service where you can blog natively. It doesn’t want links to YouTube when it is pushing a Premium service where you can upload videos, again, natively. I suspect that, in the next few months, we will see the integration of more native components — podcasting or audio would be an obvious one, a referrals shop, a la TikTok, would be another — that will turn Twitter into a one-stop shop for all your media needs. Links have been deprioritised in the algorithm, to the point where publications are experimenting with using images, first, to hook readers (the same is true on Facebook). In short, Twitter’s business interests are now entirely at odds with the rest of the publishing industry. And so the continued reliance on it — both as a source of cachet for journalists, and a traffic driver for social media managers — was doomed.
But what’s going to take its crown as the thing that gets political journos out of bed in the morning? The flavour of the month is a site called Bluesky. I first heard about it when a client told me that the publication they work for was having huge success on Bluesky, almost overnight. They felt that users looking for political news and analysis had become sick of the low-grade content on Twitter and were migrating to a platform where the news they wanted was more easily digestible, and the OnlyFans spam more easily filterable. So I signed up, and you can follow me, if you like.
A potted history of Bluesky: Bluesky was founded, back in 2019, as a research project into decentralised social networks, by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. After Elon Musk bought Twitter, it cut ties with the Bluesky project, and Dorsey, ultimately, returned to the site he’d co-founded. It wasn’t until the spring of 2023 that Bluesky became available, originally as an invite-only service, on mobile devices, and not until February 2024 that it became open to everyone. Since then it has grown rapidly and built momentum. In the last week, since the US election, it is said to have gained 1m followers, bringing the total number to around 15m. Small, still, but emerging from its cocoon. (This is a joke, because its logo is a butterfly).
I understand the excitement that journalists who have spent a lot of time and energy on Twitter over the past decade feel at the emergence of Bluesky, which is a dupe of early Twitter functionality. We’ve got our website back, they seem to be saying. The migration, while still incomplete, has been swift; top bods on Twitter are reportedly gaining thousands of followers on Bluesky within days of joining the service. It feels like some of what was lost in the Musk era of X has been regained. And yet, I have a nagging concern that this is simply replacing one problematic forum with another.
The first issue I have pertains to how much sense there ever was in turning social media into an arbiter of journalistic value. I have no problem with people cultivating a personal audience, nor with having a number value assigned to that. But what I saw was a lot of people becoming addicted to the short-form back-and-forth of Twitter. People argued with readers, in a way that was often unedifying. People freelanced opinions, routinely, on areas outside their expertise. People developed strange parasocial relationships with their audience, which often led to difficult and dangerous interactions.
I left Twitter at the start of this year after incurring the wrath of a particular, and very vocal, segment of its user base. I felt, suddenly, like the limited use I got out of the platform was wildly outweighed by the amount it exposed me to abuse and harassment. In years gone by, the journalistic process was roughly: write incendiary article, publish incendiary article, have angry readers write to your editor, have the editor decide whether to bin it or pass it on. Now though, there is a sense that readers are peering in your living room window, maintaining a direct line of communication and willing, often, to try to actually ruin your life. And the only reason that I can see why so many journalists stuck with it is that they are addicted to that tiny dopamine burst of affirmation.
My second concern is that Bluesky just defers the issues that Twitter’s disintegration has raised. Namely, the consequence of outsourcing so much responsibility, in a traffic-obsessed marketplace, to third-party platforms. Bluesky seems good — for now — and seems like it wants to support journalists. But as its user base increases, so too will its costs — and value. The company was founded as a public benefit LLC but took on $8m in seed funding in summer 2023, after which it became a public benefit C corporation. The difference is nuanced, but it shows a willingness to evolve the project from its origins — not to mention the fact it is now accountable to a legion of investors.
It is not unreasonable to suspect that Bluesky might, at some point, reach the same conclusion that Twitter has (and that, to be fair, many other social media platforms have too), that being a native content source is preferable to being a link aggregator. At that point, we’re back at square one. The collapse of industrial trust in Twitter/X ought to be a moment to spark a total reevaluation of the reliance on social media (and Google) for traffic generation. The need for more secure, more independent, routes of travel from audience to broadcaster cannot be underplayed. New products, targeting this relationship, need to be built. Switching from Twitter to Bluesky changes solution, but it doesn’t solve for the original problem.
And so, in all the joyful noise about Bluesky, I feel a bit like a man without lips at a punch party. Being freed (temporarily: I’m sure they’re coming too) from the spambots shilling drop-shipped tat, or videos of drunk women fighting, is a relief. But replacing one addiction — one over-reliance — with another is never sensible. Not sensible from a human well-being perspective, and not sensible from a business one. It feels like we, as an industry, got hooked on a dangerous drug, and are now shooting up on some harmless replacement — the methadone of this process — without really understanding the implications.
Because sometimes it’s better to go cold turkey — or to replace your intravenous opioid habit with something more benign, like crocheting or stamp collecting.
