Balk didn't elaborate much, but the general reason is that "everyone" includes a lot of loud-mouthed idiots.
Like many other hosts of "user-generated content", Twitter was at its mostly-harmless best early on. When I joined in 2007, it was almost unknown outside of Greater Silicon Valley (i.e., the subculture centered on Silicon Valley, which at the time I felt a professional obligation to pay attention to). For awhile, I found it mildly entertaining and occasionally useful, although I always thought the character limit was ridiculous and encouraged thinking in soundbites. By 2012, however, it had become infested with bots and trolls, so I stopped bothering with it. Of course, it went on to become the far more putrid cesspool it is now.
I think John Herrman captured much of the spirit of what might be called middle-period Twitter - after the early innocence but before the current Elonshittification - when he wrote (at *The Awl*), "Who tweets? Brands, and people who believe themselves to be brands." I'm stubbornly resistant to becoming a brand; I loathe the concept, and I've managed to get along fine without it. So I don't miss Twitter, even the relatively benign Twitter of 15 years ago (although I realize it was useful to journalists).
As for the "AI enhancement" nonsense, you can blame *Blade Runner* and a multitude of idiots who don't understand the difference between reality and fiction.
Well, damnit, someone has to say this. Maybe the kid in custody actually shot Charlie Kirk. But given the immediate, intense reaction of the right, I have to ask not only whether someone not trained as a sniper could kill someone in one shot from that distance but the critical question, Who Benefits? Trump's sending the national guard and a hugely beefed-up ICE into just cities with black mayors and Dem governors of the states, saying things like "Chicago will find out why we call it the Department of WAR!!", his whole contingent constantly engaging in violent rhetoric while accusing the virtually nonexistent left of being violent--these people are clearly aching for a civil war. Why, I'm not sure, but the fact that the right is enormously better armed and more aggressive than the left--or rather, the Democrats, who they confuse with the left--means they can expect to "win"--whatever that means. I guess a lot of what it means is that Trump has his excuse to declare yet another state of emergency and cancel the midterms, use the army and his ICE militia to control dissidents in otherwise clearly unconstitutional ways.
So maybe they're seizing on that kid actually having killed Kirk, maybe that came as a surprise they were ready to instantly leap upon to further their agenda...or maybe it was a CIA or Mossad sniper, sent in to take out one of a dime-a-dozen rightwing trolls so they could roll out this reaction and use it to justify an intense, violent crackdown.
Why do you add the vanity caps on the "S" in Bluesky? I'm developing my own personal theory of why people do that (Gen X behavior) but it's not present in the actual branding and never has been.
Ha I'm not Gen X — the answer here is that it's a Substack CMS editor issue that I trusted too much; Bluesky gets the red dots underneath while BlueSky does not. Thanks for flagging though barely realized I did that
Fairview Alberta is the hometown of the Quack and Charlatan Jordan "River OF Shit " Peterson. as YOU DRIVE FROM Peace River Alberta TO Fairview Alberta you pass BLUESKY ALBERTA>
The water tower says BLUESKY in all capitals and I thought it was pronounced Blueski and a Polish immigrant town not blue sky but Jordan is still River of Shit Peterson and Charlie Kirk was always a National Socialist and I was born a God Damn Jew almost 80 years ago in Montreal where my mother was born a second class God damned Jew over a century ago and my father was born in a town near CAmp Auschwitz near Krakow like the senile old pope still living in the Vatican.
Chrystia Freeland grew up in Peace River Alberta and she is Canada's Minister of Transportation. She wrote Plutocrats: The Rise of the Global Super Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else and Sale of the Century. Sale is about How the west sold out Russia's democracy to the World's oligarchs and Chrystia's uncle wrote Canada's Charter of Human RIGHTS because America committed suicide in 2024 in November and St John's Newfoundland not New Pork New York is our gateway to London , Dublin and Paris and Churchill, Manitoba is the closest North American port to Taipei, Tokyo and Hong Kong and it is closer to Minneapolis than it is to Seattle or Los Angeles. The Prime Minister of Manitoba Wab Kinew is a democratic socialist and a rap star
At least now those of us attempting to build genuine people power will not confuse social media engagement with relationships of trust and cooperation.
The irony of all these talking heads calling for lol "war" is that much like the ones who perpetuate the conditions necessary for traditional ways, they will be safe begins desks and keyboards if/when things pop off.
I am an old man and remembering my High School English literature that I studied in Cote des Neige where Kamala Harris attended the same English Protestant Schools as Leonard Cohen and Moe of Montreal.
Paradise Lost was a reflection on the English Civil War led by Oliver Cromwell who began by slaughtering Roman Catholics in Scotland and Ireland. Milton was Cromwell's secretary not his friend just as James Boswell the lowly Scot was secretary to the great English supremacist and conservative Samuel Johnson who wrote the DICTIONARY used in 1775 and 1789 to create the greatest most powerful Empire the world had ever known.
Paradise Lost was about the battle between good and evil and Milton was a Unitarian not a Christian. Satan and Jesus were two sides of a single coin and a flip of the coin says to Christians Jesus always wins and his twin brother Satan always loses. Amazingly in 2024 Satan won and America embraced Satan as their Messiah and Kirk was one of Hell's Angels. Paradise Regained was bathetic farce.
I know the Doyon of Chabad. He has asked me on many occasions to study Kabbalah with him. I love Kabbalah. My father loved Kabbalah and my great grandfather's great-grandfather loved Kabbalah. In August of 2024 Chabad held its annual Golf Tournament at Trump's Doral Country Club and despite the all day rains the golf was terrific and Satan's choice now rules south of my border.
Charlie Kirk was an angel and Kabbalah says angels only follow orders they have never eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and are forever committed to eternities of following The Laws of the father of Jesus and Satan. Jesus believed in love and Satan believed in pain and suffering and blood and war and pestilence just like Charlie Kirk and America's executive, congressional majorities, and America's Supreme Court's Tomas de Torquemada.
In Quebec we had a revolution led by Rene Levesque who served in Roosevelt's European Command and covered the liberation of Dachau as a journalist enlisted in Roosevelt's Army. Pierre Eliot Trudeau was also a journalist and covered a war and covered Mao's liberation of China. Montreal's Jews still favoured Trudeau over Levesque because we Jews are fucking ignorant and insane regardless of outside opinion. Captain Kirk to his forever shame is one of us and his second in command was a Bostonian Red Sea Pedestrian.
Kinky Friedman was a patriot, poet, philosopher, philanthropist, humanitarian and a polymath and left us with this song from 1970. The Ballad of Charles Joseph Whitman and it asks the eternal QUESTION: "Who are we to say the boy's insane." Whitman was a Marine and Eagle scout and an A student.
I don't whether Charlie Kirk or Tyler Robinson are crazy. Insane is not knowing the difference between right and wrong. Maybe they are just God's Angels. Tennyson was forced to write "Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do and die" after the suicide charge of the light Brigade at the battle of Balaclava in Crimea as the Russians were already retreating back to Russia. The light brigade was England's best and brightest from the Playing Fields at Eton College where Thomas Gray wrote "Where ignorance is bliss t'is folly to be wise."
Memphis is America's busiest airport Hartsfield Atlanta and O'Hare Chicago handle people but Memphis handles cargo and cargo has value and citizens are shit in the land where its only the economy Stupid in neoliberal and neoconservative circles.
I've lost interest being on X, Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, all of it. Started using the time tracking features on my phone, and the amount of time lost to this junk is just staggering. No wonder everyone is anxious, angry, and disconnected.
Lately I keep thinking how unfortunate it is that the discussion of the vice/virtue of social media got tangled up with the discourse of "right" vs. "left". For years, the social media (Facebook, Twitter) were coded as "left-wing". So, for far too long the "left" was in denial about their inherent toxicity, and fell prey to algorithms that (among other things) toxified "left-wing" discourses ("cancel culture", etc.) and thus discredited left-wing positions.By the time some people on the "left" finally started facing up to the problem, Musk's takeover of Twitter shifted the focus - now the issue was framed more as being Twitter's right-wing shift, rather than its fundamental toxicity. So the exodus to Bluesky ended up being perceived mainly as "lefties switching to a left-friendly platform". Seems like a huge missed opportunity to send the message that it's not about "right-wing" platforms vs. "left-wing" platforms, it's about creating platforms that are good for everyone because they don't polarize and manipulate.
Living in Germany, I'm really glad to see people here finally talking about the need to develop better social media - but it seems like the German discussion is falling into the same trap, focusing too much on the "right-wing shift" in social media rather than the fact that for-profit social media inherently sucks. Ok, maybe you need to do that to win over Twitter-addicted lefties, but that framing glosses over the underlying problems, and alienates average people who can write off the whole discussion as toxic partisan sniping.
(To be clear: I'm not trying to relativize right-wing fascism or equate it with lefty cancel culture. I'm just saying that, to reach the mainstream with these issues, we urgently need to find modes that move beyond right-left framings.)
I'm not even American but this civil war type hatred between X/twitter and BlueSky, majority on both most probably being American, seems really quite weird to me...
Twitter indeed never was a "global town square", but even if it had been, I agree with 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)
Balk didn't elaborate much, but the general reason is that "everyone" includes a lot of loud-mouthed idiots.
Like many other hosts of "user-generated content", Twitter was at its mostly-harmless best early on. When I joined in 2007, it was almost unknown outside of Greater Silicon Valley (i.e., the subculture centered on Silicon Valley, which at the time I felt a professional obligation to pay attention to). For awhile, I found it mildly entertaining and occasionally useful, although I always thought the character limit was ridiculous and encouraged thinking in soundbites. By 2012, however, it had become infested with bots and trolls, so I stopped bothering with it. Of course, it went on to become the far more putrid cesspool it is now.
I think John Herrman captured much of the spirit of what might be called middle-period Twitter - after the early innocence but before the current Elonshittification - when he wrote (at *The Awl*), "Who tweets? Brands, and people who believe themselves to be brands." I'm stubbornly resistant to becoming a brand; I loathe the concept, and I've managed to get along fine without it. So I don't miss Twitter, even the relatively benign Twitter of 15 years ago (although I realize it was useful to journalists).
As for the "AI enhancement" nonsense, you can blame *Blade Runner* and a multitude of idiots who don't understand the difference between reality and fiction.
Well, damnit, someone has to say this. Maybe the kid in custody actually shot Charlie Kirk. But given the immediate, intense reaction of the right, I have to ask not only whether someone not trained as a sniper could kill someone in one shot from that distance but the critical question, Who Benefits? Trump's sending the national guard and a hugely beefed-up ICE into just cities with black mayors and Dem governors of the states, saying things like "Chicago will find out why we call it the Department of WAR!!", his whole contingent constantly engaging in violent rhetoric while accusing the virtually nonexistent left of being violent--these people are clearly aching for a civil war. Why, I'm not sure, but the fact that the right is enormously better armed and more aggressive than the left--or rather, the Democrats, who they confuse with the left--means they can expect to "win"--whatever that means. I guess a lot of what it means is that Trump has his excuse to declare yet another state of emergency and cancel the midterms, use the army and his ICE militia to control dissidents in otherwise clearly unconstitutional ways.
So maybe they're seizing on that kid actually having killed Kirk, maybe that came as a surprise they were ready to instantly leap upon to further their agenda...or maybe it was a CIA or Mossad sniper, sent in to take out one of a dime-a-dozen rightwing trolls so they could roll out this reaction and use it to justify an intense, violent crackdown.
Why do you add the vanity caps on the "S" in Bluesky? I'm developing my own personal theory of why people do that (Gen X behavior) but it's not present in the actual branding and never has been.
Ha I'm not Gen X — the answer here is that it's a Substack CMS editor issue that I trusted too much; Bluesky gets the red dots underneath while BlueSky does not. Thanks for flagging though barely realized I did that
Thank you Sam,
Fairview Alberta is the hometown of the Quack and Charlatan Jordan "River OF Shit " Peterson. as YOU DRIVE FROM Peace River Alberta TO Fairview Alberta you pass BLUESKY ALBERTA>
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Peace_River,_Alberta
https://mapcarta.com/24154642
The water tower says BLUESKY in all capitals and I thought it was pronounced Blueski and a Polish immigrant town not blue sky but Jordan is still River of Shit Peterson and Charlie Kirk was always a National Socialist and I was born a God Damn Jew almost 80 years ago in Montreal where my mother was born a second class God damned Jew over a century ago and my father was born in a town near CAmp Auschwitz near Krakow like the senile old pope still living in the Vatican.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svPDzNO6GQk&list=RDsvPDzNO6GQk&start_radio=1
Chrystia Freeland grew up in Peace River Alberta and she is Canada's Minister of Transportation. She wrote Plutocrats: The Rise of the Global Super Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else and Sale of the Century. Sale is about How the west sold out Russia's democracy to the World's oligarchs and Chrystia's uncle wrote Canada's Charter of Human RIGHTS because America committed suicide in 2024 in November and St John's Newfoundland not New Pork New York is our gateway to London , Dublin and Paris and Churchill, Manitoba is the closest North American port to Taipei, Tokyo and Hong Kong and it is closer to Minneapolis than it is to Seattle or Los Angeles. The Prime Minister of Manitoba Wab Kinew is a democratic socialist and a rap star
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/headline-kinew-optimistic-port-churchill-011346352.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuYmluZy5jb20v&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAJHTXNrWzlfam47MpBA1AAZZQkHljgTEdWzru0WaLe5xM-BoE41LzumugNheVlA3kWz8l961bLso-6CExsBXy1Lm9yezb7DlowUO7dcrUqmLQaWAZLps3Rvfe-UWNqh3ZttrJMEA3uU7wPSu7sgo9pv_vF0T40_XDwwY8ZDtzSlJ
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/wab-kinew
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/chrystia-freeland
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/f/freeland-sale.html
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15797932-plutocrats
At least now those of us attempting to build genuine people power will not confuse social media engagement with relationships of trust and cooperation.
The irony of all these talking heads calling for lol "war" is that much like the ones who perpetuate the conditions necessary for traditional ways, they will be safe begins desks and keyboards if/when things pop off.
This was extremely thoughtful and well written.
Thank you. More like this, please.
We need as much insightful cultural commentary as we can get.
I am an old man and remembering my High School English literature that I studied in Cote des Neige where Kamala Harris attended the same English Protestant Schools as Leonard Cohen and Moe of Montreal.
https://westmount.emsb.qc.ca/whs
Paradise Lost was a reflection on the English Civil War led by Oliver Cromwell who began by slaughtering Roman Catholics in Scotland and Ireland. Milton was Cromwell's secretary not his friend just as James Boswell the lowly Scot was secretary to the great English supremacist and conservative Samuel Johnson who wrote the DICTIONARY used in 1775 and 1789 to create the greatest most powerful Empire the world had ever known.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/James-Boswell
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Samuel-Johnson
Paradise Lost was about the battle between good and evil and Milton was a Unitarian not a Christian. Satan and Jesus were two sides of a single coin and a flip of the coin says to Christians Jesus always wins and his twin brother Satan always loses. Amazingly in 2024 Satan won and America embraced Satan as their Messiah and Kirk was one of Hell's Angels. Paradise Regained was bathetic farce.
I know the Doyon of Chabad. He has asked me on many occasions to study Kabbalah with him. I love Kabbalah. My father loved Kabbalah and my great grandfather's great-grandfather loved Kabbalah. In August of 2024 Chabad held its annual Golf Tournament at Trump's Doral Country Club and despite the all day rains the golf was terrific and Satan's choice now rules south of my border.
Charlie Kirk was an angel and Kabbalah says angels only follow orders they have never eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and are forever committed to eternities of following The Laws of the father of Jesus and Satan. Jesus believed in love and Satan believed in pain and suffering and blood and war and pestilence just like Charlie Kirk and America's executive, congressional majorities, and America's Supreme Court's Tomas de Torquemada.
In Quebec we had a revolution led by Rene Levesque who served in Roosevelt's European Command and covered the liberation of Dachau as a journalist enlisted in Roosevelt's Army. Pierre Eliot Trudeau was also a journalist and covered a war and covered Mao's liberation of China. Montreal's Jews still favoured Trudeau over Levesque because we Jews are fucking ignorant and insane regardless of outside opinion. Captain Kirk to his forever shame is one of us and his second in command was a Bostonian Red Sea Pedestrian.
Kinky Friedman was a patriot, poet, philosopher, philanthropist, humanitarian and a polymath and left us with this song from 1970. The Ballad of Charles Joseph Whitman and it asks the eternal QUESTION: "Who are we to say the boy's insane." Whitman was a Marine and Eagle scout and an A student.
I don't whether Charlie Kirk or Tyler Robinson are crazy. Insane is not knowing the difference between right and wrong. Maybe they are just God's Angels. Tennyson was forced to write "Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do and die" after the suicide charge of the light Brigade at the battle of Balaclava in Crimea as the Russians were already retreating back to Russia. The light brigade was England's best and brightest from the Playing Fields at Eton College where Thomas Gray wrote "Where ignorance is bliss t'is folly to be wise."
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44301/ode-on-a-distant-prospect-of-eton-college
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45319/the-charge-of-the-light-brigade
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU-UI4lHjds&list=RDMMwU-UI4lHjds&start_radio=1
Memphis is America's busiest airport Hartsfield Atlanta and O'Hare Chicago handle people but Memphis handles cargo and cargo has value and citizens are shit in the land where its only the economy Stupid in neoliberal and neoconservative circles.
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Neoliberalism
https://www.britannica.com/topic/neoconservatism
I've lost interest being on X, Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, all of it. Started using the time tracking features on my phone, and the amount of time lost to this junk is just staggering. No wonder everyone is anxious, angry, and disconnected.
Lately I keep thinking how unfortunate it is that the discussion of the vice/virtue of social media got tangled up with the discourse of "right" vs. "left". For years, the social media (Facebook, Twitter) were coded as "left-wing". So, for far too long the "left" was in denial about their inherent toxicity, and fell prey to algorithms that (among other things) toxified "left-wing" discourses ("cancel culture", etc.) and thus discredited left-wing positions.By the time some people on the "left" finally started facing up to the problem, Musk's takeover of Twitter shifted the focus - now the issue was framed more as being Twitter's right-wing shift, rather than its fundamental toxicity. So the exodus to Bluesky ended up being perceived mainly as "lefties switching to a left-friendly platform". Seems like a huge missed opportunity to send the message that it's not about "right-wing" platforms vs. "left-wing" platforms, it's about creating platforms that are good for everyone because they don't polarize and manipulate.
Living in Germany, I'm really glad to see people here finally talking about the need to develop better social media - but it seems like the German discussion is falling into the same trap, focusing too much on the "right-wing shift" in social media rather than the fact that for-profit social media inherently sucks. Ok, maybe you need to do that to win over Twitter-addicted lefties, but that framing glosses over the underlying problems, and alienates average people who can write off the whole discussion as toxic partisan sniping.
(To be clear: I'm not trying to relativize right-wing fascism or equate it with lefty cancel culture. I'm just saying that, to reach the mainstream with these issues, we urgently need to find modes that move beyond right-left framings.)
I'm not even American but this civil war type hatred between X/twitter and BlueSky, majority on both most probably being American, seems really quite weird to me...
Maybe this helps:
https://open.substack.com/pub/noahpinion/p/the-bluesky-ization-of-the-american