Maybe, but they’re simultaneously making out like it can’t be fixed without huge concessions to the far right agenda, instead of just…holding the line on basic decency as they fix it.
Tech, policy, politics. Political editor @ The New World, Fellow @ Demos, newsletter @ techtris, writer in various other places. Latest book: The Other Pandemic – How QAnon Contaminated The World. 🏳️🌈 https://www.jamesrball.com/
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Maybe, but they’re simultaneously making out like it can’t be fixed without huge concessions to the far right agenda, instead of just…holding the line on basic decency as they fix it.
Government decisions are led by statistics—on the economy, employment, housing and more. The UK’s statistics are in a mess. There are question marks over key figures, the ONS is underfunded and in crisis…do we even know how things are going any more? www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/busine...
The government knows that, and decided it is worth taking the political hit of paying for asylum seekers to prevent far more people arriving. But that awareness of trade-offs means they can't pretend they don't know what the consequences of banning applications for families will be. It's shameful.
Every choice within the asylum system has consequences, some intended, some not. Sometimes the government makes it clear it knows about these trade-offs: asylum seekers can't work until their claim is assessed, because otherwise more ineligible people would travel and work until they were deported.
Banning refugees – people whose asylum claims have been processed by a hostile system and found to be legitimate – from bringing family members has one predictable and awful effect: instead of travelling alone, men will bring their wives and children on small boats, and some will drown.
You guys see where this is going? Right?
I do realise limiting interactions isn't ideal, but it crossed my QT abuse threshold – I think people like getting fully abusive at people for sport, and I didn't feel like making that easy. I don't mind people calling my takes dogshit, but I prefer it when they're engaging with the actual take.
I am a little pansy, though. The flag's in my bio for a reason.
But is he even wearing union jack boxers right now??? We have a right to know!
it's afternoon here and it's not raining anymore so it's pretty fine tbh
bsky.app/profile/jame...
Yeah, you’re right about that. Users can help but the onus is defo on Bluesky proper.
No I’m not and no I don’t. bsky.app/profile/jame...
Responses to this thread are pretending my argument is "let in the racists and be nice to them". *I don't want that.* Keep them out! I want normies to come here and find it fun. There are 1m daily users here out of 8bn people. Saying "I want more people here" doesn't mean "let racists in" ffs.
Normies, people who want to chat about tv or sports, you might even want to let the odd centre-right person in. The racists and fascists can stay out. But "we've got 800k daily users out of 8bn people, anyone who wants more wants to let in racists" is a dumb argument.
But it did mean that when I saw someone collating a list which was a deliberate effort to shame people still on X, it struck me as the worst possible approach to growing this place. And prompted me to look at the numbers and do that thread. Sorry for the long answer but it’s an honest one.
Having lived through the August of coverage we’ve just had, I can’t say that Bluesky rather than X is driving the UK political agenda. Horrifyingly, it’s the latter. Not sure the fix to that has anything to do with Bluesky
Checking the metrics tbh. As I tried to say (clearly not very well) in today’s thread I want Bluesky to do well *because I like it much more* (usually). But this site doesn’t have a different model that allows it to survive at this size. So it’s grow, die, or find that unicorn model.
Those who wish to leave the ECHR could argue that it’s necessary to do that renegotiation, or claim it would be easy (where have we heard that before), but claiming it doesn’t need to happen is just straightforwardly wrong. You don’t need legal expertise to see or check that for yourself.
You don’t need outside experts to check what Jack Straw and Policy Exchange are claiming here. You can just read the public text of the Good Friday Agreement to see it relies upon ECHR membership. If the UK leaves, the agreement either needs renegotiating, or it’s been breached. It’s that simple.
Muting this thread for good this time. Despite the dumb pile-on: I still like Bluesky. I still think it’s better than the alternatives. I still have more fun posting here than elsewhere. That’s why I want Bluesky to do well. I just won’t pretend it’s doing well when the metrics say otherwise.
One of many reasons I'd like this place to work!
I got caught by my own bad phrasing there. What I was trying to say was Bluesky shows we can have a social network that is nicer/better/more functional than X. But that it needs to grow to work and that’s not happening. Not “bsky should be nicer”. But my phrasing was not at all clear.
The practical case then gets complicated: if the government/ governing party couldn’t move social media discourse largely off X by leaving (and at this stage I don’t think it could), does quitting the field do more damage than staying? I lean no, but I wish they were thinking in those terms at least
I think there is a strong moral case to make that government and official media etc accounts should quit X. I’m just not sure there’s a good case to make for them moving here, tbh.
From a base of about 250-300 million daily users and $5bn a year revenue, though, which is a much nicer starting position… (those are pre-Elon figures)
I suspect government social media managers look at Bluesky and correctly work out what every reply thread would look like, and so don’t do it. Leaving X (which they should do) would probably mean an Insta/Tiktok/Facebook/LinkedIn only approach, which I suspect is sensible at this point?
Turns out nope, most people love it. Especially under 30s. Text is video now, audio is video now, video is…still video I guess but there’s more of it.
Very possible! It's why I didn't initially do it that way and just pointed to the trend – but I thought individual numbers might emphasise the point, and picked "last day of the month" as hard for me to game.
Not entirely unrelated – I would love UK political accounts to get off Twitter. They should do this, even if they don't set up on any alternatives. But it's not that hard to see why many of them won't move here: small, self-selecting, often hostile audience. bsky.app/profile/step...
If I were trying to win elections and arguments, I simply would be doing everything I could to move UK political conversation away from a website run by an avowed enemy who believes and writes this stuff about me:
My take isn't even "let a thousand fascists bloom", it's just saying this site is developing a weird and hostile culture that I suspect is alienating casual and new users. Suspect UX could fix a lot of it, but culture matters too.
No, but the point I am trying to make is that people should care about whether the site is sustainable or not, and it's not sustainable on a tiny and shrinking active userbase. Moderation, feature, etc costs plus hosting are just too high for a network this small to function.
I follow a good chunk of them. Again: I like it here (this thread aside) and want it to work – though it's insane that pointing at the metrics gets you as much "fuck off" abuse as I'm currently getting. But even 'levelling' at 600k daily users would mean the site doesn't last.
I’ve done the opposite! I did a thread about how *I have a good experience on here* and would like the site to do well, but admitting that it isn’t doing well. What I’m getting is a series of messages telling me to “fuck off” and various others saying the same slightly less rudely.
Tell you what, I’ll take that on advisement.
It is a corporate product though, that’s why investors currently pay the bills. But we have good metrics on how many people donate from communities of different sizes, and the Bluesky community is vanishingly unlikely to raise enough cash to cover its costs. It probably wouldn’t come close.
I think you misread the original post…
It’s good for journalism too! One of many reasons I’d like to see this place do well.
*I (mostly) like Bluesky*. I want Bluesky to work. But I refuse to join the angry consensus here that the best thing to do is to angrily insist it works and to shout at everyone who says otherwise. It’s like Bluesky is entirely populated by Biden’s old White House comms team, or something.
Getting a lot of “every month someone says Bluesky is dying lol” responses. Here’s the number of accounts that posted to Bluesky on the last day of every month this year: Jan: 1,060,541 Feb: 1,032,002 March: 861,309 April: 813,441 May: 674,088 June: 695,699 July: 686,058 Aug: 604,333 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I *explicitly* didn’t say that, though. You (and many others) keep responding to arguments I don’t make and ignoring the one I did. I’m not claiming the site is shrinking because of my experience: I’m citing hard data. I said I like this site!
They can barely keep the site afloat. They’re not secretly making billions selling data, even if they’d like to. (No-one makes nearly as much money trading data as people imagine – look at meta revenue. It’s all ads!)
Have you *actually read the thread*? It’s not very long. Because it really, really feels like you haven’t bothered.
Daily active likers being only around 50% higher than posters looks fairly organic to me – I suspect the bot problem here isn’t actually that bad. Not sure there’s an easy fix, but the response to my thread does I think speak to a culture problem (that gets this reaction any time it’s mentioned)
Last time I looked it had slightly more than 100 million daily active users…
Because “staying like this” isn’t sustainable. At the moment investors are paying for it. They won’t pay for a shrinking or stable site. So it needs revenue or growth. And it’s too small to make sustainable revenue.
My whole point is “let’s just have Bluesky stay like this, I like it” isn’t an option. But Bluesky seems determined to make a virtue out of angrily shoving its head into the sand.
It is a corporate asset. Bluesky is a business with investors. And it has costs to pay. Investors cover costs for growing social networks in the hopes of future revenue. It’s not growing. So it either needs revenue or to grow. And it’s too small for revenue.
It doesn’t make any money at all! But it has costs, and they will be significant. So it either needs growth to convince investors to pay those costs, or it needs revenue to cover those costs, and it has neither.
But “like it is today” won’t last. It’s not big enough for either ad revenue or subscription to work. If it’s not growing, investors have no reason to put more money in to fund its costs. “Just stay like this” isn’t actually an option – that’s my whole point.
Yep, but it has a *much* bigger group of people to pass the plate around to!
Hence me doing a thread *with reasoning and metrics* saying that this place I like is in trouble.
I have a feed that’s useful, I get reads and engagement on my articles, sometimes people RT my jokes, all good by me. But I use social media for work, and most people don’t. I also don’t get that bothered by dozens of dodgy replies on stuff, and most people do.
800k posters a day for the free service isn’t big enough to sustain a subscription model, though. We know the rates at which people upgrade to paid and trying it on a service this small would kill it.
I didn’t say it felt unwelcoming to me. I generally do fine here, as me saying that *I like it here* should indicate. But it’s clearly not welcoming to new users, it doesn’t tolerate disagreement, and it seems pleased with itself over both of those things.
It doesn’t have nearly enough users to make either an ads or a subscription model work. That’s not hard to calculate, given active user numbers are public. So…no growth, no monetisation. And there’s no growth.
I have to check it for work reasons and it always seems like such a total cesspit that I really couldn’t face that. But I’m losing hope that bsky finds a way through, and I genuinely think that’s a shame (responses to this thread aside).
Yeah, it doesn’t have the user base to make either model work. And while microblogging isn’t gonna hit the heights it once did, I don’t believe for a second the market cap is a million daily active users.
How am I wrong? Where does the money come from? Because someone is currently paying the bills and if it doesn’t grow they will stop.
I shouldn’t keep taking the bait but the aggressive indifference to having a place that works or lasts, versus just…whatever kick people get from here is maddening. No wonder we’re all so screwed.
As ever when posting about Bluesky on Bluesky, a completely normal and reasonable set of quote responses to the first post in this thread (mostly arguing against takes it doesn’t actually make, of course). What a great place! Can’t imagine why more people aren’t here!
Well, they can’t all be as charming and scintillating as yours, evidently.
In January this year, Bluesky had about 1.6m accounts liking a post each day, and about 800,000 actually posting. That peaked at 2.2m and 1.1m respectively later that month. Today, it’s 1.2m likers and 600,000 posters. That’s a steady loss of 25% (or nearly 50% from peak) in seven months.
Active users trending in the wrong direction alas bsky.jazco.dev/stats
Yep – accounts actively liking posts, accounts actually posting, etc, are all (slowly) decreasing. Fewer than a million accounts a day actively post on here.
All of which is to say: maybe think of things to make it more appealing to come here instead of new ways to shame accounts for wrongthink, if you want Bluesky to survive.
The “we get spikes of new users and then it falls back” argument really doesn’t hold very well any more. It’s been an awfully long time since the last big spike, and there’s no obvious thing to trigger the next one. What could Elon say now that he hasn’t already?
This *could* be a nicer social network. I like it here. But the reality is that not many people do, and the culture here is borderline hostile to new arrivals. “I like it fine how it is” doesn’t work: Bluesky won’t get money to keep operating. Investors don’t put more money into shrinking sites.
Bluesky is shrinking rather than growing. It has no source of revenue. If it doesn’t grow, *it will die*. Constantly making it unwelcoming, saying who you don’t want here, setting rules for what other sites people should and shouldn’t use, and the like, will kill it quicker.
Bit of a snafu for poor playbook, this – the reshuffle kicks off less than three hours after they sent out an email saying it probably wasn’t happening this week 🤦🏻♂️ Covering politics: a nightmare!
I turn on my TV and a TV presenter is asking a Govt minister why they are talking about rolling out free childcare when the big issue is asylum hotels. This is objectively insane.
Okay so I assumed this was bait, to make people spend forever scrolling on their alarm app. IT’S NOT. IT’S REAL. Wtf, Apple.
That’s pretty much exactly it as I understand it, yep
Those who wish to leave the ECHR could argue that it’s necessary to do that renegotiation, or claim it would be easy (where have we heard that before), but claiming it doesn’t need to happen is just straightforwardly wrong. You don’t need legal expertise to see or check that for yourself.
You don’t need outside experts to check what Jack Straw and Policy Exchange are claiming here. You can just read the public text of the Good Friday Agreement to see it relies upon ECHR membership. If the UK leaves, the agreement either needs renegotiating, or it’s been breached. It’s that simple.
If I were the Tory party right now, the last thing I’d be trying to do was draw attention to obvious jostling to succeed a party’s current leader.
At least she’d know what song to walk down the aisle to
Out with the dogwhistles, in with the bullhorns.
1. The child’s clearly actually called “muffin” and someone thought they were being clever with the pseudonyms here 2. Honestly how do parents not remember they are naming a human and not a baby. A teenager will have that name! They might grow up to be an actuary!
I’d say phwoar but I’m pretty sure that’s on the banned list
Wouldn’t mind a slice of that wokery tbf
Richard Tice consistently claims to be standing up for "Christian values", on the basis that "we are a Christian nation". If that's your pitch, you can't just tell the Bishops to shut up when they criticise your policies.
Hadn’t realised quite how bold (and brilliant) Private Eye’s post-Diana front page was – especially given press day was literally the day after the crash.
oh NO
“Bad statistics might mean ministers spend months focusing on the wrong problems, central bankers make the wrong decision on interest rates, or businesses invest badly—but underinvestment in data will never be the stuff of protests in the streets.”
We’re betting the future on “big data” and artificial intelligence reliant on it – but behind the scenes the most basic of statistics about our society are becoming unreliable. My feature for @prospectmagazine.co.uk, online now: www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/busine...
You can’t make a meringue today. Because of yolks.
gb news is right there pal x
Fundamentally anyone who can’t even spell the name of the governing party correctly doesn’t have much business butting in on UK politics.
Tbf the one in that photo seems to be post-decapitation so can’t really blame geronimo for that one
You don’t follow all that many people and we’ve all got used to algorithmic feeds doing discovery for us – if you follow another 100/200 active accounts the whole feed will feel a fair bit livelier…
Yes, though in my defence I made sure to engage here where it will earn no-one anything (yaaaay)
The resurgence in brown bread in the UK was (in part) an accidental side effect of strike by bakers unions in the mid 1970s that forced people to switch from supermarkets to independent bakeries that didn't sell bland loafs and realised that bread can taste interesting. Blame the unions!
This is the one, there’s definitely discourse potential here
What annoys me about this kind of engagement bait is that it’s always so lazy, too. Peak sourdough was about four years ago. Too many people did the sourdough thing in lockdown and put themselves off the stuff for life. It’s hardly difficult to find a loaf of white sliced in the supermarket, is it?
Usually it’s accompanied by saying either the climate isn’t changing, it’s not manmade or it’s exaggerated in order to fuel whichever of those agendas they think is at play…
The cover for a globalist / anti capitalist agenda stuff is the most coherent/cogent, because you can see why people think it – figures like Greta explicitly say capitalism is incompatible with tackling the crisis. And ofc everyone thinks global action/treaties are needed to address it, etc.
There’s all sorts of variations: it’s a cover for an anti capitalist agenda, it’s used to justify mass migration for population control, it’s used so we can’t benefit from oil wealth that would enrich X country vs Y, etc