In a delightful sequel to yesterday’s notes on the Democrats’ purity spiral, Fortune Magazine delivered this absolute gem of a headline:
Whoops! Who could have seen this coming? According to Fortune, BlueSky “became somewhat of a safe haven for liberal users who wanted to drown out the noise of President Trump’s reelection.” Between November, 2024, and this May, Bluesky ballooned from about 10 million to 30 million users.
They prematurely celebrated.
Far-left tech billionaire Mark Cuban, a fast-talker who owns the Dallas Mavericks and used to be on Shark Tank, was one of the most prominent BlueSky refugees, landing there with great fanfare earlier this year. Cuban’s tumescent initial post crowed, “Hello Less Hateful World.”
But this week, not even six months later, the lead has dribbled out of Cuban’s pencil. He described the exact purity spiral dynamic I broke down yesterday. “Engagement went from great convos on many topics, to agree with me or you are a nazi fascist,” Cuban wrote. “We are forcing posts to X.”
The progressives can’t even stand each other. Cuban added that he thinks Bluesky users have “grown ruder and more hateful.”
It was the very phenomenon yesterday’s post described. Cuban complained, “Even if you agree with 95% of what a person is saying on a topic, if there is one point that you might call out as being more of a gray area, they will call you a fascist etc.”
He’s not alone. The progressive billionaire cited a grim WaPo editorial from last Sunday headlined, “The Bluesky bubble hurts liberals and their causes.” The author’s outlook appeared hopeless. In the sub-header, she bleakly noted that, “The new social media network was doomed to fail as users tried to re-create Twitter.”
Editorial author Megan McArdle, in turn, cited a recent PEW survey that described an increasingly limp platform. “A recent Pew Research Center analysis found that many news influencers have Bluesky accounts (I’m one of them) but that, like me, two-thirds post irregularly. By contrast, more than 80 percent still post to X on most days.”
It’s getting worse. “Engagement on Bluesky appears to have peaked in mid-November,” McArdle reported. “It’s now down about 50 percent, and the decline shows no sign of leveling out.”
One of McArdle’s most accidentally insightful points was that, until Musk bought Twitter, liberals enjoyed free rein there, but mostly thanks to thought policing. “Progressives had the sympathy of Twitter’s professional-class employees,” she explained, “who proved increasingly susceptible to liberals’ demands for tighter moderation policies on things such as using male pronouns to refer to a transgender woman.”
Ah, the bad old days. Remember them? Back when you could get your Twitter account canceled for using wrong pronouns? Beyond the moderator madness, can you remember cancel culture?
“Progressive Twitter mobs also policed the discourse themselves,” Megan added, “securing high-profile firings that made many people afraid to cross them.” As we discussed yesterday, old Twitter’s enforced groupthink “created the illusion that progressive ideas were more popular than they actually were.” And that was really the whole point of the senseless exercise, wasn’t it? Faux consensus.
BlueSky, lacking local conservatives to target, is tearing itself apart, more viciously than an illegal dog-fighting ring. “The result,” McArdle pointed out, “is something of an echo chamber where it’s hard to get positive engagement unless you’re saying things progressives want to hear — and where the negative engagement on things they don’t want to hear can be intense.” How intense? Check out this bon mot: “The nasty fringe has become even nastier: left-wing trolls keep urging people who disagree with them to commit suicide.”
Yikes. We thought Twitter trolls were tough. At least self-cancelation isn’t a regular suggestion on X.
McArdle concluded by musing that what BlueSky liberals really need is more conservatives. “Without the leavening influence of their opponents,” she charitably speculated, “Bluesky discourse appears even more censorious and doctrinaire than what progressives were saying on old Twitter.”
Or, like trained fighting dogs, it’s just that progressives are always in attack mode. If they can’t find a conservative to pick on, they’ll happily battle each other. You decide. Either way.
As former DNC vice-chair David Hogg can attest, we’re watching a cage match of late-stage progressivism, where leftists commit ritualistic cannibalism, each round of revolutionary beheadings fueling the next, even bigger bloodletting. I encourage them to stay on BlueSky since, as more deranged nonsense gets posted over there, Twitter gets healthier.
Think of far-left BlueSky as a toxic intellectual landfill. My idea is to slap a concrete containment dome over it before it spreads back to X. Your own suggestions are welcome in the comments.
The left is composed of an assortment of far left, radical interest groups. When facing an opponent like Trump, they can all join together and vote AGAINST him but getting them to join together and SUPPORT something is another story. Their interests too often either contradict or compete with each other. They are like those fighting fish; you can’t have two of them together in the same bowl.
Good. Let them tear at each other. They are like Nazis and Communists fighting; they are both authoritarian socialist oppressors, but in their world, there can only be ONE.
Bluesky uses AI to almost instantly block any user who strays from the Communist Party Line. You don’t have to post any sort of threat, or use bad language. Just disagree with Totalitarian Socialist ideology in some way, and out you go.
The tendencies of Leftists is to “eat their own.”
If you disagree with a Lefty on ANY point, they turn on you like you are a rabid person just for thinking on your own.
No wonder we hit a nerve with Lefties when we talk about their desire to “keep blacks on the Plantation,” etc.
The chicago “class of ’68” (EXTREMELY PROUD of Brookings 1960, Engels 1962,JFK/RFK/MLK/MX, and a Nixon and a Reagan ON the side), aren’t in charge anymore?
WOW!!!!
“The More You Know” (tri-tone programming sound)
Tolkien described the left when he described Orcs. Also moslems can be limped by his description of the Orc’s behavior.
Limned, not limped.
The Bluesky is growing Darker and Darker each day