What's the point of social media?
On Bluesky and content creation.
I recently copped an invite to Bluesky, the semi-decentralized1 social network that’s one of the pretenders to Twitter’s throne. It has an interesting history, having begun its life in 2019 as a Jack Dorsey-era Twitter project. But it really got started a few years later, in 2021, when Jay Graber was hired to lead the initiative and the project was incorporated as a public benefit LLC — separate from Twitter. Bluesky hired its first 3 employees in 2022. And then Elon Musk took over Twitter. Which didn’t really halt anything. Although as Bloomberg reported, the leadership shakeup has made Bluesky’s longterm funding a bit unclear.
All of that said, it’s been pretty fun to play around with so far. It has a centralized global feed — which works right now because there aren’t that many people posting, as to get on the network you need to get an invitation — and things feel snappy and responsive. To me, the user experience feels pretty similar to Twitter2, even with all the differences under the hood3. It has an aliveness to it, though I guess you could say that the early days of any fledgling social network are always a party. But the kegs are full; the bar is stocked. The lights are low, and the people are happy.
There are a few problems, but they’re the kind that can be solved by scale: the party could use more people. Right now, it feels like I only ever see tech/crypto bros and the director James Gunn on the global feed, which is an interesting combination. Even so, Bluesky does feel like the most obvious successor to Twitter in a post-Twitter world.
For me, though, it kinda raises the question of what this is all for. And this seems to be something on the Bluesky posters’ minds, too — I keep seeing people write about how nice it is to not be misunderstood by a ton of bad-faith weirdos every time you post something dumb. They write about how nice it is to be here, away from the toxicity. I think I even saw one person say it feels like healing. It all leaves me wondering: what do we4 even want out of social media anymore? What do I get out of it? This place where I post my dumb thoughts for my friends to see, which are monetized by the sale of my personal data to faceless data brokers.
I saw a TikTok recently where a guy made the argument that social media isn’t actually social anymore — that in actuality, every platform is just a place to create content5. Which is kind of an interesting point about what feels like a larger shift in the social web. I don’t think he’s necessarily wrong, for one thing; a lot of posting on social media largely feels like marketing for brands, personal or otherwise. (For another, it feels like I only ever see personal posts from people I know and like on non-public facing networks.) And I think that’s because the influencers and the idea of virality won — now individuals can effectively monetize attention.
By way of explanation, let me tell you about a podcast idea I was developing a few years ago, around the time Bluesky was still a Twitter product. It started as an offhanded, now-deleted tweet: I wanted to know how people found the time and money to make things online. The idea was pretty simple — I planned to interview creative people and ask how they got by. As in financially, if they weren’t making a full-time living from their audiences. But when I was thinking about potential guests for the show, I realized that there were so many people I could talk to. There were suddenly more content creators than ever.
And now, one set of global pandemic lockdowns later, there are even more. I think the early pandemic occasioned a change in the way a lot of people used the internet; suddenly it was the easiest link to the outside world. People who might not have previously been inclined to influencing started creating content as hobbyists, on TikTok and Twitch and YouTube, and other people at home watched them.
Back in March of 2020, while I was a Twitch and livestreaming reporter at The Verge, I saw that trend in the data:
We are in the early days of something so big that it’s really impossible to conceptualize how it’s going to change the world. Even so, there are some things we can measure now, like Twitch.
According to the streaming software company StreamElements — which conducts regular surveys of the streaming landscape with its analytics partner Arsenal.gg — viewership on Twitch is up. By a lot. Over the last week, it’s increased by a full 10 percent. As StreamElements CEO Doron Nir wrote in an email, that reflects “the popularity of the livestreaming medium now that people are consuming higher volumes of entertainment at home.” Translation: because we all have to stay inside now to flatten the coronavirus’s infection curve, everyone is watching streams. Nir writes that he expects those numbers to increase with the number of stay-at-home mandates issued by governments around the world.
This was just after the lockdowns in the U.S. started. And Nir turned out to be right: viewership numbers just kept going up. I think the number of content creators did too.
I think that changed relation to content creation and consumption also changed a lot of people’s relationship to social media. The lockdowns have largely ended, but the content creators remain. And to be a content creator, you have to influence people to consume your content6. Which is why social media can largely feel like an endless sea of ads and self-promotion. It doesn't help that this is a good thing from the platform point of view: if they offer monetization, they get a cut of every parasocial relationship. What I'm trying to say is that social media feels professionalized. It’s not just for making friends or keeping up with people.
Which, to bring things back to Bluesky, is why that particular platform feels alive. At least right now. It’s decidedly unprofessional. Aside from James Gunn, who’s currently promoting the new Flash movie on there. As more people join, though, I’m curious how the site will change. It’s just another avenue for promotion, right?
Anyway. This is all just a theory. But I can tell you that I’ve felt my relationship to social media change dramatically over the last 3 years. Obviously I use it to promote the things I spend more time on; I am a part of the problem I have just identified. But to me the move to professionalize social media — to turn it solely into a marketing channel — is also one that says you have a healthy relationship to the platform you’re posting on. It says your priorities are elsewhere, with your more involved efforts. I’d rather be judged by my podcast episodes than my shitposts.
It’s all a mess. I’ve been thinking pretty hard about what I want out of this upcoming phase of the internet. I think social media is dead, at least in its original incarnation. What’s next is an open question — one that I hope I can find a good answer for. I hope you find one too.
With love,
Bijan
It’s built on an open protocol, but it’s still pretty early days — we’ll see how the network shapes up.
Yes, it has quote-posts.
Before Musk bought Twitter, the idea was to move it to this same decentralized platform for interoperability, etc.
And yes, being misunderstood by bad-faith weirdos is them creating content for other bad-faith weirdos.