The Post-Election Social Media Wars
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Just a quick heads up, but there is a little bit of swearing in this episode. Okay, here's the show.

Do you know how long you've .

been on the sky? Well, I joined pretty early on during the invite phase because a colleague of mine invited me on. So I would say probably about a year and a half, which is like almost as long as one can have been on blue sky at this point, I think what about you .

lazy um I joined in the invite phase, although I haven't really use IT. When I when I look at my profile, I had one post from twenty twenty three. And then like a year plus gap until very recently.

that is very common.

That is willow remiss, a technology writer for the washington post and friend of the show. He's been having a pretty good time on blue sky.

IT reminds me a lot of an earlier era of twitter, and i'm definitely the first person to say that the default feed is chronic glo. It's just like all the posts from all the people you follow in order, which is a rare these days. I also, when I started IT was sort of like the small community, like you felt like you were a part of something for a while and now that changing as IT grows.

But like one of the cool things about a for a while was your bosses weren't on IT for the most part, felt like you you feel you are talking to friends. And if I was a of more casual, IT is growing into something different now. But IT still retains a lot of a lot of old school charm.

Yeah feels a little bit, I would say, in the past week, like i've walked back into some party with a bunch of old friends.

Yeah right. So you want into that party. When is when IT was just your friends a year, a year and a half ago and then you laugh and then you came back and now your old friends are there. But it's also like grown right, like there's all these other rooms because IT has been completely booming in terms of in terms of the user are base.

In the weeks since the election, blues guy has seen its users nearly double, going from thirty million people in october to at least twenty two million at the time of this recording. But that kind of growth has come with some pains. Blue guys COO says its twenty percent team is in firefighting mode, racing to get more servers to keep up with the demand and meanwhile, its competitors, both x and threads, have noticed its success. And you're contemplating some big moves to take IT down today on the show, loose skies become the poster child for post election posting, but is IT all blue guys ahead with the social media upstart? I was your lary, and you're listening to what makes TBD show about technology, power and how the future will be determined stick around.

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Discover will automatically double all the cash back you've earned on your credit card at the end of your first year with cash back match so you could get some money for this holiday season and get more next holiday season. IT pays to discover see terms at discover dotcom flash credit card since elan musk bought ex, and especially since he remained as a proxy for the trump campaign. There's been a lot of talk about users fleeing the platform. Perhaps that's not surprising thing since a lot of mosques policy changes alienated more progressive users. But the truth is it's very hard to know exactly how the user basis changed.

Twitter was a public company and as such, IT had to report quarterly earnings. IT had to use certain standard metrics around growth and and engagement. And such IT doesn't have to do anymore. It's a private company. And so all we really have to go on our occasional pronouncements from elon mask and his CEO Linda arena about how great things are going and then occasional studies by these third party and optics firms that don't really have access to all the data that are taking guesses, most of which I think, taken together, my general impression is that x has pretty much play hold since muss has taken over in terms of users. IT has certainly fAllen off in terms of advertisers, and IT may have also fAllen off in terms of users is just really hard to say.

A lot has been made of this right word shift on x and people sort of fleeing the platform. And I think one of the things that I want to try to on pack a little bit is whether there is any way to tangibly understand or quantify what effect that has had on x, what effect that has had on the voices that are on there or if really we're just looking at an ecs and guessing because it's not a public company.

So there actually have been some studies of what the effects have been of mosques, changes on acts. And one of them was research done by my colleagues at the post as they wrote a story, the headliners on elon musk x republicans go viral as democrats disappear. That maybe would seem to overstate things. I think the democrat who are disappearing or like the ones deactivating their accounts, but the ones who are staying, are getting less and less reach relative to conservative public figures. So if you look at tweet on x that get more than twenty million views according to xi, dubious public view count measures, the number of republicans who get those viral tweet on x has gone steadily up um per corner so from five to nine to twenty nine while democrats has gone down from eight and three and and six so republicans are are getting more viral tweet on x um the White house uh under so center one must took over x the White house its views have gone steadily down of the biden White house of course I wouldn't be surprised to seek you know trump s sweet house numbers go up and it's just in general IT IT is becoming a conservation leaning platform is in many ways what .

has elan said about this publicly?

He says that he wants IT to be a platform for everyone and that, you know free speech means free speech. Even for his critics, those claims are sometimes undermined by his actions.

Um like literally blocking some of these critics um he had said when he took over x that you know that even even my worst critics should be able to be on here and even that account I hate the tracks my private jet around can stay and then a few weeks later he change that really like actually they can't stay. And not only that, but everybody who retweets them is getting kicked off as well. So he pays some lip service to sort of free speech for both sides. Certainly he would love for everyone to be on x, but his actions have made pretty clear that one side is more welcome than the other.

One way to track how many users x is losing is to look at the gains of the other major text to base social platforms. Take lue. Guy IT was cofounded by jack dorsey in twenty nineteen, and the premise was a decentralized twitter alternative. IT started doesn't invite only platform and gained popularity with people who were extremely online and disenchanted with elon musk. Now blue guys, run by engineer jake grabber, who helped build the platform and is majority owned by its employees.

Blue sky has grown by, I think, about fifty percent, which is staggering. This is that a is not an old platform person around for it's been public for nine months. It's spent around for a year and nine months.

Give her take. And more than a third of its users today have joined just in the past three weeks. So that's been a tremendous bump.

Um and you can also look at some matrix that give us a hint of what's happening on eggs. So I talk to fox on this analogs from similar web. They track the website that people go to when they are deactivating their x account on the web.

They see how many hits that website gets that hit. That website got its record high hits on the day after the presidential election. So one hundred seventy one thousand people visited the site that you only get bumped to when you try to deactivate your ex account on the web. And again, that's not counting people who deactivate on mobile. So in a single day, they lost yeah maybe a quarter of a million users or yeah.

I wanted to sort of digg into that little bit because sky has had what to eight million downloads. I think over the past weekend, about twenty two million users. Those numbers are small compared to x or threads.

But IT has this buzz. Ss, and I wonder, like how you would describe what makes IT unique, what what makes IT, uh, I don't know, feel like get sort of momentarily in the site. Gst.

yeah, that's a great question. So right at the time, that blue sky was getting all this press for adding like a million users a day after the election threads came out in the only, hey, we added an entire blue guy's worth of users in the past month. So come on, like give us some credit.

We're still out. We're not only way bigger, like ten times the size in terms of registered users more than ten times, but we're also growing faster. But then everybody d's like, well, why does that feel like everyone's on blue sky? Then, you know, why does threads can feel empty? And I think there's a couple explanations for that.

One of them is that there is a certain emptiness. Ss, to the metrics on threats because if you've ever used instagram, as many people have, you get served some threads post right in instagram and that kind of encourages you. You could end up on threads without even meaning to yeah while scaling through instagram.

And so boom is an user, but are they ever gonna? They use IT on purpose? Are they ever going to use IT again? Are they actually going to post anything on there? Who knows? Is right whether when somebody takes the trouble to sign up for a blue sky IT, you know what was on purpose? And they usually tend to stick, stick around and try IT out for a while. So I think I have a suspicion that a lot of those blue sky users are much more active than a lot of the threads.

Users are active posting about things like the election, something ma deliberately chose not to emphasise.

One of the reasons I think blue guy has had the momentum sense the election is that meta made this decision a quite a while ago to downplay hard news and politics across all its platforms because I just didn't not like getting you had all the time and hold into congress and you know threatened and and blamed by the left from this information and blamed by the right for censorship. So like we're just gna be a place to connect with your friends.

But the thing is, during the twenty twenty four, like a lot of people wanted to be talking about politics, that was a really important thing. And to the idea, even though the actual mechanisms by which met a suppresses political posts don't, in my experience, don't work all that well, just the idea that they don't want to be a place for politics. They also have really blunt moderation algorithms that I take down your posts, if you say the wrong thing, just turned off a lot of people.

And then mark zuker berg was part of this chorus of tex CEO, billionaire tex CEO, including the owner of of my company, jeff fios disclosure, who were really congratulatory toward trump. And he said a lot of positive things about trump. And so if you we're leaving eggs because you are upset about musk being so for trump, all the sudden thread started to look like a less appealing alternative.

And all of wishes to say that the people going to blue sky are people who are highly engaged, their interested in news, in politics. A lot of media types are going there because blue guy doesn't throat links out to your out to your website. And so you just get a crowd on there that, that tends to generate boz. And I think that's part of why I feel so busy.

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One of the things that I find interesting is that blue sky has kind of double down on content moderation in some ways. They had all these users come to the platform and the company told casey newton nova platform, they have quite grouped their content moderation team. And there was A A personal blue guy even posting saying, look, we might even overdo IT on some of the content moderation right now, but we'd rather do that then only do IT.

That is a very different place from a policy perspective. Then the other social platforms are at right now. They seem to be going the other way.

yes. And I don't want to give blue guy too much credit here. Their human moderators are mostly contracted. Um casey, new net platformer reported that they have gone from having twenty five contracted human moderators to hundred.

That is laudable, I suppose, but it's still a tiny number for a network with now twenty two million people, a lot of whom are active as we have discussed. But I I think the bigger issue on blue guy that people like is that they have these these user control features that really seemed to work before the election. Blue guy got a surge of users from x because x changed how blocking works.

IT used to me that if you block somebody on eggs, they couldn't see your posts anymore. Yeah, must change that so that they can still see your posts. They just can't if they're public, they just can't interact with them.

A lot of people really didn't like that. One of the reasons people block on x is because somebody y's stocking them or harassing them. And if you can keep them from singer post anymore, then you can stop them from doing that anymore.

So blues guy got a lot of people because blue guy is block feature, which is affectional ally called the nuclear block. Not only means they can't see your post, but any interaction the two of you have ever had in the past goes away. They can't.

They can't like, do anything with you that you basically don't exist for them on the site anymore. And people seem to value that a blue guy also supports shared block list. We can save look at here's one hundred as holes that that you should block and if people trust you, they might block the same hundred people um that has its downsides, but a lot of people really seem to value that. And so I think it's it's those user sort of self moderation features that is appealing to a lot of folks.

I want to ask you about two business model aspects. Blue guys built on an open source platform and IT is not making money. Does IT does that matter? Like to those things matter?

That's a great question. I mean, I think it's gona matter in the long run. Right now. Blue sky is growing really fast with a very thread barry team.

I think that they have twenty full time employees and you know meta has I don't know how many tens or hundreds of thousands of employees x has. Can you know that many thousand? And leaves even after must flash the workforce.

Um they're gonna need people to do stuff like content moderation. If they keep growing when you become when you go from a small platform to a big platform and they're not there yet, but they're headed in that direction. You get a whole host of new problems like people posting child's sexual abuse material.

You get foreign interference campaigns. It's like once you're big enough to matter, all the bad folks come out and try to manipur platform, they're going to need money to pay for that. They do not have much revenue to speak up at this point.

The only revenue they have comes from a deal with the domain service named cheap that lets you do the thing I talked about at the beginning, where you know you can you can buy your own domain from name cheap. And the news that as your handle, that's gotta be a tiny trickle of money, they have not said that they going to do advertising. If they stick to that, that's cutting off a very large potential income source. I wouldn't be surprised if they changed that someday because every company says they are not going to do advertising until they do advertising. But yes, they're gna need to make money if they want to handle the problems that come with being A A more mainstream platform in the future.

I'm just looking at the two big text space alternatives to x right? So you've got blue sky, which we ve been discussing in detail. You've got threats, what we talked about um and they're kind of like inverse of one another right now.

You know threads comes from medical comes from this normous well capitalized company with a tremendous amount of infrastructure. Blue sky is in many ways the opposite of that. And what I can't entirely figure out is whether those two companies are competitors or whether they are complimentary to one another.

Because when I go on threads, it's just like people arguing about whether you were right or wrong to take your child to the grocery store with you. IT is not. I wanted talk about this attorney general pic.

That's a great point. I could imagine them being complementary or at least competitors with somewhat different focuses on niches in in the long run. Um threads is mostly people who came over from instagram and were curious about IT.

And that's not the same crowd of people who are fluctuating blue sky to talk politics or to talk about, uh, you know, with their climate change research community or to talk with people who love for rigged for mushrooms. Like there's all there's all these weird interest community. Mean it's nerds, right? Like let's like loose guys, a bunch of nerdy people and and threads is mostly a bunch of Normal the Normal people.

And so they do have very different flavors. But IT is telling that meta doesn't seem to see them as complimentary because we wrote on saturday about how meta has taken a flurry of steps to try to respond to the rise of blue sky. So out of one side of its mouth, meat is saying, oh, these guys, we're so much bigger, why you paying attention to them? But then on the other hand, there they're making change after change after change to try to mimic the things that people love about blue sky.

Um they they added these custom feeds where you can change, can create your own feeds for your algorithm and change which one you you use um they have made as you see more posts from people you follow instead from random strangers who disagree with you about you know airline people bringing their feedbacks on the airline or whatever you and in then, after we wrote that piece on saturday, met a double down mark socket, was like, hey, we're we're going to try this idea of letting people just see a chronological feed of all the posts from people they follow. We'll see what people think about that he presented if novel idea, of course, the power users of threads have been screaming for that from beginning and meter was like, no data says you're wrong. Most people don't want that and now they're like, oh, actually let's let's give that a try so that a clearly sees blue skies a threat.

Well, where i'm going with all of this is whether IT matters um you know in some sort of capital m way, whether different communities around the country, around the world are talking to one another or are talking on their own platforms like if it's a bunch of libs on blue sky, are they in an ego chAmber or are we passed in eura of social media where everybody's in the same place?

That is a great question. I do not know the it'll be really interesting to see how I plays out. I mean, you know x twitter, even in twitters, at twitters peak, IT was still a fraction of the population, right? IT was still the people who really care about following news or politics or sports.

Yeah, but every government agency was on. Yeah, every major corporation was on there. Even if IT was small. IT was, quote on quote.

important here? Yes, absolutely. IT. IT was these analysts to the public square are fraught in so many ways that I had hesitate, even safe. But there were aspects of twitter that were that aspired to be a sort of digital public square. And if there are now different squares for the left and the right, what does that mean? I do not know, but it's it's fascinating to watch.

I mean, maybe that's why should you take your kid to the grocery store is actually the one that has the most .

users maybe yeah maybe no long run thread doesn't need to worry so much because most people actually don't want to be you know yelling about politics with their with their fellow idea gues all day. I do think that at least the social networks on the right, the ones that sprang up when conservatives were discontented with twitter, right? Truth, social and gab and rumble, and I came to remember all their names.

They still exist like they still have their communities who like being on there, who like being in their court and t echo chAmber. They haven't gone big because I think I think most people probably don't want that. So it'll be really interesting to see if I i've seen comes conservatives migrating over the blue sky lately.

They want to control the lives they want there. There's a lives of blue sky account now and x that's like the equivalent libs of tiktok. So I do think there's making more of a chance for something like blue sky to across the eye a little bit.

But yeah, I don't know I don't know how that will play out. But IT is IT mirrors. What's happened with the media right? Of in the media, more and more people get their their information from. H influencers or from news or from media outlets that online with their values and biases. And maybe that's where social media is had one.

Will aram us? As always, it's great to talk to you.

I enjoyed IT.

Willa remus is a tech reporter for the washington post, and that is IT for our show today. What next? T V D is produced by evan cambell, Patrick ford and shane roth, 而 SHE was edited by page osborn。 Alec among gma is vice president of audio of her slate, and TVB is part of the larger what next family.

And if you you like what you hurt today, the single best way to support us is by joining slave us. You get all your slight podcasts, add free, including this one will be back on sunday with another episode about the tech threat to plains that you probably don't even know about. I'm lazy. You can find me on blue sky at lazio. Really thanks so much for listening.

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