A Fault in Our (Blue) Skies?

Or, how I stopped worrying and learned to love a potentially ticking time bomb

The underlying thesis of Posting Nexus — what attention really means in a maturing “attention economy” and how the intersection of identity, attention, and platforms creates new incentive structures all the time — brings me back to the same four words every single time. 

Attention is a disease. 

We have plenty of data and behavioral research to demonstrate how rewarding the attention we give and the attention we receive has changed our brains over the years. Researchers in England found that people with higher dopamine levels in specific parts of the brain were more likely to focus on the benefit of a tedious or difficult task than those with lower dopamine levels. It’s all very Pavlovian. We are more incentivized to chase dopamine. Apps, and especially easy consumption apps like social media and social video, are designed to trigger those dopamine responses. Literally everything from the pull down to refresh — quite literally stolen from casinos — to visual stimuli is designed to reward attention. Adding interactivity as a means to direct some of that attention toward the poster instead of the posts makes it even more addictive.

So what happens when those near-guaranteed sources of positive stimuli are tampered with beyond recognition? Like X, which once provided reward for giving attention via entertainment and, for many, became a place to receive positive attention to create meaningful connection. Elon Musk’s purchase of the space and turning it into a right-wing clubhouse has forever impacted that expected reward upon opening the app for a core group of people. That sucks. It’s also not like you can just jump back and forth between apps to try and supplement what was lost. A recent study found that jumping back and forth between different platforms to find a dopamine hit (through consumption) rather than focusing on one piece of media (a movie, YouTube video, or book) actually decreased dopamine. Whoops. 

I’ve thought a lot about this lately because of the undeniable fledgling success of Bluesky, an app that is ripe for reinvention — reinvention of self, reinvention of text-based social media, reinvention of expectation. Now, the question is whether that reinvention will stick, whether this is a new era for social media, built on the foundations of knowledge that comes from shared expertise and experience, or if this reinvention will inevitably succumb to what reinvention often succumbs to: human nature. 

Reinvention as a Cure

Ironically, what prompted me to tackle attention as a disease was a positive story. There’s a never ending sentiment on Bluesky about people capturing the opportunity to reinvent themselves. Seriously, just search “reinvent” or “new me” in Bluesky’s (admittedly janky) search bar. Transferring to a new primary social platform is the digital equivalent to switching high schools. While some students might know who you are, for the most part it’s a time for a totally new you! This is the premise of, like, almost every teen movie. 

Since it’s the premise of Hollywood high school flicks, we also know how it goes. The freshness of it all wears off quicker than expected. We return to who we are because it’s something that we can’t control. Along the way, however, we do whatever we can to keep up with the praise, adoration, and general attention we’ve become accustomed to in such a short amount of time. We get a little more desperate. A rush of dopamine hits followed by a total removal is like quitting smoking cold turkey. 

Amplify that feeling by a thousand, make it permanent, and increase the sensation of being watched by a few hundred to a few million. That’s what it feels like to reinvent yourself on a new platform when the trail of your old identity is littered across dozens of graveyards with thousands upon thousands of acres formerly tread upon. We post, therefore we are. 

Now, social media norms dictate that 90% of users don’t post but show up to consume. Around 9% post somewhat, interacting within their communities or commenting. The sole 1% of posters create the vast majority of content that people open their apps to see. The next obvious question therefore is does it matter that people try to reinvent themselves on new platforms when they emerge if it’s just a small number of posters?

Absolutely, but we have to look at how social media platforms have evolved as their own closed gardens, no longer interested in serving the greater internet, but solely focused on serving their own insular business needs. Social media used to have a few specific functions. It allowed you to: 

1. Connect with friends and family, allowing you to keep up with people you love and act as a digital voyeur for people you hate. Facebook, Instagram. 

2. Connect you to similar minded people with similar interests who may fulfill a need that friends and family in your own life couldn’t. Bit Supernatural or Sherlock fan? Tumblr, and to an extent Myspace, existed for you. 

3. Connect you to the greater internet, giving you a flow of information about news-of-the-day topics to follow along and interact with, ranging from politics and sports to mindless celebrity gossip and niche interest developments. This was mostly served by X. 

Connecting you to the greater internet was beneficial for society, and for democracy writ large, but it was also terrible for the company. Twitter was never profitable, and you could make a couple of arguments as to why. Twitter was heavily ruled by reactions to news, which made it a negative space for advertisers who could spend more on platforms like Facebook or Instagram and get theoretically better results. People leaving Twitter to direct attention elsewhere also meant that advertisers weren’t guaranteed the attention they thought they were buying. Digital billboards only work so far as traffic is controlled. 

Hotel California Rules 

It’s for those reasons that I want to focus on the third category. X, unlike Instagram or Tumblr, created this beautifully flawed design that worked for society even if it didn’t work super well for X’s own profits. It directed people elsewhere (articles, etc) around the internet and brought them back to X to watch reactions, engage with opinions, and generally discuss what was happening. “What’s happening,” that little prompt empty tweet boxes used to have before you typed something and hit send, encapsulated it beautifully. 

This simple design prompt created a system built for easy reaction and juicing each thought someone had for social engagement. It was built for what would become the creator economy. This period allowed for the first wave for invention of personality or reinvention. If you were born in the mid-90s, it was an invention. You could build up the person you wanted to be seen as on these platforms designed to operate as their own miniature, exclusive internet systems. If you were born in the ‘80s, it was reinvention. You may have run a blog or participated in forums, but this was easily ready for consumption, interaction, and attention on unprecedented levels. It wasn’t just the definition of the internet being reinvented, but ourselves. 

We can see changes at X since Musk’s takeover being symbolic of those greater trends. The goal isn’t to share from outside the platform, therebeing directing attention away from the app, but to create a sense of meaningful addition within the walls of the site itself. These are Hotel California rules. The internet goes from being the world wide web to being Facebook, or Instagram and YouTube. The death of the internet we once knew coalesced nicely with the rise of the creator universe. Certainly, X was once a great portal into the larger web ecosystem — which is now defined by Google (also in the process of reinventing itself through increasingly reliant partnerships with sites like Reddit) — but then it was bought by the most self-indulgent wannabe creator on the planet. Why wouldn’t X go from inclusive to exclusive, from wanting to be connected to a larger digital universe to being totally cut off from the rest of our cohabitated virtual sphere?

This is why algorithmic recommendation feeds are so vital to the platform owners themselves. If creators are 1% of the population but responsible for 90% of what people see, and if people are using these apps to effectively just stare at something rather than discuss, then everything becomes Reels. It becomes TikTok and Threads. It becomes what exists because that’s where dollars are spent and where echo chamber factions are built. The irony of Musk building one of the largest echo chambers despite spending years decrying the pulverization of free speech is lost on no one reading this. 

Data tells a similar story. Looking at tweets shared by Musk, Republican-leaning accounts, and Democrat-leaning accounts between January 1st and October 25th 2024, a couple of researchers out of Queensland University of Technology determined that July 13th marked the split into more right-leaning territory. It wasn’t just that Musk saw a significant increase in metrics (naturally), but Republican-leaning tweets saw more of a boost compared to Democratic-leaning tweets, according to the report, whose findings were published in The Register. “Republicans' posts were viewed and engaged with more frequently before the July 13 changes, but after that date, their visibility shot up in comparison to Democrat posts, and both sides saw equal increases in engagements,” The Register noted. My favorite stat: Musk’s own posts saw a 138.3% increase in views after July 13th, with a 238% increase in the number of retweets Musk’s posts saw. So, yes — it really is Elon’s platform. And if it really is Elon’s platform, then of course it’s more right-wing oriented. 

Musk has accomplished his goal of making a conservative platform for conservative creators — mashing up his political ideologies with his own desire to be the creator of a platform. All it took was $44 billion. Since Musk’s orientation influences what type of content sees higher engagement rates, or even better visibility rates, which in turn creates an entirely new wave of influencers that become associated withX, not anything outside of  X.

If we extend this logic, then approaching these platforms to have discussions or to learn instead of to react or to be entertained means that algorithms define personalities, not the other way around. If you want to experience what that’s like, just look at the relatively short history of YouTube. As YouTube shifted its algorithmic features to better its own business, creators shifted their approach to work. YouTube favored long videos? Creators found ways to increase the length of their videos. Other times, creator-led trends (think diss tracks back in 2017 and 2018) are celebrated by YouTube (like in its annual Rewind video) before algorithmic changes force creators to focus on other styles of content that YouTube is promoting because of increased watch time.

Is everyone copying Jimmy “Mr. Beast” Donaldson because he’s popular or because YouTube now favors those types of videos, serving them to more people? It’s a little from column A, a little from column B. The main takeaway, however, is that you have to make your content work for YouTube until YouTube starts working for you. 

Apply that logic to every other platform. Some of this boils down to cultural etiquette. Social platforms take on their own cultures and that’s what draws people in. Some of this, however, boils down to ensuring that these platforms work for the companies looking to capture as much attention as possible. Threads doesn’t want news because it’s a headache, but also because news directs people elsewhere. Consider what Instagram head Adam Mosseri has always said: we don’t have a problem with people talking about news, but we’re not going to promote it. In other words, please feel free to react to something on our platform, but we’re not going to do anything that impacts advertising dollars nor are we necessarily going to promote posts that direct you outside the platform.

Why would Instagram promote those posts? This is a company that has successfully reached more than 3.3 billion people each month (or about 40% of the entire planet) across all its platforms by leaning into being, by all measures, as inoffensive as it can possibly be for 40% of the planet using its apps. The company’s only goal is to keep you glued to your screen by serving you content that its algorithms think you like that creators explicitly design for when posting. 

Bluesky’s biggest advantage right now is that it’s not thinking about any of these incentive structures — or disincentive structures based on how you look at it — because it’s not building a walled garden. It’s building what may be the first at-scale open social internet. Not being tied to advertisers helps keep that idea alive, as does not being a public company with shareholder interest. This is how Bluesky reinvents text-based social media. What happens if — and perhaps more likely based on all other precedent — that changes? Slowly at first, but then suddenly all at once?

Ultimately, my biggest concern is whether Bluesky is allowed to stop its own growth before it turns into the machine it doesn’t want to become.

So…what about Bluesky?

Of course, the biggest difference between services like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram versus X is expectation of experience. They have more in common with media (entertainment) than press (information); people expect to watch a video and go to the next, they’re not using that time to gather information as people did with X. The company’s attempt to be a destination for video didn’t really work because that’s not what people want on that platform. When X leaned further into being an echo chamber, however, it succeeded because the refocused feed appealed to a group of people looking to react, to feel included, to feel greater than, and it provided the type of quick-post/quick learning environment that others didn’t. 

Data we’ve collected over the last few weeks suggests these types of experiences are still critically in demand. Over the last 20 days, Bluesky has signed up more than seven million new users, surpassing the 21 million mark. Bluesky has also attracted key posters, including notable figures like celebrities and journalists, sure, but also the lifeblood of the social internet — shitposters. And yes, while Bluesky’s 21 million users is paltry compared to X’s 600 million or Threads’ 275 million monthly users, it’s creating a culture that invites people to enjoy and participate.

Bluesky is also focused on building monetization efforts through subscriptions rather than advertising, and focusing on its “talent” (my word, not the company’s) and their “audience" (again, my term) rather than just showing as many ads as possible for one second. The goal, according to C.E.O. Jay Graber is to allow Bluesky to exist as an option, but not the only option if, for example, someone were to come around and buy Bluesky to turn it into something users hate, or if there were uncontrollable events, such as a red wave moving to this new app. 

"The billionaire proof is in the way everything is designed, and so if someone bought or if the Bluesky company went down, everything is open source," Graber told CNBC a few days ago. "This means that someone else can pick it up and run with it…. What happened to Twitter couldn't happen to us in the same ways, because you would always have the option to immediately move without having to start over."

Perhaps Bluesky’s biggest advantage is reflected in a response from Instagram. As Instagram head Adam Mosseri said on Threads just the other day, “We are rebalancing ranking to prioritize content from people you follow, which will mean less recommended content from accounts you don’t follow and more posts from the accounts you do starting today.” Mosseri continued that creators will see “unconnected reach go down and connected reach go up,” adding that the tricky part of switching from an endless algorithmic feed of content that may appeal to someone versus a potential finite curated feed of people that do appeal to a user is “balancing the ability to reach followers and [keep] overall engagement [high] is tricky.” 

Put another way, we understand that you want to see more of the people who make this app enjoyable, and less be thrown into a pool of what we think you’d like to see. Freedom of choice! Whodathunk? 

Anyway, Instagram’s response timing isn’t coincidental. Bluesky may have 7% of the user base Threads boasts, but it arguably has much more of the juice. My friend Ryan Broderick wrote in his Garbage Day newsletter that “without a drastic de-Meta-fication of Threads, Bluesky will continue to grow just fine and easily outpace Threads in, at least, cultural impact.” Kevin Roose at the New York Times echoed these thoughts in his latest column for the Grey Lady, noting “I suspect Bluesky’s growth is a sign that text-based social media is less dead than I thought, and that there is still plenty of demand for the kind of social networking experience that Twitter offered before Mr. Musk took it over.”

But it was this paragraph from Roose that really got to me, because he seemed to have the same thought as those thousands of strangers posts (skeets?) that I scrolled through in the days following the election. And, if I’m being honest, a thought I had myself. Roose writes:

“For burned-out social media users like me, joining Bluesky can be a reset — a chance to start over on a platform that isn’t engineered to maximize engagement, that isn’t owned by a capricious billionaire or an amoral advertising conglomerate, and that doesn’t treat its users as lab rats. It’s a throwback to a rawer, lower-stakes era of social media, before elections and economies hinged on what happened there.”

In a statement that is contrary to the evidence, I do think text-based social apps have a future. People still want their information quickly, which you don’t get in a 60 second video when you can read a 15-second post or a 30-second article. Anecdotally, I believe people want to scroll without pausing, taking in reactions and information that is more aligned with “press” than “media.” Central to this essay, I believe people want to control the version they portray themselves to be on the internet as much as they can — and that is infinitely easier with text than video. Hence how Roose and me — and thousands of others on Bluesky — feel about this app. An optimism in getting away from the minute depressions of X, and an unbridled hope of reinventing who you are on a burgeoning site. Wannabe social platforms pop up all the time. Few get enough of a jolt to make that hope a potential reality. 

Yet as I sit here and write this, as I try to plan out my next post on Bluesky and think about how that should be different from the tweet on X or the blast on Threads, I know that nothing has changed. I’m still thinking about posts that will appeal to people on the platform, I’m still reacting to the same accounts that I reacted to on Twitter, and I’m still seeking out the same people I sought out on other platforms. Maybe this is a me problem, but the more that I see people engage with their followers on Bluesky, the more I think I’m closer to the truth than I am afar. 

Here’s the thing. I want Bluesky to succeed. I think the best outcome for Bluesky is that it kind of becomes Tumblr. Not an at-scale social platform. Not a key piece of the global town square, or whatever. Not as the next big thing everyone is using. If we’ve learned anything from all the issues with YouTube and Instagram and especially X, it’s that having too many people on  one platform designed to react instead of engaging leads to total disillusionment and societal fracturing. Attention for emotional connection, not attention furthering an addictive disease. Graber pointed to people being able to bring their audiences with them if they went to a new platform, but doesn’t that imply users are seemingly looking for new platforms all the time when every data point suggests that people do not want to try new platforms unless they’re absolutely forced to by a hostile environment? Is the idea, therefore, that this is inevitable for any social media site as it grows?

I saw that Bluesky had raised $15 million from various venture capital groups while I was writing this essay. I watched the C.E.O. appear on CNBC and tout the difference of Bluesky from other apps. Bluesky certainly does feel different today. But venture capitalists want growth. Even the choice of news outlet is interesting. CNBC speaks to Wall Street, not Silicon Valley or the average user. What makes Bluesky work today doesn’t make it work tomorrow if the goal is growth and capital — and as a for-profit business in America, your only goal really is growth and capital, even if everyone involved wants to build something truly special. We may all be trying to reinvent ourselves on a new app, but the bigger question is whether Bluesky truly wants to reinvent itself…or if we’re just waiting for the inevitable X-ification to play out. Is the attention it’s receiving a net positive or is it the beginning of a disease?