Category: General Nonsense

From the “This is Not an Airport, There is No Need to Announce Your Departure” Department:

After about six months of using Bluesky — one of the many social media apps proposed as a replacement for X-Twitter — I ditched it over the weekend.

So if you were one of my teeming legions of followers on Bluesky (I think I was in danger of breaking 50 people), well, I’m gone from there, at least for now, and you’ll have to follow me here, or on Facebook or Mastodon.

I was skeptical of Bluesky from the beginning. Any service where you had to be “invited” to use it kind of gets up my nose a little bit. It seemed like most of the people being “invited” were people in the media who had large followings on X-Twitter. The kewl kids, in other words.

Being neither kewl nor popular, I received an invite from an old friend — I certainly didn’t merit one from Bluesky on my own.

I also was suspicious of Bluesky because of the involvement of former Twitter CEO — and Elon Musk buddy — Jack Dorsey. Dorsey, whose net-worth is estimated at more than $3 billion, has the same questionable ideas about politics, public service and free speech as a lot of Silicon Valley billionaires, and anything he’s got his booger-hooks into is sus, in my admittedly blinkered view.

But I tried Bluesky, and I tried to give it a fair shake, and frankly I didn’t like the vibe. There seemed to be a lot of Important People With Bold-Faced Names there who are used to others Listening when they talk.

Not everyone, mind you — and not even a majority, I’m sure. But it had a definite undercurrent of mansplaining, sealioning, and whataboutism.

(Some people have said they’ve experienced the same thing on the aforementioned Mastodon, another social media service. That hasn’t been my experience over there, but I can respect that it’s happening to other people. Maybe it’s just social media that’s intrinsically bad.)

Anyway, I stuck it out. I never seemed to get more followers, even after Bluesky dropped the “invitations” and opened the app up to everyone.

(The same thing happened to me, come to think of it, when I was on another X-Twitter replacement, Post.News. I have checked my breath and my armpits just in case. It has also occurred to me that maybe no one gives a crap about anything I have to say. Trust me, it’s not the first time I’ve been told that.)

Over the weekend, an attention-seeking Washington Post writer did an interview with the operator of a loathsome YouTube channel that targets LGBTQ students and teachers for harassment. The channel has been blamed for a number of people being hounded out of their jobs, and now, at least one death — that of a non-binary teenager in Oklahoma who suffered weeks of harassment by other students before being beaten to death in a high school restroom.

The Post writer — who is making a cottage industry out of doing profiles of “edgy” (meaning “bigoted” and “neo-Nazi”) Internet personalities — defended the profile of the crank on the grounds that she was “exposing” this person’s vapidity and evil ideology. It’s the theory that says “if you give someone enough rope, they’ll hang themselves.”

I’ll get into that another time; but briefly, there is absolutely no evidence that “exposing” these cranks and kooks strips them of their power. In fact, for the past 20 years, we’ve seen quite the opposite — it tends to mainstream them and make their views seem more normal. If you put Alex Jones on network TV often enough, then suddenly — even if you still think his ideas are lunacy, and you’re trying to show people that he’s a lunatic — your audience starts to get used to him and accustomed to his lunatic ideas.

And thus is America’s Overton window inching ever closer to Nazism.

(Malory Archer voice: “Do you want Trump? Because that’s how you get Trump.”)

Anyway. The kewl kids of Bluesky in the New York City and Washington, D.C. media quickly circled the wagons around the Washington Post writer, defending her decision (and the newspaper’s decision) to platform a dangerous lunatic crank.

“You don’t understand how journalism works,” was a common tut-tut expressed all weekend by various columnists and pundits, many of whom are pulling down six-figure salaries, to any ordinary people who raised objections to one of the world’s most important newspapers giving a valuable platform to someone who has been called a literal terrorist — and who is, frankly, putting evil into the world at a frightening rate.

I posted my own criticism, figuring that my 40 or so Bluesky followers might be interested.

Well, despite the fact that all of my readers on that service could fit into a PRT bus and still leave 20 vacant seats, I started to get hammered by nasty comments. Apparently Bluesky’s algorithm was putting my comments in front of a lot more people than were actually following me. Pretty soon, Saturday night, I was blocking comments as fast as they could be posted. I was called a pervert for defending transgender kids. I was called an idiot who didn’t understand how the media works.

Bluesky is struggling with moderation, according to Wired — Black users have reported that the N-word is being slung around with wild abandon, including in user’s screen names — so I’m guessing I’m not the only one who’s had these problems.

There was a time when I would have argued with these chucklefucks, or at least made fun of them, but honestly? Life is short. Who needs to spend a single moment fighting with losers on social media — especially on a platform like Bluesky which is brand-new, driving absolutely no traffic to my radio show or other work, and so far is only exposing me to the opinions of people I already knew about anyway?

With two clicks on my phone — bloop, bleep — I nuked my account.

I’m an avid listener of the “Omnibus” podcast produced by “Jeopardy!” host Ken Jennings and The Long Winters frontman/guitarist John Roderick. Roderick was a power-user of X-Twitter until he posted a thread about trying to teach his pre-teen daughter to use a can opener to open a can of beans.

It was a cute story (I thought at the time) that quickly became not-cute when Roderick was accused of child abuse (a Twitter user actually reported him to child protective services, which investigated him) and was dubbed “Bean Dad.” He lost a co-hosting gig on one of his other podcasts and for a brief moment, there was an effort to get Jennings fired from his “Jeopardy!” duties.

Last week, on an episode about the food pyramid, Jennings and Roderick joked about what the latter called his “explosive ejection” from social media.

“You know what was very good for me?” Jennings said. “When Twitter finally auto-updated on my phone and I got the ugly black X (logo). I just don’t want to click on it … if that was a cute blue bird, I’d be like, ‘oh, this is the cute blue bird that tells me jokes and brings me news,’ but I don’t want to click on that X.”

“I think (social media) is the most toxic thing in my life,” Roderick said.

I continue to marvel at longtime users of X-Twitter who call themselves “the Twitter resistance,” who somehow are committed to staying on the service even it turns into a miasma of Nazis, edgelords, trolls, low-quality advertisers and glitchy customer service. They seem to believe that they can somehow “fix” the culture of X-Twitter although its billionaire sole proprietor is devoting ever-increasing amounts of his own time and money to make the culture worse by all available metrics.

It reminds of the joke about the two little old ladies who eat lunch at the same restaurant every day.

“I don’t know why we come here,” the first lady says, “the food is terrible.”

“I agree,” says the second lady, “and the portions are so small!”

The food on Twitter is terrible (and getting worse). Why would you want to keep coming back?

Anyway, regarding the supposedly new, shiny, better alternative. Pink Floyd sang:

Did you ever wonder why we had to run for shelter
When the promise of a brave new world
Unfurled beneath a clear blue sky?

I have no idea, but I have a hunch it was probably caused by social media.

There is enough negativity in the world already; I don’t need to have it delivered to me over my phone, unbidden, from random dum-dums wearing Oakley sunglasses in their profile photos so that Jack Dorsey can buy another $21 million compound in San Francisco. Bye, bye, Bluesky.