Doing the Waffles

mmm, the smell of bad decisions

Everything must be reinvented, shared memory is a dream

Let's look at some recent history.

In early 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter. He then did his level best to destroy it. Partially so he could replace it with his dream of X, the Everything App, which like WeChat in China, would be used for everything. Partially so he could force everyone on Twitter to read his juvenile attempts at humor. Partially so he could wrench Twitter into a haven for neo-Nazis and other assorted far right figures as part of his acquisition of the United States government, which he later gave up when he found out running a large nation-state was actually kind of hard.

But regardless, Twitter (I refuse to call it X, much like I refuse to engage in many other of Musk's various delusions) rapidly deteriorated into something worse than even Facebook, which is now 8/10ths randomly generated AI slop by volume. Most people quickly decided that Twitter wasn't for them any more. This was when I decided, for example.

(Remember when we stood up for the ADL as a non-partisan anti-extremist group? Good times.)

I experimented with Mastodon for a while as a replacement, but found quite a few issues with it:

it was difficult to onboard new users, due to its decentralized nature
the users that were present were extremely insular, and had no problem with screaming at you if you broke some minor social rule such as alt-tagging your posts
it had no way to quote-repost, which is one of my favorite ways of prompting comments on other people's posts with my own take
at the time (this may have gotten better) it was a nightmare to run, requiring a fairly expensive AWS instance due to file storage requirements in the multiple hundreds of gigabytes

So when someone gave me a code to the new invite-only social media hotness, I was intrigued. Bluesky at the time... well, I don't think it was moderated. Like, at all. When I first installed the app (in May of 2023), I was greeted by a picture of a trans woman proudly showing off her chest.

I quickly learned a few things about Bluesky:

I was right - it wasn't moderated, at all.
It was populated by clusters of ex-Twitter leftist shitposters, a few tech early adopters, and overwhelmingly, by far, trans people who felt that posting on Twitter would literally have them doxxed and killed and were deliriously happy they found a place where they could just flirt and mess around like anyone else.
There was no advertising, and no plan to monetize, at all. It appeared the entire enterprise was just running on fumes and vibes.

Over two years later and some of this hasn't changed.

Still no ads, or any way visible to monetize. I presume the entire enterprise is still running on venture capital money, and honestly, probably the least objectionable use of that I've seen lately. Jay Graber, the CEO, talks frequently about atproto, the publishing protocol behind Bluesky, which the team apparently believes is more likely to drive growth than, uh, the social network they already have. Meanwhile she's done the lecture circuit being notable mostly for not being Mark Zuckerberg.

I mean, fairly low bar, but it's good to have goals.

However, Bluesky is trying to moderate now. Emphasis on trying. And in doing so, it's driving off the group that literally built the platform, trans women.

You can blame this guy.

just asking questions about trans people, like you do

Jesse Singal has made his career out of just asking questions about trans people for a decade now, which strikes one as a bit odd given he's, uh, not trans. (This raises questions. Which I'm just asking, mind you.) It's safe to say that because of the many articles he's written questioning why exactly trans people exist, he's easily the most hated person for that group. Even more than the President, who apparently thinks that everyone is trans now. (looks down) Nope.

So, of course, he joined BlueSky to just ask questions. Predictably, he faced furious denunciations and the occasional death threat (which we've all learned recently is bad, so don't do that). Faced with this, he did what any innocent person met with a wave of unjustified hatred would do: get Bari Weiss to immediately, within hours, publish a plaintive cry about how such a thing could happen to him.

or, it may just have a jesse singal problem. hey, i'm just askin questions here

This may make you think that Singal joined BlueSky, notorious for being a haven of thin-skinned leftists and refugee trans people, solely to troll for reactions he could then get paid to write about. I know, that happens! I'm as shocked as you are.

Anyway, that's three paragraphs about Jesse Singal, which is probably three too many, but it's my blog and I'll digress if I want to. But the upshot to all of this is that for years now, trans users of BlueSky have asked, pleaded, demanded and petitioned that BlueSky ban Jesse Singal for being, well, Jesse Singal, the man who thinks sea lioning is a good thing. BlueSky's response?

You see, according to the terms of service/code of conduct/Federation Space Law, Singal's done nothing wrong. The petition referenced above links to Singal's unmasking of interview suspects (doxxing, only much, much worse given the current social climate in the US vs. trans people), but that didn't happen on BlueSky (apparently he briefly linked to where he did offsite, which the petition linked to at the time). Singal is clearly only on BlueSky to, in order, troll other users, generate content for his articles and podcasts, and get publicity, none of which is against the rules. He's a human edge case.

Which is causing a lot of users to melt down. Including ones who should know better. Like, um, BlueSky's CTO.

And, uh, BlueSky's CEO.

The Waffles reference? This classic Twitter post about refined online discourse.

Because Jay, and the others at BlueSky, still want to be the cool kids.

Only, you don't get to do that when you're running the asylum. You can say all you want that you just want to make a protocol so everyone can run off and make their own social network, but what you are painfully having rammed into your skull with the collective crowbars of thousands of angry users is that the value of a functioning social network isn't the goddamned protocol that a server somewhere is using to ship packets to another server, it's being a safe space to shitpost about waffles. Which you don't get to do here because moderating the environment so people can make waffle posts without having a sea lion pop up and yell about cis pancakes is your goddamned job.

If only this had happened before, that someone could have asked about. You know, like that time we all played silly online games back at the turn of the century and found people who made edge casing their entire identity, and which eventually resulted in the people running those games say, no, actually, you're alienating our entire customer base, get the hell out.

Too bad it never happened, and we have to keep reinventing that wheel. Also, figuring out how to actually generate income. That would be cool. Not as cool as posting about waffles, mind you. But still cool.