The Sewer and the Clear Blue Sky
By 
Henry Farrell has some characteristically well-developed thoughts on our current social media environment:
As someone with different priors myself, I would suggest that the more useful and accurate dichotomy is between the Village and the Sewer. That would not differentiate hide-bound traditional elites from calm, calculating ratiocinators, but hide-bound traditional elites from frenzied degenerate gamblers. It would distinguish the censorious curtain-twitchers of Bluesky from the depraved mob-outrage enthusiasts of Twitter/X. On the one side, the blinkered self-satisfaction of the organized professions, as magnified by crowd sourced pressures towards conformism. On the other, the dynamics through which “first principles” and “do your own research” are digested by the intestinal apparatus of algorithms and crowd identification, producing an undifferentiated slurry that is re-devoured in an ecstatic collective communion so that the cycle can begin anew.
These metaphors likely indicate my own particular biases. I’ve thrown my lot in with the blinkered curtain-twitchers. If Blueskyism has problems, and I absolutely believe that it does, the problems of Sewerism seem to me to be much worse. But instead of entering the lists on behalf of one side or other side and being pulled into the shtick, I’d like us to start figuring out how the two work together. Why is it that we (for those of us who live in the US, and some other countries) are trapped in a system where the self-images of both the professions and tech innovation are increasingly organized around their worst rather than their best aspects? It would be nice to know! NB, however, that all the below is at best social science inflected opinion journalism. I’m pulling together a grab bag of personal observations and anecdotes, and trying to weave them together with a few generalizations into a cohesive story. Treat all this as a set of pointers towards a possibly better argument rather than the product of serious investigation,
Read the rest for lots of rumination on how both the Bluesky and X algorithms distort (a less loaded term might be “structure”) conversation within their respective communities. Where I am right now… Bluesky is vastly more useful to me for a variety of work that I do with what we might regard as the larger “LGM Community,” which is to say academia and politics. It’s also more useful as a social network; stuff that I post at Bluesky is way more likely to get noticed and responded to than stuff I post at X. But… for my particular academic and policy work on defense, Russia-Ukraine, and general international politics, X is still way way way more useful than Bluesky. There are a lot of voices who are important in those spheres who are not now and will never be on Bluesky, and X still has niche communities that don’t depend on engagement with Elon and his Sacks of Shit. I also wish desperately that the community at Bluesky wouldn’t allow trolls like Jesse Singal to disrupt the functionality of the entire site, but that hopes seems forlorn at this point…
Photo Credit: By Ibrahim.ID – Own work CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=151234619