What Is Blueskyism?
Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago
natesilver.netTechstory
skepticalmixed
Debate
80/100
Social MediaOnline DiscourseBluesky
Key topics
Social Media
Online Discourse
Bluesky
The article 'What Is Blueskyism?' by Nate Silver explores the culture and discourse around the social media platform Bluesky, sparking debate among commenters about the author's biases and the validity of his observations.
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Key moments
- 01Story posted
Sep 22, 2025 at 11:49 AM EDT
3 months ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Sep 22, 2025 at 11:57 AM EDT
8m after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
13 comments in 0-2h
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Sep 23, 2025 at 2:48 PM EDT
3 months ago
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Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
ID: 45335141Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 2:38:27 PM
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Catastrophism is native to American politics. How, exactly, you live in a globalist world without forming an opinion on the matter is a study of sociopaths for someone else. There is no post-WWII America without the myth of catastrophe and salvation via nuclear war. We built this nation, and set the global status-quo, on the back of a global catastrophe. Ignoring that fact doesn't make you a better historian, it makes you blind.
Maybe those Bluesky users are just repeating the past 150 years of anthropological research that pertains to postmodern human politics. This Nate Silver guy would probably cream his shorts if he read Hegel.
And the last line you wrote is gross.
Is it really so hard to just read what somebody writes without reading something into it that just isn't there? When in doubt, simply ask, no need to insinuate.
That was the entirety of your comment/response/addition to the conversation. Someone has to read into it because there's nothing to it.
Should I make a post every time I look something up but think to myself that I'll likely forget it next week, as you did in the quoted example? Perhaps everyone in the comments section would like to know how my working memory is, too?
> You only comment to disagree without offering anything of value. Prove me wrong.
I'll repeat their request. Let's see what you have to say that is of value.
I guess I should add: I understand why people do what they do, and I see how we arrived at this point. I don't blame anyone on Bluesky for not wanting to associate with certain types. But, it seems the end results are echo chambers which certainly aren't healthy for a functioning democracy.
I don't disagree with you entirely, but I also am not sure I'm doing any good being called names and I want to spend time places online where folks don't hate at me.
So long as there is an open network where we can analyzer participants behaviors, and where we don't have to be subject to the moderation and algorithmic wins of a single controlling interest. So long as we can shield ourselves from people we don't like.
There seems to be very very very few places where there are the fundamentals in place for it to make sense to be there. There are very popular very large networks, but I absolutely cannot imagine how anyone is remotely ok trusting the "public discourse" to be held on such imbalanced lopsided private property, that's tilting the discourse invisibly underfoot.
It’s less, “this is an important thing to consider in contemporary, online political discourse”, and more, “I have personal experience with these sorts of people, and let me tell you, they annoy the living piss out of me.” And I have no trouble believing him.
I think this drives people like Nate Silver to overreact and draw big conclusions about platforms and political ideologies and put out content like this.
Some people are annoying on social media. If the platform structurally focuses you on a group of annoying people it'll look like everybody on that platform is annoying. But I'd hope that somebody who got famous for data analysis could do a better job with this. The bluesky firehose is there. AI tools make mass sentiment analysis easier to perform than ever. We could have a real analysis of "blueskyism" but instead we get a bunch of gripes from a person who sees a tiny portion of the website yell at him every time he opens the site.
Also Bluesky was never the "prom king" even on his graph it had 3% market share at its peak WHILE X had 30%.
That being said, it was impressive for it to hit 3%, but last I heard every conservative person that tried to join it was instabanned within 3 minutes. You'll never have a rival to X if you ban half the population.