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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   16282 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

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So I've done my best recently to avoid being subjected to personalized social media feed. So my lurking on mastodon without account saw that something happened over at Bluesky and people were leaving to go to the fediverse instead. It turns out it is classical Culture War stuff. Bluesky is apparently imploding because of "Waffles".

So this is not a "boo outgroup" post, my observation is that bluesky is resisting its best of becoming an "ideological monoculture", failing at that though. It is as uninteresting because of the monoculture for me as getting an actual account mastodon instance or truth.social and gab due to the ideological alignment of majority of their users.

It seems that it is hard to make large scale "microblogging" platform that caters to heterodox political culture and I'm a little curious if there is any insight for why it is hard to make one?

This raises so many questions. Does Bluesky have a communications team (apparently not)? Why do so many of the Bluesky staff treat their (very queer, very trans, very liberal) userbase with open contempt? Why are they so attached to having bigots on their platform? And does this perhaps indicate that a fair part of the Bluesky staff have fascist sympathies (unclear, but we would do well to assume the worst)?

Gee, I wonder why they don't want their current userbase?

More broadly, I think that there was a time when a) the grey tribe thought that they had more in common with the liberals than they did, and b) thought that queer liberalism was the future and opposing it was just asking for damnatio memoriae. They were therefore inclined to allow/enforce progressive political orthodoxy.

As this arrangement broke down, tech leaders have become increasingly aware that a) they don't have much in common with this faction and b) having a solid bloc of very queer very trans very liberal users makes your userbase incredibly volatile, aggressive and hard to please. See for example:

Furthermore, while I don't believe that most of the tech industry or most "tech people" are outright fascists, reactionary centrism of the debate-bro flavour, or what noted race scientist Scott Siskind calls the "grey tribe", is distressingly common.

The fundamental problem with having a heterodox social media platform is that humans are very tribal and are not psychologically capable of being in genuinely heterodox environments. Even what we have here is, largely, a political monoculture with a strict set of rules and a culture that is (somewhat) orthogonal to red/blue but still very clear. You can talk to someone and think 'yeah, they would make a good Mottizen' and look at a 4channer or blueskydiver and think that they wouldn't. Observations to this effect have been made by many posters here right before they flame out.

EDIT:

I didn't know we had any channies here

Look, okay, some 4channers are all right

I didn't mean that literally no 4channers could be good Mottizens, only that AFAIK the speech norms are often pretty different and a lot of people who enjoy spending time on 4chan kind of enjoy being deliberately provocative, which is banned here.

and look at a 4channer

There are a decent amount of anons here, actually. /pol/ is where I go for a fun roll in the mud (and to add to my edgy meme collection), this place is where I go when I want some actual substance and intellectual stimulation.

See edit, I hadn't meant to express such a sweeping sentiment :)

I'm no longer a 4channer, unfortunately, but 15+ years ago, I used to use it heavily. Spending time there and seeing how communities can develop when anonymity is enforced both through trivial inconveniences and norms, on top of not only tolerance for but celebration of the breaking of taboos and common decency is one of the main things that convinced me of the value of free speech. In my 30+ years of using the internet, 4chan remains the most loving, welcoming, dynamic, and fun community I've encountered. TheMotte comes a distant 2nd and is even better in some aspects, but falls far behind in others.

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