3mo ago

Bluesky now has 24 million users. Jay Graber is still vowing to keep it from enshittification

www.wired.com Bluesky Now Has 24 Million Users. Jay Graber Is Still Vowing to Keep It From Enshittification

At WIRED's The Big Interview event, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber discussed the booming user numbers for the Twitter rival and why giving social media users more control is a recipe for success.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/20853350

Bluesky has seen massive growth in the weeks following the US election. As of Tuesday, there are 24 million users on the social media platform. With great engagement comes great responsibility, which means Bluesky CEO Jay Graber has to do a lot to keep her promise to not “enshittify” the platform with ads while still funding its explosive growth.
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Enshittification, as its known, generally comes as social media platforms expand and need to squeeze money out of users in order to please investors and keep the lights on. Since Bluesky doesn’t plan to run ads, WIRED senior writer Kate Knibbs asked, how does Bluesky plan to make money? “Subscriptions are the first step,” Graber said, referring to a plan to have users pay a regular fee for the ability to upload higher-quality video, for example, or access certain customization features.

16 comments

How did we end up in a world where people forgot about lying?

If Mark Zuckerberg can say that Facebook’s ad targeting is not surveillance capitalism, Graber can say that whatever Bluesky ends up doing is not enshittification.

Of course she's gonna say that, it's the easiest way to get new users right now. And, of course, Bluesky will be enshitified. It's inevitable for every service trying to make money.
- Honestly disagree. I think it's important to distinguish between companies who make a product or offer a service and charge appropriately for that transaction. Commerce isn't an inherent evil.
  Enshittification is inevitable when the customers are no longer the primary method to make money for the executives. That's the perverse incentive that results in actively sabotaging your own business for greater short term profits because you've created a system that doesn't punish you for doing so (typically by running every 'real' competitor into the ground first).
  If they are more concerned about stock price, or advertisers or selling data, those are the avenues to enshittification. But selling a service to end users for profit is just normal business.
  
  Blue sky does not primarily make money off its users?

And the scorpion vowed "I'm not going to sting you" to the frog.
- It's worse than that - the scorpion might stick to its promise but hops off half-way across to be replaced by a far less amiable scorpion.
  
  I like this analogy. And... yeah, it's true - even if the current owners might vow to not enshittify their platform, they'll likely cash out in the future, and the next owners will do it for them.

Lol they just announced subscriptions so it's already beginning.

Didn't they just get a bunch of money from a blockchain venture capital company? I bet they demand some sort of return on that investment... But how?

She'd be the first to succeed if so.
- He is a lady
  
  Thank you. I've corrected my comment.

The user base already incorporates enshittification. Watching who immediately picked it up was enough of a deterrent for me.
Isn't that the monetization crowd from Twitter?

16 comments