Bluesky’s Rachel Maddow problem

No One On Bluesky Knows How To Behave

Huge celebrities have been flocking to Bluesky over the last few months. Slowly, but surely, big names like Stephen King, John Cusack, Mark Ruffalo, and George Takei have decamped to the new platform and, well, continued the breathless libposting they were doing on Twitter back when it was still Twitter. Adding to Bluesky’s very 2014 vibe right now, cable news anchors have set up shop there, as well. Chris Hayes has a little over half a million followers, Joy-Ann Reid has around 200,000, and Rachel Maddow beats them both, with 800,000 followers on the app.

Maddow’s popularity is, in part, because her brand is just a very good fit for Bluesky’s post-election user base of disillusioned Dems, who are, generally, a whole bunch of people who think that calling Elon Musk “Elmo” is funny. But she also plugs the site on her show fairly regularly, mentioning it again this week on air. And while we don’t have hard data on how many of Maddow’s viewers are signing up for accounts each week, she is currently the ninth-biggest user on the app. Though, I should also say that her posts are fine, a far cry from the other big #Resistance accounts on there that spend their days posting libslop. See below…

If you aren’t on Bluesky, you probably aren’t aware of how weirdly aggressive random users are there. I’ve had the misfortune of having a string of posts crack the 1,000 reposts mark (😌) and the replies are always a mess. Part of this is clearly due to the influx of bots on the site, which users first noticed back in December, many of which are using AI to argue in users’ replies. But there are also just a whole bunch of real people on there who, frankly, appear to have never used a website before. And I am not the only person to notice that Maddow’s free advertisements of Bluesky feel directly correlated to these exact kind of users signing up for accounts.

“This is like watching the tidal wave from 'deep impact' coming right for your beach, but instead it's people who don't get jokes,” Secret Base director Ryan Simmons wrote of Maddow’s Bluesky shoutout this week. While user @ruemcclammyhand.bsky.social was much more succinct, writing, “why would she do this to us?”

So who are the Maddow reply trolls? Well, anecdotally, they do appear to be older. They tend to have double-digit follower counts and love to reply with snarky animated GIFs. They also have no problem attacking users they do not know. One guy who snipped at me in the replies of a post recently described himself as a “lifelong centrist.” And this does line up with what we know about the demographics for cable news. According to a Los Angeles Times piece from 2023, the median age for an MSNBC viewer is 71 and about half of America’s TV audience, in general, is over 50. And, 10 years ago, I would have said, oh, well, you know, boomers don’t know how to use the internet. But that’s absolutely not true anymore. They know how to use a very specific part of the internet — Facebook. Which would explain the behavior we’re seeing on Bluesky right now. They think the whole internet rewards the same very specific behaviors that Meta products do. Mindless sharing, overly-emotional, but ultimately pointless replies, and a bewildering sense of entitlement over the content they see on their individual feeds. Essentially, it’s a whole lot of older people who have never known anything other growth-hack influencers fed to them by an algorithm designed explicitly to enrage them. They want to “speak to the manager” even though, on Bluesky, there isn’t one.

And Bluesky is not the first social network is experience this problem — nor do I think it’ll be the last, for reasons I’ll get to in a sec. The “Facebook effect” was first noticed on Threads, last year, when writer Max Read dubbed it, “the gas leak social network.” The perhaps naive assumption at the time from many of us tracking the app was that Threads’ delirious and anti-social users were a specific phenomenon caused by Threads pulling them in from other Meta-owned platforms. The end result, at least on a macro level, was effectively a spam problem. Thousands of users who did not know how to use a Twitter-like website, clogging up everyone’s feeds and replies with unreadable content. The exact kind of social-spam-at-scale issue Facebook built algorithms to automate a solution for a decade ago.

But the Maddow trolls are proof that this is actually a much more existential problem for communication online. Because convincing these people to make accounts is the only path forward for any new text-based social network to grow. And, to be clear, it’s not that Maddow is doing anything bad here by recommending users join Bluesky. But she is absolutely inviting in users that seemingly have no interest in learning how to properly interact with the site. Though, who knows, maybe dealing with ornery Facebook boomers is easier than convincing zoomers to read, which is sure to result in equally strange, if not worse behavior.

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A Good Bluesky Suggestion

The DOGE Site Appears To Be Run By A Company Owned By A DOGE Staffer

This was spotted by hacker and bug bounty hunter Sam Curry. If you view source on join.doge.gov, and ctrl+F “imagedelivery.net,” you’ll see multiple references to it in the site’s code. This means that the images on the site are hidden behind a proxy run by CloudFlare, which helps load times. But, as Curry explains in his thread on X, it also assigns a unique user ID. And the user ID for the DOGE site is connected to a forum user posting under the name “Kyle Schutt,” the same name as a 37-year-old that was revealed to be a DOGE employee recently by Propublica.

Schutt helped develop the Republican equivalent of ActBlue, WinRed, as Propublica noted. But Curry discovered that he also listed himself as the chief technology officer of a company called Outburst Data, which is connected to a slew of right-wing websites, including WinRed.

In other words, it looks like it’s Elon Musk isn’t the only one using DOGE to personally enrich themselves.

The Duolingo Owl Died, If You Even Care

Duolingo says their aggressive owl mascot died. This is obviously a stunt and the owl will, assuredly, come back. So that’s not really the thing to focus on here. What is worth mentioning, though, is the jawdropping amount of weird branded X accounts having a digital funeral for the cartoon bird right now — Netflix, Pizza Hut, the World Health Organization, Dua Lipa. Who is this for???

A Genuinely Fascinating ChatGPT Experiment

A user on Reddit’s r/GlowUps shared a pretty neat experiment using ChatGPT. They had the AI analyze photos of the nutrition labels of the food they purchased. From there, they created a calorie tracker and would check in with the AI daily to go over how they ate during the day. You can see the results here. I also think he, you know, had a workout plan in place, but, still, it’s an interesting use of ChatGPT.

About two years ago, when ChatGPT launched an Instacart plugin, I tried a similar experiment. I had the AI design a week’s worth of healthy meals, break those meals down into ingredients, and then order them for me. It worked better than I expected and also introduced me to a salad dressing that I am still obsessed with lol.

Spanish Reality TV Is On A Completely Different Level

A scene from the Spanish version of Temptation Island went real viral this week and, honestly, it’s as crazy as everyone says it is. Also, full warning, the video embedded above gets pretty NSFW.

The TL;DR here is that contestant Montoya freaked out after his girlfriend Anita cheated on him after she watched a video of him getting a lap dance, which he got after he saw a video of Anita kissing another man. It’s a lot. Here’s a good breakdown of everything on Reddit for non-Spanish speakers. There are now a lot of memes about the incident and they’re all pretty good. Unfortunately, Americans can’t watch full episodes… well, without a VPN 👀

One Last Bit Of Philly Content For You

Some Stray Links

• “Soy Right ascendant”

• “Ozempic Could Crush the Junk Food Industry. But It Is Fighting Back.”

• “I Dated Multiple AI Partners at Once. It Got Real Weird”

P.S. here’s Lawrence of Arabia AMV - Good Luck Babe (Chappell Roan)

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***