Bluesky has growing pains. Here’s what we can learn from X/Twitter

File this under good problems to have: Bluesky is growing like gangbusters. But lurking beneath that good problem is a whole viper pit of nastiness, as any study of Twitter history will tell you.

The Twitter-like social media underdog (or, as its logo suggests, the under-butterfly) passed 20 million users last week, with more than a quarter of those users coming after the US election. The Twitter/X owner put his big thumb on Donald Trump’s scale and the election made billions of dollars in one day – leading to what we call the ongoing X-Odes. Now leaving Musk’s sinking ship to Bluesky: the Taylor Swift stans.

More importantly, new users are very active and the trend shows no signs of slowing down. According to a live counter built into Bluesky’s API, the service reaches 23 million users and could cross that line by the time American families sit down to a Thanksgiving meal. Growth rate is 4 to 8 new users every second. It’s easy to climb if crazy Republican uncles everywhere get off their deranged Democrats.

So what’s the problem? Now tell us: Content measurement. Bluesky will not only have to deal with misinformation from fake accounts, exploiting its lack of account verification, but an outbreak of child sexual abuse (CSAM) – from two confirmed cases in 2023 to eight confirmed cases a day. – Selection.

What did Twitter do in this situation? In a word: nothing.

Twitter’s early history is one of chaotic growth, company name changes, excessive “failure whale” downtime, and ego clashes between the shy male nerds who happen to be lucky enough to run it. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg famously described his rival social media service as a “clown car that fell into a gold mine.”

As a result, there is little data on account growth in the early years. We know Twitter, born in 2006, took until 2008 to reach its first 600,000 users. As of April 2010, the company boasted 105.8 million accounts, according to a Visual report Mashable is a social media news website. In other words, the closest analog to Bluesky was Twitter in 2009.

Mashable Speed ​​of Light

‘We’re tired of dealing with abuse’

When did Twitter start policing hate speech and other crimes? Before 2014, the company didn’t even offer a way to report abuse on the platform, and the tool was very slow. In 2015, following a targeted harassment campaign known as GamerGate, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo wrote a mea culpa explaining how it was costing the company:

We’re fed up with dealing with abuse and trolls on stage, we’ve been soaking it up for years. It’s no secret, the whole world talks about it every day. We are losing core user after core user by not solving the simple trolling problems they face every day.

Disney CEO Bob Iger admitted in 2016 that he had closed a deal to buy Twitter that had the backing of both companies’ boards. The reason? “Nasty” and “hate speech,” Iger wrote in his 2019 autobiography.

That didn’t faze Elon Musk — or did it? After all, even Musk tried to back out of his $44 billion offer for Twitter in 2022 before a court forced him to say anything publicly. At the time, Twitter was belatedly introducing content moderation (starting in 2018, it permanently suspended the account of conspiracy maven Alex Jones).

A growing moderate group under Aaron Rodrigues was decimated in Musk’s first year. His “Content Review Council,” which was supposed to decide whether to reopen accounts like Trump’s (banned after being used to lead an insurgency), never materialized. And what happened? A steady stream of users exiting it.

In contrast, Bluesky plans to quadruple the size of its content review team from 25 to 100. “We’re trying to go above the legal requirements because we want to be a safe and welcoming place. A lot of users,” Rodericks — now Bluesky’s head of trust and safety after Musk kicked him out of X — told Platformer.

Bluesky has many challenges for Rodriguez and everyone else who aims to build trust among new users. For now, those fake accounts are all that matters. Twitter introduced its verification badges, the famous blue checks, in 2009; At this stage of its development it is perfect according to bluesky.

Additionally, EU leaders noted this week, the site is technically operating in breach of its terms. But the compatibility problem is minor. There is no sign yet that Bluesky wants to follow Musk in his ongoing battle with the EU; The problem is that Bluesky is growing so fast that it doesn’t even have a European representative.

Again, a good problem to have.