EDITORIAL: BlueSky ahead, X behind

I’m making a rare lapse into first-person tense here on the editorial page because I recently made an executive decision and I want to explain why.

As of a couple of weeks ago, Triad City Beat will no longer be posting to Twitter, or X, or whatever they’re calling themselves these days. My reasons are the same as everyone else’s: It sucks there now.

Ever since Elon Musk took over the place, it’s become a sort of cesspool for the extreme right, porn bots and catfish accounts, while at the same time becoming openly hostile to those of us practicing actual journalism. One of the first things Musk did — after he reportedly fired 80 percent of the staff and, for some ridiculous reason, changed its name to X — was to add a pricing tier for its API. For those who don’t know, which is mostly everybody, an API is the way a site like Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn allows other apps to share data from its site. We used it for our autoposter, which allows us to automatically post our web articles to various social media platforms without having to do it manually. Saves a ton of time. But we haven’t been able to do that on X for months without paying a premium. Occasionally I’d drop a big story on there manually, but even before Musk we rarely got web traffic from Twitter.

Then he de-emphasized links to news articles, which was the site’s bread and butter. And he also fixed it so that somehow, everyone had to see his posts, which like the man himself were often half-baked, misinformed and juvenile.

And he’s tinkered with the algorithm, dredging the tweet stream to amplify the lowest opinions, the most controversial feeds, the filthiest accounts. Then he became interested in politics.

During the election, he actively tried to shape public opinion by boosting right-wing talking points and Kamala takedowns. It probably worked, or at least Trump thinks so. Musk will be part of his hellscape of a new cabinet, if he gets approved, pledging to do with the Dept. of Government Efficiency — or DOGE, which is like an inside joke for crypto losers — the same thing he did at Twitter, which was make it so that everyone hates it except his friends.

Twitter’s value was in that so many journalists were on there, opining on each other’s work, posting breaking news tidbits, debunking the conventional wisdom and offering the kind of insight into the day’s news that only seasoned reporters can give. It was great for networking, too. Now it’s like a dead shopping mall, going the way of Geocities and MySpace.

Like a few million others, I have moved my personal account, and Triad City Beat’s, over to BlueSky, where there is no governing algorithm to bury the important stuff and boost content nobody cares about, and where users — many of them journalists and celebrities disillusioned with Twitter — have more than doubled since September, up to 24 million as of today’s count from 9 million at the end of September.

Musk has made it difficult to gauge how many people — real people, not porn bots — are using his site, but all you’ve got to do is go over there to see how it is decaying. Turns out tweeting is not as much fun when you can’t trigger the libs.

BlueSky is a comparative breath of fresh air, bereft of trolls, for now, no gratuitous nudity and with the celebratory vibe of those who have quit an awful job, or just broken out of jail.

I still pop open the Twitter app once a day or so, largely out of habit, but if you need me, you can find me where you’re still not allowed to use hate speech and the skies are blue.