Bluesky now has 24 million users. Jay Graber is still vowing to keep it from enshittification
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.
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.
Everyone says their app will remain pure and innocent until they need to start making money or the owner wants to cash out.
Since Bluesky doesn’t plan to run ads
I've heard this many, many times before.
Jack Dorsey left Bluesky. For the better, he was an absent Twitter CEO and is big into crypto and NFTs.
it's inevitable. you can't have an online service with millions of users, serving potentially billions of pageviews, and not have sources of revenue to pay for it all.
bluesky already enshitified when they started banning palestinians while pretending they were spam.
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.
It's amazing how people are just utterly incapable of learning from past experience. Every commercial service that has become popular started out being good, that's how they build the user base. Once they hit a critical mass where network effects keep people on the service, that's when enshittification starts. Bluesky might stay good for a year, two, maybe even a decade, but sooner or later it will do the same thing every other oligarch owned platform does.