Everyone is Hitler but Me! Even Mark Cuban is Sick of Bluesky
Users seem more interested in emoting than persuading
Dear Coddling Movie Community,
On Monday, Courtney and I head to Los Angeles for another special screening of The Coddling movie.
It’s the kind of outreach that paid subscribers to this substack directly support. Special screenings have reached five nations and dozens of campuses including Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, UCLA, and Duke.
Thank you to our paid subscribers, and if you’d like to help spread the un-coddling message, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
By the way, today’s post references Lucy, one of the wise-beyond-their-years Gen Zers profiled in our film.
All the best,
Ted
“Hello, less hateful world.”
That’s how Mark Cuban announced his arrival on Bluesky back in November. Many others viewed the self-styled anti-Elon, anti-X social media platform the same way. Since the presidential election, millions fled X, and Bluesky has swelled from about 10 million to 30 million users.
Like Cuban, many sought refuge from Musk and MAGA. They sought a nicer version of X. They sought a place free from hatred and intolerance.
Yet now, just seven months later, Cuban sees things differently.
In a recent series of posts, the billionaire ripped Bluesky for its hatred and intolerance. He now regards the platform as a left-wing echo chamber that’s repelling users, and driving them back into the arms of Musk:
“Engagement went from great convos on many topics, to agree with me or you are a nazi fascist,” Cuban wrote. “We are forcing posts to X.”
The former Shark Tank star and Dallas Mavericks owner also said he thinks Bluesky users have “grown ruder and more hateful.”
“Even if you agree with 95% of what a person is saying on a topic, if there is one point that you might call out as being more of a gray area, they will call you a fascist etc.,” said Cuban [...]
Other famous lefties have reported similar problems. For instance, Bluesky users throttled director Rob Reiner for saying that progressives should accept that Donald Trump won the election.
And how might someone with a more libertarian orientation fare on the “less hateful” platform?
Consider the experience of Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle:
First impression:
1) I am possibly the most conservative person on the site, and I voted for Harris.
2) Group dynamics make it hard to voice dissent. (I got blocked by someone for noting that in 2019, just under 3,000 females were victims of homicide, which means the overwhelming majority of women are, thankfully, at low risk of being killed by a man in their life.)
3) Founder effects mean this dynamic will be hard to change. The libertarians I see there mostly seem to be posting on issues where they agree with progressives, not ones where they disagree. Progressives who point out that, say, it's actually really hard to denaturalize a citizen and this is probably not a big risk, even under Trump, are getting dragged.
4) I'm not sure there's Twitter-level demand for a conversation that is restricted to agreeing with the leftmost 7% of the electorate.
Ah, those Seven Percenters!
Regular readers know that I’m always moaning about the Eight Percenters.
Here I refer to the essential report Hidden Tribes, published by the British research organization More in Common. According to the report, the left-right, Dem-Republican divide obscures what’s really going on in America.
Instead of focusing on two political parties, the report’s authors separate America into seven different political “tribes.” On consequential issues such as free speech and affirmative action, roughly 92 percent of us—lefties, moderates, and conservatives— actually share a lot of common ground.
But there is one tribe that breaks with the rest, the Progressive Activists (a.k.a. the Eight Percenters).
This is the leftmost tribe.
Its members are very likely to be active online and posting about politics. Although small in number, its members dominate our most powerful institutions including entertainment, academia, and the legacy media.
I prefer the term “Eight Percenters” to “Progressive Activists” because my term serves as a reminder of how small this tribe is. The tribe might seem to represent most of the nation, but only eight percent of America agrees with its worldview.
The Choice
The Eight Percenters who dominate Bluesky face an important choice: emote or win?