Charles Benaiah is the publisher of unCharles, a rough jewel mined from the Substack diamond fields. In this feature, specially syndicated for Mx3’s Collectif, he looks at the illegitimate son of Twitter, Blue Sky. If it’s good enough for the New York Times and WaPo, is it good enough for your media business? Or just old news?
Unless you live under a rock, you know Elon Musk bought Twitter. You likely know that he screwed up everything pre-Musk Twitterati loved about the social platform built by and for writers. But, unless you sip virtual Papa Dobles with truly in writers, you may have missed that there’s a new place to post tweet-like things that has writers cawing. It’s called Blue Sky. It could have been called white elephant for all it matters. It’s the closest thing modern writers get to La Closerie des Lilas.
It’s so exclusive that getting an invite is like getting one of Willy Wonka’s gold-ticket chocolate bars. If you’re among the lucky few, you run straight to every social media you’re on to tell your friends. And, don’t stop ‘til you get there!
My journalist friend, Matthew K, gave me a Blue Sky invite. I didn’t think I would feel special entering a password to create my account. But, I did. My first impression: Blue Sky has all of the meh of early Twitter; but few of its current foibles.
Today’s Twitter is a loud, happening rage filled with people you’d expect to at a loud, happening rage. Clubbers scream to be heard over head-splitting background noise. They say increasingly stupid things and show increasingly more skin to get noticed.
Blue Sky is the street outside at 4am. Dead quiet. A few people nodding smartly, speaking in hushed tones, leaning against eco-friendly poles, while vaping as they wait for their Ubers.
The New York Times and Washington Post are there. But, not many more mainstream outlets. Matthew made a list of credible journalists who regularly post to BS. So far, his list is Jake Tapper.
Then it hit me.
Very few people are interesting enough to fill any of these places with pithicisms. Tapper’s posts focus mainly on Philly cheesesteaks, the Phillies, and cat pics. Riveting. This is Jake Tapper.
That’s why other platforms let people play photo-filter Pictionary. Or offer canned music for herky-jerky dance-like moves.
By my remarkably unscientific method, I’m going to guess there are about 50,000 people in the U.S. who can regularly create short-form, mostly text content. Report for America said there were 23k newspaper reporters in 2019. Zippia’s number is about 6k. Seventeen thousand people Substack. I follow about 12 interesting people on Twitter. On LinkedIn, the number is half that or… four. Add them up, account for overlap, add a fudge factor, and bingo… 50k.
This explains why Twitter, Threads, Notes, Blue Sky, and Mastodon can’t find enough writers to pith on their bathroom walls. Which is perverse given the oversupply of every other kind of content. Will pith get more pithers? And, most problematically, how long can a text-first place exist before it descends into a pithing contest?
People get so caught up in the trees, they can’t see the forest. Twitter was never about the pith. Or tweets. It was about the flywheel.
Flywheel: The thing you do that sets other good things in motion.
Twitter had a flywheel. Little things posted there made there way into mainstream media. Journalists would amplify the things posted on Twitter to huge audiences who didn’t know what Twitter was, go there, or care about it. Tweets got noticed by lots of people. That meant tweets had huge power. So, people wanted to be there.
CNN doesn’t quote Blue Sky. The Wall Street Journal doesn’t reference Substack. The New York Times doesn’t bring you stuff happening on Threads. Right now, Twitter is absolute mess of conflicting posts. Some by the same people separated by mere minutes.
At 7:06PM Eastern, on October 16th, MediaREDEF tweeted that, “Leaving Twitter had no effect on NPR.” Eighteen minutes later, they tweeted, “Twitter is throttling Patreon, creators say it undermines their livelihood.” Is Twitter effective or isn’t it? Both. Neither. It doesn’t matter. It never did.
There’s an old joke. Uh, two elderly scribes create accounts on the latest follow-me texting platform, and one of ‘em posts, “Boy, the posts in this place are really terrible.” The other one posts in reply, “Yeah, I know, and there’s not enough of them.”
That’s how I feel about most socials these days. Full of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness and it’s all over much too quickly.
Charles Benaiah is the CEO of Watzan, a techy company for medical media. When he’s not running a media company, he reads about media, thinks about it, pull out what’s left of his hair dealing with it, and, then, he writes about it over on unCharles. Charles is a member of Media Makers Meet – Mx3 Collectif.
