from Hacker News

What Is Blueskyism?

by ImJamal on 9/22/25, 3:49 PM with 23 comments

  • by throwmeaway222 on 9/22/25, 4:54 PM

    Did Nate Silver notice 2 grammar errors in his post there that nearly affect the meaning of it? People need more ChatGPT than they think.

    Also Bluesky was never the "prom king" even on his graph it had 3% market share at its peak WHILE X had 30%.

    That being said, it was impressive for it to hit 3%, but last I heard every conservative person that tried to join it was instabanned within 3 minutes. You'll never have a rival to X if you ban half the population.

  • by bandyaboot on 9/22/25, 4:30 PM

    I don’t know, this seems like something to be taken with a grain of salt. Throughout, the post is dripping with personal contempt for the people he’s talking about. It just seems like he’s taking his personal experience with the “blueskyists” pre Bluesky and turning it into something important enough to coin this term “Blueskyism”, without ever making the case that that’s true.

    It’s less, “this is an important thing to consider in contemporary, online political discourse”, and more, “I have personal experience with these sorts of people, and let me tell you, they annoy the living piss out of me.” And I have no trouble believing him.

  • by standardly on 9/22/25, 4:00 PM

    separating public discourse into two distinct echo chambers is among the worst possible things I can imagine for our society right now
  • by bigyabai on 9/22/25, 3:57 PM

    As someone who never used Bluesky or X, the only thing this article has convinced me of is that the author is terminally online. They seemingly ignore that all three of their "essential characteristics" are just byproducts of modernity. Dialectic digression and credentialism are the product of empiricism dominating the human spirit. Nobody prays to get rid of illness anymore, you go to the doctor so they can give you an empirically-tested cure. And it works better than prayer, hence, we worship digression and credentials.

    Catastrophism is native to American politics. How, exactly, you live in a globalist world without forming an opinion on the matter is a study of sociopaths for someone else. There is no post-WWII America without the myth of catastrophe and salvation via nuclear war. We built this nation, and set the global status-quo, on the back of a global catastrophe. Ignoring that fact doesn't make you a better historian, it makes you blind.

    Maybe those Bluesky users are just repeating the past 150 years of anthropological research that pertains to postmodern human politics. This Nate Silver guy would probably cream his shorts if he read Hegel.