Bluesky Reminds Me Of The Golden Age Of X

Gaming Twitter hasn’t felt like Gaming Twitter in years. That may not change on Twitter anytime soon, but Bluesky feels like a window into the not-so-distant past.

Twitter has been in steep decline since Elon Musk took the website over in 2022. As of the end of August, the social media giant was estimated to be worth nearly 80 percent less than it was pre-takeover. And following the United States presidential election in November, hundreds of thousands of users have closed their Twitter (now known as X) accounts in favor of Bluesky, a Twitter competitor which has gained eight million users since October, rocketing from 13 million to 21 million.

Twitter’s Loss Is Bluesky’s Gain

Musk tied himself very publicly to Donald Trump’s reelection bid, and the former president’s return to the White House was the catalyst for many users to finally get serious about finding an alternative to Twitter, which increasingly became a source for right-wing activity as the election drew closer. I get it. I’m still on Twitter, but I understand why someone would choose this moment to leave. Prior to this, I’ve seen plenty of the gaming accounts I followed go dark.

Though the increasing prevalence of users spouting hateful talking points is a major blight on the website and has caused an exodus of advertisers, the problems with Musk’s Twitter go deeper. His decision to transform the blue checkmark from an icon that signified that the user was who they claimed to be into a status symbol that anyone could pay eight bucks a month to pin to their profile makes the site significantly less trustworthy and more difficult to navigate.

Additionally, Musk has given users with blue checkmarks priority in the algorithm, so you see their tweets more often. That extends to their replies being given priority over all others, and this is the biggest change that has made Twitter borderline unusable.

The Blue Checkmark Problem

I don’t want to generalize, but blue checkmarks are the site’s absolute worst users. When Musk introduced the idea of paying for verification, a common response from longtime Twitter users was, essentially, ‘F*** you, you should be paying me.’ The people who decided to shell out for features that had been free were, by and large, posters who hadn’t been able to grow an audience organically. That, and bots. The result is that blue checkmark replies tend to lack any insight at all. If you were known for your sparkling wit, you wouldn’t need to pay to shove it down everyone else’s throats.

So, if you’re actually interested in starting a conversation with a tweet, and that tweet achieves any degree of popularity, you’ll need to scroll through dozens of vacuous responses before you get to anything related to what you’re actually talking about. Similarly, if you want to reply to an interesting post, your tweet won’t be seen unless the poster goes to the trouble of searching through all of that trash.

And if you’re just interested in seeing the conversation, you either need to do that work or, more likely, move along. This hurt Twitter’s functionality as a vector for conversation about shared interests, and it fully killed the ability to click on funny tweet and read a bunch of great replies, which is really the whole point of being on Twitter.

An obnoxious change that I was reminded of today: you can no longer see anyone else’s likes at all.

As a games journalist who got my start as a freelancer in the 2010s, Twitter was central to the conversation around games. It was where I went to see what new indies other games journalists or developers were talking about, and I got all sorts of recommendations through the kinds of posts that, now, wouldn’t be favored by the algorithm. You could see developers interacting with each other, replying to players, and talking about their games.

Developers shared levels they were working on for Blocktober, and put together threads of cool things they learned on games they worked on. More than any of those specifics, it was the place where everyone who worked in the industry or covered it could go to talk about what was happening in games and see what their followers had to say about it.

Gaming Twitter Isn’t Coming Back

Under Musk, Twitter has massively boosted right-wing accounts — largely because, given his political heel turn, most others would be embarrassed to pay for a blue check, even if they wanted it. That makes it difficult for anyone to have a conversation about remotely sensitive topics, like race, gender, and sexuality in games.

Those posts, if they gain any traction, will be flooded with hostile blue check replies. So, people just don’t talk about that stuff much anymore, and gaming, which was already a vector for right-wing radicalization, loses out on progressive voices.

But Bluesky still functions like an unbroken Twitter. You still see the most-liked responses first, not the ones from people who paid to be treated as interesting. I can actually see people talking about games in interesting ways, sharing their work, and replying to cool stuff that other people made. I can see users doing that 1 Like = 1 Game prompt as a way to engage with their followers.

People are still posting pictures of their food, or sharing articles they wrote, or just talking about their thoughts on new games with the expectation that they won’t be engaged with exclusively in bad faith. It feels like my Twitter feed like pre-2022. Elon broke the bird app so bad that a competitor that does exactly what Twitter did three years ago is a major breath of fresh air.

Given how quickly Twitter has changed — Musk only took over in October of 2022 — it’s easy to see how Bluesky could go the same way. In a world where money can buy anything, no matter how vital it is as a global public communication tool, it seems perfectly possible that a bored billionaire could buy Bluesky and remake it in their image. It’s a dark aspect of life under capitalism. But for now, I’ll enjoy this little window into a slightly brighter past.