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.
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.