← Mixed Signals from Semafor Media
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- [00:11]
A
Welcome to another episode of the Mixed Signals podcast from us here at Semaphore Media, where we are talking to some of the most important and interesting people shaping our new media age. I'm Max Tawney. I'm the media editor here at Semaphore, and with me, of course, as always, is Semaphore's Editor in chief, Ben. Ben Smith. Ben, are you on bluesky? Do you use bluesky, the social networking app that is a lot like Twitter X, but is not?
- [00:40]
B
You know, sometimes I drop a link in there and then I just kind of duck and run away.
- [00:45]
A
You're a poster, but you're not a lurker, correct? Well, listeners, slash viewers of the show can probably guess that. The reason why I'm asking is because our guest on the show this week is someone who is very heavily involved on Blue sky and a user herself, of course. That's Rose Wang. She is the COO of BlueSky, which is the Twitter competitor alternative, but also a lot more platform that has grown just tremendously over the past few years, partially in reaction to Elon Musk's purchase of X and all of the changes that have come along with that. And we've been wanting to have someone from Blue sky on the show for a while because it's just this really interesting platform where a lot of our peers in the media business are trying things out, you know, in particular, because they are not as. As averse to journalism and outside links as X has become. But, Ben, what's your feeling about Blue sky as a platform? Why are you just dropping a link in there and ducking and leaving?
- [01:45]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think it's both a really fascinating experiment and a different technical idea for what social media should be, which we can get into a bit with Rose, and then simultaneously captures some of the worst things about social media, where you have a very, like, politically polarized community that can be very hostile to just kind of anyone delivering a message it doesn't want to hear. Kind of developed a bit of a reputation for shooting the messenger.
- [02:08]
A
So we want to ask about its rapid growth. We want to ask Rose about her vision for Blue sky beyond what a lot of people are engaging with, which is just this one single kind of X or Twitter like feed. And of course, we want to also ask about what the ramifications have been from this kind of big new influx of users over the last several years and where she sees it going. Blue sky has a new AI tool that she's probably a lot better at explaining than I AM this is a little bit more of a technical episode because Rose has a PhD from, from Stanford in computing. She's a lot smarter about this stuff than I am, even though I think Ben and I are maybe. I'm speaking for you, Ben, in saying that, you know, through Claude code, we're feeling a lot more, you know, technically savvy these days, or it's making us feel technically savvy, even if we aren't necessarily.
- [02:54]
B
We're great with computers over here. It's amazing. I also want to ask Rose about how this thing is going to make money as a company, because while they have this very interesting, really utopian, philosophical vision, they're a public benefit corporation. They also raised $100 million last year and they, I think, basically have no revenue and have out. Are they in the advertising business? Are they in the subscription business? Are they going to reinvent some other kind of business? And I think that's, I suspect, starting to press down on them a bit.
- [03:18]
A
Well, clearly we have a lot to get to with Rose, and she's actually in the waiting room for us right now. So we'll take a short break and we'll be back with Rose Wang right after this.
- [03:33]
B
Our friend Josh Spanier, Google's VP of marketing, has a new podcast out called Frontier cmo. It's from Think with Google, and it gets into all the ways marketing is shifting, especially in the AI era, where the old marketing playbooks have become obsolete and the whole role of the CMO is being redefined in real time. Josh talks to the people who are actually figuring it out, top CMOs, industry leaders and creators, and gets into the real world challenges and specific strategies they're using to navigate this new era. These are notes from the marketing Frontier. You can find Frontier CMO on any podcast platform or watch it on YouTube. Rose, thank you so much for joining us. And I was thinking, I think that when people think about Blue sky, they often think about it as, okay, that's another platform, an alternative to threads, to Twitter, to X. And people shorthand it that way. But its origin story is in many ways kind of stranger. You know, Mike Masnik wrote this famous essay in 2019 that outlined a switch from platforms to protocols, an approach that would bring us back to the way the Internet used to be. And I wonder if, before we get kind of into what Blue sky is now, if you could tell us a little about the sort of idea of Blue sky and I guess, how you found trying to get to that idea.
- [04:44]
C
Thank you so much for having me Ben and it's very nice to have someone who really understands the history of Blue sky, which is exactly, as you said, quite different from a normal startup. So we actually started as a tweet. Jack Dorsey in 2019 had a tweet about let's start a project called Blue sky where we're going to have an open protocol. And he was inspired by Mike Masnik's paper on protocols, not platforms. Because the world that we were living in at the time is we started realizing there's actually only a few companies that control speech. They control what goes in terms of attention that you see and also what gets taken away. And this is a very difficult world to moderate in, because how do you have one set of policies for a global population when even free speech is different in UK compared to the us and so the whole idea of, hey, this social media platform that we have become so accustomed to and actually have, I would say, a quite toxic relationship with, we need to relook at why those things are happening and what's happening under the hood. And if you actually look at the incentives behind these social platforms, it's an incentive where they want to lock eyeballs into one feed so they can sell that number of eyeballs to brands and advertisers who are the actual end customers and end users of these social platforms. And that creates this dynamic where then of course, engagement baiting, outrage tends to get a lot more views because that is the incentive. Those posts should get shown more because they will get more reactions. And so Blue sky was founded to actually solve and disrupt a lot of the same these issues with big tech social incumbent platforms. They have basically one or two feeds that control all of our attention, one set of moderation rules that govern the boundaries of speech. And our goal was how do we create an ecosystem where anyone can create an app? And what we disrupt is this cold start problem where it's so hard to build a social app because you need millions of people to start. It's not just, let's get 100 people here and you have a social network. And so that's why we really haven't seen many social platforms that popped up in the last 10 years. Because this cold start problem is so hard to break. And our thesis is users will choose a better experience for themselves if they were given that choice. And that choice demands competition. We cannot be the only app. There can only, or there cannot only be three to five platforms that exist. We need to have thousands of options and the best experiences will rise to the top.
- [07:47]
A
So I Don't think that any social media platform starts with the idea that they want to build this toxic engagement baiting, you know, ecosystem. Maybe some do, but I don't think that any of the successful ones have kind of started out that way. But as you kind of correctly pointed out, the financial incentives kind of drive them that way. Right. You want to keep users engaged on your platform so that you can sell advertising, have more eyeballs to sell to more advertisers. I guess you guys are trying to, you know, disrupt that. But then how do you plan on making money?
- [08:21]
C
I guess that's the trillion dollar question. I think that for us money follows value and I think that's always been true. And essentially what we hope to create is a new model that reflects the value that's actually being created on social networks, which is that at the end of the day, creators are the ones who are creating the content that people are looking at and platforms are a distribution engine. And so where dollars are going today is platforms are getting most of the dollars from advertisers and the people who are creating the value get a fraction of those dollars. Attribution is totally broken with Blue Sky. Our hope is that we can reverse that trend where creators, builders, community curators are the ones who are making most of the money and then we are taking a fraction of that cost, what that looks like. Yet we're still figuring it out. We luckily have raised VC dollars so that we can do experimentation before we're forced to put in a business model. And so a lot of the dollars that we raised was so that we don't have to depend on advertising having
- [09:28]
B
having been worked for a company. I was theater buzzfeed for a while whose model in retrospect was raise VC money and spend it. Like I saw you raised $100 million a year ago and I'm sure if you really count your pennies, that'll go a long way. But you've got to be feeling some pressure beyond the sort of hand wavy. We'll think about it at some point and experiment to generate revenue. Right. What are the sort of first efforts? What are you going to do?
- [09:51]
C
Yeah, I mean the really cool thing about Bluesky is because it's not just an app, but there's a whole ecosystem that's built on top of our protocol. In fact, there's 6,000 projects that have been built in the last two years. There's actually been a lot of experimentation, even third party app development ecosystem. So we can kind of watch what they're doing and there's already been a lot of experiments around money that goes to feed creators. So on bluesky, it's not just one feed, but in fact there are hundreds of thousands of feeds that are user generated. And what we've seen actually is there's a company called Graze that is a feed builder, it's a third party project. And on Graze there are feedbuilders who've gotten money from advertisers for whatever they've built. And so it's more of a subscription model in that sense. We've also seen other folks experiment with sponsored posts and I think that that's also really interesting. And so in general, I think that's a direction we're excited about is something around subscriptions where there are some set of services that either we're offering to developers or we're offering to users that folks can pay for, but we want to enable that for creators themselves where they can have subscriptions that users subscribe to, I guess.
- [11:12]
A
How do you explain. How do you explain what bluesky is and what the community and the environment is to people who may be members of your family who may not know as much about social networks and may just think of it as an app? Can you kind of explain what this other universe that people are building on top of is? I think you've laid it out really well just now. But just for people who may not have understood exactly what you said, if you could just explain it in simple terms, that would be. I personally would find it to be informative. And then I think also it would be useful for some of our viewers and listeners as well.
- [11:42]
C
Thank you for the prompt, Max.
- [11:45]
A
That's a nice way of saying I only understood about 50% of what you just said and I think it would be good for me to hear it again.
- [11:52]
C
No, I really appreciate that. I think oftentimes we're in such a little bubble and so it's very important for us to be able to translate. But honestly, I think protocol is truly a super nerdy way of saying we've deconstructed the components of social media and made each part modular, competitive and buildable. So what does that look like? You have an identity system that's universal, that you can actually take with you. So right now when you go on Facebook or LinkedIn, you actually have different handles and different usernames, and this whole concept of squatting a handle actually indicates ownership. It means that the platform owns your identity and you have to ask them for the identity through their process. Why is that? A problem? Well, let's say when X changed to. From Twitter to X, the leadership could come in and just take the X handle away from the user who already had it without asking for permission or paying for that identity. It'd be like in real life if someone just came was like, well, I really like Max. Honey, that's a problem.
- [13:00]
A
That sounds terrible. Yeah, travesty.
- [13:03]
C
And then there's not only your universal identity, but also all your relationships. So this idea of who follows who and why, that is such interesting information, is because so much of our life is social. What I eat depends on what my friends are recommending. What I read depends on what my friends are reading on Goodreads. It affects even our dating lives. In fact, Hinge was built off of Friends of Friends Dating because that's how we date offline. But that whole experience has been closed off to the platforms that own the social graph. How Hinge was able to build Friends of Friends Dating was because they used Facebook Social Graph so that they could see, oh, these. You know, Ben Smith is a friend of both Max and Rose. And so, you know, you should meet. But as soon as Facebook realized, oh, this is an industry or a market that we should go into, they closed off the API access to their social graph. And no dating app has had access to friends of friends until, I think, yeah, it was 2018 when that happened. So it's been almost eight years. And so these are all huge problems from our perspective of not having these publicly available and open for other developers to use and build on top of, because essentially we've been building in a world where it's not social at all. And if in a world where that open social graph of who follows who is open and anyone can build on top of it, that just completely opens up the world of apps. And so you can actually have a Friends of Friends dating app. Or for us, we've chosen to build an app that's a mix between a Twitter and a Reddit to connect communities that some people lovingly call a liberal echo chamber. But, you know, there's 6,000 projects built on our ecosystem and so playground, with lots of experimentation. And what we hope to have that happens over time is all this remix of your, you know, data of who likes what content, plus who's following who, built on top of, like, a music player. That's a whole different experience that doesn't exist today.
- [15:25]
A
Well, we have a lot more that we want to get to with Rose, but we need to take a short break.
- [15:28]
C
Break.
- [15:28]
A
So we'll be Right back with more after this.
- [15:38]
B
In this week's branded segment from Think with Google, I talked to Google's VP of marketing, Josh Spanier, about how AI can be a rubric for leadership. We often hear about AI as fundamentally kind of an efficiency play. But in your conversations with CMOs, you often talk about it as a leadership test. Why is that?
- [15:54]
D
That so? Ben, AI is the worst it's ever going to be right now. Tomorrow it'll be better, next month it'll be even better, and next year it will be exponentially better. And that gets to kind of the challenge we have within marketing today. The AI is incredibly strong, incredibly good and getting better and better, and us humans are not progressing at the same rate, at the same pace. I was just with 100 CMOs at an event on gathering of CMOs and it's very, very clear that this is a leadership gap and a challenge for CMOs. How do you get your teams to embrace the technology which is accelerating much faster than their own ways of working as humans and as marketers on teams? What we found inside of Google Marketing is there's three or four things that have really helped. One of them is just to find your rock stars. Find the people at any level who are into the technology, help them get more responsibility, more AI projects, projects, and have them be your change agents internally. We also found that building a secure sandbox, a place using Google's Gemini cloud services to actually put all your data and know that it's not going to leak out into the world, but you can actually apply Gemini to it. Incredibly powerful and a big unlock to get over the human fear of doing something wrong with AI. And third, you kind of have to embed AI into your culture. You have to, as a leader, be using it in your personal life and professional life and see your team see it. And then in your team meetings and all your other formats and places of interaction, you need to be celebrating AI work. You have to get the humans to embrace the AI so they can see the opportunity and embrace the change in ways of working.
- [17:28]
B
And where can people go for more?
- [17:29]
D
Head on over to thinkwithgoogle.com where we have a myriad of articles around transformation of teams and people and process as much as we do around the actual individual technologies you can take advantage of. It's all at sync with Google.
- [17:53]
A
Ben, do you want to ask about the people who are lovingly calling blue
- [17:56]
B
sky a liberal echo chamber would say such a thing? Yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, I mean, I am like, I think my Own sort of political views are probably close to yours. And Jackson, like, I really love the utopianism of these, and unlike Matt, you know, really fully understood what you were talking about of this kind of idea of breaking a social network and opening it up and all those things. But it also is true that social networks are mostly just communities when it comes to the reality, not the ideology. And I mean, just even as myself and obviously a lot of people find Blue sky kind of a difficult place to be because, like, for instance, as a journalist, you go on there and if you report something that is not. That just isn't what people there want to hear, it's just sort of an unpleasant place where people yell at you a lot. Like, that's my actual experience of Blue sky and why I don't post there. And I'm curious. I mean, it just seems like a big central problem for this project that you're building, that it has become you don't have power over the community. But isn't the reverse that maybe some community comes and has power over you? And if it's a community that is very hostile to outsiders, as the kind of liberal tone of Blue sky is, that pretty much kind of kills your growth, right? Like you're kind of stuck with the people who've come and hung out in your bar.
- [19:08]
C
What I would say is that we. Our early user base that does skew to the left is not by design but by circumstance. When Twitter changed to new ownership, the first wave of people to leave were those who are most alienated by that new direction. And that group tends to lean progressive. And I think that also is then the network effect that happens. And it's not totally new. I think we've seen this where in the early days, Twitter was for tech nerds, Reddit was for gamers. TikTok was, was just for people who wanted to watch teenagers sing and dance. And that's not what they became. So this is a problem that most social networks experience early on. And as a reminder, we're two years in, and it took about, I think, Facebook two to three years to get to 40 million users. And it took Twitter three to four years to get to where we are, and we're two years out. What I will say, though, is that that early concentration of users that did create that network effect is not where the growth we're seeing happening now. And we're seeing that academics are coming here because they lost access to reliable data and research communities. Journalists came because their reach and distribution were being throttled. Right? Links are downranked on a lot of platforms. And what we're seeing is there's a majority of new users that are coming on who are just people who want a simple chronological feed or genuine connections or freedom from engagement bait. And so what we're seeing is one, politics are only like 10% of post less than we're seeing growth in sports. And I think on Game 7 of the World Series, the network lit up 2 to 3x more than it normally does on a given night. And there were people talking about baseball who I swear to God have never talked about sports before. And so I think what we see is. That is exactly what you're talking about, is the answer is communities. That's how we grew in the beginning. It wasn't random. We grew through substack, first coming to Blue sky and then, you know, tech Twitter and then black Twitter. And so I think similarly, what we see is that there's so many groups that are underserved, and these are not groups like the big groups out there that everyone expects, whether that's like, about the Met Gala or the Oscars. But it's like the mechanical keyboard community.
- [21:37]
B
But do you think politics is, like, uniquely toxic for media platforms? It basically destroyed Facebook. You know, Twitter is now, has always to some degree, been torn apart by it, but certainly is now. And you sound very enthusiastic about mechanical keyboard people and less enthusiastic about political people. What do you think that is?
- [21:54]
C
It's not just that I'm excited about mechanical keyboard enthusiasts. I think that what's happening around the world is that politics is just dominating the conversation because so much is happening. Whether that's what happened in Venezuela to now, what's happening domestically with different primaries. It's just politics is such a topic of conversation, and social media is a reflection of society. So I don't think that it's something that we want to dissuade folks from talking about. And in fact, I think it's what makes us culturally relevant. We're a tiny startup, we're 40 people, and two years out, we have 40 million users, and we're competing with giants like X and meta, with, you know, hundreds of thousands of people, or some are maybe thousands, with some cuts now. And so I would say that it's. It's a difficult challenge of how do we build tooling so that people can create safer spaces for themselves or turn off or tune off content when they want, Because I do think it can be overwhelming. But I don't think the answer is to not have that content.
- [23:02]
B
Do you think we could make Max an app where, like, people don't yell at him. Thank you very.
- [23:08]
A
Something that we could do. I appreciate it. I feel like I'm trying to figure out who my followers and stuff on bluesky are, because it's. It is interesting. You know, one of the things that happened is I. I joined, you know, around the same time that everyone in our kind of cohort joined, you know, as well, which was when X decided to throttle Links.
- [23:27]
B
Right.
- [23:27]
A
And a place where formerly had been a good, fairly decent distribution platform for my stories, particularly because they were for kind of an insider Y media audience that lived on X no longer kind of was there. And I've definitely found that there is that audience on Blue Sky. I think I have more followers on Blue sky than I do on X, which, know is pretty nice, considering I've been on Twitter and X for, like, you know, God knows how long, and I've been on Blue sky for like, two years. But I. I guess the question that I am curious about, Rose, is like, how did you think about this kind of major influx of users that you got around the time of, you know, late 2024, early 2025, when it seems like people were looking for a new platform? Is that something that is thrilling because now you're competing with, you know, the big guys, even though you're a company that's old and has 40 employees? Or was it difficult because you weren't able to necessarily build the thing that you had set out to kind of build? And as Ben said earlier, you know, you're a bar that opened up and a bunch of people happened to find it, and now it's incredibly overcrowded and maybe a little bit different than you had originally intended?
- [24:38]
C
Yeah, honestly, the answer is yes, which is both. I don't think it's one or the other. And no company is going to sit in front of you and say, wow, we really did not like growth that sucked. I think growth is one of the hardest things to come by. And for Blue Sky, I think we've done a really good job of being reactive in capturing people who are trying to leave. And there were other decentralized protocols out there. For example, Mastodon is built on top of Activity Pub and has been around for almost a decade now. And users could have gone there, but they didn't. They came to bluesky. So I do think that we were built for this moment of scale, and it was really tested in the moment where millions of people joined in 24 hours, 48 hours, and our system stayed Online, despite being such a small team and us building on a decentralized protocol. And for the nerds, that means it was really, really hard to stay online. And on the other hand, we were a 20 person team when that happened. And we had no idea at that point what that scale meant. And it was not just an exercise in learning how to keep systems online, but it was really, hey, this is governance. And here are 40 million people who've now joined a network. And these 40 million people are made up of lots of different communities with lots of different needs. And I think it's taken us some time to learn who we are, what we care about, and also scale up our team to go and build out what we want. And it could have been the answer is, oh, we're gonna go put all of our attention on the app and just try to get all the attention back into that one feedback. And I think that's what a lot of companies might have done. But we've stayed true to our mission, which is we are built for builders. We want to give tools to not only the traditional developer builders, but also community builders. Creators are builders. Anybody who wants to go and do something about the world we live in today and disrupt it and not just sit there and feel powerless, but actually go and take these tools to go and experiment and see what they can do, whether that's a feed or an app.
- [27:06]
B
And you guys have now this, I think, quite interesting new project. It's called Attie, an AI powered app that, if I've got this right, that would allow me to build my own, you know, to make my own feed, to make my own app on top of Blue sky in which it could. And it could. I mean, I guess I'm wondering, like, are people, or could people use it to say, you know what? I like a lot of the content in Blue sky, but I don't like being yelled at by people who are mad at me, just like, I don't want to see any of that stuff.
- [27:34]
C
You're almost 100% there. So let me explain. Addy.
- [27:39]
B
I get that a lot.
- [27:41]
C
You know, one of the things that we've seen with AI is it's definitely happening. I think there's this debate about like, yes AI or no AI, and I think we're beyond that. It's more of how it's implemented. What is it actually being used for? And the frustration, the confusion, just all of those and just generally like doomsday feelings about AI, I think are real and warranted because this is a super powerful Tool that can kind of maybe do everything in a way that we can't understand because it's more intelligent than we are. And in that world, people are. We're back to this. A few companies own all the models and control what happens. And our approach to why we're taking a step into building AI tools is because we want to level the playing field. At the end of the day, we want a lot of what's happening in AI to come into this open world. And not only do we want it to come into the open world, we want to give people the tools to go build their own feeds, their own apps, on top of this remixable data that we have, whether it's your interest or social graph. And so I think that's the promise and the direction we're headed in. And the first demo we demoed was this feed creator where you can go and create any sort of feed you want based off of the posts across the Blue sky network. And you just have to type in natural language and just chat with the bot to say, okay, this is the type of feed I want. It produces that feed for you, Rose.
- [29:19]
A
You know, I think it's been widely talked about and discussed, and it's conventional wisdom now that, you know, since Elon bought Twitter, turned it into X, it's kind of made it into. It's made it into a very different platform, both from, like, a user and ideological perspective, and also from just from the perspective of how clunky and sometimes glitchy and malfunctioning and just overall in general, like, more difficult to use it is. But I guess I'm curious, is there anything that they have done that they've changed over the last few years that you've been like, oh, that's pretty interesting, and that's good. Maybe we should be doing something like that. That.
- [29:52]
C
Yeah. So I think that X has been doing a lot of different experiments, and I think it's been really interesting to see what has taken and not taken. And I think there's a lot be left on the table with communities that we're excited to pick up in terms of some of their experiments. You know, I think that we've seen that Twitter has gone more towards video, and they've done a pretty good job in that direction. And Blue sky has been primarily text first. We still very much believe in the spoken word, the written text. We're a bunch of nerds ourselves. But I do think that we. We need to meet where the market is today on video and images. And so I think Those are investments you'll see us make, maybe to get to parody in terms of where we should be with other platforms. But I don't think that it's necessarily like our strategy. But that is a good learning we have taken from X and other platforms.
- [30:49]
B
And then finally, Rose, when I was researching your background, apparently, I guess you were a member of the class of 2016, Forbes 30 under 30, which obviously is a great honor, but has since then kind of developed this incredible curse that people keep getting indicted. And you obviously do not seem like you're gonna get indicted, but I noticed it seems like one of your classmates did. I don't know, just. Cause as somebody who's a member of that group, it's become such kind of an interesting meme. What is it about people who kind of hustle their way into that kind of prominence under 30 that seems to correlate a bit with getting into trouble?
- [31:22]
C
This is a funny question, because I cannot answer for most of the 30. First of all, I think that people misunderstand the 30 under 30 list. It's a list of 600, because there's many lists. So first of all, I think it's, like, not as exclusive as people think it is. And I also think it's always about the, like, how you get on the list that matters. And I can tell you that I had no idea I was even in consideration for the list. I was just told one day that it happened versus I've heard of folks campaigning and, like, hiring PR firms to
- [31:58]
A
get on list like that.
- [31:59]
C
Oh, my God.
- [32:00]
B
Rose didn't even campaign to get on our show. We had to drag her on. So we really, really appreciate it.
- [32:05]
C
Thank you both so much. This was super fun.
- [32:13]
B
Marketing used to change by the year. Now it changes by the week. And if you're trying to keep up using last quarter's logic, you're already behind. Think with Google is there to help. Think with Google is a compass for the modern marketer. It's the place to learn how AI is evolving. Search to see exactly which creators are shaping culture on YouTube and to transform your measurement. It's where you go to ensure your 2026 strategy isn't stuck in 2026. Don't just keep up. Stay ahead. Head over to thinkwithgoogle.com today. Okay, Max, how did Rose do? Do you feel you understand now what Blue sky is doing?
- [32:53]
A
You know, I. I came away feeling like I understood a little bit more of what the vision is, but I do think it's one of those interesting situations. And her answer on this was really interesting. Where Blue sky, through some, though no fault of its own, ultimately ended up being something very different than what they had originally envisioned and were prepared for. Ben, I'm curious. Do you think that they're gonna have success, you know, allowing people to build their own versions of apps and their own feeds and that. That will be something that. That brings people to. Into the Blue sky ecosystem, community, society?
- [33:30]
B
You know, I mean, I think it's like such genuinely sort of a beautiful idea and so interesting and kind of cool, but not. And I think it's a little. Imagine if the owner of your favorite bar was talking to you about how he had built everything with reclaimed wood from the ocean. It's all very nice, but then what the scene winds up at the bar may have nothing to do with that. And I do think that technologists often see these social networks so abstractly, and then the emphasis is on social. And ultimately most of what Blue sky is, is the home for a particular community, which in many ways is super interesting and full of ideas and great conversations and also slices differently. But then also there's something to me, really interesting that the social network that has been kind of like most intentional about avoiding the pitfalls of other social networks, avoiding particularly the idea that you have this centralized corporate power that even has the capacity to censor speech, which is so troubling, somehow winds up being the one that recapitulates a lot of the worst habits of social networks, which is the kind of mobbing and the social toxicity. I mean, I don't really know what to make of that. And I think they have a really good thing going. But the notion that their plan is to monetize with the future also seemed like, not entirely thought through. And they may just actually be a social platform for liberals that can sell them Ms. Now subscriptions, you know, not
- [34:57]
A
a terrible business, probably in the end. Well, first of all, many great bars have been ruined this way. Great, amazing bar owners who put a of thought and care into these projects. And then all of the worst people, you know, in the entire world flood in and make it crowded, and you never want to go there. So you go to a worse bar,
- [35:13]
B
but the bar owner laughs all the way to the bank, right? Or it feels very ambivalent.
- [35:16]
A
I think that that's probably, you know, what's going on here to a certain degree, which is they're not going to complain about being a. As. As Rose correctly pointed out, being a social platform that has 40 million users after two years. I mean, that's, that is undoubtedly successful and they have wedged themselves in here. The main thing that they need to do is continue to kind of pry the door open and, you know, different varieties of people to be on there. Because as you can see, there are other people who are still trying to do a very similar type of thing. She mentioned substack. Obviously X is still, you know, doing its version of things, but I think generally the problem with BlueSky, if there is one, is they have successfully captured one pool of users. That seems like a solvable problem to me to a certain degree.
- [36:00]
B
And there is something, it's something strange about this pool of users. And this is maybe a part of the pool. Cause it's more the left part. And of journalists who are genuinely so influential. The elite conversation, when histories of this period are written, they're gonna be quoting tweets and Blue sky posts, not books. I mean, this is like genuinely where the real conversation is happening. And it's just notoriously hard to make money off. And nobody's making money off it. And it's a terrible business. And then meanwhile, I thought, you know, I was just thinking about our conversation with Adam Masseri, who runs Instagram on here, I guess, last year. But if you think about how, how Instagram, which is, you know, just sort of ruthlessly commercial, fundamentally thinks about this, like they're out there very actively trying to court celebrities, influencers, like kind of user friendly media and on threads have clearly made some kind of choice that makes it unusable for people who want to talk about politics, which seems like a total win for them.
- [36:49]
A
You know, one other thing I wanted to mention as well is I came away pretty impressed just by our conversation in general with Rose. We have always been careful about the executives who we put on the show, mostly because we feel like there are certain executives who want to come on and talk their book and won't seriously answer and engage with our questions. That's why I think that the CEOs and CMOs that we have on the show largely have been people that we know will really engage with the questions and answer them, or at least interesting to listen to when they don't answer. And I thought that Rose was really interesting and genuinely seemed to engage with their questions. And you know, at a moment when Blue sky doesn't have a CEO, its CEO recently stepped down. It seems like Rose is a kind of a rising star over there. And I don't know, I can see why Am I allowed to say that? Is that too biased? I thought she was impressive.
- [37:40]
B
Yeah. Maybe we can get her on like a 40 under 40 or something. Yeah.
- [37:47]
A
Well, that is it for us this week. Thank you so much for listening to another episode, the Mixed Signals podcast from us here at Semaphore Media. Our show is produced by Manny Fadal and Josh Billenson with special thanks to Anna Pisino, Jules Zern, Rachel Oppenheim, Tori Kaur, Garrett Wiley and Daniel Haft. Our engineer is Rick Kwan and our theme music is by Steve Bone, our public editor this week are the lovely liberal and left leaning users of bluesky. Bluesky Users, tell us what you thought of the episode. What did you think of Rose? Did you think that me and Ben were too skeptical or too rude to our haters on Blue Sky? Let us know.
- [38:27]
B
And if you like this podcast from Semaphore, we've just launched another one that I think is very much in the same spirit and I think you'll enjoy. It's called Compound Interest, hosted by our colleagues Liz Hoffman, our business editor, and Rohan Goswami, a great business reporter. And it's trying to have the same thing, kind of frank, high level conversations with CEOs who are right at the edge of the ways in which business is changing right now about how that's happening. So they've had the CEO of Uber, the CEO of the company that makes the Oura ring, and the CEO of a company that is trying to revive the Woolly Mammoth, among others. But they're just very fascinating conversations, I think, again, very much in kind of the open and hopefully pretty sophisticated spirit of this show.