Nate Silver's big list of grievances

“Blueskyism” Isn’t Real

Last week, liberal wonk Nate Silver wrote a Substack post titled, “What is Blueskyism?” It’s very long and tries to make a connection between Bluesky wokescolds and Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss last year. Silver also spends a considerable amount of time trying to argue that Bluesky doesn’t have any political influence. Which is a curious choice. If it doesn’t have any influence, why’d you write a thousand-plus words about it, Nate?

Silver’s essay generally doesn’t make a ton of sense — going so far as to claim that “blueskyism predates Bluesky.” So it’s not really Blueskyism, is it? Sounds like it’s something else entirely! Silver also displays an incredible lack of understanding of how the internet works or how to measure influence. So first, we need to knock down Silver’s data.

Silver makes his case that Blueskyism is an irrelevant political sphere by, first, graphing out Google Trends data, which is a terrible way to measure anything, especially in 2025, when search traffic has fallen off a cliff. Dumb! But he claims that, according to Google Trends, Bluesky is receiving less search traffic than X, which Silver thinks is good actually. Except Google Trends doesn’t measure “search traffic.” Google Trends data shows the popularity of search terms. It’s also a dumb way to measure the influence of a social platform. Active users of a social network are not, by definition, going to Google to find stuff that’s happening on there. Silver then goes even further, lining up that Google Trends data, which he thinks is search traffic, which, again, does not really matter when we’re talking about social platforms, with state-by-state electoral data. Dumber! Also, if you look at his electoral data graph, it actually shows that activity on both X and Bluesky correlated with support for Harris’ campaign in blue states last year.

But Silver loves data and graphs, and we have some numbers on Bluesky. I had Garbage Day researcher Adam plot out monthly aggregate growth among the platform’s biggest accounts, comparing when we first started tracking them back in 2023 to last year’s spike. (We paused our tracking for a while in between because nothing was happening on the site and our main metrics tool went down.) There was essentially a massive spike of interest following the election and now growth has fallen back to where it was around August 2023. Which is actually both normal and a good sign. The site onboarded a ton of new users and the majority of those users are still using the site regularly.

Also, Adam wanted me to mention here that about 5-10% of the most popular posts on Bluesky — 1,000 likes or more — are actually just cartoon erotica. Which no one seems to mention when they talk about the influence of the platform.

But I digress. Yes, Bluesky has flatlined a bit. And, as I wrote last week, X does still offer a direct line to the Trump administration, which is useful if you want to personally cyberbully Vice President JD Vance. But Silver’s graphs even show that unique users and posts from those users on Bluesky are 50% higher than they were last summer, even if a lot of the bigger growth has calmed down.

Dumbest of all, though, Silver goes on to basically admit that “Blueskyism” isn’t actually a thing. “It’s not a political movement so much as a tribal affiliation,” he writes. “A niche set of attitudes and style of discursive norms that almost seem designed in a lab to be as unappealing as possible to anyone outside the clique.” So what are we even talking about here?

Well, Silver does finally get around to defining “Blueskyism,” breaking it up into three smaller ‘isms: Smalltentism, or the “aggressive policing of dissent, particularly of people ‘just outside the circle’ who might have broader credibility on the center-left.” Credentialism, or the “centering of the suitability of the speaker based on his or her credentials and/or identity characteristics.” And, finally, catastrophism, or “humorless, scoldy neuroticism.” Hilariously, though, Silver, again, undermines his entire point, by including screenshots of very viral X posts from journalist Taylor Lorenz as an example of “catastrophism” on Bluesky. Really, really dumb!

So, just to summarize what Silver has laid out here. So you really understand how dumb this all is. Bluesky has no influence, even though it saw an insane amount of growth last year. And has come out of that spike about double the size it was before. And has stayed that popular. The leftist ideology on the site, “Blueskyism” as he calls it, is not a coherent political movement, though, but Democrats should ignore it, regardless. But it also predates Bluesky. Silver admits that most of the people he personally hates on Bluesky were posting the same stuff on Twitter back when it was Twitter. Also, much of what’s being put on Bluesky is completely indistinguishable from what you see from liberals and leftists on X. Great blog, Nate. All cleared up.

Silver concludes by writing, “Bluesky will probably settle into a small but sustainable steady state as the equivalent of a niche hobbyist subreddit.” Which is probably true, but it’s, again, clearly true for X, as well. What Silver doesn’t appear to understand is that he’s actually made the case that Bluesky is basically just a very active offshoot of X and that both sites are becoming less popular and less influential. X, because it used to be Twitter, just has a slightly stickier network effect.

A commenter in the subreddit for If Books Could Kill summed this up pretty well, writing, “It's so funny to see these Twitter celebrities become obsessed with BlueSky. My take is that microblogging is losing its influence. Neither Twitter, Threads, or Bluesky is going to have the cultural impact as Twitter at its height. And these people like Nate Silver are dealing with the fact that they are big fish in a small pond, so they're lashing out.”

This is what’s really driving centrist pundits like Silver mad. These ostensibly Serious People don’t like the feeling that they are becoming unremarkable internet users like everyone else. When online influence was concentrated on Twitter in the 2010s, they felt like they were somehow different from normal users. Their real world professional contacts mapped over fairly seamlessly and they were able to dictate what was popular on the platform. But as all text-based social platforms lose their grip on both the internet at large and, by extension, mainstream media, which is also on its way out, guys like Silver are clearly feeling uncomfortable about it. And you can make as many charts about it as you like, but unless you put it in a 30-second video, it’s not going to matter.

*Looks around my newsletter and laughs nervously*

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A Good (Threads) Post

Some Garbage Updates

We’ve had a big year! We’ve added a managing editor, the fabulous Cates Holderness, finished a string of packed live shows at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn, and inked a partnership for our podcast Panic World with Courier. Also, Panic World is officially a year old now! Thank you to all of you who read and listen every week. We want to make sure Garbage Media (yes, that’s the company’s real name lol) can keep growing and putting out great work. So we’re going to be making some changes to make sure our business can stay as strong as it is.

Garbage Day is going to one free issue a week. This is a big change. I, personally, don’t love the idea of paywalling more content, but the ad industry is a mess. Making things worse, we’ve had a string of advertisers in the tech space approach us, asking if we’d run ads for their new AI products. This is something we don’t feel comfortable with and it’s becoming harder to avoid. So we’re really going to focus on paid subscriptions. Later this month, our Monday issue will stay the same, and feature one ad slot, but our Wednesday and Friday issues will be going behind the paywall. We’ll be bugging you a bunch about buying a subscription as we make the change. But if you want to buy one right now you can click the green button below.

We’re reorganizing the Discord. Our paid community of over a thousand binheads, as they call themselves, has gotten a little messy and confusing, especially for new users. This Friday, we’re gutting it and streamlining it, as well. Cates and I have spent the summer scheming and I think it’s going to be a lot easier to navigate. We also have some really exciting plans for the community, which we’ll reveal shortly.

Lastly, Garbage Day is throwing a party next month. On October 9th, we’re taking over TV Eyes in Brooklyn. Mark your calendars! It’s going to be very different from the live events we’ve done before, but it should feel substantially garbage-y. Mark your calendars and we’ll be sending around a ticket link very soon!

MAHA Goes To Washington

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testified before the Senate Finance Committee last week, with this country’s top politicians finally scrutinizing Kennedy and the growing extremist movement he’s been building. And, yes, Kennedy’s Make American Healthy Again movement should be considered an extremist movement.

If you want the highlights from the hearing, PBS has a good post rounding them up. But the TL;DR is that Kennedy ranted and raved about vaccines and COVID to a point where even Republican senators seemed alarmed.

Garbage Day has started a new project tracking MAHA spaces on platforms like Instagram and Facebook (more on that soon) and the extent to which almost all major health misinfo online orbits around Kennedy’s pages was surprising even for us. Like every other online reactionary movement, it’s half an engagement play — antivax content does very well on Meta platforms — and half a political wedge to open a path for more extremist content, in this case Evangelical trad lifestyle influencers who literally want to send us back to the Stone Age. Mother Jones was not being hyperbolic when they wrote this morning, “Impeach RFK Jr.” Other members of the Kennedy family are saying the same thing btw.

Speaking of health misinfo…

The Firing Of A Popular Voice Actor Is A Little More Complicated Than You May Have Heard

A fan campaign has sprung up to get Greg Cipes, the voice actor for Beast Boy on Teen Titans Go!, reinstated to the show. The narrative flying around the web right now is that Cipes was fired immediately after his disclosed that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s. This, obviously, sounds alarming. It has even led some users on X to compare it to Chadwick Boseman’s silent battle with cancer, using Cipes as an example as for why actors shouldn’t tell producers about their health struggles.

A source inside of Warner Bros. Discovery told The Wrap that Cipes was fired because his performance as Beast Boy wasn’t consistent enough.

Well, what both fans and Warner Bros. Discovery haven’t mentioned is that Cipes has been using Beast Boy in posts on his Instagram where he promotes “electromagnetic crystals,” coffee enemas, drinking your own urine, and sun gazing as ways to combat his Parkinson’s. Which I can’t imagine Warner Bros. would be too comfortable with.

The 67 Meme, Explained

The number 67 has quickly become a very big meme among Gen Z. To the point where McDonald’s is using it in ads now. I’ve seen some compare it to 69, the sex number, but it’s a little different.

It’s a reference to the song “Doot Doot (6 7)” by the rapper Skrilla. Last winter, it was used in a bunch of basketball edits on TikTok and spread that way. It’s used more similarly to a Rick Roll, where the joke is how randomly you can fit it into whatever you’re talking about.

A Good Post

Some Stray Links

• “Obligatory ‘YouTube is Broken’ Video”

• “Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI”

• “RFK Jr. Is Living in a Pretend Anti-Vax World”

P.S. here’s some high tech emoji surgery.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***