Musk's sadism economy

It's not really about "better moderation", it's not even monetisation – there's a reason X is so different to anything else.

Bluesky hits different. When you get to the newly-viral social network – and when you build up enough of a following/followers list for it to feel alive – the novelty is striking. It feels nothing like Twitter (or X, as it has become. It’s not Twitter any more).

Except it doesn’t actually feel new. Bluesky feels good because it feels familiar, at least if you were on there in its ‘golden’ era of a decade or more ago and had a following in the low thousands – especially if you’re a working journalist.

Sharing your articles results in RTs, likes, and even some constructive feedback. It doesn’t generally lead to a flurry of abuse. Jokes seem to work. The whole place feels like moving back into a childhood home you thought had been demolished. It’s still here. Perhaps social media could be like this again.

The roots of Bluesky’s potential downfall probably lie in that familiarity, too. There are some genuine innovations: starter packs – user-generated lists of people to follow – make it easier to get started, while feeds are perhaps Bluesky’s best feature. Instead of having one “algorithm” forced on you by Elon, or by Bluesky’s bosses, you can have several, and pick them yourself.

Some specialise in particular topic areas, some highlight posts from people you follow who don’t skeet (yes, “skeet” is the new “tweet”) often, others highlight posts people you follow interacted with. You can just see the posts of everyone you follow in order, but you can also see a range of algorithmic feeds that you choose yourself. That’s genuinely great.

But if we’re honest, Bluesky hasn’t fixed any of the fundamental issues that have plagued social media for decades. It still doesn’t have a business model, and that will have to come soon – more users means more costs. Now it has more users, the crypto bots and the impersonators are arriving, and will need to be dealt with. Its ‘solution’ to verification is clunky and technical, and probably won’t last.

It has no magic fix for the problems of moderation now the user base is less self-selecting – its rules aren’t clearer and it doesn’t have a new solution to the problem. I have seen obviously abusive posts (including “kill yourself” posts) left online for five days or more after being reported.

Being on Bluesky feels like breathing clean air, but there’s nothing to suggest we won’t pollute this one again, or that they have an intrinsic plan to scrub it. But there is something more going on, and it’s here where it feels like we all radicalised ourselves somewhat and are still in cooldown mode – and it’s what I’m describing as Elon Musk’s “sadism economy”.

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The term coalesced last weekend when I found myself “posting through it”. I had published an admittedly inflammatory article about Bitcoin (because an editor had asked me to write it, I’ll note) and in a moment of madness, decided to cross-post it on X and Bluesky to gauge the relative reaction on the two. I then went out to enjoy the last day of a holiday in Lisbon.

By Bluesky standards, the post proved incredibly spicy – but despite protracted rows between different factions in my replies, there was virtually no abuse. The post went viral on X, though, getting a million views (but fewer than 1,000 actual link clinks to read the post), and more than 1,600 replies. You can probably guess what they look like: lots of “enjoy staying poor”, but much more, including variations on the homophobic, transphobic(??), and similar abuse that’s on there.

What struck me was that I wasn’t just ignoring it. While looking around Lisbon’s beautiful Gulbenkian museum, I was barely looking up from X. Significantly, I found myself typing the following, to someone sharing a (copyright-infringing) link to the article that beat its paywall: “Meh, it’s monetised in my replies so I’m alright either way.”

If you’re not excessively online, this might need some unpacking. If you have a blue tick on X, you’re able to monetise your account through a revenue share with Elon. The process is incredibly opaque, but is based on the number of replies, QTs and other interactions with your posts from other blue tick accounts. Engagement is everything, and blue ticks are the only audience that matters. Get lots of it, and you’ll get a modest amount of Elonbucks at the end of the month.

I have around 80,000 followers on X, and don’t deliberately troll for engagement, so my monthly yield of Elonbucks is pretty modest – but even on the slowest of months, it has comfortably outpaced the £11 a month cost of a paid blue tick. Elon might despise my MSM lib style, but he is paying me to post.

The reason my “I’m alright either way” post struck me was that when I sent it, I meant it. My internal logic was roughly this: Who cares that hundreds of strangers are sending me abusive messages? It’ll pay for an evening out.

There have been millions upon millions of words written about the “attention economy” of social media and the potential harms it’s caused to our society over the last decade. But most of this has relied upon building up a following, a fanbase, and ideally generating a parasocial relationship with that group so they think of the influencer as a friend.

Elon has built something different, and it’s reflected in the site. X rewards assholery, shithousery, amateurish trolling and outrage baiting. That’s what brings in the bucks. It’s that simple. X isn’t a shithole just because of who’s on there, or because Elon laid off lots of moderators. It’s full of ragebait because that’s what is rewarded.

Most of the supposed Marxist or ‘communist’ accounts posting idiotic takes aren’t doing so sincerely – it’s ragebait. Obviously racist takes on the IQs of different groups cash in even more efficiently: they get approvingly shared by other trolls (and actual racists) while being dunked on.

People make posts with deliberate, stupid mistakes in them knowing that corrections are irresistible to posters. Your QT dunk adds sweet cents to their account balance. Those magic eye style posts that obviously show a rabbit, but are accompanied by “what do you see in this post? 90% of people see two boots”? Bait.

Elon Musk has built the digital colosseum – his “aren’t you entertained?” quote (trust him to mangle the original) to the Financial Times was prophetic on that front. The network relies on everyone tearing each other to shreds, boosting the dumbest content, interacting with other blue ticks to cross-monetise, and generally creating a social network only a teenage goober or decaying middle-aged manchild could love.

X’s driving engine is not attention, and stopped being anything resembling fandom long ago: it’s sado-masochism. The people replying with vicious attacks get their kicks from their hate, and their targets masochistically bask in the fact they’re getting paid for it. Elon has turned the blue tick from a symbol of a verified news source into a symbol of digital S&M kink.

The global town square has been reduced to a bear-baiting pit. No wonder the celebrities stopped posting months ago, and news outlets are slowly realising there’s no place for them any more. The FT doesn’t make many sales from brothels, after all.

This, though, is why Bluesky – or any network other than X – feels so different. It’s not that moderation is suddenly ‘fixed’ (and this will likely get worse, perhaps much worse, on Bluesky before it gets better, because scaling up moderation is hard). It’s that no other social network has deliberately monetised the very worse of its interactions in the way that X has, and it’s unlikely any other will attempt to repeat the experiment.

Without knowing it, without most of us noticing it, Elon Musk engaged us all in his experimental economy of sadism. People respond to incentives, and Musk’s algorithm rewarded bear-baiting and his financial model made it pay, too. Absent that flywheel, any other social network will feel like a breath of fresh air.

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