Wednesday was a pretty fun day on Bluesky, especially if you’re someone who’s been on Twitter/X long enough to remember when it too was fun.
Established users of the social media app spent the day welcoming new arrivals with messages about how this was the panacea they were looking for. They shared “Starter Packs” to help newbies find their old friends and good follows. They made it clear that 2024 Bluesky is nothing like 2024 X. Better yet, that 2024 Bluesky actually resembles 2012 Twitter.
The excitement there is palpable. The app went from having a little over 6 million users to 15 million in the last 90 days and hit number one in the iOS App Store this week. That’s a far cry from the 335 million active users on X, but according to Similarweb, 115,000 US-based web visitors deactivated their X accounts after Election Day and that company’s user base and appeal are in decline.
“The current owner of Twitter’s politics aside, his role in the recent election aside, the ways he has changed the platform aside, I think Twitter peaked probably 5-10 years ago, period,” The Ringer’s Howard Beck said on the Sports Media with Richard Deitsch podcast this week.
Beck has been on Bluesky for a while but was part of that app’s welcoming committee this week, especially for the many of his fellow sports media members who finally showed up.
Those new arrivals run the gamut, from ESPN’s Mina Kimes, Sarah Spain, and Benjamin Solak to Meadowlark Media’s Pablo Torre to FS1’s Rachel Nichols to The Athletic’s Nate Tice to The Ringer’s Danny Kelly. The sports media influx seemed to touch every major sports outlet and organization.
No porn bots. No crypto scams. No blue-checkmarked trolls. Just vibes.
To be fair, Meta’s Threads has also been seeing a recent uptick in users and has a sizable advantage over Bluesky (over 200 million users). However, Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter clone also has a reputation for being the place where brands and your parents hang out. As Jamelle Boiue might say, Threads just doesn’t have the juice.
Friend or Foe?
The timing of this latest wave is obvious, but that’s not the only reason. For a lot of sports media folks, they’d already strapped on their parachute and boarded the plane. They were just waiting for the push. It’s easy to take the plunge when the platform that once served as a journalist’s ideal tool has become actively antagonistic toward them.
“The current owner of Twitter has absolute contempt for journalism and for journalists,” Beck told Deitsch. “Because of that, the site has been re-engineered in a way that is to our detriment or certainly is not to our benefit in the way that a previous version of Twitter once was.”
He wasn’t the only person in the sports journalism world to notice that change and the way it impacted engagement.
“Truth is, Twitter had become less useful to me professionally,” wrote Dr. Brian Moritz, a sports media scholar at St. Bonaventure University. “The engagement wasn’t there anymore. People weren’t sharing this newsletter, my podcast, or really anything. I never had… that much of an audience there anyway, but given the technical and philosophical changes that have happened there over the past year or two, even that little audience had basically vanished.”
The Athletic’s Meg Linehan hasn’t deactivated her X account but she’s stopped posting there, choosing to focus her energy on platforms that don’t inspire dread every time she logs on.
“Honestly, I should have done it earlier, but the election was a last-straw sort of situation,” she told Awful Announcing. “It had stopped being a major traffic driver anyway, but I was in a cycle of dreading opening the app or looking at my notifications even before last week. Mostly I think I’ll be on Instagram, which obviously has a different feel and purpose, but Bluesky has surprised me this week. I wish Threads were better but the algorithm feels pretty antithetical to real-time sports discussion or coverage.”
Michael Waterloo, a freelance writer for The Athletic and Winsidr, joined Twitter in 2010. But the recent changes under Musk set in motion a chain reaction that culminated in him leaving the platform for good this week.
“The change to allow people who you block to still view your posts, which felt like it was done to make Elon Musk feel better about himself, was the end of the line for me,” he told Awful Announcing. “Mental health is so important, and Twitter became so toxic that blocking was the only way people could have a sense of normalcy on the app. That’s when I decided I was leaving – I had Bluesky set up since last year and used it now and then with my partner being an avid user – and the night of the election just expedited the process for me.”
Sports Business Journal’s Ben Fischer announced at the beginning of the week that he had deactivated his X account. For him, the degradation of Twitter/X wasn’t even about a loss in engagement or pageviews. It was much simpler than that.
“At least for me, Twitter was never an important driver of KPIs — page views, subscriptions, etc. — but at its peak, it was a very useful reporting tool and fun,” he told Awful Announcing. “Then it ceased to be very useful. Then it ceased to even be fun. I should have done this months ago.”
Fischer says he plans to focus on Linkedin as his social media home base moving forward as it “provides at least as much actual professional value to me with almost none of the outrage merchants, liars, and porn bots that Twitter offers.”
That desire to recapture the “fun” of Old Twitter is at the heart of what a lot of sports media members seem to find appealing about Bluesky.
“Bluesky to me is the closest thing functionally to Twitter, and it’s the closest thing that it reminds me of Twitter back in the 2008, 2009, 2010 days when it was just fun,” Deitsch said on his podcast. “Maybe I’m romanticizing it, but it wasn’t toxic. You could say something and you weren’t going to have bots come at you, and you might be able to have an interesting, intellectually cool conversation.”
X’s Sunk Cost Fallacy
Deactivating one’s X account isn’t feasible for many in sports media. The sunk cost fallacy is hard to overcome. When you’ve spent years building up a follower base in the thousands or hundreds of thousands, it’s tough to give that up and start over elsewhere. That goes for leagues, media companies, and sports franchises as well.
“Manchester United, the soccer team. They have 33 million followers on Twitter, or at least based on Twitter’s calculus,” said Deitsch. “Can they afford to just decide to walk away from that and start on Bluesky? Now, maybe eventually they do, but that’s something I think about as the one thing that gives me a little bit of pause.”
For what it’s worth, count the Seattle Kraken and Cleveland Guardians among the teams that kicked off their Bluesky presence on Wednesday.
The NFL and ESPN both have Bluesky accounts but no one would say they’re close to giving up on X yet (except maybe Pat McAfee who, to his credit, is on Bluesky). They and other entities like them have built up way too much brand equity to walk away empty-handed, for now.
That concern about wasting hard-fought victories and fracturing established communities applies in other ways, as well.
“I do worry that — especially for women’s sports — it’s just another splintering of where fans previously gathered,” said Linehan.”But it feels like players especially had already moved on to Instagram and TikTok for the majority of their posts.”
There’s also the fact that many of the “whales” of sports media have yet to make any significant move away from X. The day Shams Charania and Adam Schefter start breaking news directly on Bluesky, Threads, or elsewhere is the day we really know the party is over. Some insiders like Jeff Passan and Adrian Wojnarowski flirted with moving their scoops to other platforms a while back but mostly returned to form. Until then, X’s value as a sports news resource remains intact.
Days of Future Past
Whether they deactivated their accounts, made them private in perpetuity, or will continue to post, many sports media members seem much more content with being part of the migration away from X, even if that process is like turning around a battleship for others.
“I’m going to cross-post, but I am going spend more of my energy catering to the Bluesky audience and not the Twitter audience because reasons,” said Beck.
“I locked my account, told people where they can find me and my work, but I won’t deactivate it so that someone else can’t claim to be me and cause any harm,” Waterloo said.
“Mostly hoping to see a mental health benefit to being off Twitter as much as I used to be,” says Linehan.
“In the end, it was an easy decision,” wrote Moritz. “It doesn’t feel required to be on Twitter anymore.”
Bluesky was the place to be on Wednesday but there’s still a long way to go before that or another social media platform truly becomes the new sports media home base. Or maybe there never will be another one. Maybe sports media goes in a different direction when it comes to engagement and building followers. Maybe the point is that places like Bluesky become where they go to blow off steam, share some memes, have a little fun, and that’s it.
These days, that sounds pretty good.
[Sports Media with Richard Deitsch, Sports Media Guy]