What Happened to X Since There Are No More Libs to Troll?

Leah Feiger: Also in the studio with me is WIRED reporter Vittoria Elliott. Hey, Tori.

Vittoria Elliott: Hello, Leah.

Leah Feiger: Guys, how are you? What social media are you on right now?

Vittoria Elliott: A violent question if I’m honest. I logged into Bluesky.

Leah Feiger: Yes?

Vittoria Elliott: Indeed.

Leah Feiger: That’s right.

Vittoria Elliott: I just sit by myself and people follow me. It’s the lowest pitch I’ve had to participate in for a long time.

Leah Feiger: So you like attention?

Vittoria Elliott: I just like attention. I love getting little pings on my phone every day that reassure me.

Leah Feiger: That’s what Twitter used to be for most people. David, you’re in Bluesky too, right?

David Gilbert: I am sure. I even followed you, Leah, at last.

Leah Feiger: I know. I had to beg it. It was annoying.

David Gilbert: I’m very busy though. I have a lot of new fans to check out and check out.

Leah Feiger: Attention.

David Gilbert: Yes.

Leah Feiger: Disrespect. What do they produce? Do you guys love more than X yet? There has been this massive exodus that I feel not only of journalists, but it has left people dependent across the board. What are the reasons why?

David Gilbert: For me at least it’s less of a trap. It is less toxic. It’s easy to just be there for a while and scroll and not be woken up by something stupid someone said, which is what X just turned into. And I think I’m very happy to spend time there. The participation seems natural, it is true. Conversations happen instead of people shouting all the time. And I don’t know, it’s very early days and I think it could be really good, but it could also be very bad because it’s the Internet.

Leah Feiger: The CEO says they gain like a million users a day. That is an unmanageable figure.

Vittoria Elliott: Yes. I mean, so I agree with David, the user experience is better. I mean, even if it’s slow in the load because they gain a lot of people very quickly, it’s a platform that you feel is designed not to ignore all your attention. So if you see like X, sometimes you’ll find a really interesting post and the website will automatically load and push you to the top, so you have to keep scrolling. And Bluesky doesn’t work that way. It feels like the old social media where you’re like, I’m here to see the things I want to see, but this isn’t designed in a way that makes me feel like the ultimate goal is to make me lose more. time on this website as much as possible.