I don’t know, this seems like something to be taken with a grain of salt. Throughout, the post is dripping with personal contempt for the people he’s talking about. It just seems like he’s taking his personal experience with the “blueskyists” pre Bluesky and turning it into something important enough to coin this term “Blueskyism”, without ever making the case that that’s true.

It’s less, “this is an important thing to consider in contemporary, online political discourse”, and more, “I have personal experience with these sorts of people, and let me tell you, they annoy the living piss out of me.” And I have no trouble believing him.

I believe that a substantial challenge with modern pundit discourse is that every pundit with any meaningful reach can now go online and see a whole bunch of people calling them big dumb idiots on any given day. Even if the vast majority of discourse is fine it feels absolutely horrible to open up twitter or bluesky or whatever and have a whole bunch of DMs calling you an asshole.

I think this drives people like Nate Silver to overreact and draw big conclusions about platforms and political ideologies and put out content like this.

Some people are annoying on social media. If the platform structurally focuses you on a group of annoying people it'll look like everybody on that platform is annoying. But I'd hope that somebody who got famous for data analysis could do a better job with this. The bluesky firehose is there. AI tools make mass sentiment analysis easier to perform than ever. We could have a real analysis of "blueskyism" but instead we get a bunch of gripes from a person who sees a tiny portion of the website yell at him every time he opens the site.