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Bluesky quickly sold out of the T-shirt its CEO wore to troll Mark Zuckerberg
- sejje 2y ago> (Yes, it is weird that Zuck goes out of his way to compare himself to a violent dictator.) Why can't news sites just report the news? Why do they need to tell me what to think about it?
- smrtinsert 2y agoYou're thinking of a wire service. Associated Press for example is what you want. TechCrunch is a blog and it's completely normal for blogs to be editorialized.
- sejje 2y ago> Top Headlines > Latest News > Newsletters > TechCrunch is an American global online newspaper focusing on topics regarding high-tech and startup companies. [0] Oh, okay. My fault. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TechCrunch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TechCrunch
- zeroCalories 2y agoYeah and New York Post calls itself a newspaper but we all know it's some trashy shit.
- sejje 2y agoThat's reflected on its wikipedia page [0], too. Note the word "tabloid": > The New York Post (NY Post) is an American conservative daily tabloid newspaper published in New York City. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Post https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Post
- hagbard_c 2y agoTabloid is a form factor for a newspaper - roughly defined as 'half of a broadsheet' - and not directly related to the content of the publication. It got a bad reputation because lots of trashy publications are published in this form factor but this is not its defining characteristic. Aside from that Wikipedia is not a good source to decide whether a publication is to be trusted due to its heavy political bias. The New York Post has a conservative bias while (English-language) Wikipedia has a heavy 'progressive´ bias as is reflected by its list of what they consider to be 'reliable/perennial sources' [1] which closely resembles a political litmus test. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...
- sejje 2y agoCan you name a newspaper we call a tabloid that has a good reputation? I'd like to check that out.
- hagbard_c 2y agoWhen you say 'good reputation' I assume you mean 'serious general news' papers? UK: The Independent, The Times, The Scotsman, The Guardian NL: Het Parool, Trouw, NRC Handelsblad, de Volkskrant, de Telegraaf, Reformatorisch Dagblad and many others (most of them owned by DPG) DK: Berlingske Tidende SE: Dagens Industri, Dagens Nyheter, Svenska Dagbladet, Expressen, Aftonbladet and many others There are many others, take your pick. As said these are newspapers published in tabloid format, not 'tabloid newspapers' publishing celebrity gossip and other trash although some of them do also venture in that direction on occasion.
- aiBorland 2y ago[flagged]
- theoryofx 2y agoWhat bothers me about this is not injecting an opinion (it's TechCrunch) but the superficial and ignorant take. Julius Caesar was not just some "violent dictator" like a Hitler, Stalin, or Putin. He wasn't sending people off to gas chambers, gulags, or out of windows. He was famous for his clemency toward his enemies in the civil war which made him dictator. Even the title of "dictator" was a legal office in ancient Rome and meant something very different from the modern usage. Zuck admiring Julius Caesar (which doesn't mean endorsing all his actions) puts him in the company of many of the most successful, ethical, and well informed people in history
- aiBorland 2y ago[flagged]
- invalidname 2y agoWell... About a million dead and a million enslaved might disagree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallic_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallic_Wars . He murdered/enslaved for political gain back home, then killed the people who opposed to him back in Rome to stop democracy. I don't want to compare to these other guys because obviously it was a different time/culture and you can't really make such broad sweeping comparisons. I won't judge people for admiring him because I also appreciate a lot of his political and strategic savvy. But he was a very violent dictator.
- adamc 2y agoThis. Caesar made a huge fortune from the people he sold into slavery.
- theoryofx 2y ago"About a million dead and a million enslaved might disagree" You might be very surprised at how differently ancient people viewed the world compared to yourself. Sure, no one wants to be killed or enslaved but the societies of these very people behaved in precisely the same way as the Romans and most ancient societies did. These were not peace loving hippies being invaded by alien monsters. Anyway, Caesar was not dictator when he fought in Gaul. He was a Roman proconsul/general fighting in his provinces the way all ancient Roman armies did, and was more inclined toward mercy than most, although he also fought a much bigger war than most. In the civil war Caesar was fighting Pompey, the guy who used his military power to control the Roman government for the previous decade. And who would have continued controlling the government had he won. The narrative that Pompey was defending the republic against a tyrant is more ancient propaganda than reality. A reasonable and accurate summary is that Julius Caesar led a violent army against violent enemies, fought a civil war with unprecedented clemency, and was a benevolent dictator until his assassination by the envious people he had granted clemency.
- catlover76 2y ago[dead]
- fullshark 2y agoBecause no one goes into journalism to report the news, they go into to influence public opinion. This is done largely by deciding which stories to amplify and to kill, and which information is presented in which order. That is a subtle art, this person seems to lack subtlety.
- croisillon 2y agobecause apparently 77M Americans can't add 2 and 2 when it comes to wannabe dictators
- hagbard_c 2y agodictator, in modern political systems, a single person who possesses absolute political power within a country or territory or a member of a small group that exercises such power. The term comes from the Latin title dictator, which in the Roman Republic designated a temporary magistrate who was granted extraordinary powers in order to deal with state crises. Modern dictators, however, resemble ancient tyrants rather than ancient dictators. (from Britannica [1]) In some ways this fits the election of Donald Trump - he was designated as a temporary magistrate who was granted extraordinary powers in order to deal with state crises - but in most ways it does not. Trump does not possess absolute power nor is a member of a small group which possesses such power as the plethora of court cases blocking his decisions make clear. The real important bit here is this: > apparently 77M Americans That is the majority of the voting public which you're lambasting for making the wrong decision. Here's a bit more on that subject, read it well: https://www.britannica.com/topic/democracy https://www.britannica.com/topic/democracy and https://www.britannica.com/topic/republic-government https://www.britannica.com/topic/republic-government Don't agree with the majority and think they should listen to you or your group instead? There are names for such forms of government as well, names which are generally portrayed as being opposites of the two I pointed at earlier. [1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/dictator-ruler https://www.britannica.com/topic/dictator-ruler
- croisillon 2y agoweird you would prefer to use the 2000 y.o. definition of dictator than the current one but if that helps you cope, be my guest the 77M people were not the majority but a plurality, although i'm not sure there is a 2000 y.o. definition for that to help you cope don't look too far for a president who has been elected by a minority, it happened as recently as 2016
- sejje 2y ago
- jazzyjackson 2y ago[flagged]
- chomp 2y agoIs this a serious question
- bongodongobob 2y agoTech people can be smart and incredibly dense at the same time.
- jazzyjackson 2y agoMore or less, I am being incredulous that they "didn't make enough oops", it's ink printed on a commodity, there is essentially an endless supply available, so it's a choice to sell out.
- llamaimperative 2y agoHave you ever ordered commercial merchandise? You tend to order a number far below infinite, and if your goods sell faster than you’re able to get a new order, it is “sold out.” And yeah, presumably they didn’t do a giant run for this, nor should they have?
- synalx 2y agoWell, it is an all black shirt...
- add-sub-mul-div 2y agoThey don't make the shirts themselves. They ordered a finite number from a supplier. They're not claiming that the world is out of potential to make new shirts.
- the_optimist 2y agoSo you're saying this is a marketing piece.
- rKarpinski 2y ago> Zuckerberg has drawn comparisons between himself and the Roman dictator Julius Caesar Thought it was Caesar Augustus? IIRC Zuckerberg has even claimed that his hairstyle is inspired by him.
- gm3dmo 2y agohere he is training with Henry Cooper: https://youtu.be/TvjsWmlOJmY https://youtu.be/TvjsWmlOJmY
- jazzyjackson 2y agoyea it's augustus, but Zuck's "Zuck or Nothing" playing off of "Aut Caesar aut nihil" isn't even referring to a particular Caesar, but it's use as the title Emperor, and attributable to Cesare Borgia. I think Zuck's shirt is a good joke on everyone trying to displace Facebook from the market. BlueSky wants to be the next Facebook/Twitter, so IMO by not getting the joke the Bluesky shirt is a self-own.
- pyrale 2y ago> BlueSky wants to be the next Facebook/Twitter, so IMO by not getting the joke the Bluesky shirt is a self-own. The point of the shirt seems to be that they don't want to be the next facebook. The article clarifies that. Whether they'll live up to that promise if they grow is another issue.
- skeledrew 2y agoOh they'll live up to the promise, because of the protocol's technical architecture. Also mentioned in the article, if they decide to go on a direction the public doesn't like, it's an easy fork.
- jazzyjackson 2y agoIt's an easy fork maybe, but where's the incentive to stand up a peer or replacement? They're made a paradox for themselves, in attempting to create adfree social media that moderates itself the userbase now expects the service to be free and ad free and heavily moderated by volunteer labor. This will work for a while spending millions in VC cash but I don't see the sustainability. I've considered standing up a PDS a few times, and I think if I was going to design a financial incentive I'd wrap up a static blog host and personal cloud storage so I could charge a market rate fee (5 bucks a month for 100GB storage, whatever Dropbox is charging) and bluesky publishing and following just tacked on as a value add. the real money would be in extending the protocol to support distributed marketplaces, so hosts could each have their own rules - disrupt Etsy, eBay, Facebook marketplace, but at some point you're getting into Silk Road 3.0 territory
- pathless 2y agoI forgot about BlueSky since, around ~2 months ago, every last person I followed on there moved back (reopened) to Twitter due to the user number falloff... I am so out of the loop now
- melodyogonna 2y agoTwitter is very usable once you block Elon and the unhinged conspiracy accounts that he retweets.
- ivewonyoung 2y agoI frequently have the opposite problem where the algo is pushing liberal accounts tweeting $OUTRAGE_OF_THE_DAY
- almosthere 2y agoSame
- hbn 2y agoFor twitter being supposedly a right wing social media platform, the only tweets I see break 100k likes are extremely left wing political takes (and Elon's tweets cause he's almost surely gotten him to be artificially pushed in the algorithm). I've seen theories that there's like botting happening on those posts, and it kinda seems likely given how little real interaction they get.
- _bin_ 2y agoi notice the same thing. there are a handful of big rw accounts i've muted and no longer see but big lwers there always seem to be more. i also muted musk but periodically find my account has magically re-followed him, so i concur that there's almost certainly a special case in the code that artificially boosts/follows him.
- irelephant 2y agoThe algo is designed to surface accounts you may like to follow. Hence, its called "discover". You may enjoy a custom feed more.
- drpossum 2y agoWhile I agree with the sentiment, Bluesky is not the answer to fixing social media.
- zeroCalories 2y agoSocial media should never have entered the mainstream. Serious people like politicians should not be on Twitter. You should not be posting about your work drama on Facebook. Bluesky is not fundamentally better than either of those.
- jredwards 2y agoPerfect is the enemy of good. BlueSky is an iterative improvement on the other viable platforms.
- drpossum 2y agoNo, the iterative improvement is to go back to letting communities develop the services and interactions they need rather than it being dictated to us by a monoplatform. It was like that with Twitter and now happening again with Bluesky. If you don't see how this ends you're not paying attention. If you support this you're the problem.
- lukev 2y agoThe whole point of ATProto is personal ownership of content. The current degree of centralization is an undesirable but (arguably) necessary feature of bootstrapping a new platform.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Tade0 2y agoPerhaps merch is the path to successful monetisation of software products? The Something Awful forums had a $9.95 registration fee. I'm sure markup on those $40 shirts is more than that. Some game developers also embraced this business model: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/745810196/deep-rock-galactic-high-quality-mugs-50cl https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/745810196/deep-rock-gal... Personally I would not spend this much on a plastic mug, but it seems there were enough takers to fund continued development.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- arghandugh 2y agoI'm reasonably sure they will be able to fund continued development without merch drops: https://www.businessinsider.com/x-competitor-bluesky-valuation-new-funding-round-2025-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/x-competitor-bluesky-valuati...
- theschmed 2y agoFunding =/= monentization, and the former presupposes a need for the latter
- arghandugh 2y agoThe monetization strategy has already been announced. I’m pointing out that there is no near-term scenario where the bills aren’t getting paid.
- jazzyjackson 2y agoThe article you posted doesn't hint at any strategy toward monetization, and only links to a blog post from 2 years. Have they done anything besides sell domain names and tshirts ? Also accepting investment from Bain Capital is a terrible omen.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tempodox 2y ago> Mundus sine Caesaribus That can allude to all the all-too-powerful overlords, in tech and politics. They should make more of those shirts and take mail orders. Maybe even an NSFW version with a middle finger.
- averageRoyalty 2y agoThe article, the store page and the tweet - none of them mention how many t-shirts were for sale. Was it 500,000? Was it 8? Apart from being barely significant in the first place, the article lacks the context to even make its point. Journalists are meant to do research. This is just a big, sloppy retweet.