Unfollow You Unfollow Me

Stay with me. An unlikely paradigm is playing out in social media — unliking. It’s the antithesis of hoping you’ll always be right by my side. Is this progress? This Genesis story may shed some light.

In the beginning… like way back in 2005… media was massive and broadcast itself at us. You might say it had lived in the darkness of our wants for so long that it was… devoid. Devoid of the nuance and subtleties that made it personal. Then, came social. And, we had choice.

We built our social networks by following people and things we liked. We felt so safe and so secure that we added accounts willy and nilly. And every day became such a perfect day to spend… alone with you… our feeds.

It was a happy time. Ashton Kutcher raced CNN to see who could get to one million followers first. Spoiler… Ashton won. When he did, he said this, “I found it astonishing that one person can actually have as big of a voice online as what an entire media company can on Twitter.”

We’ve come a long way in 15 years.

Our follows told platforms what we wanted to see and they’d prioritize the content for us. Yeah, a stray post would show up to test our resolve like the way a commerce site asks us if we might also like shower curtain rings with that shower curtain we put in our cart.

Tiskets and taskets, TikTok dispensed with relating things to our baskets. They show us a bizarre bazaar of items that are, at best, only tenuously related to one thing we glanced at that one time. And it worked. Other platforms followed the unfollowed content crazy. Which worked poorly for three reasons. Their content was different. Our networks were different. The algorithms couldn’t overcome those differences.

The more platforms pushed unwanted content as us, the more we pushed back. We started unfollowing things. You know what socialites like today? Not liking things. Not liking things begat blocking which begets leaving.

So it stands to reason that platforms that make unliking easy are well liked. The venerated federated social X-alt platform Bluesky is a leader when it comes to unfollows. Unlike Instagram that makes you block accounts one by one, Bluesky allows you to block swaths of accounts with one click. Amazon would be thrilled. In fact, a cottage industry has popped up around Bluesky to provide mega block lists for new users. Since September, Bluesky, has more than doubled its user base.

Blocks are becoming Bluesky’s vanity metric. I followed Bluesky’s unfollow data to a bleak picture. About half (48.4%) of accounts on Bluesky are blocked by at least one other account. Slightly fewer accounts (42.5%) block at least one account. Almost every major trend peaked a week after the election. Fewer unique posters generate fewer unique likes and garner fewer followers. It’s hard to build a business around a platform of marginalized accounts.

The why is complicated. With more than 77k blocks, reporter Jesse Singal has the most blocked account on Bluesky. Yeah, there’s a leader board for blocked accounts. Accounts seem to block Jesse for his positions on transgender issues. That comports with the platform’s left-leaning ethos. Twenty thousand more accounts block Jesse than the second most blocked account – Brianna Wu. Brianna is a trans person. See, complicated. A former video game developer who called AOC one of the best politicians in America. Brianna supports Israel. Make that very complicated.

Blocks may play a big role in the new-new media.

In October, Joe Rogan interviewed Donald Trump for the former’s podcast. Hours after it was uploaded to YouTube, it had 33 million views. Then, people couldn’t find it. Rogan posted on X that there was a glitch at Spotify. Three days later, YouTube said it was their fault and they were working on fix.

A Google insider claims YouTube marked the Rogan video as XLQ – code for Extremely Low Quality Spam. Typically, this happens when a video gets lot of unlikes. The insider claims that there was a campaign to mass report the interview.

I have no idea if this happened to Rogan’s podcast. Frankly, it doesn’t matter. It is a playbook for DBoCel. My convenient acronym for Distributed Blockage of Content Everyone Loathes (pronounced debacle) follows the more widely known cyberattack known as a distributed denial of service (DDoS). If enough people don’t like something, platforms running on autopilot will block things.

If people mark a YouTube video as spam, YT’s algo kicks in and automatically removes the video from the playlist. In a way, this is genius. Frightening, but genius. It lets censorship hide in plain sight.

Dangerously, perhaps stupidly, Elon Musk is baking this form of swarming suppression into X. If more people mute or block you than like you, X will limit your reach. At this point in the story, you don’t need me to tell you why this is bound to fail on a colossal scale, 2Pac did, “Misplaced hate makes disgrace to races.”

I block you, you block me. No one sees our posts. We all stop posting.

With the dark
Oh, I see so very clearly now
All my fears are drifting by me so slowly now
Fading away

But it doesn’t have to be this way. We need a flood of content based on unlikes to wash away our misgivings. I’m waiting for someone smart who’s noodling on this to build a platform that leverages unlikes. I suggest the name Unlikeagram.