Academic networks need to prepare for waves of enshittification
After the US election in November 2024 there was a significant movement of users from Elon Musk’s X platform, which had been deployed politically by an owner now explicitly affiliated to a candidate. There’s a risk of overstating the size of the exodus, given that at the time of writing Bluesky has 30 million users compared to what clearly remains a much bigger userbase on X, even if it is difficult to trust their reported numbers given Musk’s vested interest in repudiating a narrative of decline. Even so there are now thriving communities on Bluesky engaged in patterns of interaction which are eerily reminiscent of the early years of. For many academics this has clearly been a relief following the changes imposed on Twitter/X over the last two years. Even if I remain sceptical about the future of Bluesky, for reasons I will explain below, it’s hard not to be touched by the goodwill which pervades the platform, at least if you are wired into the academic networks who are now so enthusiastically using it.
So why did it take academics so long to leave X? In asking the question I realise that I’m interrogating my own motivations for remaining there until after the election. I found myself using the platform ever less frequently, eventually not logging on for months at a time, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to delete the account. In part this was because I was conscious that my university valued markers of public engagement, which a social media account with almost 10k followers constituted even if I rarely posted on there. It feels slightly awkward to explain that I was driven by the appearance of social capital to remain on a platform which I felt increasingly hostile to. For other academics it was the reality of the social capital which left them bound into remaining on X, even if they felt increasing uncomfortable with the culture of the platform and the user experience associated with it. If you built up a following on Twitter/X then leaving it unilaterally meant that you would lose your place within that network, missing out on the appearance and reality of visibility which can feel so significant in an anxious sector into a state of political and economic crisis.
In my case a prominent academic blog, sites where I was a regular guest blogger and a popular Linked account meant I was less concerned about losing my connections. In fact I was in the strange position of being engaged in a slow multiyear project of shrinking my online network, having become one of the most visible sociologists on Twitter during my PhD, in support of my own wellbeing. I felt I had the platform that I wanted but I was concerned about that platform being legible to my employers in a manner they would value. Ultimately I’m not sure it matters whether it’s the connections themselves or the appearance of them which leads academics to remain committed to a social media platform. The fact our working lives are now mediated in this way is what’s really significant, such that our professional fortunes are now tied up in our use of platforms (see for example the role of the impact agenda in the UK) which once seemed like liberating spaces free of the strategic conduct which defined university life.
This is why it’s not a simple matter for academics to move between platforms. At root these are issues posed by switching costs. What are the costs incurred when you move between platforms? To the extent a platform operates as a walled garden, a closed ecosystem controlled by a particular firm, there will be costs imposed on users who want to leave. Not only are the large platforms aware of this dynamic, they have actively built their strategy around it. For example in a recent book Cory Doctorow reflects on how the threat posed by Google’s nascent social network Google+ was perceived by Facebook, including correspondence from an executive which revealed a confident stance:
“[P]eople who are big fans of G+ are having a hard time convincing their friends to participate because 1/there isn’t [sic] yet a meaningful differentiator from Facebook and 2/ switching costs would be high due to friend density on Facebook.”
Since Google+ ceased operating in 2019, eight years after launch, this executive’s confidence seems well founded in retrospect. This wasn’t simply a neutral observation about how the platforms had developed but rather a reflection of a deliberate policy to maximise switching costs, relying on mechanisms like photos to keep users locked into the platform. If you deliberately make it an ordeal for users to switch to another platform you fortify your own position at the cost of user experience. This reveals, as Doctorow puts it, “a company that is thoroughly uninterested in being better than its competitors – rather, they’re dedicated to ensuring that leaving Facebook behind is so punishing and unpleasant that people stay, even if they hate Facebook”.
Bluesky is distinctive because it is built on a protocol intended to mitigate this problem. The AT Protocol describes itself as “an open, decentralized network for building social applications”. It actually emerged from a project incubated within Twitter from 2019 onwards, reflecting former CEO Jack Dorsey’s interest in a decentralised approach to social media. The problem is that, as Cory Doctorow points out, “A federatable service isn’t a federated one”. The intention to create a platform which users can leave at will, without losing their social connections, does not mean users can actually do this. It’s a technical possibility tied to an organisational promise, rather than a federated structure which enables people to move between services if they become frustrated by Bluesky. The promise to make it easy for users to exit in future is nothing more than a promise, unless there is a pathway to implementation.
This might not feel like a problem for a platform in this early stage but we must consider where it might be heading. What happens when investors start to pressure Bluesky to increase engagement on the platform? What happens when a certain level of user growth becomes a non-negotiable condition for funding? The reason other social media platforms turned out the way they did is not due to the malign influence of bad actors (though clearly they didn’t help) but rather due to the strategic logic of building a mass commercial social media platform. If you need it to operate at scale, you design it in ways which shape user behaviour to this end, even if that wasn’t the vision which initially animated the platform. Musk pursued this logic in a particularly aggressive and politically partisan manner. In doing so he gave license to others within the digital elite to shift their public profile, as can seen in the political repositioning of Mark Zuckerberg in the last month following a longer term rebranding exercise which laid the groundwork. He did not however create the logic he was following, instead confronting an operating environment in which the uncertain economic model of the opening phase mutated into something very different, once the free trial period was over.
The fact Bluesky has staff with patently good intention and the firm itself is a public benefit corporation doesn’t provide us with grounds to assume they will evade this trend, at least if they want to build a commercially viable business. The problem is that, as Doctorow observes, “The more effort we put into making Bluesky and Threads good, the more we tempt their managers to break their promises and never open up a federation”. If you were a venture capitalist putting many millions into Bluesky in the hope of an eventual profit, how you feel about designing the service in a way that reduces exit costs to near zero? This would mean that “An owner who makes a bad call – like removing the block function say, or opting every user into AI training – will lose a lot of users”. The developing social media landscape being tied in the Generative AI bubble means this example in particular is one we need to take extremely seriously.
I could be wrong. It’s certainly a much better place for academics to be than Elon Musk’s X. It would be a mistake to assume it will stay that way, given the forces likely to drive enshittification. It’s illuminating to compare this (partial) academic migration to Bluesky to the failed migration to Mastodon, analysed by Wang, Koneru and Rajtmajer. While there was an “initial surge in sign-ups” following Musk’s takeover, this “did not translate into sustained long-term user engagement” because “the level of established history, as well as the strong communities established on Twitter, with some over a decade, proved too significant to overcome”. If it’s the community which holds academics in place, it raises the question of how we might better coordinate that community in future, recognising social media as the vital part of the research infrastructure which it has become. The tendency has been to see social media for academics as a trivial feature of professional life, whereas in reality it is now central to how academic networks form and reproduce.
It can be difficult to recognise this significance because it’s far upstream from specific collaborations but the things which academics do together (empirical research, scholarly communication, public engagement etc) now frequently feature social media in their origin stories, even if not necessarily in a central role. Even though it’s become a routine feature of academic life it’s still treated as a purely individual matter, in terms of choices, training and regulation. There’s little sense of strategic purpose concerning social media as a form of digital infrastructure upon which research collaboration depends, which leaves the sector precariously outsourcing it to unpredictable private corporations. We’ve seen how badly this can work out in recent years with Twitter/X. Could we respond in a more organised and effective way to future waves of platform enshittification? I hope so but it would require universities, as well as sector-wide organisations such as funding councils and learned societies, to recognise and take a stance in relation to these issues in a way they have thus far failed to do.
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