Since its launch in early 2023, Bluesky has become a sort of rival for the Elon Musk-led microblogging platform X (previously known as Twitter). The site has added over 15 million users since the November 2024 election (which saw a thumping win of the Republican Donald Trump), pushing it to over 32 million users by March 3.
“Positioned itself as a refuge from X, the site formerly known as Twitter. For nearly two decades, Twitter had been considered the internet’s town square, chaotic and often rancorous but informative and diversely discursive. Then, after the tech billionaire turned Trump backer Elon Musk acquired the platform, in October of 2022, it devolved into a circus of right-wing conspiracy theories. Liberals began fleeing, and Bluesky in turn accumulated more than ten million users by the fall of 2024, making it one of the fastest-growing social networks. But the post-election influx proved to be of a different order, turning Bluesky into what one tech blogger compared to a Macy’s at the start of Black Friday sales,” The New Yorker summed up things with these words.
The platform has been grappling with a notable challenge: a unique problem with detecting humour, something that has personally affected internet personality Amy Brown.
What are we talking about?
Amy Brown was not yelling. She didn’t cry. She wasn’t vomiting. However, on Bluesky, she claimed to be doing all three at once. What was the reason? During a February business trip to Ohio, Brown’s husband stopped by a Walgreens (American pharmacy store chain). He told her that the prices here were lower than in California, where they live.
Because of the price difference, she posted that she was crying, screaming, and throwing up. However, the “joke problem” kicked in, as she was told by several Bluesky users that she was exaggerating and that no one could possibly care that much. While the replies were accurate (as they tried to invoke the basic laws of human body functions), they all missed the point: she was referring to one of the most popular sayings on the internet: one that is so widely used that it has its own Spotify compilation name.
Brown faced a unique challenge with humour detection that anyone familiar with Twitter/X and now navigating the younger, more serious social network Bluesky would recognise. Some users struggle to understand jokes, while others seem to deliberately miss the point in order to make a different statement.
Many Bluesky users transitioned from X, a platform where controversial figures were livetweeting the degradation of US infrastructure. This shift represents a much larger issue. However, for those new to Bluesky, the perceived ignorance or self-seriousness of many users can be quite frustrating.
In 2023, Brown, who had previously worked as Wendy’s social media manager, joined Bluesky. After nearly two hours of impersonating Elon Musk on November 4, 2022, her X account was banned. The “incident” occurred soon after X made the paid verification announcement.
Brown changed her display name to “Elon Musk (real)” and her profile picture changed to a picture of a balding business entrepreneur. While she knew her actions on the microblogging website might result in her ban, she accepted the possibility.
Now she believes that there is still a lot of “popular sayings on the internet” kind of humour on Bluesky, but surprisingly many people are perplexed by it. There are factors behind it. Let’s start with the conflict between former Facebook and X users.
Brooklyn-based freelance writer Ashwin Rodrigues said, “Anyone who has spent time on the Everything App is familiar with Twitter’s idiom, which consists of ironic posts, in-group allusions, and platform-specific history. All of that inside jokes and sarcasm were with them when they left X. Former heavy users of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, on the other hand, are used to their own standards of humour. Facebook, at least before it turned into Click FarmVille for engagement bait and ads for strangely specific custom novelty tees, was the opposite of Twitter, which felt like a purposeful way to interact with mostly strangers and that a familiar face might make the user feel horrified. Broadcast media also helped Bluesky gain a lot of users.”
“MSNBC featured several segments about the social network, including appearances on Morning Joe, The Weekend, All In With Chris Hayes, and The Rachel Maddow Show. Regular MSNBC viewers who made the leap may not be as accustomed to the tone and manner of online discourse on the shrewd social web,” he remarked.
Then comes the tendency of the technology to display random posts to random users through algorithmically curated content, similar to Bluesky’s Discover feed, which, in Ashwin’s opinion, is worsening the platform’s ability to detect humour.
“When an ex-Twitter user describes in detail what they would do to the Hamburglar if they saw him in person, a Maddow referral on Bluesky may react with real horror and bewilderment. There is an issue between the keyboard and chair, which is also a PEBKAC issue,” he added.
Make humour great again
“A person cannot be made to understand a joke. Anger is the only more pointless reaction. If there is one thing that these diverse groups have in common, it is a distaste for large tech companies run by unpleasant CEOs and a desire to post in the language of their once-favourite platforms. Each person has a unique form of brain damage. I understand people who find the joke hard to understand. However, my sympathies are more with those who are attempting to make them,” Ashwin observed.
A 2024 story from Axios claimed that America is experiencing a gullibility crisis. Nobody can tell if a screenshot is a joke, a lie, AI, or a manipulated image.
Comedian Josh Gondelman, who previously worked as a writer and producer on Desus and Mero and wrote for “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” claims that the political environment has made the problem worse.
According to Gondelman’s memory, at some point during the previous six months, Bluesky reached a user base that was sufficiently active to be entertaining and helpful.
He laughs and adds, “But that also means it hit the tipping point where it’s populated enough to be annoying.”
Ignatz Award-winning cartoonist, author, and illustrator Mattie Lubchansky says she is “mainly a joke-posting kind of person.”
Bluesky’s humour-detection problem is a component of a larger phenomenon she has noticed, which she refers to as “riff collapse.”
The day after the 2025 Oscars, Lubchansky posted, “I haven’t seen any of the Oscar movies this year, nor have I seen any movie ever made. I’m afraid that the people trapped inside the screen will be angry at me for not helping them escape; and once they are out, I will be punished. Anyway, here’s how the awards validated an opinion I already had.”
The ensuing responses were sincere disagreements and opinions regarding Oscar-nominated movies. A few people wanted suggestions for movies. It was suggested, without irony, that she read “The Purple Rose of Cairo”. It appears that only a small number of people realised she was kidding.
According to Lubchansky, she witnesses this kind of “riff collapse” every day and believes it is caused by the surge of new users from Meta and X.
However, there has long been an annoyance with new social media sites. Longtime users will continue to be irritated by newcomers, and networks will hopefully continue to appear.
When people first started using the internet in the early to mid-1990s, it was frequently when they started college. Several new users would sign up for their university’s network in September each year and begin exploring the discussion groups and forums.
Technologist and writer Anil Dash said, “The internet old timers would be very frustrated, because the new people didn’t know the social norms. The exact phenomenon that we are currently witnessing. The majority of internet users dreaded September more than any other month. Everyone can now access the internet at any time thanks to AOL. The Telecommunications Act of 1996, which deregulated the telecom sector and connected homes and businesses nationwide to the internet, coincided with AOL’s rise to prominence. This period was called the Eternal September, with wave after wave of newbies getting online.”
LiveJournal and even Twitter have shown the same pattern. Ashton Kutcher, an investor and actor, challenged CNN in 2009 to see whose account could reach one million Twitter followers first. Kutcher emerged victorious. Due to the stunt, the microblogging platform experienced a surge in users.
As per Lubchansky, people have a chance to consider their response manners at this time.
“Read the whole post before you respond. Take a moment to respond. And if you’re going to respond with a joke, and we’re not friends already, go look and see if somebody’s made it already. Because there’s a really good chance they have,” Lubchansky said.
Meanwhile, Brown considers the block function on Bluesky to be a favour to its recipient.
“If someone comes into my comments and they just really, really don’t understand, usually I just block them so we don’t run into each other again. No hard feelings. I’m not trying to repeat the part of Twitter where the internet makes me mad every day,” she noted.
It’s a different approach than the norm on X, where quote-tweets viciously insulting the original post are part of the platform’s noxious fabric.
Satirical site “The Onion” has the fifth-largest Bluesky account, with over 1.2 million followers. Onion CEO Ben Collins doesn’t mind people replying to jokes in earnest. On the contrary, he says it’s “the funniest part of the internet.”
“It means more people are seeing your jokes. If everyone is immediately breaking out into uproarious applause at your joke, your audience is too small. As someone who regularly used and posted on Twitter for years, I share the frustration when one of my jokey posts is misread or taken as fact. But it also strikes me as unfair to shame someone because they haven’t been slamming their head on the same wall of the internet that I have. Not everyone crawled here from the radioactive sewer of X. As we all get settled along with our new neighbours, it might be helpful to remember that. If not, at least Bluesky has very robust blocking features,” Ashwin concluded.