A blog-shaped peg in a social media-shaped hole

Follow for follow is an ancient scam: A complete stranger looking to growth hack¹ their account follows you (on X, Instagram, wherever) and then immediately solicits you to follow them, too.

Whereas you’re likely posting only the highest quality content² and of course deserve the follow, they’re almost invariably posting hashtag-laden garbage while also following thousands of accounts—well beyond what anyone could actually keep up with. They’re not on the platform to interact or listen to anyone but themselves; their vast follow count means they practically can’t do anything else. To follow them is to make their number go up while polluting your own feed with unreadable, demoralizing, and relentless posts, in a darkly cute microcosm of how the logic of social media intersects with that of the stock market and environmental degradation.

With the advent of private Instagram accounts and the decline of the hashtag as an earnest form of engagement³, the follow-for-follow scheme was one I’d assumed had become an extinct-in-the-wild species in the social media ecosystem: not gone, but rare enough that it’s appearance was startling against the noise of the new normal.

Asymmetrics on Bluesky

But Bluesky, the would-be X/Twitter successor, has become a virtual wildlife refuge for follow-for-followdom. This is like the woolly mammoth coming back to life (ironically, not on Mastodon), or perhaps in a better metaphorical fit, the quagga, except with new and slightly ahistorical stripes. Indeed, Bluesky—due to the confluence of its libertarian rules and a matching attitude toward their enforcement plus its abundance of bored email job-havers—has reinvigorated follow-for-follow as a matter of social justice.

Here’s the outline, with an example:

1. Let’s say Account A, with its 35 followers, follows Account B, with its 3,500 followers.
2. Account B doesn’t follow back, likely because it doesn’t recognize Account A and/or is “too swamped to vet it and decide if a follow is merited.
3. Account A sees this lack of reciprocation as an insult. Its operator thinks they deserved a follow-back, and that not getting it signals the arrogance of Account B.

Account A-type personalities have even coined a term for Account B counterparts: asymmetricals, as in “big” accounts that have numerous followers but relatively few follows.

This Bluesky post, which I’ll just copy and not link to (so as not to put the person “on blast,” even though I don’t have an audience sufficient to even “blast” them), sums up the stance and even has a tacky hashtag to go with it and emblazon the follow-for-follow legacy:

HChoosing [sic] not to follow back can signal a belief that you’re above your followers. It suggests their opinions don’t hold weight in your world. Social media is about connection, not superiority. Let’s remember: engagement should be mutual, not one-sided. #SocialMediaDynamics

It’s indisputable that the “big”⁴ accounts on Bluesky are descriptively asymmetric. They often follow very few people, and some rarely repost or quote anyone. On X/Twitter, this behavior once reached a comical extreme with the widely followed nominal leftist account zei_squirrel, who had thousands of followers while following literally no one.

However, accounts like the above-quoted use the term “asymmetric” normatively, as a judgment holding that big accounts on Bluesky are being unfair by refusing to follow their followers. Their key claim is that “social media is about connection, not superiority”—they nominally want more engagement, a wish that they think is stifled by an elite group of relatively big accounts who only want to hear themselves and their close circle talk.

What a bunch of crybabies, right? Or at least that’s the prevailing (and predictable) reaction from “big” Bluesky accounts, who see the new wave of follow-for-follow acolytes as children with naive and unworkable notions of fairness. “They’re not owed anything” and “I’m far too busy to engage with randos” are fair summaries of this mentality, and I can partially endorse the first sentiment⁵ at least considering that many accounts seeking follow-backs are indeed just bad-faith growth hackers seeking to build their personal brands (I just puked writing that sentence). You’d have to be a real self-loather to follow all of them, for ideological and practical reasons.

Buuuut (you knew that was coming), I don’t think the sudden wave of backlash at “asymmetrics⁶” is entirely frivolous, nor is its timing (as Bluesky siphons off some users from X) an accident. Not everyone annoyed with “big” accounts is a growth hacker. Moreover, the perceptions of such accounts as out-of-touch, self-absorbed broadcasters were decisive in Elon Musk’s transformation of Twitter and in the overall decline of social media (but perhaps not social networking) as a useful tool for the public.

Social media vs. social networking

First, a note on “social media” as a term, and its relation to the similar concept of “social networking.” Ian Bogost has succinctly differentiated them:

The terms social network and social media are used interchangeably now, but they shouldn’t be. A social network is an idle, inactive system—a Rolodex of contacts, a notebook of sales targets, a yearbook of possible soul mates. But social media is active—hyperactive, really—spewing material across those networks instead of leaving them alone until needed.

The shift from social networking to social media occurred circa 2009 for Bogost, and this squares with my own experience: That was the year that baseball manager Tony LaRussa sued Twitter for an account impersonating him, leading to the “blue checkmark” system under which Twitter (the company) individually verified the accounts of high-profile figures to prove they were who they said they were. This verification took the visual form of a blue (or white, if you were in dark mode) checkmark next to the account’s display name.

Verification put “big” accounts at a distinct remove from everyone else. Ny doing so, it also signaled how social media was more like broadcast media than an internet chatroom. Some accounts were just going to be Too Big To Interact With.

Although Twitter was always much smaller than Facebook (the platform it was often mentioned in the same sentence with), its novel verification system and one-way follow structure made it a sensation among journalists and the perpetually bored in its early years. For the media—who along with public figures were among the earliest blue/white checkmark bearers—there was the prestige of being visibly “verified,” like online recipients of a knighthood or other Birthday Honours title. For everyone else, instead of having to jump through the two-way follow hoops of Facebook (that is, sending a follow request to someone and then waiting for it to maybe be approved), you could just follow someone on Twitter and then consume their tweets much like you would blog posts in an RSS reader.

Whereas you’d use old-Facebook⁷ to build real connections with people you knew, you’d use Twitter to keep up with a lot of strangers, many of whom would not want to (and indeed would not) interact with you, even though the site’s setup made you think such interaction was inevitable and expected. Verification and the dawn of the social media era ironically made Twitter more like an old blogging service, with a social networking-like feel of only interacting with your digital Rolodex, for its most prominent and active users, even as it became much more free-flowing and chatroom-esque for everyone.

The blog-like core of old-Twitter

This structure worked, in that it seemed to keep big and small accounts alike content, for a while because it so closely resembled ones that people knew from the late 2000s and early 2010s: Reading a blog, commenting on it, and adding its RSS feed to a feed reader. After all, Twitter was for years referred to as a microblogging service—a descriptor that was accurate long ago but that seems cringe and irrelevant now. The biggest accounts were, yes, like bloggers, and their followers like the audiences, in both actual membership and overall behavior, that some of them had once built on their blogs.

But Google Reader, by far the most popular RSS reader, shuttered on July 1, 2013. Blogging itself declined significantly as people shifted more posts off the open web and onto closed social media platforms. The relative silence and slowness of posting a blog and maybe seeing a few comments on it to which you could respond—and the corresponding flow of refreshing your RSS reader to see a trickle of new blog posts—was replaced with the infinite scroll of social media.

This shift, which coincided with the major growth of social media platforms, brought with it a breakdown in the expectations of how social media relationships should work: The old one, modeled on consuming a blog conservatively and from afar as a frequent reader and occasional commenter, gave way to a new one in which all parties were like participants in the same chat room. Replying, quote-tweeting (which was only added as a feature to Twitter in the 2010s!), and asking for follow-backs were normalized. During my first foray into using Twitter, my timeline was flooded with people with virtually no followers of their own @-mentioning massive celebrities to tell them to delete their accounts (or much worse) and engaging in other types of self-promotion, whether sharing a link to their site or cramming their tweets with hashtags like the follow-for-follow grinders.

Such interactions became inescapable during the 2016 election cycle as big accounts ended up predominantly as Hillary Clinton supporters and smaller ones as Bernie Sanders Stans. This dynamic in turn drove a lot of big accounts to disengage from most intra-Twitter conversations: They embraced Twitter’s suite of content filtering features to lock replies or at a minimum effectively ignore (by muting) any accounts with default profile pictures, unverified email addresses—and most important of all—without checkmark verification. Yet even as they treated Twitter like a blogging service with themselves at the wheel, the site still looked and mostly worked as a giant chatroom where anyone could talk to anyone. This ambiguity was never resolved, and it still bedevils every Twitter-like service, most of all Bluesky.

Anyway, one way to think about this behavioral shift is as the “big” accounts doubling down on the blog-like core that originally sat beneath Twitter, while the smaller accounts—many of which were part of their audiences!—moved on. Elon Musk’s 2022 purchase of Twitter can in part be understood as him intervening decisively on the side of the latter group.

What did Musk do soon after buying Twitter?

1. He stripped all the verification checkmarks and then only re-awarded them if people either paid or were deemed by him to be significant public figures (e.g. the President of the United States). By far the group hurt the most by this change were the left-liberal journalists, academics, and activists who’d constituted a disproportionate share of all checkmarks on the site.
2. He made it so links—the currency of the email job-havers who were Twitter’s most active posters—got down ranked , making it so that the only way to have high-visibility posts was to post just text, images, and videos that kept people on the site.
3. He degraded many of the content filtering features, such as how the block function worked, so that accounts could no longer so easily avoid interacting with other users.
4. He emphasized the algorithmic timeline that serves you posts it “thinks” you might like, rather than ones from accounts you’ve actually followed (thereby shattering the value of the followed-follower hierarchy).

I’m not saying any of these changes were good⁸, only that they clearly represented (even if by pure accident) Twitter finally being forced by a major capitalist to catch up with other social media platforms such as Facebook (which has long downranked news content of any sort) and TikTok (where there isn’t really a followed-follower hierarchy) by abolishing the blog-like structure of old-Twitter. In turn, the groups of people most likely to flee the newly christened X were predictably the ones who’d most benefited from the previous hierarchy: left-leaning, hyperactive (in Bogost’s sense reference above) posters who weren’t real celebrities or even YouTube-level stars raking in millions from their online activity, but who had been the main characters on a one-way (micro)blogging service cleverly disguised as a fully interactive two-way social media platform.

Or to frame it another way: Their escape to Bluesky, which has all the same issues as old-Twitter did especially post-2016, is them trying to fit a blog-shaped peg into a social media-shaped hole.

Bluesky is one-way for me, two-way for thee

The search for a “new-Twitter” that can fully replicate the old-Twitter that Musk destroyed has been mostly dispiriting for those involved, for this fundamental reason: Nothing today can combine the blog-like legacy structure of Twitter with the scale and excitement that accompanied early-days social media, before it became something more readily associated with mental health breakdowns, direct political messaging, and aggressive censorship. And to the degree that any network can feel like old-Twitter, it’ll then inevitably have to deal with the same issues that beset that site in its later years, namely the disparity between how certain big accounts see it as a one-way megaphone and smaller accounts see it as a two-way (multi-way, I guess) chatroom that everyone is equally entitled to commandeer.

Mastodon, the first would-be successor, blurs the lines between social media and social networking. It’s a simple concept that seems complex: Anyone can install the Mastodon software (which is free and open source) on their domain and by doing so, connect it to other sites that also run the same software. It’s similar to how email works. Just as the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (authored all the way back in 1980) lets email accounts from Gmail, Yahoo!, Outlook, iCloud, etc. communicate with each other, the ActivityPub protocol (a W3C standard) lets servers running Mastodon software interact with each other. Because there’s a bit of a learning curve, Mastodon users seem somewhat likelier to have deep connections with each other because after all, they too survived the gauntlet of making the service work for them, and they often come from similar (technical) backgrounds. Mastodon’s decentralized structure means it’s much harder to become the center of attention. Your server might be blocked by another, there’s no suggestive algorithm to boost your posts based on the size of your followership, and you have to self-verify through a website you own.

Threads, Meta’s Twitter clone, is for real celebrities and brands, not people. It buries posts beneath its algorithmic timelines, will soon be stuffed with promotions, and is overall basically just X run by Mark Zuckerberg rather than Elon Musk.

That brings us to Bluesky, which has succeeded to an extent in becoming “Twitter 2,” albeit at a much-reduced size. I’m on the record as a Bluesky bear. Like Bogost, who separately described Bluesky as a short-term “bubble” amidst the longer-term decline of social media, I think social media is fundamentally flawed in that overexposes us to the opinions of others, beyond a scale that we can manage. Bluesky doesn’t fix this; the entire site, which looks and feels like something from 15 years ago, makes no sense except as a successor-in-waiting to Twitter/X. On my since-deleted X account, I once likened its vibe to a high-school reunion for Twitter-famous posters: Awkward, insular, and maybe not a great idea.

And “succeed” it has, in replicating the old hierarchy and its accompanying issues in miniature. The site is dominated by erstwhile “big” accounts that fled Twitter and have re-established a reduced but still bigger-than-most following. This reduction in scale is important: Just as the “big” accounts are diminished compared to their previous presences on Twitter, so are the small accounts even smaller. This has, I think, been a catalyst for the follow-for-follow discourse, for these reasons:

• The small user base combined with the instant dominance of the “big” accounts that simply moved shop from X to Bluesky means that engagement is difficult unless you’re already big. Even though there are plenty of bad-faith growth hackers asking people to follow them back, there are also people who just want to get some (any) interaction on Bluesky.
• The big accounts are now operating at a reduced scale in terms of their own mentions and interactions. A “hit” post on Bluesky might have fewer than 1k likes (compared to tens or hundreds of thousands on X), and an ordinary one far less than that. That means that in theory, they should be able to read and acknowledge many of the interactions coming their way—something that would’ve been impractical at the scale of X.
• And yet big accounts often do completely ignore earnest replies, and forego any attempt to follow beyond a narrow circle of people who agree with them, while simultaneously interacting with trolls and annoying reply-guys. They might also talk about how busy they are, a statement somewhat contradicted by how they’re announcing that on a niche low-interaction social media platform. This behavior probably drives small accounts wild; “why are you ignoring me?”

At the same time, Bluesky like Twitter hasn’t resolved the tension between how its “big” accounts see and use the site and how everyone else does, and if anything the tension is worse because:

• The site is technically janky, without the polished functionality (like muting of unverified accounts, plus centralized verification that goes beyond its Mastodon-esque domain-name verification system) that once let the “big” accounts truly stand aside from everyone else.
• The reduced scale plus the growing distance from the one-time blog-like structure of Twitter means that people expect more interaction than they did on Twitter, even though that’s not possible even under the best of circumstances due to the sheer user numbers.

So, I think there’s something understandable in the frustration from accounts who don’t get followed back or even replied to, just as there’s something understandable in “big” accounts thinking such behavior is weird and Bluesky should instead be a one-way street for them to share their every utterance, trivial or profound, with their audience. Note that this exact dynamic doesn’t exist on, say, YouTube, where absolutely titanic accounts are never expected to follow or interact with you because the site makes it clear that you’re mostly there just to passively watch and then maybe briefly comment. Nor does it exist on Instagram (which is more celebrity-driven and distant, thanks to its relative dearth of text).

But on Bluesky, a “big” account looks like any other account, and the site makes you expect that you can interact with it directly.

And yet you get the sense that a lot of “big” accounts would almost prefer not having to interact with anyone—in which case you have to ask what value are they getting from the site, or from continued social media usage at all. Is their presence just some vestige that they can’t discard? Or do they just like hearing themselves talk and get adulation, free from thoughtful interaction? If the latter, they have a lot in common with the follow-for-follow hustlers after all.