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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

You can just Google these things. Nate Silver posted (grim looking) usage numbers --- followers and posters --- just a couple weeks ago. They very publicly raised a $15MM (priced) A round a year ago, after raising what I understood to be a comparable amount of seed funding. There was talk early this year of them raising again at a $700MM valuation, but I don't see a subsequent announcement that that happened.

You can generally take a headcount number and assign a fully loaded cost to it (say, $200k, conservatively) and just math it out. And of course that analysis assumes their infra expenditures round to zero.

So no, I'm not just making stuff up. I could be wrong! I feel like I was open about that.

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Nate Silver is an ideologue who deeply wants BlueSky to be failing.

I think you’re going to need to back that up in order for me to take your claim seriously. I’ve always found Nate Silver to be opinionated, sure, but with opinions based on data.

(To be clear, I’m not disputing that Silver thinks BlueSky is failing—I’ll take your word for that—I’m disputing that he’s doing so because he had an axe to grind rather than data backing him up.)

It doesn't matter, because nobody is taking Nate Silver's word for anything. That Nate Silver dunks on Bsky is of absolutely no probative value whatsoever.

In other words you gave no idea how much runway they have as a company but are spouting off.

Also ignoring that Bluesky isn’t dependent on any company in the long term.

Saying "you can google it" when the range of online information is massive is not a helpful thing to say. What numbers are you believing and why?

Nate Silver has basically zero juice on Bluesky, people go there to get away from that sort of "expert" that's got a huge profile already but is hard to escape if you are uninterested in his takes.

I mean he'll, take his own word on it, it's not the social network for him!

https://www.natesilver.net/p/what-is-blueskyism

What does it matter how much "juice" he has on Bluesky? The numbers are the numbers.

His numbers may be bad because people on the website don't like him, not because of something inherent about bsky (other than better taste)

Plenty of big accounts have anecdotally said they have much better engagement on bsky than twitter

They're not his numbers. He's just pointing to them!

You didn't point to his numbers so that wasn't clear, but either way, Silver has beef with bsky because he isn't popular there and he likes to whine about it.

The usage numbers I've seen are down from their peak last November but have mostly stabilized at this point. The devs say they have multiple years of runway, and each time there is an exodus from twitter the numbers have a sharp increase and then decline to a stable number higher than they started.

13 months ago there were 200k daily likers and now there are 1.2 million. Yes, that is down from the highest peak directly after the election, but the 1.2 million has been fairly steady for the past ~4 months and if there's one thing you can count on it's Elon doing something stupid to piss off users and cause another user exodus. That one will cause another peak and slow decline but if it's like every other one he's caused the end result will be higher numbers for bsky than before.

> You didn't point to his numbers

They were linked in the thread by the person complaining about them in an ancestor of your comment.

> if there's one thing you can count on it's Elon doing something stupid to piss off users and cause another user exodus. That one will cause another peak and slow decline but if it's like every other one he's caused the end result will be higher numbers for bsky than before.

Only seeing growth when Musk does something stupid, and most of the new users not sticking around are strong signals it doesn’t have long-term value. Bluesky is the rebound social network.

> Only seeing growth when Musk does something stupid, and most of the new users not sticking around are strong signals it doesn’t have long-term value. Bluesky is the rebound social network.

One thing that often gets overlooked is that Twitter itself was on pretty shaky financial ground (and likely still is, though being private now makes that harder to know). Even if Bluesky managed to absorb the entirety of Twitter’s user base, it’s still unclear whether that translates into a strong business model.

Yes: Plenty of criticism has been aimed at how Twitter was run, and maybe Bluesky is managed more effectively right now, but there's no evidence to suggest Bluesky would be run significantly better at that scale.

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