Don’t Strip-Mine The Sky

In my first big rant on Bluesky, I tapped into a small seed of an idea that I think deserves expansion: The idea that the problem with many companies is that they maximize profits instead of protecting what got everyone interested in them in the first place.

Based on what CEO Jay Graber is saying—including at a TechCrunch event this week—she strikes me as someone who does not want to maximize profit in consumer-unfriendly ways. She suggested advertising, but only based on contextual intentions, i.e., through search rather than shoved into your feed.

Though I did not imply advertising was on the list, that dovetails somewhat into the ideas that I was pitching in that post. I suggested that if Bluesky is looking for a way to monetize itself, it should use its decentralized user architecture model to lean into secondary network graphs that may offer more direct financial success than its original text-based offering. An obvious one is LinkedIn, whose job listings companies pay a pretty penny for, and a service for which people pay hundreds of dollars for each year just to increase recruiter access.

But, like many social networks, LinkedIn pushes it too far by messing with the social graph in ways that maximize on-site engagement. Bluesky could essentially replicate LinkedIn’s model with its existing userbase and leave the social graph alone, and it would likely find enough success to cover its costs. The key there is enough success. It doesn’t even need to beat LinkedIn. It just needs to make a profit.

That idea could be expanded on into any industry you could think of. To go much further out: Bluesky could use its social identity protocols, create a secondary level of access through ID verification, and use that access to build a competitor to Ticketmaster that runs a much tighter ship around artist presales. To be clear, I’m not saying that they would want to do this, necessarily—lest they risk the ire of the Taylor Swift fandom. But the idea is that the network’s value would be built by combining the social graph with an ethical center of trust, something that is sorely lacking from the ticket-purchasing process.

The line connecting those two ideas—one somewhat realistic, one more a pipe dream—is the idea that you would build a corporate structure that is not built around maximizing profit. Rather, it dabbles in multiple sectors of the social graph, not aiming for the rafters in any single one, and finding just enough success to cover its bills and make a reasonable profit. That is a desirable model that ultimately centers the user in the equation.

Craigslist, the great example of a company that succeeded despite leaving money on the table. (Anne Cloudman/Flickr)

In this way, the model might end up looking something like Craigslist, which doesn’t really try to excel in any one area, but just opens up basic access to community services, for sale offerings, and job listings. That model has not changed in 30 years, and honestly, it does not need to. It has worked extremely well because of a combination of a first-mover element and a hard-fought ethos of consistency.

I will concede that Craigslist is not perfect. For one thing, it deeply undermined an existing industry, newspapers, almost by accident, by essentially removing the need for classified advertising. For another, it struggled with moderation and, after the passage of a controversial law, that eventually led to the closure of its personals section. And if you ever sold a ticket or bought an old Xeon through Craigslist you know that you’re taking a leap of faith.

The famed “unbundling” graphic reads differently than it did in 2012. (Spark Capital/CB Insights)

And from a purely UX perspective, its vintage design gave competitors an obvious way to outdo it. There is a famous Web 2.0-era graphic from the early 2010s that suggested that the way to beat Craigslist was not to build a new Craigslist, but to build lots of small companies that did much better than Craigslist in every way, an “unbundling” concept of sorts. The problem is largely what came after: Many of the companies on the graphic, including Uber, Airbnb, and Stubhub, ultimately became some of our most enshittified companies. Other companies in the graphic, meanwhile, went away or merged into the larger ones, leading to the very “rebundling” that the “unbundling” concept was meant to avoid.

But enshittification never came for Craigslist. The roots of its model, the person-to-person approach to commerce, has never truly gone away because it chose never to allow itself to reach beyond its original goals. Craig Newmark didn’t need to become a multi-billionaire, but nonetheless still succeeded beyond his wildest dreams because he knew when enough was enough. He never exploited the spigots or threw an algorithm on the thing he built. He has put much of his money into philanthropy. He is a key example of living the ethos.

To me, looking at the fediverse or services like Bluesky, that’s the real opportunity: People can do well while not being exploitative or overcapitalizing the business. With the AT Protocol, Bluesky doesn’t even have to build most of this themselves. They can create services to build upon the social graph, and they can build a services business that allows others to build on the social graph. (They could even charge end-users for services that support more advanced uses of the social graph, while leaving the roots of the product free for most people, like Cloudflare does for websites.) But the goal must be to hold everyone to an ethical line. By creating a standard that the social graph is not to be disrupted or exploited, even as businesses are built around it, that creates a baseline for others to follow.

And if it’s just Bluesky building on top of the AT protocol in the end, creating four or five secondary businesses that support the “loss leader” that brings in the users, fine. But the ethos of building towards “successful enough” is one that not enough companies do, and it is positioning itself as one that could realistically pull it off.

It may not bring in the billions that Meta and Google do, but it could encourage a better overall internet experience, and that means something. Bluesky’s ethos has been on-point so far. Let’s hope they’re able to keep it going.