After a record run: Bluesky struggles with a wave of content complaints
Recently, millions of new users joined Bluesky. But with them also came trolls, scammers and spammers – now Bluesky is flooded with complaints.
(Image: Diego Thomazini/Shutterstock.com)
With a large number of users comes great responsibility – This is the experience of those responsible at the rapidly growing social media platform Bluesky. After initially making headlines with millions of new users, the start-up is now receiving masses of complaints about inappropriate postings on its own platform.
Bluesky itself has now informed its users about the situation. A post on the "Bluesky Safety" account mentions 42,000 complaints that the team received within 24 hours from Thursday evening to Friday evening alone – - a record high. Users apparently complained about spam, attempted fraud and unspecified trolling activities. There is also talk of child pornography, and the team writes that reports of this are being treated with the highest priority. Overall, Bluesky is now pursuing a triage strategy similar to that used in emergency medicine: the worst cases are treated first, followed by the rest in descending order of severity.
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The flood of complaints continues
According to Bluesky, the team currently receives an average of 3,000 complaints per hour. In 2023, the total number of complaints was around 360,000, which, according to the company's earlier figures, affected 3.4 percent of accounts on Bluesky. Logically, as the number of users of an online platform increases, so does the number of "black sheep".
It remains to be seen whether the proportion of reported accounts in the total user base will also increase, but the figures can at least be put into a vague perspective: If we assume 42,000 complaints on Friday based on the Bluesky data, these were compared to around 6.7 million posts published on that day according to the statistics portal jaz. The jaz data comes from Bluesky itself.
There is not always a need for action
However, experience shows that only a fraction of the reported activities actually result in action. For example, of the 46,000 or so accounts reported in 2023, only around 5,000 were ultimately blocked.
However, the startup still has to adjust to the growth of the Bluesky community: Due to the many complaints, the company now wants to recruit new staff, according to the Bluesky post. The first candidates are already positioning themselves in the comments with their LinkedIn profiles.
New user million after wave of X churn
Bluesky has welcomed several large waves of new users in recent weeks, with the last big influx coming after Republican Donald Trump won the US presidential election. The tech billionaire and owner of X (formerly Twitter) Elon Musk had massively supported Trump during the election campaign, sparking a new wave of X churn.
Bluesky recently cracked the 16 million user mark, with the last million being added in just a day and a half. This means that Bluesky is now growing almost as fast as Threads, which is backed by the Meta Group.
(nen)
