Gaming Twitter hasn't felt like gaming Twitter in years. This may not change anytime soon on Twitter, but Bluesky feels like a window into the not-too-distant past.
Twitter has seen a steep decline since Elon Musk acquired the website in 2022. As of the end of August, the social media giant's value was estimated to be nearly 80% lower than before the acquisition. And after the US presidential election in November, hundreds of thousands of users shut down their Twitter (now known as X) accounts and turned to Bluesky. Bluesky has gained 8 million users since October, jumping from 13 million to 21 million. .

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Are you planning to switch to Bluesky?
Wario64 is now on Bluesky. I don't think there's ever been a better time to make a transition. I finally took the leap. do you have If not, are you tempted?
Twitter's loss is Bluesky's gain
Musk has very publicly tied himself to Donald Trump's re-election bid, and the former president's return to the White House was a catalyst for many users to finally get serious about finding alternatives to Twitter, which has increasingly become a source of right-wing activity as the election begins. It is done. I moved closer. All right. I'm still on Twitter, but I understand why someone would choose this moment to leave. Before that, I saw a lot of gaming accounts I follow go dark.
The growing number of users spewing hate has been a major headache for the website and has driven advertisers away, but Musk's Twitter problems are even more serious. His decision to transform the blue checkmark from an icon that shows users are who they claim to be into a status symbol that anyone can pay $8 a month to pin to their profile significantly undermined the site's credibility. and makes it more difficult to navigate.
Musk also ensured that the algorithm would prioritize users with a blue checkmark so that their tweets would be seen more often. This extends to their replies being prioritized over all other replies, and this is the biggest change that has made Twitter borders unusable.
blue check mark problem
I don't want to generalize, but blue checkmarks are the absolute worst users on your site. When Musk introduced the idea of paying for verification, the general reaction from longtime Twitter users was basically 'Fuck you, you have to pay me.' The people who decided to opt in for the feature that was free were largely posters who weren't able to grow their audience organically. That and the bot. As a result, blue checkmark answers tend to lack any insight at all. If you're known for your sparkling wit, you probably don't have to pay to shove it down someone's throat.
So, if you're actually interested in starting a conversation with a tweet, and that tweet becomes somewhat popular, you'll have to scroll through dozens of empty responses before you get to what they're actually talking about. . Likewise, if you want to reply to an interesting post, your tweet won't appear unless the publisher goes to the trouble of searching through all of their posts.
And if you're just interested in watching the conversation, you'll most likely have to take that action or move on. This undermined Twitter's function as a vector for conversations about shared interests, and completely eliminated the ability to click on interesting tweets and read many of the great replies. This is the core of Twitter's existence.
An unpleasant change that comes to mind today: I can no longer see anything that other people like.
As a games journalist who started out as a freelancer in the 2010s, Twitter was the center of conversation surrounding games. It was my go-to place to see what new indies other games journalists and developers were talking about, and I got all kinds of recommendations from the kinds of posts the algorithm now doesn't favor. We got to see developers interacting with each other, responding to players, and talking about the game.
The developers shared the levels they were working on for Blocktober and rounded up some cool things they learned from the games they worked on. More than anything specific, it was a place where anyone in the industry or covering a related field could go and talk about what was happening in games and see what their followers were saying about it.

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Twitter for gaming is not coming back
Under Musk, Twitter has significantly increased its right-wing accounts. That's because Musk's political shift will make him embarrassed to pay a blue check, even if most other people want one. This makes it difficult for anyone to have conversations about highly sensitive topics like race, gender, and sexual orientation in games.
If the post gains traction, you'll be flooded with hostile blue check replies. So people don't talk about that much anymore, and games that were already vectors for right-wing radicalization lose their progressive voices.
However, Bluesky still functions like Twitter uninterrupted. You'll see your favorite reactions first, not the reactions of people who paid for your attention. In fact, you'll find people talking about games in interesting ways, sharing their own work, and replying to awesome content created by others. We see 1 Like = 1 Game Prompt as a way for users to engage with their followers.
People are still posting pictures of food, sharing articles they've written, and talking about their thoughts on new games, all with the expectation that they won't come into the game with bad intentions. It feels like my Twitter feed before 2022. Elon ruined the new app so much that it's a breath of fresh air to have a competitor doing the same thing Twitter did three years ago.
Considering how quickly Twitter has changed (Musk only acquired it in October 2022), it's easy to see how Bluesky could move in the same direction. In a world where money can buy anything, no matter how important it is as a global public communication tool, it seems perfectly possible that a bored billionaire could buy Bluesky and remake it in his own image. This is the dark side of capitalist society. But for now, let's enjoy this little window into a brighter past.

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