Premier League opening weekend at Bluesky was nice and soft, but X hard edges remain | American football
hWell, I'm new here, although you may know me from somewhere else. The sun is shining in the sky, there is not a cloud in sight, I am here to enjoy good humor and polite relationships on social media. Thanks for the starter pack. Welcome, then, to blue skywhere the algorithm isn't blocked by the far right, self-policing isn't too harsh, although there was that weird guy who listed the schools everyone attended.
After the Twitterectomy (to use Nick Cave's indelicate term for this liberal migration) to a promised land where Elon Musk does not cite articles on the Great Replacement Theory on Twitter because he considers them “interesting.” Now, how would this new Xanadu look when placed in the hottest oven of public debate known to humanity? Forget geopolitics and hot-button social issues, forget even Donald Trump, the truest test is a first division weekend.
The moody agony of an international breakup had heightened anticipation and at the same time given more time to social media migrants crossing the great divide. Do we relive the spirit of 2011, the decisive year of Twitter, those good times of Follow Friday, when everyone had fun, apart from the occasional avalanche? Thinking back, they became quite unpleasant, especially on football Twitter.
So far, so friendly and cuddly, maybe a little too antiseptic, although it seems like a necessary step. They are all older and, if not wiser, they know how things can change. Reading X's responses now is a look into a seething pit of bile and misinformation. In Bluesky right now there is the novelty of not having your appearance, hated profession and/or prejudices in the answers. You won't miss the hidden answer that revealed vile abuse or the Telegram address of a gambling scam you always clicked on.
Social networks are better – and more fun – when they are fed by events and the properly organized football weekend. Manchester City's latest defeat brought some taunts from Bluesky about Pep Guardiola's “blatant fraud” failure under pressure after that 4-0 defeat to Tottenham. “I think Manchester got rid of the wrong blatant fraud” was one example; Erik ten Hag endures as a meme.
Back to the old house where hysteria still reigns and, indeed, much of the best material still resides. A few X-ers hit the mark with jokes about legal challenges to City's five-game losing streak. Meanwhile, a blue aggregator account went completely through the roof, demanding Kyle Walker's exile to “China or Saudi Arabia” and declaring that “(Phil) Foden's decline should be studied at Oxford.” Bluesky is not yet a battleground for the City's real legal problems, where X has become a happy place for those who have fun with associated party transactions and shareholder loans. Should that situation develop, as is expected with City's Premier League charges any day now, he can only be expected to flourish within the new environment.
Another driver of reliable content is refereeing, tinfoil hats easily donned into the belief that all referees are against it. his club. Musk's toy has several specialists in this area, with a prolific account that compiles a file of several tweets about Adrian Holmes, the assistant referee who denied Arsenal a goal in Saturday's match… check notes.. .3-0 victory over Nottingham Forest. In Bluesky, Holmes received no such mentions. Apart from some complaints about a booking for Bukayo Saka, Arsenal fans were happy to celebrate an important victory. For now, the wild conspiracies remain largely confined to the mothership and not the escape pod.
Still, on Sunday, when Liverpool awarded a debatable penalty against Southampton, the name of Michael Oliver, the person responsible for VAR, was in vain on both platforms. A Bluesky player shouted quite inexplicably: “I'm 54 years old and I've never seen a penalty like that.” No one went as far as User X who stated that penalty takers should not be allowed to score rebounds. Anyway, soon all was well again among Liverpool fans. “Mo Salah is the best player in the world right now,” shouted one Bluesky user, although complaints emerged that the Egyptian king's yellow card for stripping naked in celebration had cost him Fantasy Premier League points.
Which left Manchester United, with a faded grandeur repurposed over the past decade into a pathos-laden soap opera best represented by a series of viral memes: the other Andrew Tate, Rio Ferdinand's “Man Utd are back, man,” whatever amount of managerial ridicule. Universal Postal Union. Rubén Amorim's greeting in Ipswich and United's first goal on 81 seconds provoked much sarcasm that United were “back”, and when performance levels dropped and Ipswich earned a deserved draw, the sarcasm was used even more as a security blanket: “Amorim out.” A series of serious discussions about which players fit in a 3-4-3 formation represented the cold wind of reality, before some old-fashioned vitriol – completely deserved – was held back for Ed Sheeran's salacious cameo on the broadcast from Sky Sports.
So, a soft launch. If the bite once enjoyed in the abandoned hellscape is missing, if the edges are dull, things will soon escalate. After all, what is social media other than a broken mirror of humanity? Just be careful with those piles.
