Bluesky quickly sold out of the T-shirt its CEO wore to troll Mark Zuckerberg

https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/13/bluesky-quickly-sold-out-of-the-t-shirt-its-ceo-wore-to-troll-mark-zuckerberg/

by c5karl • 1 year ago

88 69 1 year ago

techcrunch.com

sejje5• 1 year ago

(Yes, it is weird that Zuck goes out of his way to compare himself to a violent dictator.)

Why can't news sites just report the news? Why do they need to tell me what to think about it?

smrtinsert• 1 year ago

You're thinking of a wire service. Associated Press for example is what you want. TechCrunch is a blog and it's completely normal for blogs to be editorialized.

sejje5• 1 year ago

Top Headlines
Latest News
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TechCrunch is an American global online newspaper focusing on topics regarding high-tech and startup companies. [0]

Oh, okay. My fault.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TechCrunch

theoryofx4• 1 year ago

What bothers me about this is not injecting an opinion (it's TechCrunch) but the superficial and ignorant take.

Julius Caesar was not just some "violent dictator" like a Hitler, Stalin, or Putin. He wasn't sending people off to gas chambers, gulags, or out of windows. He was famous for his clemency toward his enemies in the civil war which made him dictator.

Even the title of "dictator" was a legal office in ancient Rome and meant something very different from the modern usage.

Zuck admiring Julius Caesar (which doesn't mean endorsing all his actions) puts him in the company of many of the most successful, ethical, and well informed people in history

invalidname2• 1 year ago

Well... About a million dead and a million enslaved might disagree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallic_Wars . He murdered/enslaved for political gain back home, then killed the people who opposed to him back in Rome to stop democracy.

I don't want to compare to these other guys because obviously it was a different time/culture and you can't really make such broad sweeping comparisons. I won't judge people for admiring him because I also appreciate a lot of his political and strategic savvy. But he was a very violent dictator.

InfiniteTitan• 1 year ago

HN never disappoints.

fullshark2• 1 year ago

Because no one goes into journalism to report the news, they go into to influence public opinion. This is done largely by deciding which stories to amplify and to kill, and which information is presented in which order. That is a subtle art, this person seems to lack subtlety.

croisillon2• 1 year ago

because apparently 77M Americans can't add 2 and 2 when it comes to wannabe dictators

hagbard_c3• 1 year ago

dictator, in modern political systems, a single person who possesses absolute political power within a country or territory or a member of a small group that exercises such power. The term comes from the Latin title dictator, which in the Roman Republic designated a temporary magistrate who was granted extraordinary powers in order to deal with state crises. Modern dictators, however, resemble ancient tyrants rather than ancient dictators. (from Britannica [1])

In some ways this fits the election of Donald Trump - he was designated as a temporary magistrate who was granted extraordinary powers in order to deal with state crises - but in most ways it does not. Trump does not possess absolute power nor is a member of a small group which possesses such power as the plethora of court cases blocking his decisions make clear. The real important bit here is this:

apparently 77M Americans

That is the majority of the voting public which you're lambasting for making the wrong decision. Here's a bit more on that subject, read it well:

https://www.britannica.com/topic/democracy and https://www.britannica.com/topic/republic-government

Don't agree with the majority and think they should listen to you or your group instead? There are names for such forms of government as well, names which are generally portrayed as being opposites of the two I pointed at earlier.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/dictator-ruler

rKarpinski• 1 year ago

Zuckerberg has drawn comparisons between himself and the Roman dictator Julius Caesar

Thought it was Caesar Augustus? IIRC Zuckerberg has even claimed that his hairstyle is inspired by him.

gm3dmo• 1 year ago

here he is training with Henry Cooper:

https://youtu.be/TvjsWmlOJmY

jazzyjackson6• 1 year ago

yea it's augustus, but Zuck's "Zuck or Nothing" playing off of "Aut Caesar aut nihil" isn't even referring to a particular Caesar, but it's use as the title Emperor, and attributable to Cesare Borgia.

I think Zuck's shirt is a good joke on everyone trying to displace Facebook from the market. BlueSky wants to be the next Facebook/Twitter, so IMO by not getting the joke the Bluesky shirt is a self-own.

pyrale• 1 year ago

BlueSky wants to be the next Facebook/Twitter, so IMO by not getting the joke the Bluesky shirt is a self-own.

The point of the shirt seems to be that they don't want to be the next facebook. The article clarifies that. Whether they'll live up to that promise if they grow is another issue.

fullshark2• 1 year ago

I'm not laughing

hooloovoo_zoo• 1 year ago

Sounds right; Zuck’s threads generally are a joke.

mnsc• 1 year ago

I don't get it, could you explain the joke?

jredwards2• 1 year ago

The entire point Jay Graber is making with her shirt is that BlueSky does not want to be the next Facebook or Twitter.

I don't understand how you misunderstood that so badly that you came to this conclusion.

pathless• 1 year ago

I forgot about BlueSky since, around ~2 months ago, every last person I followed on there moved back (reopened) to Twitter due to the user number falloff... I am so out of the loop now

melodyogonna• 1 year ago

Twitter is very usable once you block Elon and the unhinged conspiracy accounts that he retweets.

ivewonyoung• 1 year ago

I frequently have the opposite problem where the algo is pushing liberal accounts tweeting $OUTRAGE_OF_THE_DAY

irelephant4• 1 year ago

Its like a hydra - more weird accounts pop up despite me blocking every one similar and pressing "not interested".

Never had a similar problem on Bluesky.

croon• 1 year ago

I guess the people I follow either don't care about the numbers or didn't have that issue, but I'm finding more and more of the people I wanted to read from there everyday, and am enjoying it so much more after a year of engagement bait (or worse) on X. Bluesky to me is what Twitter was a few years ago, which (IMHO) is great.

toomuchtodo2• 1 year ago

They just crossed 33M users. Maybe your microcosm?

https://blueskyusercount.com/

jazzyjackson6• 1 year ago

Active monthly is probably a tenth of that. I've made an account 2 or 3 times over the years but never find much to make me stay, I think I delete my accounts tho so I don't know if I'm in that stat.

microtonal• 1 year ago

I think it really depends on the communities you are in. I use Bluesky mostly for ML stuff and Mastodon for more Unixy stuff and my Bluesky feed is quite lively with a good signal/noise ratio. I completely nuked my X account over a month ago, it was just drowning in ragebait and Elon posts (even though I don't follow Elon).

irelephant4• 1 year ago

Thats interesting, I have always got far more engagement on Bluesky than Twitter.

harvey9• 1 year ago

Depends on who you interact with. Some self-declared twitter-leavers never really left, others absolutely did.

drpossum2• 1 year ago

While I agree with the sentiment, Bluesky is not the answer to fixing social media.

zeroCalories2• 1 year ago

Social media should never have entered the mainstream. Serious people like politicians should not be on Twitter. You should not be posting about your work drama on Facebook. Bluesky is not fundamentally better than either of those.

jredwards2• 1 year ago

Perfect is the enemy of good. BlueSky is an iterative improvement on the other viable platforms.

drpossum2• 1 year ago

No, the iterative improvement is to go back to letting communities develop the services and interactions they need rather than it being dictated to us by a monoplatform. It was like that with Twitter and now happening again with Bluesky.

If you don't see how this ends you're not paying attention. If you support this you're the problem.

Tade0• 1 year ago

Perhaps merch is the path to successful monetisation of software products?

The Something Awful forums had a $9.95 registration fee. I'm sure markup on those $40 shirts is more than that.

Some game developers also embraced this business model:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/745810196/deep-rock-gal...

Personally I would not spend this much on a plastic mug, but it seems there were enough takers to fund continued development.

arghandugh3• 1 year ago

I'm reasonably sure they will be able to fund continued development without merch drops:

https://www.businessinsider.com/x-competitor-bluesky-valuati...

theschmed• 1 year ago

Funding =/= monentization, and the former presupposes a need for the latter

nickthegreek• 1 year ago

It works for bands, it can work for brands. I’d rock a jellyfin shirt for $30.

tempodox• 1 year ago

Mundus sine Caesaribus

That can allude to all the all-too-powerful overlords, in tech and politics. They should make more of those shirts and take mail orders. Maybe even an NSFW version with a middle finger.

averageRoyalty• 1 year ago

The article, the store page and the tweet - none of them mention how many t-shirts were for sale. Was it 500,000? Was it 8?

Apart from being barely significant in the first place, the article lacks the context to even make its point. Journalists are meant to do research. This is just a big, sloppy retweet.

Bluesky quickly sold out of the T-shirt its CEO wore to troll Mark Zuckerberg

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