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

[rKarpinski]

> 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]

here he is training with Henry Cooper:

https://youtu.be/TvjsWmlOJmY

[jazzyjackson]

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.

[Tade0]

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.

[nickthegreek]

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

[arghandugh]

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

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

[averageRoyalty]

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.

[tempodox]

> 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.

[wmf]

The real question is why isn't the shirt open source and decentralized?

[synalx]

Well, it is an all black shirt...

[chomp]

Is this a serious question

[add-sub-mul-div]

They don't make the shirts themselves. They ordered a finite number from a supplier. They're not claiming that the world is out of potential to make new shirts.

[drpossum]

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

[jredwards]

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

[zeroCalories]

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.

[sejje]

> (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]

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.

[croisillon]

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

[theoryofx]

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

[fullshark]

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.

[pathless]

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

[croon]

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.

[microtonal]

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).

[irelephant]

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

[toomuchtodo]

They just crossed 33M users. Maybe your microcosm?

https://blueskyusercount.com/

[harvey9]

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

[melodyogonna]

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