Latest news with #JayGraber
Business Insider
29-07-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Bluesky's CEO warns you shouldn't 'fully outsource your thinking' to AI
AI is may be transforming your job, but critical thinking is still key. That's according to Bluesky CEO Jay Graber. She told Business Insider that developing critical-thinking skills is "very necessary" in this day and age. "AI is able to automate a lot of critical-reasoning tasks, and if we fully outsource our own reasoning, it's actually not good enough to run in an automated fashion," saidGraber, who previously founded a social network focused on events called Happening Inc. If you're a student, maybe that means writing your essays by hand, Graber said. The idea is to build "the muscle for critical thinking," and keep it growing, the CEO said. "You can't just fully outsource your thinking, or an essay, to AI," she said. Graber said that Bluesky uses AI in areas like moderation and curation but never lets it operate autonomously. She said employees check and revise the output and use critical thinking to decide what actually gets implemented. "When you let it run autonomously, it doesn't have actual context or intelligence, or the many things that we need as humans to make good decisions," Graber said. "And so it's producing stuff that sounds or looks right without actually being right." Cultivating a range of skills Graber advises embracing a generalist mindset. With AI providing "specialist expertise packaged up," the real value lies in discerning what's important. "You need to have the good judgment of how you're going to use it, and then you have to have the flexibility to take that knowledge and do something useful with it," Graber said. While these new skills are important to learn, Graber still believes job seekers should have a firm understanding of the basics of their industry. "I think it's still very necessary to learn all these skills, whether it's writing or coding or anything else that you're going to use AI assistance for," Graber said. Just because AI can write essays doesn't mean people shouldn't learn to write anymore, she said. The same applies to skills like coding, Graber said. While AI can help insert structure, figure out bugs, and generate code, Graber said you still need to have a solid foundation. "If you don't know what good code looks like, if you don't know how to actually build a system, you're not going to be able to evaluate its output," Graber said.
Fast Company
09-06-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
How Bluesky Is Charting a New Media Course fro Social Media
An inspiring conversation with Jay Graber, CEO of Bluesky The extended deadline for Fast Company's Brands That Matter Awards is this Friday, June 6, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply today.
Business Insider
04-06-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Bluesky started out at Twitter. Now it's a Twitter rival. CEO Jay Graber explains what happened.
I admit it: I most definitely rolled my eyes in 2019, when Twitter announced vague plans to build a " open and decentralized standard for social media." At the time I didn't really understand what then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was trying to do — or why the head of a social media company with plenty of problems was messing around with plans to create more social media companies. I get it now: Bluesky was a science project that aimed to let people build their own social networks. And that's still what it is at its core, says Bluesky CEO Jay Graber. But in the meantime, Bluesky has also become an accidental Twitter rival, with some 36 million users. And most of them likely don't care about Bluesky's origins, or the fact that it's really supposed to be a technical framework for decentralized social media. Or what decentralized social media means, for that matter. All of which means that talking to Graber about Bluesky means you're doing two things at once: asking about how Bluesky, the app, works — and what Bluesky, the idea, is. I tried to do that in a conversation with her at Web Summit Vancouver in May, and you can hear the entire conversation on my Channels podcast. In the edited excerpt below, Graber discusses the recent influx of Bluesky users, the premise behind the company and its ambitions — and her T-shirt that trolled Mark Zuckerberg. Peter Kafka: You've been growing really fast. I assume a lot of that is people who came over after Elon Musk's Twitter takeover, and then another wave of people who came over when Mark Zuckerberg pivoted toward Donald Trump. Jay Graber: I think it happens for various reasons in different places. But in general, people want to branch out, try new things. And in the US recently we've seen a lot of uptake since November. Are people coming because they want a service that gives them something they don't have somewhere else? Or is it because they don't like the service they're using — either because of the people that are on there or the people who are running it? It's all sorts of reasons. It's moderation policies. It's a sense of toxicity and fatigue. It's people wanting to just try something new. It's people finding their community here. I think in general it's both people looking for something and people looking to get away from something. I think most people are still confused about what Bluesky actually is, because it's not a simple answer. Want to try explaining? Bluesky started as a protocol that Twitter would run on, and so it was an alternative foundation for Twitter. It has turned into an alternative app that people treat as a microblogging alternative. We built an app that is very familiar, and that's both good and bad. It's good because it's familiar, so people don't have to feel like it's this big learning curve to use it. It's also bad, because people think that's all it is. And what it actually is, is a lobby to the open social web, which is what we set out to build — this open protocol ecosystem that you could build apps like Twitter on. In Twitter's earliest days, there were debates about whether it should be a protocol instead of a company or a service. What does protocol mean? The protocol is like a toolbox for building social apps. The way to think about it is it's a bit like email. Email services [can] talk to each other [because there's a protocol]. And so the protocol is a way to build a microblogging service that talks to other services. It's a language that computers talk in order to transfer data and information. And companies can build on the protocol. A big idea behind Bluesky is that it's decentralized. That appealed to Jack Dorsey, who started Bluesky when he was still running Twitter, and it appeals to you. What is it about decentralization that excites you? Is it inherently a good thing? There's benefits to both centralization and decentralization. There are ways to build things. There are system properties. You see it across the organic world, and you see it in organizations and you see it pretty much everywhere once you start looking for it. And what decentralization is good for is parallel experimentation and resilience: You can do a lot of things at one time, like all the arms of an octopus. When you're centralized, you can concentrate resources, and move one direction very fast. But if you get that wrong, then you have no fallbacks. With decentralization, you can try all these things and then you pick the experiments that win. It lets you evolve in a more open manner. And I think that produces better outcomes in a time when you have a lot of rapid change. Because if you bet on a centralized direction, you're putting all your eggs in one basket. I get why that appeals to a developer, someone who wants to try building their own thing. Why is that good for a normal person, who probably doesn't know that this thing is decentralized, and probably has not heard the word protocol? Why would they care about whether something is centralized or not? It really takes developers to show you what you can build. But we've tried really hard to make it possible for people who don't know how to code to be able to experience some of the benefits of decentralization. That means having control over your timeline and the way that you moderate the app. You can build your own moderation service and you don't even have to know how to code: You can use one of the open source tools we've put out there and you just go in there and run your own little moderation service for you and your friends. You can do the same for your own feed. Sometimes we say it's a choose-your-own-adventure app. Because you can come into the default experience and the main storyline is familiar. But then if you go deeper under the hood, you can find all these different little universes. Of those 36 million people who are using Bluesky today, how many are using the straight out of the box, Twitter replacement version? And how many are modifying the experience or building on top of that? A good number of them play around with it. It's something that is getting increasingly integrated into people's everyday experience through various feeds. There's about 50,000 feeds. A few thousand are relatively popular, and a few dozen or a few hundred are quite popular. There's the science feed or, Blacksky. There's one called the 'gram, which is just pictures. There's one called Quiet Posters, which is just your friends who don't post that often. Those are essentially different algorithms that give you a different experience of the network. There are no ads on Blue Sky right now. A lot of people say "ads are the reason the internet sucks." You haven't ruled out ads though, right? I think ads work their way into every attention economy. But we are very wary of going down the ad-driven path, because we know that's the history of Twitter and a lot of other sites — particularly when you lock users in around your timeline, you do a lot of things to start actually making the timeline more engaging, but in some ways worse in order to keep users on there. I think there's probably a new relationship that needs to be found with advertising. You wore a T-shirt with Latin on it at an event a couple months ago. What did that say and why did you wear it? It said " a world without Caesars" and I wore it because I saw this article where Mark Zuckerberg had worn this shirt that said "All Zuck or Nothing", which is a "Caesar or nothing" reference. Is there a Bluesky store where I can buy that shirt?
Fast Company
30-05-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
Bluesky is most definitely alive and kicking
Last weekend, an ugly rumor of a tragic death spread began rocketing around Bluesky. What made it odd was the identity of the dearly departed: Bluesky itself. It's not entirely clear what prompted this discussion, which ultimately seemed to be dominated by Bluesky fans rejecting the possibility that the social network had died (or at least jumped the shark). According to one theory, a story by Semafor's Max Tani ignited the debate by mentioning Democratic congressional staffers who'd given up on Bluesky 'after their bosses kept getting yelled at by Democratic users angry at their impotence.' That doesn't sound like evidence of death to me. Another contributing factor might have been slowing user growth after millions of disaffected Twitter users arrived en masse in the wake of the U.S. November presidential election results and Elon Musk's Trump boosterism. The service grew from 11 million users to 25 million between late October and mid-December, but has added only about 10 million more since then. Again, not a sign of rigor mortis or even a dreaded vibe shift. For a social network, being prematurely written off is a rite of passage. It's even a compliment of sorts—a sign that people are paying attention and care. Way back in 2014, for instance, when Twitter was still ascendant, I wrote about the fact that cranky users had started predicting its demise less than a year after it launched in 2006. So when I chatted with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber this week, I wasn't surprised that she didn't seem fazed by the debate on her platform and saw the parallels with early-days Twitter. 'Reports of our death are greatly exaggerated,' she told me. 'It's a similar thing, because with social sites, it's not straight up all the time. [Growth] comes in waves, and at each stage, there's a new era of communities being established and formed. We're still seeing a lot of community formation, and one of the most exciting things is how structurally different this is. It's not just another social site that has to be a singular winner takes all in an ecosystem with existing incumbents.' I spoke with Graber backstage at the Web Summit conference in Vancouver, shortly after she'd been interviewed by Wired's Katie Drummond during the event's Tuesday night opening session. (I should note that she's also appearing at a Fast Company event next week.) Her assertion that social networking's days of corporatized centralization are over seems manifestly true to me, and it's a phenomenon bigger than Bluesky itself. In November, I stopped posting to Twitter and began using a wonderful multi-network app called OpenVibe to post to three alternatives. Bluesky is one of them. So is Mastodon, an even more grass-roots operation that makes Bluesky, with its 25 employees, look like a tech giant. And the third—Meta's Threads—actually does hail from a tech giant. I've had rewarding experiences on all three, though Threads, which has around 10 times as many users as Bluesky, feels too much like a purposefully sterile planned community to me. I prefer havens for wandering conversations and playful weirdness, which Bluesky and Mastodon both provide at their best. All three show every sign of remaining relevant for the long haul, unlike some of the Twitter wannabes that didn't make it (RIP, T2 and Post) or turned out not to matter all that much (hello, Substack Notes). Like The Atlantic's Charlie Warzel, I'm surprised that so many reasonable people remain active on Twitter, which has come to resemble a dystopian carnival ride. (Exhibit A, for the moment: The bizarre recent incident in which Musk's Grok bot wouldn't shut up about supposed white genocide in South Africa.) But I wouldn't argue that Twitter is dying—just that it's a disfigured shell of its former self. I don't expect any social network to replace the Twitter of yore as the internet's uncontested go-to destination for real-time chatter about current events and pop culture. Bluesky, however, is still making progress in its quest to fill the hole left by Musk's dismantling act. A new Pew Research Center study confirms that the presidential election results led to a major influx of news influencers at Bluesky, though even more are still on Twitter. Moreover, Bluesky is beginning to build functionality to cultivate conversations around the day's events. Earlier this month, for example, the service began beta testing a feature that lets the NBA use its Bluesky profile picture as a portal that sends users to live content. The company says the WNBA account will also get the capability, which—if deployed more widely—would be pretty useful for anybody who offers live video, including individuals on YouTube and Twitch. In a roundabout way, this new Live Now feature reminds me of Twitter's pricey 2016 gambit to turn itself into a live-event platform by streaming NFL games. Except all Bluesky is doing is facilitating users leaving the service to consume video elsewhere, which is both infinitely cheaper than buying sporting rights and more in line with its philosophy of knocking down social media's walled gardens. 'We are a pass-through so that, as a content creator, you can get users onto your site more easily,' says Graber. If Bluesky is still in the process of becoming as conducive to community as Twitter once was, it's also avoided some of the problems that have long dogged the older service. The Pew study showed that its news-influencer presence skews to the left, a finding that won't startle anyone who's spent time there. Any broadening of its political spectrum could result in its tenor growing more fraught. Already, it can have a snappish quality, as reflected in the congressional drubbing reported by Semafor and software kingpin Adobe's hostile reception after it began posting in April. (Overly brand safe Bluesky is not.) What happens if Bluesky ever gets overrun with trolls, as Twitter was years before Musk took charge? I asked Graber about its approach to moderation, especially in a period when Meta seems quite proud of its Twitter-like decision to dramatically scale back attempts to keep the conversation on its platforms accurate and civil. 'We've always stayed lean, but we've always had human moderators, and we think that humans always need to be in the loop,' she told me. 'Because ultimately, you're dealing with humans. On the other hand, there are automated systems that are constantly attacking social networks and you have to have automated systems to keep up with that. So we use a combination.' The company also leverages the work of third parties who use open-source moderation tools to block spammers, she says. One other challenge that Bluesky has not yet fully confronted is monetizing itself. Onstage at Web Summit, Graber emphasized that it's working on subscription services, a healthier revenue source than stuffing feeds with ads, though potentially a tougher one to scale up to sustainability. The company announced a $15 million Series A funding round last October. Graber isn't the type to declare her intention to crush the competition. In a previous conversation I had with her, she said nice things about Mastodon. Even her digs at Meta are a principled stance against social media being dominated by a few monolithic companies. But neither is she satisfied to operate a social network that may never grow to the size of a Twitter or Threads. In both her onstage interview and our subsequent chat, she was at her most passionate when discussing the company's aspiration to decentralize social networking via its open AT Protocol. It powers Bluesky—and variants such as the Pinksky photo-sharing app, which she praised onstage—but could also provide the infrastructure for further-flung social experiences. Maybe even ones catering to folks who have zero interest in participating in the Bluesky community. 'The goal is to really get through that this is a choose your own adventure and Bluesky's just the beginning,' she says. 'The sky's the limit.' Whether she'll fulfill her grandest ambitions, I'm not sure. But I already like this era of social networking better than the one when a handful of winners really did take all.
CTV News
29-05-2025
- Business
- CTV News
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on Vancouver, customization and the future of social media
On opening night of the much-anticipated Web Summit conference's first year in Vancouver, the convention centre's main event space was jam-packed with attendees eager to hear from a tech superstar. Jay Graber may not be a household name, but the CEO of the Bluesky social media platform is one of the most high-profile women in the tech world and has a bold new vision for the future of social networking that could revolutionize how we connect with other humans – and maybe even make it fun again. CTV News had a few moments to speak with Graber backstage after her centre stage discussion on 'The Next Era of Social Media' and quickly discovered the Seattle resident is not stranger to Vancouver. 'I actually love it,' she said. 'I find it so interesting how it's this other city on the other side of the Salish Sea and there's a lot of similarities to Seattle, but it's also very different.' The entrepreneur has become a heroic figure for some social media users weary of the deterioration of online discourse and enthusiastic about her platform, which has been hailed as a potential 'Twitter Killer.' What is Bluesky, exactly? Any time Graber speaks about her company, she inevitably has to describe how Bluesky is different from other microblogging platforms like X (formerly Twitter) and Threads. The structure of the technology puts it in a position for other developers to design new interfaces or themes or areas of focus with the same user profile and followers. It's this flexibility and 'sky's the limit' ideology that Graber believes could usher in a whole new era of social media where users have more control over what they see and how by choosing algorithms built by different developers, for example. 'The long-term vision is that the atmosphere, the broader ecosystem of all these apps being built around Bluesky – some of them interacting with Bluesky, some of them being built more on top of it, and some of them being completely their own thing – can all start to flourish and kick off an era of innovation in social that we haven't seen in a long time,' she said. New users flock to the 'sky' It's a huge goal for an app that had been invite-only until last year, but new users signed up in droves after the U.S. election, and the platform continues to gain momentum. One of those new sign-ups was an account for Mark Carney, which popped up when he was still the Liberal leader. While his staff continue to use X, he is now the first Canadian prime minister to use Bluesky just as often, and Graber acknowledges that has helped add to the platform's legitimacy. In fact, her staff flagged the account for her early on as they sought to make sure it was, in fact, associated to the real Mark Carney. 'Now we have verifications and the delegated verification system, which means that we're able to start verifying more folks,' Graber said. 'I think it's becoming a better and better place for breaking news and a lot of this is why there's notable people joining.' So does Graber think Bluesky has the principles, flexibility, and foundation to fix or maybe rehabilitate jaded users' relationships with social media? 'We hope so, that's what we're trying to build,' she explained. 'Anyone who decides that, you know, Bluesky out of the box isn't completely what they want can go in and customize it under the hood.' Considering that's not easy for the layperson to do, Graber has an open invitation to fellow entrepreneurs and coders to come up with their own take on the social media experience. '(If) you want to zoom in on something that you like more, you can customize your corner of Bluesky,' she said. 'It can really be a 'choose your own adventure.''
