Bluesky quickly sold out of the T-shirt its CEO wore to troll Mark Zuckerberg
81 comments
·March 14, 2025rKarpinski
gm3dmo
here he is training with Henry Cooper:
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.
pyrale
> 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.
skeledrew
Oh they'll live up to the promise, because of the protocol's technical architecture. Also mentioned in the article, if they decide to go on a direction the public doesn't like, it's an easy fork.
jredwards
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.
jazzyjackson
On the contrary, the phrase is a direct threat, "we are here to disrupt and take you down", maybe Jay Graber does not want to be the Mark Zuckerburg, but bluesky wants to be the next Facebook. its just evolving to diffuse the legal and ethical responsibilities of moderating. It's laudable and I agree with them on principle, but I'm not in love with the David Goliath framing. They're equally as silicon valleyish and VC funded as anyone else.
hooloovoo_zoo
Sounds right; Zuck’s threads generally are a joke.
mnsc
I don't get it, could you explain the joke?
jazzyjackson
Sure. It's ironic, because someone saying "Emperor or Bust" is trying to become the emperor. Zuck is already zuck, so "Zuck or nothing" is throwing shade at everyone trying to be him.
fullshark
I'm not laughing
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...
theschmed
Funding =/= monentization, and the former presupposes a need for the latter
arghandugh
The monetization strategy has already been announced. I’m pointing out that there is no near-term scenario where the bills aren’t getting paid.
null
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.
jazzyjackson
[flagged]
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
jazzyjackson
More or less, I am being incredulous that they "didn't make enough oops", it's ink printed on a commodity, there is essentially an endless supply available, so it's a choice to sell out.
llamaimperative
Have you ever ordered commercial merchandise? You tend to order a number far below infinite, and if your goods sell faster than you’re able to get a new order, it is “sold out.”
And yeah, presumably they didn’t do a giant run for this, nor should they have?
bongodongobob
Tech people can be smart and incredibly dense at the same time.
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.
the_optimist
So you're saying this is a marketing piece.
ceejayoz
What company-branded shirt isn't?
throawayonthe
[dead]
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?
croisillon
because apparently 77M Americans can't add 2 and 2 when it comes to wannabe dictators
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.
sejje
> Top Headlines
> Latest News
> Newsletters
> TechCrunch is an American global online newspaper focusing on topics regarding high-tech and startup companies. [0]
Oh, okay. My fault.
zeroCalories
Yeah and New York Post calls itself a newspaper but we all know it's some trashy shit.
catlover76
[dead]
aiBorland
[flagged]
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
invalidname
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.
theoryofx
"About a million dead and a million enslaved might disagree"
You might be very surprised at how differently ancient people viewed the world compared to yourself.
Sure, no one wants to be killed or enslaved but the societies of these very people behaved in precisely the same way as the Romans and most ancient societies did. These were not peace loving hippies being invaded by alien monsters.
Anyway, Caesar was not dictator when he fought in Gaul. He was a Roman proconsul/general fighting in his provinces the way all ancient Roman armies did, and was more inclined toward mercy than most, although he also fought a much bigger war than most.
In the civil war Caesar was fighting Pompey, the guy who used his military power to control the Roman government for the previous decade. And who would have continued controlling the government had he won. The narrative that Pompey was defending the republic against a tyrant is more ancient propaganda than reality.
A reasonable and accurate summary is that Julius Caesar led a violent army against violent enemies, fought a civil war with unprecedented clemency, and was a benevolent dictator until his assassination by the envious people he had granted clemency.
adamc
This. Caesar made a huge fortune from the people he sold into slavery.
InfiniteTitan
HN never disappoints.
aiBorland
[flagged]
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.
null
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.
drpossum
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.
lukev
The whole point of ATProto is personal ownership of content. The current degree of centralization is an undesirable but (arguably) necessary feature of bootstrapping a new platform.
null
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.
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.
danieldk
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?
jazzyjackson
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.
pfraze
Active monthly is 12M so it's a third of that
irelephant
Clearsky.app reports 31m active.
edit: Misinformation - number is actually 12m.
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.
irelephant
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.
ivewonyoung
I frequently have the opposite problem where the algo is pushing liberal accounts tweeting $OUTRAGE_OF_THE_DAY
irelephant
The algo is designed to surface accounts you may like to follow. Hence, its called "discover". You may enjoy a custom feed more.
hbn
For twitter being supposedly a right wing social media platform, the only tweets I see break 100k likes are extremely left wing political takes (and Elon's tweets cause he's almost surely gotten him to be artificially pushed in the algorithm).
I've seen theories that there's like botting happening on those posts, and it kinda seems likely given how little real interaction they get.
almosthere
Same
> 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.