Wire walking YouTube & BlueSky

There's only a razor to slide down.

Since Elon’s X-bots decided that I was not an authentic human and banned me without appeal, I have been wandering like an old alky barred from my favourite pub for wearing sneakers and a torn Ramones T shirt.
YouTube still gives me a proper choice of content to view, even if it, Google, and others tried to block everyone from finding Joe Rogan’s interview with Donald Trump… which incidentally should be compulsory viewing for senior Democrats so they can see why it got 360 million views to Harris’s 8 million for the TV show she chose to do instead, just before the election.

I won’t pay for YouTube premium so after skipping past countless ads lying to me about magic electric heaters, spy cameras, slimming pills and design aids, I can still manage to gather the balanced info I seek - on what Musk is actually saying and doing, who is trying to ban who from public life, and where there are people seeking truth over tribalism.
YouTube’s algorithms are only just getting a handle on what to suggest to me as, to them, it must have appeared I was all in on the UK left-leaning centrist Dad agenda - but because I kept researching alternative takes, via videos from Americans with Teslas, European ex politicians, Advertising gurus, China experts and Jewish podcasters, as well as community development focused projects, lawyers and Men’s rights advocates - they have had to develop a selection of recommendations that reflect this “eclectic” choice, see today’s menu:-

We all think we have good Bullshit radars, but the truth is we all have conditioned biases that cast doubt on stories we find threatening to our worldview, and find truth in those that confirm it.
We all need some kind of feeling of belonging, some sort of tribe, but when you ally yourself with multiple tribes that are not in agreement with each other things can begin to get a little hairy. You find yourself without a comfort zone - and incidentally, to my mind that is a good thing.
Trying to live cognitively beyond the bias, by actually listening to, then cross referencing stories from, “people you are supposed to despise”, tends to lead to a head full of contradictions that take a long time to unravel,
- and in doing so, when you discover the messy and nuanced truths behind the presentations you are checking out, you are left in a land that feels a little too much like solitary confinement.

No one else is on your side.

It’s a very uncomfortable space, but, if you just want people to be on your side, and let’s say, you believe that
Democrats - four legs, Trumpists - two legs (yes, another Orwellian reference),
Then…
BlueSky.Social is the place for you!
I’ve been posting on there for about 8 weeks now, and aside from the cats, (way more cats than dogs in the bluesky, I wonder why, said the cat in the hat) the photoshopped landscapes, the owls and foxes and the occasional actual comic starburst, it appears to want to feed me an endless stream of hate and bad memes aimed at Trump and everyone who voted for him, with monotonous blindness to the hypocrisy and blinkered vision that is exposed by simple digging beneath the echo chamber’s custard skin to look at the saccharin comfort pudding they are all feeding on.

It does make the platform get boring when this is accompanied by a thousand self-pitying posts from the salty tears brigade, worried that their world is falling apart and convincing each other that Musk is Hitler born again. There are one or two posters genuinely interested in why Harris and the Democratic power brokers were so blind to what was happening, and challenging the current party machine to do better, but they tend to be scorned in replies for being “self-hating Dems”.
When it comes to the truth behind any of the claims put forward I see blindingly obvious parallels with the worst lunacies and excesses of the right when Trump lost to Biden,
It seems that time passing has shown us that the winners from both sides can claim to be gracious and peace loving but losers just want to shout, or curl up and cry, then maybe burn the opposition with fire.

UK BlueSky users are where we find the comedians, writers and liberal lefties who prefer to keep their jokes less party political, and these guys I follow… I can choose that very limited feed and not get annoyed, but the “discover” feed algorithm seems unable to find hardly anyone who thinks that Trump’s government might not be THE ONLY thing to hate in the entire world…
I think that some of the more radical socialist power fans are not posting on BlueSky because they prefer the angry bite-backs they get on X, (they love a good half hour argument) and realise that Musk’s platform is far more open to finding a range of disagreements and lies, whatever you post.
The UK based feed is not exactly pro-Hamas but the majority seem to want to do the same thing to Israelis. The left -right divide has never looked so devoid of power and ultimately meaningless.

I guess it’s just as YouTube podcasters have discovered - try to walk the centre line and be a beacon of truth and discovery, and your follower count will never grow above 100 - what the audience and the algorithms are geared towards is “Shock”, “Destroyed!” and controversies over the best dunking biscuit…

There are a few YouTubers I return to and several I subscribe to, but I’m not here to recommend them since I don’t know why on earth you would want any such advice from this hopeless fence sitter…

But remember all you younger folk, as Tom Lehrer once said, “Soon you will be sliding down the razor blade of life”.
and rather than choosing a side it might be good to catch the fairer takes of those who try and avoid wearing blinkers.