Amy Brown was not screaming. She was not crying. She was not throwing up.
But on
Bluesky she said that she was doing all three, simultaneously. Brown’s husband visited a Walgreens while he was on a business trip in Ohio in February. He told her the prices were cheaper than in California, where they live.
The price disparity led her to post that she was screaming, crying, and throwing up. Several Bluesky users responded to tell her she was exaggerating, and that nobody could possibly care that much. They were right. She didn’t. She was referencing one of the internet’s common sayings, one used so often that it’s the name of a
Spotify compilation.
What Brown experienced is familiar to any former
Twitter/X user gathering their bearings on the young and decidedly more earnest social network Bluesky: a distinct humor-detection issue. Some users are unable to decipher jokes, or they are deliberately trying to miss the point to make a different one. Many Bluesky users migrated over from X, where the top DOGE who did
Nazi-like salutes on television is live-tweeting the destruction of American infrastructure. That’s a different and much more serious problem. Still, the seeming obliviousness-slash-self-seriousness of many Bluesky users is grating when you’re not used to it.
"They're speaking a completely different language than me,” Brown says. “We're both speaking English, but I'm speaking internet.”
Brown, a former social media manager for Wendy’s, joined Bluesky in 2023. Her X account was banned after she impersonated Elon Musk for almost two hours on November 4, 2022.
The “incident,” as she calls it, happened shortly after X announced paid verification. Brown changed her profile picture to one of a balding entrepreneur and edited her display name to “Elon Musk (real).” She convincingly emulated his voice, posting musings like “my wife left me lol” and “my penis is NOT weird.”
She didn’t know whether she’d be banned for her behavior on X, but she was OK with the possibility. “It's like, Elon's already the main character on this platform every day, and now he owns it. Do I really want to be here anymore?” she says.
While you can still find plenty of this kind of humor on Bluesky, there are a surprising number of people genuinely confused by it. There are several factors to blame here.
First is the clash between former users of X and Facebook. Anyone who logged their time on the Everything App is familiar with the language of Twitter: posts steeped in irony, in-group references, platform-specific history. When they left X, they brought all that wisecracking, insidery drollery with them. They even brought their pig-shitting-on-its-own-testicles JPEGs.
Meanwhile, former power users of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads are accustomed to their own barometers of funny. While Twitter felt like an intentional way to primarily interact with mostly strangers, and a familiar face might cause the user a moment of horror, Facebook was the opposite—at least initially, before it became Click FarmVille for engagement bait and advertisements for oddly specific custom novelty tees.
Bluesky also got a big boost in users from mainstream television: MSNBC ran multiple segments about the social network, including bumps on
Morning Joe,
The Weekend,
All In With Chris Hayes, and
The Rachel Maddow Show. Regular MSNBC viewers who took the plunge might not be as familiar with the tenor and style of online conversation on the smart-ass social web.
The lack of humor detection is made worse by tech: algorithmically curated content, à la Bluesky’s Discover feed, surfaces random posts to random people. A Maddow referral on Bluesky might see an ex-Twitter user’s vivid description of what they’d do to the Hamburglar if they saw him in person and react with genuine horror and confusion. It’s also PEBKAC issue—problem exists between keyboard and chair. You cannot force a person to understand a joke. The only action more futile is to get mad about it.
If these disparate groups have anything in common, it’s disgust with gigantic tech companies led by unpalatable CEOs, paired with a yearning to post in the lingua franca of their previously beloved platforms. Everyone’s brains are broken in different ways. I empathize with those who don’t get the joke. But I empathize more with the people trying to make them.
To paraphrase an Axios story from last year, America is in the midst of a
gullibility crisis. People can’t tell what’s AI, a manipulated screenshot, a joke, or a lie. Many of us have opened up our relationship with reality. And the political climate has exacerbated the issue, according to Josh Gondelman, a comedian who previously worked as a producer and writer on
Desus & Mero and wrote for
Last Week Tonight With John Oliver.
“Since Trump’s run for the presidency, there has been a rapidly accelerating not-getting-jokes on the internet,” Gondelman says.
By Gondelman’s recollection, Bluesky hit a point where it was populated enough with active users to be both fun and useful at some point within the past six months. “But that also means it hit the tipping point where it’s populated enough to be annoying,” he says, laughing.
Mattie Lubchansky, an Ignatz Award–winning cartoonist, author, and illustrator, describes herself as “a primarily joke-posting kind of person.” The humor-detection issue of Bluesky is part of a broader phenomenon she has observed, which she calls “riff collapse.”
The day after the 2025 Oscars, Lubchansky
posted: “i haven't seen any of the oscar movies this year, nor have i seen any movie ever made. i'm afraid that the people trapped inside the screen will be angry at me for not helping them escape; and once they are out i will be punished. anyway, here's how the awards validated an opinion i already had.”
The replies that followed were earnest opinions and arguments about Oscar-nominated films. Some people asked for movie recommendations. Some unironically recommended she check out
The Purple Rose of Cairo. Only a handful of people seem to have understood that she was joking. Lubchansky says she sees this type of “riff collapse” happen daily, and she thinks it’s because of the influx of new users from Meta and X.
But the frustrations around new social platforms isn’t new. Networks will continue to pop up, ideally, and longtime users will continue to be annoyed by newbies.
In the early-to-mid-1990s, people often first accessed the internet when they arrived at college. Around September of every year, a bunch of new users would log on to their university’s network and start poking around the forums and discussion groups.
“The internet old timers would be very frustrated, because the new people didn’t know the social norms,” says technologist, writer, and former WIRED contributor Anil Dash. “Exactly the phenomenon we’re seeing right now.” September, for the most online netizens, was a dreaded time of the year. AOL opened the floodgates, allowing anyone to access the internet at any time. AOL’s bloom coincided with the
Telecommunications Act of 1996, which deregulated the telco industry and brought internet connectivity to homes and institutions across the US.
This period was called the Eternal September, with “wave after wave of newbies getting online,” Dash says.
The pattern has repeated itself with LiveJournal and even Twitter. Actor and investor Ashton Kutcher appeared on CNN in 2009 and
challenged the network to see whose account could hit 1 million Twitter followers first. (Kutcher won.) The stunt led to a rush of users flooding the microblogging platform.
Lubchansky thinks this moment presents an opportunity for people to examine their reply etiquette.
“Read the whole post before you respond. Take a moment to respond. And if you're going to respond with a joke, and we're not friends already, go look and see if somebody's made it already,” Lubchansky says. “Because there's a really good chance they have.”
Meanwhile, Brown considers the block function on Bluesky to be a favor to its recipient.
“If someone comes into my comments and they just really, really don't understand, usually I just block them so we don't run into each other again,” she says. “No hard feelings.” It’s a different approach than the norm on X, where quote-tweets viciously insulting the original post are part of the platform’s noxious fabric.
“I'm not trying to repeat the part of Twitter where the internet makes me mad every day,” Brown says.
Satirical site The Onion has the fifth largest Bluesky account, with over 1.2 million followers. Onion CEO Ben Collins doesn’t mind people replying to jokes in earnest. On the contrary, he says it’s “the funniest part of the internet.”
“It means more people are seeing your jokes,” he says. “If everyone is immediately breaking out into uproarious applause at your joke, your audience is too small.”
As someone who regularly used and posted on Twitter for years, I share the frustration when one of my jokey posts is misread or taken as fact. But it also strikes me as unfair to shame someone because they haven’t been slamming their head on the same wall of the internet that I have.
Not everyone crawled here from the radioactive sewer of X dot com. As we all get settled along with our new neighbors, it might be helpful to remember that. If not, at least Bluesky has very robust blocking features.
