Rose Wang, Bluesky COO: ‘People are tired of the algorithm deciding everything’

Bluesky is thriving. A week after Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election, the platform had gained a million users. By the second week, it was adding a million new users per day. As of Sunday, the user base had reached 22 million. And everything indicates it will continue to grow amid the widespread dissatisfaction with Elon Musk’s management of X.

Rose Wang, a 33-year-old San Francisco resident, is the chief operating officer (COO) for this rapidly growing social network. A Harvard psychology graduate with a background in various digital and AI-focused startups, Wang says she joined Bluesky at the suggestion of CEO Jay Garber, who is also 33. “One of the most important things about women being in charge is just that they pull other women up with them,” Wang explains via video call. “When you have a company that’s either all one gender or all one race, then oftentimes the team’s perspective is incomplete.”

The young executive is optimistic about Bluesky’s future, emphasizing that her team — comprising just 20 employees — is “dynamic, agile, and highly experienced in the social media space.”

Question. Why is Bluesky growing so quickly?

Answer. Many social networks are focusing on branded or celebrity content, they have forgotten about everyday people. We don’t do that. Bluesky is built by the people, for the people. Here, users interact with real people, have fun conversations, make friends again. We’re going back to basics. We have 50,000 different algorithms and feeds to choose from, it’s much easier to find people with similar interests to you, whereas on other platforms you’re trapped in a single algorithm that tends to promote certain users over others. That’s why about 30% of our users post content, versus 1% on Twitter.

Q. What exactly do you mean when you say that Bluesky is built by the people, for the people?

A. Bluesky is built on an open protocol, which allows anyone to build, whether that’s a feed or a moderation service. What I’m saying is that for the last decade, social media APIs have been closed — developers couldn’t modify them. We’ve changed that — anyone can come into Bluesky and build a Yellowsky or a Greensky. The goal is for users to be able to bring their followers with them and take them with them if they decide to leave. If they don’t like one feed, they go to another.

Q. What are the practical advantages of having this open protocol?

A. I think a good metaphor is email. Email was built on an open protocol: if I’m on Gmail, I can reach you, even if you’re using Yahoo! These services are interoperable, they can talk to each other. That’s not the case with social media: I can’t write to you on your LinkedIn account from Facebook. We believe that social media should be like email, an open web where different services can talk to each other, so we’re not a walled garden. We’re opening up social data so that users can find each other and create more cohesive communities around the music they listen to, the books they read, or whatever. And if you don’t like how Bluesky works, you can take your community and invite them to join a platform that you create.

Q. How are you able to manage 21 million users with only 20 employees?

A. We’ve hired a lot of content moderators and support staff to cope with our new volume of users. But we can operate with a small workforce because we were built for scale. We’ve experienced spikes in new users before: when Brazil banned X, we got four million users in two weeks. It’s not just about the number of people, but who those people are. Each of us has a lot of experience. For example, Aaron Roberts, our head of trust and safety, is bringing all his experience from Twitter to the table.

Q. Can you cope with system failures with such a small team?

A. We haven’t had significant downtime yet. But unlike what happened at X after Elon Musk fired many developers, we do have people who write code on the team, who can step in if something happens.

Q. Will you be expanding your workforce? Do you plan to open an office in Europe?

A. The goal is to expand the team in the future, but we were inspired by Instagram and WhatsApp, which kept a small core until they had hundreds of millions of users. Right now, we are looking for community managers and engineers to refine our algorithm. As for offices, we don’t have any: we work remotely.

Q. Why do you think X users are moving to Bluesky and not to other options?

A. People are tired of the algorithm deciding everything. I think people are like, “this is giving me a buffet menu of all-you-can-eat options of all the things I don’t want to eat.” They want chronological feeds, not algorithm-based ones. Ultimately, you’re on a social network because of the people there. We started slowly, our first users were very online people. Then different communities joined: artists, musicians, urban planners, journalists... It was a slow curation, followed by the nurturing of the communities and people finding each other. All of this makes the experience more authentic and personalized.

Q. Twitter started out like this, attracting users tired of Facebook’s dynamics. Why should we think that Bluesky won’t follow the same path as X?

A. What happened to Twitter is the reason why Bluesky exists. Fundamentally, from day one, we believe that the future company is a possible adversary. It’s normal for people to think that the people running Bluesky could change our views or our line of business. And so I say: don’t trust us, trust our infrastructure. Bluesky is open source, we’ve given users all the tools they need to recreate this experience in case we become disconnected from the user base. We believe it’s important that there are multiple layers of decision-making, from our own to what users can do with the code.

Q. X owner Elon Musk, who likes to post memes on just about anything, hasn’t mentioned Bluesky in recent weeks. What does that suggest to you?

A. I think he’s reposted comments from other people talking about us, so we’re not totally off his radar. He’s got 200 million users or more, and we have 22 million, so we’re still very small. But we’re seeing Threads, for example, mimicking some of the things we do. It’s great for us to see someone like Mark Zuckerberg, who’s been in social media for two decades, taking inspiration from our ideas.

Q. How do you approach content moderation?

A. We have a centralized system that we expand through our user communities. We believe the way to deal with it is by adding layers, involving more organizations, and continually changing what is and isn’t acceptable. We should label comments when they are toxic or rude, but also label those who respond in a creative or inspiring way.

Q. Your investors include companies related to the world of cryptocurrencies. Why?

A. Technology should serve the user, not the other way around. At Bluesky, we don’t use blockchain or cryptocurrencies, and we will never introduce tokens or anything like that into our network. The reason we decided to go ahead with those investors you mentioned is because they very much believe in the decentralized world we’re building, and that’s hard to find. But money doesn’t mean control. Yes, we have capital from those companies, but the decisions are made by Jay [Garber, the CEO] and the team.

Q. What will Bluesky’s next steps be?

A. The first thing is to keep the website online [laughs]. It may seem funny, but our CTO says it’s not a joke. We want to put together quarterly plans, including, for example, launching a feed builder in the app, but the flood of new users keeps us quite busy. In any case, the main objective is to continue giving tools to the communities that are emerging on Bluesky so that they can configure interesting spaces. We also want to become a kind of showcase or app from which users connect with publications or brands. And we will launch subscriptions.

Q. What will these subscriptions entitle you to?

A. We would never put core functionalities behind a paywall [like X did with user verification]. We’re looking at offering avatar customization options, longer video uploads, higher resolution images, and things like that.

Q. What other avenues of monetization are you considering?

A. We are seeing a lot of users paying each other through Patreon or other systems for the feed they built, or to thank them for a starter pack. In the future, we want to create our own tool to manage these payments and keep a percentage as a transaction cost.

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