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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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I'm surprised Elon hasn't done anything with twitter. He's talked a lot about wanting to save free speech and keep the free marketplace of ideas going, except twitter's format is absolutely garbage for discussing and sharing ideas. From it's inception it was always more top down and geared towards established brands and personalities using it to soapbox or advertise. He spent all that money on the massive install base, but hasn't really done anything with it. Even for the people that have followings they tweet out to it's a chore. I occasionally will see for example that one motte user that quit and created the schism and now posts to twitter effortposting on there and they will have to break their posts up into multiple and rely on users knowing to use some 3rd party tool like threadreader to make it more legible.

You'd think it wouldn't cost that much to spin up some reddit clone but with alternative modding or some kind of free speech list of user's rights to balance mod power. Combine with twitter's userbase and now right wing people or even dissident left no longer need to ever frequent reddit.

You'd think it wouldn't cost that much to spin up some reddit clone but with alternative modding or some kind of free speech list of user's rights to balance mod power. Combine with twitter's userbase and now right wing people or even dissident left no longer need to ever frequent reddit.

It's simply too late for that - Twitter and its format have too much recognition. You can't guarantee people would stay on the new platform, and it wouldn't even make as much sense for governments and institutions use Twitter - a place to post updates about what is happening. Following the account of your representative makes sense, subscribing to a subreddit about them feels odd, at least to me.

I don't think Elon has any idea how to use Twitter for making free speech, er, freer. He does not strike me as the kind of person to have particularly nuanced thoughts about how to moderate speech to actually make for a better platform, he seems to have baby's first thought on free speech, "Oh, some people want me to ban others? I won't ban anyone they say!"