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Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 17, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

Jump in the discussion.

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There is nearly no interesting discussion on Reddit now, the vanishingly rare interesting post on 4chan is extinct (and will probably be posted on X anyway), substack is fine but most blogs are found and marketed on X and the comment system sucks (impossible to determine which comments may be valuable on ACT, for instance), tik tok is probably interesting for viewing memetic culture but obviously has no discursive value…

For quality discussion on popular sites, this just leaves X, then?

Best to abandon all hopes of reading something interesting online in 2024. Put the onus on yourself to dig through old publications and research instead.

impossible to determine which comments may be valuable on ACT, for instance

That's just because Scott doesn't want likes, the rest of the blogs have "Top" sorting, and you can see who liked the comments, if "total like count" is not a relevant metric to you.

X is full of such garbage and riddled with mediocre grandstanding (even if you prune your followed obsessively), but it remains the place with the most interesting links. The issue is more that midwits clog up the comments for anyone even remotely interesting, misinterpret things constantly, and generally bring annoying.

Honestly I just want to see in what kind of circular firing squad Bluesky will eventually turn out to be. I do hope that X will have some competition, but not exactly bullish on that.