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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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Twitter is what you get when someone goes "You know the most addictive, para-social, skinner-box elements of Myspace, Facebook, Et Al? what if we made something that optimized for that"

Can you elaborate / post a link that fleshes this out? This is a very widespread claim but I'm not sure how true it is. The 'addictive/parasocial' elements of twitter are - as far as I can tell - tweets having likes, people having follower counts, and tweets being recommended based on likes. Aren't those basic social media features that are legitimately useful?

Other criticisms of twitter are 'the short tweet form means anything subtle can't happen' (sort of true but its not like long-form platform with the same userbase is better), and 'the ui is awful' (kinda true)