This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Ok I'm curious, I admit to being a relatively minor Twitter user with a poor understanding of the platform, but I used to use it to check sports news and war updates. Then, a couple weeks after musk bought it, I kept getting porn on those hashtags. It happened enough that it became impossible to open in public, and within a week I deleted the app.
Idk if that is typical or Musk related related, but isn't that a failure mode? That eliminating jannies just leads to bigger piles of trash and an unlivable space? The problem with social media moderation is that your enemies are always human, The Most Dangerous Game.
I could argue that 'porn on sports hashtags' is probably failure mode 1, swarm actors deliberately trashing the joint. But I guess it's possible that this was always a problem and twitter's old mod team just handled it effectively.
In that case, failure mode 3 would be "old fashioned incompetence, making the service worse than existing incompetent competitors and squandering the absolutely massive advantage of 340 million active users."
This could happen! I'm no Musk fanboy, I think he mostly succeeds on having a good sense of when breaking the rules won't be punished. But Twitter was already wildly incompetent(1) & it dominated regardless, and despite the platform having much more powerful enemies now I think Elon probably won't screw it up as badly as would be neccessary, and nor would anyone with a modicum of business experience, regardless of their politics.
(1) one of my big takeaways from the Twitter Files has been the incredible disorganization of the company & ignorance of upper management towards major issues until it was alreasu a PR disaster.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link