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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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I think a notable part of this is bubble effects. When I look at twitter, most of it is garbage and a most of the popular areas are 'meh' at best. While a lot of subreddits have a bunch of garbage posters, that seems similar to twitter. I think the difference is that twitter makes it easier to follow people who you like, while reddit is limited (ish) to topical subreddits with no great way of only paying attention to the parts of it you tend to enjoy more. Then, there's the issue of subreddit moderation getting corrupted and also not growing in minimum-quality standards as they get more people which drives away better commenters.

Twitter avoids that by letting you pay attention at an individual level, and thus gives more incentive for insightful people to commentate. Though, it has the issue that it isn't a good medium for commentation.

(aka, there are a dozen subreddits with interesting posts and comments, similar to how there's only a ~hundred people actually worth following for twitter - though, there's more if you lower your standards but you can't filter out posts from them you don't care about, like politics from a guy who you like his biology papers)