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 -
It's not a bad heuristic in general that companies/sports teams/countries that change all the time are probably doing badly, while sticking to the tried and true is indicative of success. While the media frequently trumpets a new coach, a new CEO, a new rebrand, a fresh constitution, as indicative of improvement and a new winning strategy, but more often than not it is "the noise before defeat." This is the concept of Lindy applied in reverse. The more big change you see, the more likely it is to be a sign of failure. Good change, slow adaptation, happens so slow that if you don't zoom in you miss it.
Every change Musk makes might be bad for Twitter on its own, but it is definitely indicative of problems at Twitter in general. I've made the joke since I joined Reddit an embarrassingly long time ago that nobody hates Reddit more than Redditors. The same applies to Twitter users, who all love to complain about Twitter and other Tweeters. Left wing blue checks hate the racist CHUDs in their replies; Right Wingers decry censorship and the dominance of Blue Check blue hairs. Because Elon is essentially a twitter power user, the equivalent of the bar fly who buys the bar, he lives in that world. So he thinks Twitter's brand is low value and must be dumped.
In terms of rebrands, maybe - obvious comparison is Meta. But, eh, with the rate of technological and social change large companies trying new things is very good. Amazon going in on cloud computing despite being an online store was valuable, AWS was responsible for 3/4 of their profit recently. Similarly for MS's investments in AI and Google's lead in AI research (that they very poorly translated to actual products). Twitter's changes aren't indicative of any good strategy, they aren't low-probability high-payoff experiments, they're just dumb.
My prior is that any directional strategy change is probably a bad sign. Not a bad choice, just a bad sign. A good toy example: hiring a new head coach in the NFL: a new coach typically sees a bump of one and a third wins yet over time the number of coaching changes made by a franchise negatively correlates with winning percentage, even moreso if you weight extra for playoff success.
Now obviously changing coaches isn't always a bad decision, at some point coaches like Bill Belichek and Mike Tonlin were hired. And my own favorite Franchise just made a big strategic choice to move on from a recently successful head coach and found their way back to the big game just a couple years later. But most coaching changes are rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Similarly, here, I don't have perfect or even good data on twitters underlying numbers and values. I do know that musk himself tried to evade actually buying the company once he actually saw the numbers.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I feel like that was more of a post ~2012ish stance, maybe post 2010 in certain places (I was also on reddit for an embarrassingly long time).
Around the time of the Great Digg migration, I remember the site being really proud of itself (I'll let others decide if that was deserved or not).
Thinks like this were emblematic of the time. Reddit just really seemed like it was a better place to be than everywhere else. This is also the era when I heard it described as "4chan with a condom", so take that for what you will.
But that was a long time ago. If you'll excuse me, I need to go be nostalgic for a while.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link