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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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Is another Twitter post okay? People are panicking about Twitter and Elon Musk's actions so far.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/10/elon-musk-twitter-disastrous-weekend/671942/

I'm someone who has never loved Twitter and I am dismayed at how it influences media and national discourse. It seems to foster a special brand of toxicity and bring out the worst impulses and tendencies of online interaction. My question is, what if the best case scenario happens and it totally implodes? Imagine - advertisers leave, users sunset their accounts, the thing just turns into a ghost town. Do you think national discourse changes for the better? What platform do all those frustrated users move to and will that platform just turn into another Twitter? Is there an equivalent platform at all? Will media outlets actually have to start reporting on meaningful content rather than the latest Twitter dust-up? Those high-profile personalities who suck all the oxygen out of the room, will people simply stop paying attention to them without a platform?

Twitter got big in 2012-2015 when violent revolutions were being organized, literal beheading videos were bieng shared, and ISIS recruitment was the norm on the platform.

People want unmoderated content. They want to see how fucked-up other people are, they want to point a gawk.

4chan is somehow still one of the more relevant online spaces depite having and awful interface that has barely improved since 2005, and now requires nigh unusable captchas to post anything at all (since they're always under bot attack)

Any its still used by 100s of thousands of daily users.

.

Twitter has consistently destroyed its own market power the past few years in the name of appeasing the US security state. They restricted COVID misinfo right when something like twitter might have caused an armed anti-lockdown insurrection in the US (Twitter mobs have destroyed nations over vastly less), and they booted trump at the exact moment he could have issued a tweet that would have brought down the republic.

Imagine if Jan 6th he had tweeted support for the stormers and told his 60 million supporters to start a revolution?

.

Twitter's power is its a place where unapproved ideas, extremism, and yes, even lies, can move fast enough that history itself is torn assunder. Its a place you have to be if you want to follow the news or accumulate power... because it is the modern battlefield. And that's worth vastly more than 45billion to own.

And they were willing to give that up and be just a second teir social networking platform... when the FBI and DHS hasn't even taken them to court?

Jack Dorsey's old line that he wanted twitter to be "The free-speech wing of the free-speech party" wasn't just an aspiration... its what's gave twitter its importance and success.

Twitter is the only social media platform that can measure its impact both in users, and in nations destroyed.

That's power! That's impact! That's growth industry! That's the future! (if indeed we are ever to enter the future instead of decay into a parody of the 20th century)

By buying twitter and taking it private where equity firms can't force it to follow ESG or bend over to "anti-extremism" pressure Musk has gotten closer to actually being one of the Cyberpunk CEO-Warlords like Weyland, Tyrell, or Arasaka.

In 2024 he'll be in position to decide what Arab Spring style story he wants to rock the American empire.

.

He flies who flies

This king flies away from you

Ye mortals

He is not of the earth

He is of the sky

He flaps his wings like a zeret bird

He goes to the sky

He goes to the sky

On the wind

On the wind

Twitter's power is its a place where unapproved ideas, extremism, and yes, even lies, can move fast enough that history itself is torn assunder. Its a place you have to be if you want to follow the news or accumulate power... because it is the modern battlefield

How sad. A battlefield with no glory. If this is true then we have removed the last bastion of masculine excellence. sexless hydrogen from now to forever.

Eh, you could always move to Ukraine.

Not my people, not my glory.

Imagine if Jan 6th he had tweeted support for the stormers and told his 60 million supporters to start a revolution?

Would have been a very bad week for a lot of coastal elite Twitter shareholders I imagine.

4chan is somehow still one of the more relevant online spaces depite having and awful interface that has barely improved since 2005, and now requires nigh unusable captchas to post anything at all (

Twitter sucks, but these alt platforms are just as bad, either with unusable interfaces, captchas, requiring a phone, arbitrary rules/censorship etc. 4chan has so much censorship in other ways besides speech. /biz and /pol block all VPNs, public proxies, Tor, and some ISPs from posting (i have not tried it on EC2 addresses but I am sure those do not work either). And also full of feds there too. Twitter its credit does not do this.

since they're always under bot attack)

As it they have a worse bot problem than other sites which do not require a near-unsolvable captcha to use? Lame excuse on 4chan's part.

Twitter allows you to use Tor... As long as you give them your phone number lol. At least 4chan and the other alt platforms don't do that yet.

4chan... has an awful interface that has barely improved since 2005

What problem do you have with 4chan's interface? I vastly prefer it to Reddit's, since it allows a comment to have multiple parents. Maybe you forgot to enable the "Inline quote links" option in the settings.

4chan... now requires nigh unusable captchas to post anything at all

Or you can just pay $20 per year for a 4chan Pass.

TBH I would rather give Agrawal $20 than 4chan, imho. The IRS/DHS/FBI or whoever are probably watching that $20 very closely. They can just not req. the captcha, like any other website, instead of asking for money and making up lame excuses.

They can just not req. the captcha, like any other website, instead of asking for money and making up lame excuses.

They really really can not. Accelspammer was just one person.

Son, 4chan gold accounts were a joke and I refuse to admit otherwise.