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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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A good chunk of twitter's moderation is automated. Even as recently as a year ago the spam use to be way worse for certain categories.

Twitter will have to either restrict posting to an unbearable degree or watch as the remaining users get tired of slurs in their replies and bounce.

This will likely not happen. The evidence suggests engagement has only gone up. Tweets by important and or controversial people are getting 2-10x the engagement compared to a year ago. Elon's own tweets are easily getting 300k-1.5 million replies, a 5x increase from 6 months ago. The people who spend time on twitter are disinclined to leave to leave because of slurs in the replies. Otherwise, they would have quit long ago. Also, most twitter users do not read replies or do not care much about them.

I think twitter will succeed and Elon will be able to to resell Twitter for a decent profit. Elon is a savvy businessman with a good intuitive business sense . For example, he after dipping his foot in crypto early 2021 he correctly saw it for the overhyped garbage it was and bailed, only losing a little money. VCs and others rode it all the way down.

Moderation: I agree that twitter has a lot of automated moderation. Unfortunately, a good chunk of incoming Bad Shit escapes it because of the endless creativity of our great species, so that on the front lines you generally forget about the automation (until you have to fix some false positives, or do maintenance). This implies, but I want to explicitly say, that the percentage that escapes does not go to zero over time, even though you're constantly upgrading your systems. They vastly outnumber you and are always trying to post their crap, because often there's a financial incentive to do so.

Engagement: Yeah, people are saying the site may die; that's entertaining and will bring people back, but is more importantly a temporary trend. I don't think we can say how many people are coming back due to the new moderation policies, although a lower bound on that is the number of people talking about them, which is certainly a fair number (but niche in the grand scheme of things, a fact I can appreciate as someone knowledgeable about Mastodon administration).