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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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The character limit is actually a big problem because it excludes the possibility of expressing any nuanced thought

You can link articles/other long-form content though, and a solid fifth of the articles I read come from twitter links. This gets to my claim that it's more the quality of people - smart people just link stuff & read the links, and dumb people, when they read, do shitty fiction/motivational books/etc.

Attention span doesn't really make sense as a concept tbh, I argued this on reddit but twitter's "attention span" effects aren't at all different than that of casual social conversations, which happen constantly.

I think being exposed to that for a sufficiently long enough time will make you retarded

There are many, many, many competent professionals who perform at their job better than 99.9% of humanity has for all of history, and use twitter very frequently, and have for years or a decade. Programmers are one of those, but many non-programmers do too. This is just plainly and obviously false.

So when you are on twitter all you perceive is either the hugbox of likes, anyone that disagrees with you is either invisible to you or a troglodite that responds with a short (and from your point of view stupid) "sick burn".

I constantly see disagreement on twitter though. Quote tweets, replies, just general posts of the form 'this other guy said X which is bad bc Y'. It's usually not useful disagreement, but it's not like the comments sections of major newspapers, or random peoples' long-form writing, are better.

And then there's the fact that celebrities are on it.

celebrities have always been dumb and said dumb things, that's just not new at all, read a tabloid from the 19xxes or something

And then there's the moderation, by applying politically biased moderation twitter has created a false consensus on its platform

False consensus? Mainstream center-right accounts exist and get tons of engagement though? Even if those were downweighted 50%, hypothetically, there's still not a 'consensus'

They also come to believe that reporting about tweets from politicians and artists is a valid form of journalism

how is this any different than reporting on random out of context statements from long political speeches or conversations, a mainstay of journalism historically?

No other media that existed before or after twitter is as bad as twitter, 4chan is better, reddit is better, instagram is better, tiktok is better, microfilm is better, vellum is better. Literally the worst possible way to communicate ever made.

at least twitter has some complex and intelligent people, tiktok has none of those. what's a single tiktok account comparable to professional discussion among scientists on twitter, or just @thezvi, or even @rapegroyper14?