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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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Rural Japanese cuisine good girl is best girl. Seriously, her story arc was the best thing about that series.

In any case, I think this is an interesting question. I think we need a term for the sort of hyper-online partisan political engagement culture. I have no clue what it could be. In any case...would Twitter be better off if it basically ignored that? I think the argument you're making...and I agree...is that it seemed that it leaned in to that culture over the last few years, pretty hard, and maybe it would be better off if it didn't. And I think that lack of value...I'm certainly seeing people want to leave Twitter because frankly, they don't want to be in a space that they see as fundamentally hostile to them. And I'm thinking...welcome to my world where practically every place is hostile to me.

In any case, I do think that's where things are heading to some degree, is a deprioritization of politics overall. And honestly that's a good thing. That's where most of the toxicity comes from.

hyper-online partisan political engagement culture

If anything, this seems like this is fundamental to how Twitter is designed: the differences between it's "shouting into the globally visible void" versus, say, Facebook leaning into connecting before content visibility emphasizes seeking the most viral content to maximize engagement. That said, I do think Twitter has leaned into that premise in deliberate ways: they could probably make modest changes to minimize pile-ons (especially of non-public figures), but seem to have decided that amplifying, for example, the Covington debacle.

To its credit, Facebook seemed to make some deliberate choices about 5 years ago to reduce the amount of rage-bait political content and emphasize the friend graph over re-shared content. I think Twitter must want to be the home of low-quality political hot takes over, say, a centralized equivalent of RSS for link aggregation, although maybe that wouldn't pay the bills.