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There's so much interesting stuff going on right now - why is every post here such a snoozefest? Is anyone else checking here less and less often because equal quality commentary seems increasingly available elsewhere?
I haven’t found anywhere with equal quality commentary. Twitter is terribly formatted and seemingly encourages by its very nature edgelording, rudeness and one-upmanship. Reddit is full of morons who tediously invade any serious discussion about anything, and any well-moderated communities are (as we found out) banned from having interesting discussions. So what’s left? A few other obscure forums (DSL is fine but worse than here, with worse writing, and I prefer the Reddit structure) and blog comments sections (where participation is structured around what the singular blog author posts).
When something interesting happens, this is usually the place that I want to discuss it. ‘Experts’ can be found on Twitter, but that’s not really the idea - after all, I’m hardly an expert. Instead, I want discussion about current events with smart, somewhat ideologically sympathetic people in an environment that respects long-form writing, politeness, manners and which is well moderated to ensure the above.
Where else has that?
I’ve been spending a lot more time on Twitter lately, particularly since I can mottepost there now. What I formerly read as fundamental constraints in the directions you point turn out to be mediated pretty heavily by the part of it a person spends time in and who they choose to interact with. There’s a self-selecting group in and around the ACX-adjacent parts of Twitter that is pleasant and full of smart, well-mannered, somewhat ideologically sympathetic people, with two clear advantages in my view:
The decentralized nature means that incompatible personalities can self-select into slightly different subcommunities where people who get on with both can still interact with both in what feels like the same space, meaning in particular that the ideological range is much broader than here.
The public nature means that when you chat with people in your quiet corner, your posts will occasionally leave the bubble and contact a much wider audience, sometimes including the public figures you talk about. In the recent OpenAI drama, for example, the interim CEO was a well-known regular in Twitter’s ACX-adjacent sphere.
I don't think 'fundamental constraints of a medium' are real, necessarily, every mottepost could be a TikTok video if there weren't any other options, just like 2000 years ago knowledge was mostly transmitted via spoken lecture or conversation. But as people figure out social media platforms, they'll tend to collect their serious, subtle posts in long-form text, and their idle chatter and jokes on places like Twitter. So even though Twitter has most of the same people people you see posting here, or in the ACX comments, it has a different 'culture', and it's one that's a lot less careful about accuracy, and more just people slinging vibes at each other.
Don't get me wrong, I spend a lot of time on twitter, and have for years. I think a lot of other people here do too. But there's a reason I still come here.
it used to be from 2009-2012 twitter had lots of celebrity gossip, as well as the celebrities themselves having a large presence . now just AI talk. AI discussion is half the site it seems; the rest is split between sports, porn, pro-Palestine propaganda, politics, and Musk.
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The problem with twitter is posting anonymously. I could use an alt but for the most part there are too many spammy anonymous posts. And a lot of things here are close enough to the Overton window or past it that there tough to discuss in your real name if your not a trust fund kid.
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