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As bad as Twitter is, blogging is essentially dead. Wordpress's free product is garbage that now runs block ads, breaking the flow of content, and Substack is Y Combinator, which to a lot of people is a turn-off given the incubator's historical association with DVFs (domestic violence founders). Ultimately, the greatest danger to the written word is that, because it is so easily indexed, fascistic employers (pardon the redundancy) can, in a couple of seconds, search everything a target has ever written and find reasons either to reject him (after he has passed an interview) or reduce his offer on evidence of lower leverage. Social media is a fool's game. In ten years or so, the ultimate flex will be not to partcipate. Twitter somehow survives in spite of this, because (a) it is an unserious format, a fact that lends some plausible deniability, (b) a fraction of people--arguably perversely, but also arguably nobly--enjoy gambling with their reputations, and (c) there is a defeated, demoralized understanding among the young that, given the destruction of the middle-class labor market, not to play the social media game is just as dangerous (it suggests having something to hide) as to play it. So today's savvy young people might tweet a little bit but mostly lurk, or use alternate accounts to post anything that might get serious. |
wait till you find out about hacker news