I'm in a groupchat with a dozen or so liberal guys who all went to fancy liberal arts colleges and are all generally "woke". We even have a few openly gay members in the chat. The content in this chat consists of posts that are so outlandish it would easily all get us fired immediately if it became public, and boy do I love it. We all know everyone is acting in good faith and mostly being ironic anyways, and when someone goes too far people just ignore it. It's strangely one of the things I value most in my life and hope it never ends. It's nice to have a safe space to get jokes off.
I have the same - a group chat of fewer than 10, all of whom are left (or center at best), all of whom work in the media. All of whom would be swiftly cancelled if the contents were isolated out of context.
But yes, it's cathartic to trade the same insults you would have used in school 20 years ago, or as Ethan mentioned, issues that people would have LOST THEIR MIND about even 5 years ago but you can't say it on your forward-facing profile.
This was another great article, Ethan. Part of the reason why it feels like society is fracturing is because people in elite spaces seem entirely disconnected from non-elites. So when things don't go the way elites expect then they freak out and blame nefarious forces. If you disagree with mantras like "trans women are women" then you're just a boorish bigot. Elites didn't stop and ask whether norms are changing too fast, or if they persuaded enough normies first before they began handing out punishment for said disagreement.
Orthodoxy that's enforced from the top-down is a recipe for more fracture.
I've been thinking about this more than I care to admit lately: a lot of ESPN employees act as if twitter is their group chat. I see so many tweets that I'm like....you are all on a show together...you should be friends off twitter...this should be group chat stuff...the only reason you're saying this publicly is for attention...do they even realize how performative they've become?? ...it's sad either way.
On the other hand, there are so many "normal" people who built a following online in the early days, and they initially probably really enjoyed that "fame" but (i'd guess) a lot of them don't view themselves as "content creators", they enjoy their regular life and regular job and regular friends and they don't want to be "famous" or be "paid to entertain" but they view twitter as the 'deep end' and they yearn to be there because they're intelligent enough to be, and it's fun and it's interesting....but boy does this public sphere suck with so many bad faith actors ruining all the good/smart dialogue from taking place. A lot of them made "internet friends" with other similar people, and my guess is they've already taken those relationships off (public) twitter and into DMs or a diff chat app. So yes, the "group chat" is where EVERYBODY is being more of themselves, but a handful continue to perform part-time on their main twitter feed for the public
This reminds me of one of the few "politically incorrect" group-chat discussions I had that happened solely because I would never say it fully. Sarah Fuller as Vandy's "kicker" was a patronizing farce. The coach did not think she was good enough to be on the team and made that glaringly apparent with his decisions. Who did kickoffs? The punter. Who kicked field goals? The punter. What exactly is the point of having a kicker that only attempts the easiest kicks? There wasn't one. Maybe she was good enough to be out there, but her coach CLEARLY didn't think she was!
This just made me sad that I’m not part of an anti-woke group chat. I have one likeminded IRL friend that I text with all the time… but no group. I suspect people don’t invite me because my demographics suggest that I’d be woke.
I find it interesting to think of public social media as the public square it was advertised to be/replace. The public square is idealized many places - by Hannah Arendt as the place the Greeks and Romans learned and practiced civic life, with essentially all political philosophy and commentary lionizing public parks and squares in a similar vein.
That is true a few places. However, in most of the country such a public square did not exist, and in many places never had. Public parks grew more popular as they'd become safer. However, they were where folks brought their kids to blow off some energy, not to discuss politics with their fellow citizens. That was the parks that were in use - many were not, having been given over to the downtrodden, homeless, and destitute thanks to our laws protecting their access to those places, and the predictable abandonment of them by many folks in response.
In those communities, the public square of Facebook and Twitter was and is something new, or at least not seen in decades. But they are suffering the same fate as the romanticized public spaces they supposedly were replacing. To the extent folks are walking/scrolling around them ranting about politics, those folks are considered crazy and avoided. Some folks persist in them to the extent they can fashion a small and uniform or insular community in them - essentially the parents who take their kids to parks, recreated as knitting groups and various other enthusiast communities.
Everyone else is realizing what unpleasant places they are to be and abandoning them for more congenial environments - the private social media, playing the role of Starbucks and other private gathering venues in providing places for like-minded folks to gather, free from the unpleasantness of the public realm and those who inhabit it.
Excellent article. Using that NYT “study” as a point of departure was terrific. You hear the thought sometimes these days from men -- “people don’t want to hear what I really think,” and you ask them to tell you and it’s often just impolite but nothing really bad or profound. They just want to vent a bit and move on. The observation that group chat is where we can speak freely in small groups because we know the people in the group is a great observation. In the early days of Twitter, you knew the people who followed you and you followed them. Then it took off and most people are now strangers and even the term follower seems creepy. Loved the Vonnegut passage.
"Well, in the Group Chat, people are confiding in one another about how the top-down Covid mandates they lived through don’t appear to have mattered. They’re talking to friends, as loud as clandestine can be, about how so much of this was bullshit: the continued restrictions absent supporting evidence, the decay that came with them, and the stigma against pushback. People, the type of people who enthusiastically supported a lot of restrictions in the chaotic early going, are waking up to feeling worked over. Their version of saying it sotto voce is actually to now say it loudly, but to one another, in the Group Chat."
The perspective of journalists in California is fascinating to me. I don't discredit your experience; I'm sure you've been living under intrusive and (at least sometimes) enforced restrictions. I believe you that many of these have been burdensome and annoying, despite some seeming to lack basic logic or coherence.
I just don't share your experience in the slightest. My parish never really enforced the statewide mask mandate; it officially stopped, in defiance of the statewide order, over 8 months ago. Our kids went back to school in August 2021; since that summer, essentially all businesses have been open and free to operate as normal.
I've appreciated this during the lulls in cases. However, overall I did not and have not experienced this as welcome freedom vs what my friends in California are living through. I was unable to enjoy it most of the time, as in any locale we were at the mercy of the lowest common denominator who decided to venture forth that day - never masked, not-infrequently infected and symptomatic, always defiant and insistent they had the right to be shopping/eating/socializing too.
At one point last summer during the Delta surge my region of the state (not New Orleans) had the highest (or second highest, depending on how one dated the Botswana statistics) death rate in the world. It wasn't just old people either - they suffered the worst, but there were plenty of deaths, and even more very bad hospital stays, among the middle aged, and even children.
The surge to the highest rates in the world (versus upper-middle of the pack, where we'd been before) corresponded with our repeal of essentially all anti-COVID mitigation measures. Those crummy studies like the one you linked to? Folks took those seriously and stopped trying to do pakon to prevent it. The result was horrific; nothing could change people's minds.
A middle-aged guy proudly ran for Congress and won while eschewing COVID safety measures. He caught it and died - as a state legislature had died the previous legislative session from COVID - leaving behind a widow and child. His widow ran for his seat and won. It wasn't even contemplated that she'd support anything but letting the virus rage unchecked.
I don't know if you'd prefer it or not - when cases have been down, it certainly has been nice to experience "normal" life again. However, to have the virus spreading like wildfire around you as students and teachers from your kids' school are hospitalized, and still masses of people everywhere proudly refuse to wear a mask (much less get a vaccine) even when you plead you'd like to bring your immunocompromised child or pregnant wife somewhere - I didn't enjoy it or consider it worth it.
Regardless, many regions haven't been experiencing the oppression of California vigilance. We have different group chats as a result - about the frustration and despair of living in such an environment and wondering what the cost will be of the mistake we made not to move somewhere else - anywhere else but the place with the highest death rate in the world.
Ya, I don't know what it would be like to live outside of here, in an extremely different anti vax place, but I've been in enough slightly different places to crave what they have. Before the mandates were rescinded elsewhere in CA, I'd go to Placer County, where people were happier and living freely. Much preferred it there. Berkeley's been grim and appears to be somewhat addicted to that mode. Basically, I don't think what's happening is just about safety/precaution.
You're probably right. Your comment section is one of the few places I know of where I see reasonable people talking about things and not getting angry about differences of opinion. I'm just greedy and I'd like more of that.
Wish this one was free so I could share with my group chat. Speaks so perfectly to exactly why we do what we do. I guess I'll just have to do my part and convince them to subscribe.
I feel like you’re overlooking the massive massive flaw in this logic in that group chats like the ones you’ve described just turn into echo chambers where members think their stances are more popular than they are because their ideas get reinforced constantly. Just like how an “anti woke” substack writer could attract a whole lot of other “anti woke” readers and have them all convinced they’re the silent majority when all evidence is to the contrary.
It's an interesting tidbit you put out there, how you don't personally know anyone who voted for Trump. Yet you seem careful to not cross the line of getting into electoral politics when discussing culture. On some level I can understand why you don't want to. But, another part of me thinks that's an avenue you would do very good at uncovering, especially given the fact that the politics coverage in this nation is not grounded in reality. Maybe you would piss some of your readers off. But are you and your friends really all that subversive if you are nibbling on the edges of why mainstream democrats are really pu***ies, but the modern day GOP is b*t-sh*t crazy? Is that too offensive to too large a slice of your subscription base?
I just tend to follow whatever's interesting to me in a given week. It's nice that people think there's a plan or strategy here, but there isn't. Nothing is off the table, but I can't envision writing an electoral politics angle right now. That said, I'm very curious about the midterms and whatever trends will be revealed there.
It’s because Ethan is trying to toe the line of being anti-left enough to attract right wing readers but not so anti-left that he’s thought of as MAGA. When in reality it’s clear he’s either sympathetic to the right and their causes, or completely unaware and disillusioned about what the right wing is in this country today. You see it in the way he frames so many issues.. people are unhappy with how Covid was handled, could it be the 1,000,000 dead Americans? The large portions of the country that refused any measures to slow the pandemic or get vaccinated? No.. it’s the mask mandates were the problem. The biggest issues with trans rights right now is that he can’t vocalize he thinks they shouldn’t be able to play sports? What about the laws being passed to prosecute parents of trans kids? And the biggest issue in media today is that it’s too woke and yet no mention at all of the propaganda network that’s the most popular channel on TV funneling hate and anger towards the other political party 24/7. What he isn’t seeing or saying tells me way more where Ethan stands on things than what he writes.
In fairness, I don't think Ethan needs to. He's more of an observer of culture, than actually wanting to put this thumb on the scale. I'm just merely more or less a provocateur by nature. It Ethan delved into politics, there might be unintended consequences, where he becomes a different type of writer, that is overall less appealing. There's a certain anger in political writing that I'm sometimes actually happy to avoid. And Ethan's writing in many ways is a breadth of fresh air. Even if there are times I do wish he devoted a piece directly to politics, instead of it being ancillary to much of his work. But over-all, Ethan is creating great content on his Substack.
I agree he definitely doesn’t need to, but this article and the Naomi Asaka one are just fodder for the right wing anti woke reader base that he attracts. It’s like he’s feigning objectivity by “staying out of politics” but then writing articles that just so happen to resonate very strongly with one side while including lines like “no one I know voted for Trump” just to make sure he really hammers the point home that “I’m not saying I’m on the right but..”
"I’d venture to say that most of Ethan’s subscribers don’t care or don’t care to know whether he’s on the right or left." I guess the same, but maybe that's because this is how I approach things when I'm reading others. When I'm reading, I'm just looking for interesting ideas. Buffet model (take what ya want, leave what ya don't) over a Reservoir model (worry about the purity of all supply)
I completely understand that readers might not care but for me it’s just very simple, we have 2 political parties in this country, one is incompetent the other is actively trying to end American democracy.
Ethan has no problem pointing out the incompetence of the left and feeding into the culture wars the right is waging to drive people away from the left. It’s a zero sum game in my opinion, you’re either on the side of our democratic form of government or you aren’t. There’s no “middle” there’s no “left leaning with some right wing views” you either see the Republican Party for what it is or you don’t.
So from that standpoint, it’s very frustrating to read someone who is clearly intelligent, but is fine towing the line acting like we live in a normal left vs right world where disagreements are about tax rates and immigration policies. These culture type articles are political statements, I wouldn’t be saying this stuff on his sports articles. The stakes are just too high in my opinion for his fence riding on these cultural/political issues.
How much of Group Chat is about a changing paradigm in content moderation? I don’t find the form factor all that innovative. You noted it’s been around for a decade and you could make a case it’s been around for much longer as chat rooms, listservs and BBS.
I would welcome your pontifications on content moderation design patterns. You’ve got a deep perspective here from your experiences as a social media aggregation grunt to beat writer battling a mega team PR department to early contributor of a disruptor media outlet to now having your own community.
I did notice NateTweetGate. Something that caught my eye about it: the freak out against him was disproportionately Canadian NBA Twitter, for whatever reason
I'm in a groupchat with a dozen or so liberal guys who all went to fancy liberal arts colleges and are all generally "woke". We even have a few openly gay members in the chat. The content in this chat consists of posts that are so outlandish it would easily all get us fired immediately if it became public, and boy do I love it. We all know everyone is acting in good faith and mostly being ironic anyways, and when someone goes too far people just ignore it. It's strangely one of the things I value most in my life and hope it never ends. It's nice to have a safe space to get jokes off.
I have the same - a group chat of fewer than 10, all of whom are left (or center at best), all of whom work in the media. All of whom would be swiftly cancelled if the contents were isolated out of context.
But yes, it's cathartic to trade the same insults you would have used in school 20 years ago, or as Ethan mentioned, issues that people would have LOST THEIR MIND about even 5 years ago but you can't say it on your forward-facing profile.
35 for me is way too many. I couldn't trust 34 other people. Because of one goes rogue, this happens: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/media/2022/mar/18/fox-sports-presenter-tom-morris-stood-down-pending-inquiry-into-alleged-sexist-and-homophobic-slurs
This was another great article, Ethan. Part of the reason why it feels like society is fracturing is because people in elite spaces seem entirely disconnected from non-elites. So when things don't go the way elites expect then they freak out and blame nefarious forces. If you disagree with mantras like "trans women are women" then you're just a boorish bigot. Elites didn't stop and ask whether norms are changing too fast, or if they persuaded enough normies first before they began handing out punishment for said disagreement.
Orthodoxy that's enforced from the top-down is a recipe for more fracture.
I've been thinking about this more than I care to admit lately: a lot of ESPN employees act as if twitter is their group chat. I see so many tweets that I'm like....you are all on a show together...you should be friends off twitter...this should be group chat stuff...the only reason you're saying this publicly is for attention...do they even realize how performative they've become?? ...it's sad either way.
On the other hand, there are so many "normal" people who built a following online in the early days, and they initially probably really enjoyed that "fame" but (i'd guess) a lot of them don't view themselves as "content creators", they enjoy their regular life and regular job and regular friends and they don't want to be "famous" or be "paid to entertain" but they view twitter as the 'deep end' and they yearn to be there because they're intelligent enough to be, and it's fun and it's interesting....but boy does this public sphere suck with so many bad faith actors ruining all the good/smart dialogue from taking place. A lot of them made "internet friends" with other similar people, and my guess is they've already taken those relationships off (public) twitter and into DMs or a diff chat app. So yes, the "group chat" is where EVERYBODY is being more of themselves, but a handful continue to perform part-time on their main twitter feed for the public
This reminds me of one of the few "politically incorrect" group-chat discussions I had that happened solely because I would never say it fully. Sarah Fuller as Vandy's "kicker" was a patronizing farce. The coach did not think she was good enough to be on the team and made that glaringly apparent with his decisions. Who did kickoffs? The punter. Who kicked field goals? The punter. What exactly is the point of having a kicker that only attempts the easiest kicks? There wasn't one. Maybe she was good enough to be out there, but her coach CLEARLY didn't think she was!
This just made me sad that I’m not part of an anti-woke group chat. I have one likeminded IRL friend that I text with all the time… but no group. I suspect people don’t invite me because my demographics suggest that I’d be woke.
I agree with the thrust of this article.
I find it interesting to think of public social media as the public square it was advertised to be/replace. The public square is idealized many places - by Hannah Arendt as the place the Greeks and Romans learned and practiced civic life, with essentially all political philosophy and commentary lionizing public parks and squares in a similar vein.
That is true a few places. However, in most of the country such a public square did not exist, and in many places never had. Public parks grew more popular as they'd become safer. However, they were where folks brought their kids to blow off some energy, not to discuss politics with their fellow citizens. That was the parks that were in use - many were not, having been given over to the downtrodden, homeless, and destitute thanks to our laws protecting their access to those places, and the predictable abandonment of them by many folks in response.
In those communities, the public square of Facebook and Twitter was and is something new, or at least not seen in decades. But they are suffering the same fate as the romanticized public spaces they supposedly were replacing. To the extent folks are walking/scrolling around them ranting about politics, those folks are considered crazy and avoided. Some folks persist in them to the extent they can fashion a small and uniform or insular community in them - essentially the parents who take their kids to parks, recreated as knitting groups and various other enthusiast communities.
Everyone else is realizing what unpleasant places they are to be and abandoning them for more congenial environments - the private social media, playing the role of Starbucks and other private gathering venues in providing places for like-minded folks to gather, free from the unpleasantness of the public realm and those who inhabit it.
Excellent article. Using that NYT “study” as a point of departure was terrific. You hear the thought sometimes these days from men -- “people don’t want to hear what I really think,” and you ask them to tell you and it’s often just impolite but nothing really bad or profound. They just want to vent a bit and move on. The observation that group chat is where we can speak freely in small groups because we know the people in the group is a great observation. In the early days of Twitter, you knew the people who followed you and you followed them. Then it took off and most people are now strangers and even the term follower seems creepy. Loved the Vonnegut passage.
"Well, in the Group Chat, people are confiding in one another about how the top-down Covid mandates they lived through don’t appear to have mattered. They’re talking to friends, as loud as clandestine can be, about how so much of this was bullshit: the continued restrictions absent supporting evidence, the decay that came with them, and the stigma against pushback. People, the type of people who enthusiastically supported a lot of restrictions in the chaotic early going, are waking up to feeling worked over. Their version of saying it sotto voce is actually to now say it loudly, but to one another, in the Group Chat."
The perspective of journalists in California is fascinating to me. I don't discredit your experience; I'm sure you've been living under intrusive and (at least sometimes) enforced restrictions. I believe you that many of these have been burdensome and annoying, despite some seeming to lack basic logic or coherence.
I just don't share your experience in the slightest. My parish never really enforced the statewide mask mandate; it officially stopped, in defiance of the statewide order, over 8 months ago. Our kids went back to school in August 2021; since that summer, essentially all businesses have been open and free to operate as normal.
I've appreciated this during the lulls in cases. However, overall I did not and have not experienced this as welcome freedom vs what my friends in California are living through. I was unable to enjoy it most of the time, as in any locale we were at the mercy of the lowest common denominator who decided to venture forth that day - never masked, not-infrequently infected and symptomatic, always defiant and insistent they had the right to be shopping/eating/socializing too.
At one point last summer during the Delta surge my region of the state (not New Orleans) had the highest (or second highest, depending on how one dated the Botswana statistics) death rate in the world. It wasn't just old people either - they suffered the worst, but there were plenty of deaths, and even more very bad hospital stays, among the middle aged, and even children.
The surge to the highest rates in the world (versus upper-middle of the pack, where we'd been before) corresponded with our repeal of essentially all anti-COVID mitigation measures. Those crummy studies like the one you linked to? Folks took those seriously and stopped trying to do pakon to prevent it. The result was horrific; nothing could change people's minds.
A middle-aged guy proudly ran for Congress and won while eschewing COVID safety measures. He caught it and died - as a state legislature had died the previous legislative session from COVID - leaving behind a widow and child. His widow ran for his seat and won. It wasn't even contemplated that she'd support anything but letting the virus rage unchecked.
I don't know if you'd prefer it or not - when cases have been down, it certainly has been nice to experience "normal" life again. However, to have the virus spreading like wildfire around you as students and teachers from your kids' school are hospitalized, and still masses of people everywhere proudly refuse to wear a mask (much less get a vaccine) even when you plead you'd like to bring your immunocompromised child or pregnant wife somewhere - I didn't enjoy it or consider it worth it.
Regardless, many regions haven't been experiencing the oppression of California vigilance. We have different group chats as a result - about the frustration and despair of living in such an environment and wondering what the cost will be of the mistake we made not to move somewhere else - anywhere else but the place with the highest death rate in the world.
Ya, I don't know what it would be like to live outside of here, in an extremely different anti vax place, but I've been in enough slightly different places to crave what they have. Before the mandates were rescinded elsewhere in CA, I'd go to Placer County, where people were happier and living freely. Much preferred it there. Berkeley's been grim and appears to be somewhat addicted to that mode. Basically, I don't think what's happening is just about safety/precaution.
Can we get a group chat going for HoS subscribers? Perhaps a Discord?
It’s under consideration. But I kinda wonder what Discord can accomplish that the comment section can’t.
You're probably right. Your comment section is one of the few places I know of where I see reasonable people talking about things and not getting angry about differences of opinion. I'm just greedy and I'd like more of that.
Wish this one was free so I could share with my group chat. Speaks so perfectly to exactly why we do what we do. I guess I'll just have to do my part and convince them to subscribe.
I feel like you’re overlooking the massive massive flaw in this logic in that group chats like the ones you’ve described just turn into echo chambers where members think their stances are more popular than they are because their ideas get reinforced constantly. Just like how an “anti woke” substack writer could attract a whole lot of other “anti woke” readers and have them all convinced they’re the silent majority when all evidence is to the contrary.
It's an interesting tidbit you put out there, how you don't personally know anyone who voted for Trump. Yet you seem careful to not cross the line of getting into electoral politics when discussing culture. On some level I can understand why you don't want to. But, another part of me thinks that's an avenue you would do very good at uncovering, especially given the fact that the politics coverage in this nation is not grounded in reality. Maybe you would piss some of your readers off. But are you and your friends really all that subversive if you are nibbling on the edges of why mainstream democrats are really pu***ies, but the modern day GOP is b*t-sh*t crazy? Is that too offensive to too large a slice of your subscription base?
I just tend to follow whatever's interesting to me in a given week. It's nice that people think there's a plan or strategy here, but there isn't. Nothing is off the table, but I can't envision writing an electoral politics angle right now. That said, I'm very curious about the midterms and whatever trends will be revealed there.
It’s because Ethan is trying to toe the line of being anti-left enough to attract right wing readers but not so anti-left that he’s thought of as MAGA. When in reality it’s clear he’s either sympathetic to the right and their causes, or completely unaware and disillusioned about what the right wing is in this country today. You see it in the way he frames so many issues.. people are unhappy with how Covid was handled, could it be the 1,000,000 dead Americans? The large portions of the country that refused any measures to slow the pandemic or get vaccinated? No.. it’s the mask mandates were the problem. The biggest issues with trans rights right now is that he can’t vocalize he thinks they shouldn’t be able to play sports? What about the laws being passed to prosecute parents of trans kids? And the biggest issue in media today is that it’s too woke and yet no mention at all of the propaganda network that’s the most popular channel on TV funneling hate and anger towards the other political party 24/7. What he isn’t seeing or saying tells me way more where Ethan stands on things than what he writes.
In fairness, I don't think Ethan needs to. He's more of an observer of culture, than actually wanting to put this thumb on the scale. I'm just merely more or less a provocateur by nature. It Ethan delved into politics, there might be unintended consequences, where he becomes a different type of writer, that is overall less appealing. There's a certain anger in political writing that I'm sometimes actually happy to avoid. And Ethan's writing in many ways is a breadth of fresh air. Even if there are times I do wish he devoted a piece directly to politics, instead of it being ancillary to much of his work. But over-all, Ethan is creating great content on his Substack.
I agree he definitely doesn’t need to, but this article and the Naomi Asaka one are just fodder for the right wing anti woke reader base that he attracts. It’s like he’s feigning objectivity by “staying out of politics” but then writing articles that just so happen to resonate very strongly with one side while including lines like “no one I know voted for Trump” just to make sure he really hammers the point home that “I’m not saying I’m on the right but..”
"I’d venture to say that most of Ethan’s subscribers don’t care or don’t care to know whether he’s on the right or left." I guess the same, but maybe that's because this is how I approach things when I'm reading others. When I'm reading, I'm just looking for interesting ideas. Buffet model (take what ya want, leave what ya don't) over a Reservoir model (worry about the purity of all supply)
I completely understand that readers might not care but for me it’s just very simple, we have 2 political parties in this country, one is incompetent the other is actively trying to end American democracy.
Ethan has no problem pointing out the incompetence of the left and feeding into the culture wars the right is waging to drive people away from the left. It’s a zero sum game in my opinion, you’re either on the side of our democratic form of government or you aren’t. There’s no “middle” there’s no “left leaning with some right wing views” you either see the Republican Party for what it is or you don’t.
So from that standpoint, it’s very frustrating to read someone who is clearly intelligent, but is fine towing the line acting like we live in a normal left vs right world where disagreements are about tax rates and immigration policies. These culture type articles are political statements, I wouldn’t be saying this stuff on his sports articles. The stakes are just too high in my opinion for his fence riding on these cultural/political issues.
How much of Group Chat is about a changing paradigm in content moderation? I don’t find the form factor all that innovative. You noted it’s been around for a decade and you could make a case it’s been around for much longer as chat rooms, listservs and BBS.
I would welcome your pontifications on content moderation design patterns. You’ve got a deep perspective here from your experiences as a social media aggregation grunt to beat writer battling a mega team PR department to early contributor of a disruptor media outlet to now having your own community.
I did notice NateTweetGate. Something that caught my eye about it: the freak out against him was disproportionately Canadian NBA Twitter, for whatever reason