A slopocalypse, if you can keep it. Surfing a tidal wave of virality, in part triggered by an apparently incorrect infographic targeting a bunch of right-wing influencers, the statistician, public intellectual, and overall good lib Nate Silver has dominated Twitter for two full days following the publication of his latest piece. His arguments are, first, Twitter (now X) has become more right-wing under Elon’s stewardship (true). Then, the most popular accounts on the platform, from both the left and the right, are “extremely low-quality” (also true). But as Nate and his followers carried on discussing the piece over the following hours, and then days, conversation shifted to something more general: does this platform just kind of suck? And — the big question — is it worse, both practically in terms of its usefulness for writers, intellectuals, and the public, and morally in terms of its value to the country and world, than it was before Elon bought it and made it his Clown World internet castle?

Here, I find myself in disagreement with popular opinion. Most center-left liberals, speaking from atop a large and growing online crowd, think X is worse today along both dimensions. But if endless garbage is the price of freedom, it seems to me a price worth paying.

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Nate’s piece is generally good. It’s in part a brief history, and in part a little insight into the media business from a professional who has lived through several of its iterations on the internet. Ultimately, it’s an analysis of what it takes to win on a platform like X as opposed to a service like Substack, where the rewards are far more valuable and the quality of content produced tends to be higher as a result. I agree with almost everything Nate wrote, and even think his final bit of pettiness (‘people who only thrive on X make less money because they suck,’ basically) is warranted. You can read the full piece on Silver Bulletin, and if you aren’t already you should subscribe.

But mainly, I think, conversation surrounding the piece has coalesced around a superficial critique of X. It has, perhaps, mostly become a kind of ice-breaker for the conversation people really want to have, which concerns the relentless dedication with which this product apparently sets out to make us miserable each morning. Which… yeah lol. I hate this garbage dump (which I will absolutely never delete).

I don’t like the shitty fight videos, or this new social media equivalent of the television show Cops, with looping reels of body cam footage. I don’t like the endless flood of racist memes, or what they do to me. I’m maybe somewhat glad we’re seeing the occasional unhinged Muslim imam post, as the average American still refuses to face the historic challenge of integrating people who hate us into our society, but the incredible prominence of these videos seems to me too great. There is too much short-form video in general, I think, and maybe 1 out of 20 videos I catch are worth my time. I agree it’s harder to find community on the platform today, and I miss the days when I could easily discover new and interesting ideas, pithily put, in a single little tweet.

But this, from Nate, gives me pause:

“It’s not hard to notice that Twitter has become extremely right-leaning,” he writes. “But I’d argue there’s an equally important trend: the top accounts are of incredibly low quality. Elon, with the algorithmic boost he built in for himself, is at the eye of the storm, of course. But ‘Catturd’ literally gets far more engagement than the New York Times, for instance.”

Nate echoed the sentiment on X:

This quality judgment seems to imply an information ecosystem is unhealthy if Times articles aren’t thriving, with further analysis from other journalists giving Bluesky credit for a dominance among more credible voices like the Times, and less popular newspapers with great old brands that people like to pretend are as important as the Times. But of course the reason none of these outlets are thriving on X is they ignore the rules of the algorithm, and post their content to die. As X product head Nikita Bier explained (and has been publicly roasted for since), the Times exclusively posts paywalled links with no native content on a platform that — we literally all, every single one of us, including everyone who works at the Times, know — punishes paywalled links, and rewards native content.

Given everyone in this conversation has proven they understand how to navigate the platform’s rules, since everyone in this conversation has had no problem getting X eyeballs on their content this week, what journalists really seem to be requesting is for the Times to be artificially boosted, as it once was. And that is the path to darkness.

Now, even successful efforts on X rarely lead to subscriptions, which is the main business of the Times. The company’s decision to simply not give a shit is, therefore, understandable, and of a kind of judgment I am forced to grapple with myself at Pirate Wires. I think our brand still finds value posting on X, so I’ve netted out on a different decision. But it is a decision we make ourselves.

And if the decision to post is a decision we make ourselves, why should X intervene on our behalf?

“Catturd shouldn’t” receive more attention than an outlet that cares so little about the platform it refuses to experiment within the rules of engagement. But I guess they’re special right?

Okay.

First, in publishing an article with the headline “A North American Treaty Organization Without America,” the Times did not just make a simple error, as Nate argues above. It was an egregious mistake made totally mortifying because we all know the writers and editors responsible (at an outlet as large as the Times, there were several) not only believed they were correct, but failed to check their work because of their incredible bias. They wanted to make that play on words, and to criticize the president, because they hate him. They of course have a right to hate him. They of course have a right to their bias. But they are biased, and over the past ten years they have relentlessly proven their bias.

Now, if you believe, all that bias considered, they deserve some kind of preferential treatment, there is also a case in your favor. But you can’t just compare the Times to Catturd as if that case is made. You need to explain why the Times should be boosted.

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Richard Hanania, the former white supremacist turned contrarian contrarian center-left Substack personality, made the case more clearly:

Try your best to ignore the bad-faith argument, in which he twists meaning into a statement of mine that was obviously not intended, as is his impish, Rumpelstiltsken-esque style of engagement. He is, separate from the obnoxious theatrics, making a fairly consensus case, which is worth a bit of attention.

He made the case more clearly in a separate post:

“Conservatives got their own platform,” he writes.

This is not correct. Richard is not only wrong that the average conservative doesn’t understand Twitter is trash (there is broad agreement across the ideological spectrum that Twitter is trash). Richard is wrong in his apparently earnest belief that Elon architected a right-wing algorithm.

This is something many left-wing writers argued in the early hours of Elon’s platform rule. To anyone with sense, it was clear at the time liberal posters were only noticing the absence of their own artificial boost, which had been stripped from them along with their unearned official status after Elon bought the platform — back when blue checks were only granted to loyal members of the One Party. And you know what they say, “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”

Now, today, it seems the sort of poster pining for the old order is largely projecting themselves onto the present chaos of X. They assume the platform has been architected to disseminate a certain kind of content because, if they were in charge, they would create a system to disseminate their preferred content. We of course do not have to wonder about a world like this, because we lived through it, and now know, for sure, that Twitter was designed — from trending topics and news items to its status hierarchy and, ultimately, the content it censored — to not only reflect, but enforce, left-wing orthodoxy.

But there is no curation at X today. The trash you see is just what happens in what is basically, with very few legal guardrails, a system of anarchy (overseen by a chaotic ringmaster named Grok, who definitely manages the often inaccurate “Today’s News” tab). You can say, “a system is what it does.” It doesn’t matter that there is no curation at X. An anarchist, attention-starved algorithm produces a certain kind of result, and all of us should rightly judge the result. Is this system of anarchy “good”? Here, we can and should contrast this current, chaotic system with old Twitter, which was a left-wing project rooted in elitism.

It’s important to state clearly that, contrary to many right-wing accounts that spent the past couple days stupidly dunking on Nate, he agrees old Twitter was bad:

It is also true Nate fought back, to an extent, against many of the worst excesses of the prior authoritarian arbiters of truth. But he is being a bit uncharitable, here, and possibly a bit naïve:

No, it is absolutely not “easy” to provide both freedom and excellent content on an open social media platform, as the prioritization of one works against the other. This is probably why there isn’t a single large platform in the world that threads the needle in a manner most of us find satisfying.

Certainly, if Elon really is, finger down, deciding we should all listen to idiots, that is bad. But if the kind of garbage flooding X today is just what the average idiot finds compelling, then the word for what we are living through is something like “democracy.” And enduring the relentless spew of bullshit pouring from the mouths of idiots online is just the price I need to pay for my ongoing permission to question, for example, whether Covid came from Wuhan’s local Covid factory.

What the average well-intended liberal is maybe hoping for from X is a very small sacrifice in freedom in exchange for a very large increase in quality. If guaranteed no further sacrifices, I might ask for this myself. But what people like Richard Hanania seem to be pining for is a highly biased system of curation and censorship that prioritizes the opinions of people like Richard Hanania over the opinions of Catturd. Because, incredibly, Richard earnestly believes his opinions are more valuable than Catturd’s, and somehow doesn’t see he is at his core almost exactly the same kind of entity, if aesthetically different and slightly less honest, as Catturd does us all the favor of sharing his opinions under the helpful brand of, literally, a type of animal shit.

There are many people I would rather not see influential on the internet, from Candace Owens and Hasan Piker to Ezra Klein (I’m never getting over the Mamdani endorsement). But I also know the world would be much worse if my personal bias shaped our social internet. Which, I guess, nets me roughly out at satisfied with the platform, if hopeful for an increase in the kind of content Nate would probably like to see himself.

Because while the claim ‘Twitter is trash’ is (sorry) true, the trash seems to indicate the platform is in a state of loosely controlled anarchy, which is preferable to the real authoritarianism we lived through very recently, and seem intent on forgetting.

So fuck you, garbage dump. I genuinely hate it here. But also thank you for your service.

-SOLANA

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