Should I Stay or Should I Go?

On X, that is

If things continue the way they have been on X (the social media platform formerly known as Twitter), we may soon be left with only bots from troll farms yelling at each other.

As S. Peter Davis pointed out in his essay about the need for content moderation online - the more terrible stuff you allow on any site - the more it will drive away non-terrible users. In the end, the sludge is all you’ll have left.

“Fringe speech is actually a lot like pornography in the way it proliferates. They’re both what I’m going to call liquid content. That’s not making a moral argument about pornography. But whether you’re against it or not in principle, not everybody wants to be around pornography all the time.

But there is also a lot of demand for pornography. It flows in like water wherever it is allowed to be. It’s liquid. It fills she shape of its container. People who don’t want to swim in it move away from it, but it’s not similarly repelled by anything else. There’s no anti-pornographic content t…