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It's kind of funny to think anyone still believes in 2025 that anything can come of yelling at people on this stuff now, let alone the people running it. Like going to the ruins of Delphi and shouting questions at the broken columns.

Engaging with the attention game itself is pure Kobayashi Maru. Waffle/pancakes derailment is manufacturing drama spectacle to accumulate attention capital. Responding seriously simply feeds it. Social media is rarely social and definitely not media.

What it actually is: a giant attention market disguised in the skins of community and publishing. The social is scaffolding, the media is camouflage. Calling anything "social media" at this point is like calling a casino a "leisure library".

It's designed around Section 230 concerns by making moderation opt-in and distributed. Users choose their own labelers, run their own instances if they want. The platform can shrug and say "we're just pipes" - which is way more legally defensible than any PR statement could ever be.

This is exactly the problem I was having trying to explain to someone still operating on the Twitter playbook the other day, and I'm not sure if it's a problem in translation, framing, or people being stuck in old mental models. Or maybe everyone's just stupid and spoiled. I'm not ruling it out.

The thing is, it's not deflection; it's the actual design philosophy. Moderation as infrastructure rather than editorial control. I don't agree with all of the decisions, but I understand it. But then again, that seems to be the modern anti-pattern. Fighting yesterday's battles, ad nauseam.