i have a lot of friends on here who are in the media industry broadly and/or write for a living so let me just throw a content warning here for you, because i mean all of what i'm about to say very lovingly

the way twitter evolved (and especially the verified badge becoming seen as a sign of prestige), journalists and bloggers—let's call them writers for brevity's sake—have sort of defined the terms for much of the mainstream discussion here on this site specifically

that was natural once this platform began that pretty gradual but eventually unmistakable shift from micro-personal-blog oriented to micro-news and micro-opinion oriented: follow the news writers if you want the news, plus they're all heavily followed and part of the badged class

but, like, i don't know how to tell you that most of us didn't choose a career path that would force us to reckon with being publicly judged and dissected because of what we write, and therefore develop systems to understand and remain healthily detached from it

so the antagonistic style of goading and brawling and virality leading to more conflict and more career-enhancing virality (which i do know is not every single writer's m.o.) which is seen as cool because the popular kids are doing it actually sort of negatively impacts us

i don't want to tell anyone how to run their lives, obviously, so if nothing else this is just one of those things where people who are creating a culture don't realize exactly how much influence they have and maybe this is thought provoking. who knows

what'll probably happen is that a journalist gets really mad at me and quote-tweets this thread and causes a dogpile which therefore sort of proves whatever point i was trying to make here