Clubhouse has unbundled the "discussion" part of Twitter from the "news" part. That's good. People who just want to talk now have a place to talk without being subject to constant dunking, reply-guying, etc.
Substack, meanwhile, has unbundled the "long-form writing" part of Twitter. It's just a better place to lay out your thoughts. Of course other blogging services like Medium help with this too. But Substack's email list integration helps broadcast to a large-ish audience.
The smallish number of people who denounce Clubhouse and Substack are going to fail. Their denunciations might keep a few people off the platforms for a while, but eventually people will realize these are good platforms, and will simply migrate there.
The problem is that Twitter is still The News. As long as Twitter is The News, journalists, thinkers, and politicians will still be trapped here, pinned in place by a strong network effect where they can be dunked on by every pseudonymous schmuck on the internet.
Thus, if you want to completely shift our discourse away from its toxic reliance on this one ill-made platform, you must find a better way to deliver people breaking news.

I will blog more thoughts about this soon.

(end)

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More from @Noahpinion

23 Feb
1/Here's a Substack post about the Ivy Leagues, and our unhealthy obsession with them, and what that says about our society.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/who-cares-ab…
2/Americans are OBSESSED with the Ivies and a few other small elite private schools.

The bribery scandal.

The Asian discrimination lawsuit.

Cornell changing the name of its English department.

Every story about the Ivies is Big News.
3/@mattyglesias writes that Ivies should let in more poor kids. He's right, of course...BUT, they won't.

slowboring.com/p/fancy-colleg…
Read 19 tweets
22 Feb
Yup.

I'm afraid that the "believe the experts" people are going to be super strident about telling people that being vaccinated doesn't change anything (which is wrong), and as a result the "don't believe the experts" people are going to think the vaccines are worthless.
The other day I had someone scold me for saying "vaccines work", saying actually it's VACCINATION that works.

That's nuts of course. VACCINES WORK.
Of course these are the same people who were yelling at us not to wear cloth masks in April 2020, because there was "no evidence that masks work" (wrong!), and wearing a cloth mask might motivate some stranger to use an N95 that could have gone to a hospital.

Remember that?
Read 5 tweets
19 Feb
1/OK, here's a thread about my beloved home state of Texas.

I strongly believe that Texas CAN be The Future if it wants to. But not if it clings to dying technologies.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/texas-vs-the…
2/Texas governor Greg Abbott is going on TV and lying through his teeth about the causes of the blackouts!

3/And this is providing fuel for culture-warrior liars like Tucker Carlson to go on a crusade against renewable energy:

Read 13 tweets
19 Feb
1/Here's a thread about the column that Larry Summers called "the year's most naive".

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
2/Inflation is low. So why are Summers and a couple other people (like Olivier Blanchard) warning that government borrowing and spending could lead to rampant inflation?

Heck, the spending they're scared about is smaller than the CARES Act!

noahpinion.substack.com/p/larry-summer…
3/Well, my (charitable) answer is that they are afraid of a POLICY REGIME CHANGE.

To most people, "regime change" sounds like a war, but in econ, it means a change in the way policymakers make policy.
Read 19 tweets
18 Feb
By the way, this appears to be a reboot of the theory of "race suicide" from the early 20th century. W.S. Wallace claimed that immigrants caused native-born people to work harder and have fewer kids, this negating the effect of immigration on population.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_suic…
But note that Wallace argued that immigration lowers fertility by making people work HARDER! Carney argues that immigration lowers fertility by REDUCING work.

Remember, the only thing that matters to the anti-immigration people is the policy conclusion: Brown Men Bad.
Read 4 tweets
15 Feb
1/Today's Substack post is about the U.S. vaccination effort.

It's not good enough. BUT, it's better than almost the entire rest of the world!

And I don't think Americans have collectively realized this fact yet.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-us-vacci…
2/This is not yet enough vaccination.

New variants are spreading, some more transmissible, some more antibody-resistant. To outrun them, we need to keep ramping up both production and distribution as quickly as possible.

bloomberg.com/graphics/covid…
3/BUT, while it's not good enough yet, the U.S. is ahead of nearly every country in the world!

Israel is tops, as everyone knows. But the only sizeable country ahead of the U.S. is the UK.
Read 21 tweets

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