[T]he reason why people care so much about Twitter and finding a good replacement is not because of total user numbers: Twitter was always the smallest of the Big Tech platforms after all. Twitter and X matter because of its unparalleled ability to generate culture and shape politics. Twitter and X are the places where elite consensus is formed. It is the dominant platform for shaping our collective understanding of the world. That’s why control over X’s algorithm (and chatbot) is so valuable: it is not about telling individuals what is correct, but it is about influencing what people think about what other people think.

So Twitter/X is where people higher in the hierarchy go to publicly perform their opinions, while people lower in the hierarchy sort themselves into their teams.

That sounds like the classical Greek democracy I remember from school.

But hearing it laid out like this (“elite consensus”) sounds instinctively gross.