True. Though the bottom line is publishers saying "we need to get money somehow", and readers mostly not enthused by paying for a subscription. So if it's not ads and the often-paired click bait, it has to be something else, itself paired with something else.

I definitely do not condone that, especially for outlets present to inform the general public, but they're businesses after all.

The only part of Vice that's worth giving the benefit of the doubt when it comes to The Truth is their Motherboard section. The rest has been tripe for a few years. There was a glimmer of hope with Simon Ostrovsky's reporting from Ukraine, but he seems to have moved on.

I mean, there are lots of niche discussion forums on the internet that are better and worse than Twitter for various reasons. For instance, LessWrong.com is popular in my niche and has a higher signal-to-noise ratio than Twitter, but contains a much smaller group of expert contributors and (by design) isn't good for short rapid discussion.

It only becomes a cesspool once it grows beyond the size where it can be moderated by users themselves. For example, I post on a soccer forum dedicated to a specific team. It's been around since 2000 or so, built using PHP forum software.

There is a shared culture between the users. While there are thousands of accounts, there are only a few hundred active users, so everyone 'knows' each to an extent. That's why when someone tells someone else that they're behaving badly, it's usually made in good faith. That creates a completely different feedback loop than on social media, where no one knows each other and their default position is to get defensive when called out about something.

These old-school forums still have admins, moderators and allow you to flag things like spam, hate speech etc, but they're rarely used, because when someone signs up for an account, you can assume that they're there to partake in the aforementioned shared culture.

The harassment has been flowing in both directions.

Cancel culture invariably effects the poor and powerless to a greater extent. The poor are shackled to their next pay check, the truely powerful cannot be cancelled.