it was also a lot nicer to do it communally on vbulletin forums than on algorithmic media. the incentives were still messed up but they were a lot better than platforms which so incentivise aggressive, contrarian, baiting, incendiary, bad-faith and often downright imbecilic contributions.
Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them)*whispers* you know we can do this cultural debate about art thing all the time, right? Websites and news organizations used to have culture critics on staff whose entire job was writing about books, movies, and TV. People read them and then discussed them. We have the technology to do this again.