It suffers from the same fundamental flaw as a self-selected poll: the people most motivated to participate are not necessarily representative, impartial or even particularly reasonable. What appears like a diverse community of fair, objective and well-intentioned people is nothing of the sort.
The community-driven model necessarily means that control of narrative rewards persistence and an aptitude for social engineering. Lift the lid on almost any contentious topic and you will find a fiefdom of committed obsessives who assert seniority, weaponise whatever rules they can, and ultimately wear down anyone with an opposing viewpoint.
Your "counter" is nonsensical - if you are referring to the concept of a logical "red herring", something to distract by introducing an irrelevant topic, this is not that.
Your comment pertained to your (dislike of) use of wikipedia in contrast to the relevant site (X.com).
My comment pertains to both of the relevant websites you had related (wikipedia is no more related to x.com than governments, neighborhoods, etc. that you have brought up), and to the specific reason why x.com came to be (it's current "authorship"), and how the directly related collary (grok) is not the thing you randomly brought up...
Which if there were a red herring here, it would be wikipedia (as it is not a site whose primary purpose is as a commentary website, nor it used in the same fashion)...
But for the topic you specifically brought up, this is entirely relevant, namely, your dislike of another website, and it's direct relation to the general topic at hand.
As for the rest, further nonsense. I can just as easily flip the subjects in each statement and they will remain true...my (factual) statement stands.
You substituted a different question ("who owns the platform") for the one I originally raised ("how its information and narratives are governed in practice"). Call that a red herring or simply a non sequitur; the label isn't important. It didn't rebut the argument.
You're missing the point of those examples. Of course you can reverse them -- and that is precisely my point! Organisational form or ownership tells you very little, by itself, about whether an institution behaves well. My criticism of Wikipedia concerned how authority over contested information emerges and is exercised. "But Wikipedia isn't owned by an evil oligarch" doesn't answer that criticism.
In terms of species-level harm arising from the ways their systems can be abused, I’d rank them roughly as follows. To be clear, I’m ranking a platform’s potential for species-level harm based on its scale and its ability to concentrate, enforce, or algorithmically amplify a shared narrative or behaviour while limiting meaningful challenge or escape.
S-tier: Instagram, TikTok, YouTube [shorts, recommendations]
A-tier: Facebook
B-tier: Wikipedia, Reddit
C-tier: X, YouTube [subscriptions]
D-tier: Most major LLMs, e.g. ChatGPT.
Null-tier: Bluesky, Truth Social, Mastodon, etc. (too irrelevant to have any meaningful species-level effect.)
I can imagine how this analysis might look bonkers at first blush. But I strongly account for how much disagreement is surfaced. Say what you will about X, at least the arguments are visible for all to see. By contrast, the proportion of Wikipedia readers who also read the talk pages to understand active disputes probably rounds to zero.
LLMs such as ChatGPT are problematic because they can reflect and reinforce prevailing views embedded across their source material, most significantly Wikipedia. But their conversational nature provides an important escape hatch: you can challenge an answer, interrogate its assumptions, ask for competing interpretations, and explore multiple perspectives.
