There’s some real interesting stuff in here.

It doesn’t take much to destabilize or stabilize the system, Törnberg found. Even if the threshold for disagreement was quite low, the disagreements became amplified to the point where each random interaction was increasingly likely to exceed those thresholds. More and more users were pushed to relocate until what was once a community with a solid diversity of opinion rapidly became polarized and/or overly homogenous.

Conversely, if just 10 percent of users in a given social media community largely agree with your stances, you will be more tolerant toward diverse opinions that contradict your own. “There’s a certain chance that some users will end up in communities where it’s very homogenous and 99 percent of users are disagreeing with them,” said Törnberg. “That will cause them to leave, and you get this feedback effect just because of the structure of interaction. But if you have a filter bubble effect, where everyone is shown 10 percent of their own type, that creates a possibility for you to find the people who you agree with within the community. And that stabilizes the entire dynamics so it doesn’t tip over to one side or the other and become extreme or overly homogenous.”

Törnberg found some confirmation of those dynamics when he analyzed an actual online echo chamber: the subreddit r/MensRights. He found that members of the subreddit were more likely to leave if their posts diverged too far, linguistically, from the community’s center of gravity.

“Who are the users leaving the community?” said Törnberg. “The users that are more ideologically distant are more likely to leave. So it captures the same mechanism of feedback dynamics, where the community becomes more homogenous and more extreme because users leave—[and they leave] because they feel it’s becoming too homogenous and extreme. Eventually it tips over to one direction. And of course, as the community becomes more extreme, there’s this boiling the frog effect where the users who stay are influenced by the community and become more extreme.”

Yeah, that’s about as conspiratorial as I’m prepared to get about the whole thing. I don’t think the cancellation was for solely political reasons - if that were the case, they probably would have just pulled the plug immediately - but it seems very possible that political reasons were in the mix.

I’m sure there’s a pitch to studios that could work, but

That’s pretty much where I’m at. Is it something I think I desperately need? Not by a long shot.

Could they do something interesting with it? Sure, I guess.

They announced the show would be ending, but gave it another season. That’s the opposite of a sunk cost, but thanks for showing your whole ass.

Your definition of “sunk cost” seems…unique.

I watched it fully expecting to be disappointed by the lack of iridescent paint, but nope it sure has iridescent paint.

That’s Colbert, over at CBS. “Retiring” isn’t exactly the right word, though…

And the movie still made nearly $2.8 billion.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s important to foster healthy online spaces that are free of that sort of nonsense - I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t - but that crowd is a drop in the bucket when it comes to the actual audience.

They’re just loud, obnoxious, and spurred on by grifters.

If there’s one thing people need to realize about the “anti-woke” crowd, it’s that outside of poisoning online spaces, they don’t matter.

They are very loud, but at the end of the day, there’s not actually that many of them. The box office numbers speak for themselves.

And it’s an anecdote, but the single biggest F&F fan I know is a woman.

Can there be stories that anyone—regardless of gender, ethnicity, or country—can enjoy?

Sure - there are plenty of global mega-hits, from the MCU to Star Wars to The Fast and the Furious.

But I don’t think you can (or should, really) separate a work from the cultural context that led to its creation.

Nothing can stop us now that we’re in charge of a website.

Hey, they stole our line…

Mostly set dressing, stuff that you could find in stores with some light modifications like labels.

And, y’know, a whole-ass turbolift for $10k.

Even so, I’m surprised there are no Starfleet phasers, tricom badges, and the like.

The stellar irony here is that in the Star Trek universe, the United Federation of Planets is a post-scarcity, post-capitalist society where money is obsolete and its enlightened citizens work instead for self-improvement and the betterment of humanity. Hautlence didn’t get this memo, as each Retrovision ’64 will retail for an out-of-this-world $165,000. Only three ardent Trekkies will be able to get one, though, as that’s all that will be made.

Sounds like it’s a matter of their distribution license expiring.

I’ll join the chorus of people recommending it - it’s a lot of fun.

Well, it technically was - they were just given enough runway to wrap it up.

But season 5 will just be six episodes.

Correct!

The Technical Manual explanation is that replicators save storage space by using statistical averaging techniques in the molecular patterns, resulting in single-bit “errors” that some people swear they can taste.

There’s certainly a lot of pressure to move productions back to California right now.

Then again, they do own (one of) the buildings in Toronto, and Canada isn’t likely stop being an attractive place to make sci-fi any time soon.

The bigger question is likely the “if it happens” bit.