I still don’t think we talk enough about the extent to which identity politics and social justice content was an objectively reliable route to Facebook vitality and web traffic circa 2013-2018 — there was a five year span when “go woke, go broke” was 180 degrees off base.

The impulse persisted after algorithmic changes or whatever else shifted the incentives, but that’s in part because we had a whole cohort of young writers where the ones who churned out takes like “the racist origins of breakfast” or whatever were the most successful.