Keep the obvious question closed until the end, because answering it first turns a genuinely interesting fortnight into a scoreboard. Who won?
Set it aside. What happened over the last two weeks is better understood as a form being used at a speed it has never been used at, and the form is older than either participant.
This is a profile of the diss record: what it is, what its rules are, what the last fortnight did to them.
What the object is
A diss record is a song whose primary function is an accusation against a named person, released publicly, inviting a reply in the same medium.
Three properties make it a distinct form rather than a rude song. It names the target, which converts it from complaint into challenge. It is released rather than performed, which puts it on the permanent record. And it expects a response, which means it is one half of a structure rather than a complete work.
That last property is the interesting one and it is what separates this from almost everything else in recorded music. Most records are finished when they are released. A diss record is a move.
The rules, which are unwritten and real
There is no rulebook and there is a remarkably consistent set of conventions.
Speed matters: a reply that takes three months has conceded something regardless of content. Specificity matters, because a general insult is weak and a checkable allegation is strong. And the reply must be in the form, which is why a statement through a publicist counts for nothing.
There is also a rule about what the audience is doing. A diss record is judged by listeners as a performance, which means the better record can win an exchange even when the worse record makes the more serious charge. That is a strange property for something structured as an accusation, and it is the thing the last fortnight tested hardest.
What the fortnight did to the clock
Compress the timeline and the novelty is obvious.
The exchange ran through late April and into the first week of May, with records arriving within hours of each other rather than within weeks. On 3 May two arrived from one side on the same day. On 4 May another. On 5 May a reply.
The traditional rhythm allowed a week or more for a response, and that interval was doing work nobody noticed until it was removed. It gave a listener time to absorb one record before the next arrived, and it gave the respondent time to make something good.
Remove it and the form changes character. The records become moves in something closer to an argument than a sequence of performances, and the audience stops evaluating songs and starts tracking a fight.
What the acceleration cost
Craft, mostly, and the participants would probably not dispute it.
A record made in thirty-six hours is a different object from one made in three weeks. Some of what arrived in that fortnight is very good and some of it is plainly rushed, and the difference is audible.
The second cost is to the audience’s capacity to judge. The form’s one mechanism for settling anything is that people listen and decide which record is better. At one release a week that is a judgment. At three in a day it is a reaction.
The third cost is to the archive. Records made this fast are frequently pulled, altered or left off streaming services afterwards, which means the sequence people argued about in May is not reliably the sequence anybody will be able to hear later.
What it gained
Scale, and it is worth being honest that the scale is the point.
One of the records became a hit on a scale that diss records essentially never reach, which is a genuinely new thing. The form has historically produced records that mattered inside the culture and rarely outside it, and this one moved into general circulation within days.
That is the acceleration paying off. A fortnight of daily releases is a story that people who do not follow the music can follow, and a story is what carries a record past its own audience.
There is also a distribution effect that the form has never had to handle. A record released at midnight reaches its whole audience within hours, which means a reply can be written against the full public reaction rather than against the record alone.
The answer to the question
Unanswerable by design, and the design is the point.
A form that settles disputes by having listeners prefer one record to another has no adjudicator, no criteria, and no moment at which the result is recorded. People will say a winner emerged, and they will mean that one record was played more, which is a fact about distribution rather than a verdict on anything either of them alleged.
What the fortnight leaves
Nine or so records, most of them released inside two weeks, all of them permanently available and none of them ever going to be heard the way they were heard on the day.
That is the cost of the compression, paid over time rather than at the time. A record made as a move in a fast exchange is a record that stops making sense once the exchange is over, and in ten years the sequence will be a playlist that somebody has to arrange in the right order and annotate before any of it means anything at all.
