the systems governing what people see are no longer structured primarily around relationships, but around probabilistic prediction, behavioural feedback loops, and continuous optimisation.

TikTok made this shift explicit by breaking the link between identity and distribution by showing content to users with no prior relationship to the creator and... See more

helping readers discover work they’ll actually subscribe to.

Today most algorithms that recommend or suppress content act purely on the basis of inferred popularity. They look at how much time people spend engaging with a piece of content, and boost it to more people if the numbers look good. The content itself is almost purely a black box. Some algorithms try to classify content with tags like “food” or

... See more