‘The Internet Is Broken’: @ev Is Trying to Salvage It (Published 2017)

In a 2017 interview, Ev Williams (the founder of Twitter), said something that has stuck with me since: “the trouble with algorithms, is that it rewards extremes. Say you’re driving down the road and see a car crash. Of course you look. Everyone looks. The internet interprets behavior like this to mean everyone is asking for car crashes, so it trie... See more

To accomplish this goal, the “proud extroversion” of the early Web soon gave way to a much more homogenized experience: hundred-and-forty-character text boxes, uniformly sized photos accompanied by short captions, Like buttons, retweet counts, and, ultimately, a shift away from chronological time lines and profile pages and toward statistically opt... See more