Saved by Paulina Paucic and
The internet wants to be fragmented
Perhaps someday the human race will be ready to become one collective consciousness. But the experiment of the 2010s shows that this day is not today. Let the internet once more be an escape — a place where you can find your people and be happy. Let us learn to speak a thousand different languages once again. Let the Tower of Babel fall.
Noah Smith • The internet wants to be fragmented
It started with the Facebook feed. On the old internet, you could show a different side of yourself in every forum or chat room; but on your Facebook feed, you had to be the same person to everyone you knew. When social unrest broke out in the mid-2010s this got even worse — you had to watch your liberal friends and your conservative friends go at ... See more
Noah Smith • The internet wants to be fragmented
🚨This is the trap that social media, and by extension all of us, are in:
📈Toxicity drives use. Lowering toxicity drops ad sales (if you are ad supported) & engagement (even if you are not)
📉Toxicity spreads like a disease. It turns regular users toxic & makes networks awful
📈Toxicity drives use. Lowering toxicity drops ad sales (if you are ad supported) & engagement (even if you are not)
📉Toxicity spreads like a disease. It turns regular users toxic & makes networks awful
Noah Smith • The internet wants to be fragmented
The internet was where you could just go be a dork with other dorks, whether you were an anime fan or a libertarian gun nut or a lonely Christian 40-something or a gay kid who was still in the closet. Community was the escape hatch.
Noah Smith • The internet wants to be fragmented
Maybe we’ve realized that the internet simply works better as a fragmented thing.
Noah Smith • The internet wants to be fragmented
That experiment failed. Humanity does not want to be a global hive mind. We are not rational Bayesian updaters who will eventually reach agreement; when we receive the same information, it tends to polarize us rather than unite us. Getting screamed at and insulted by people who disagree with you doesn’t take you out of your filter bubble — it makes... See more
Noah Smith • The internet wants to be fragmented
“You know...fifteen years ago, the internet was an escape from the real world. Now the real world is an escape from the internet.”
Noah Smith • The internet wants to be fragmented
Whether it’s intentional self-sorting into like-minded or community-moderated groups, or the natural fragmentation that comes from a bunch of different people watching their own algorithmically curated video feeds, these apps all have a way of separating people based on who they want to talk to and what they want to be exposed to.