Linus Torvalds Says Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram Are 'A Disease'

If Linus’s angry emails are on a distribution list, the exposure is minimal and the damage is contained.

His same excess in social media is reproduced and exploited for various reasons, positive and negative and overflows into unrelated circles where unrelated people have input into something containment would prevent them from being exposed.

This state of total diffusion without commensurate dilution is the problem. Everyone is a perpetrator and everyone is a victim.

An analogue in biology might be tumors. The individual cells might not be bad but them running unstopped can have negative consequences.

Social media needs to attenuate virality. But that’s at odds with their current economic model. So in the meantime they implement useless ineffectual bandaids they know don’t address the problem head on but gives them a plausible “we’re trying” or “shikata ga nai” 仕方がない

The broadcast of oversimplified messages through a human network that reacts strongly to those messages, and thus boosts the signal of those messages further, is something that bears careful consideration.