Everything in that thread seems correct, but it doesn't address
why its so bad on social media sufficiently, as those philosophical language and principal problems apply to all forms of written communication that have managed to avoid the problems of social media, including wide open written communication (remember
actual bulletin boards instead of virtual bulletin boards? Wide open text forums are not a new thing)
I'm very confident at this point that the problem is the enormous size of the rooms where everyone is talking.
I don't think user behavior will ever be better in a sufficiently large room. Effective communication requires shared context which is impossible to establish when a room is sufficiently large and sufficiently diverse.
What we're seeing with increased political polarization is I think an attempt by most people to differentiate themselves into groups of like minded people not just so they can form echo chambers, but so they can actually talk and be heard, and hear what other people are saying. You don't get that when the room becomes global in scale, you just get a bunch of noise, as is mentioned.
I think we're in a particularly nasty situation in tech because most of the people involved in creating and administering these platforms have a huge blindspot when it comes to the lack of context hopping ability in the average person, because the people that tend to get into tech tend to be very open to global connectivity and actually do have somewhat of a capacity to hop around and absorb a huge range of different contexts (although much more superficially than I think they realize/that's the price of extreme openness).
I am also fairly confident the solution is to create user managed and federated platforms. The problem would I think solve itself if people were better able to control what online social groups they expose themselves to. We've been organizing ourselves for thousands of years into a hierarchical networks of different families/towns/cities/states because those are the only long term stable systems that can deal with the huge variations in contextual difference between people. You can still have egalitarian cosmopolitan global villages for people who want that, and you can still have emissaries and exchange programs and global shared interest channels and encourage cooperation amongst different groups and avoid conflict, but I think the idea of a singular all encompassing global village was always a terribly thought out, completely untenable idea that would never work at scale.
I was going to write an article on this a long time ago after a similar thread came up here, but I don't have any clout and ended up getting swamped in other things, so I never did. Properly making this case would also require a lot of research and historical comparison to really evaluate, but the more time passes, the stronger and stronger my hunch is that we need to do almost exactly the opposite of what most people seem to think we should and allow people to differentiate themselves instead of forcing them to be together and all play by the same rules. The echo chambers will become less echoey if you allow people to build their own and feel safe enough to poke their heads out of when they feel sufficiently understood in their corner. The echo chambers are the result of gamed automated feeds where people are trying to signal I want my space by pulling harder and harder in a direction that makes them less and less likely to be bombarded with stuff they don't want entering their space involuntarily.