Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

Maybe that's a good thing? I remember a few years ago when journalists were outsourcing their reporting to Twitter and we had headlines like "The Internet is Freaking Out About X" when it was really a dozen nobodies on Twitter. The death of Twitter and the re-fragmentation of the internet sounds like a breath of fresh air compared to the purple haze of the last decade's centralized web.

I think many people would relate in some fashion to your sentiments. However, your sentiments are ironically what spurred how we got where we are.

The eviscerating 'me' movement has underpinned all other movements and social interactions. It's everywhere. Individualized everything. This started sometime in the late 1990's early 2000's. It made observational journalism briefly a few times over the last two decades, but not enough nor deep.

No longer is it just material items - no it's worse - fully digital and everything everywhere.

I speak for myself from the US but I can only assume it's prevalent everywhere else in world, at least to some extent.

> The very idea of popularity is up for debate: Is that trend really viral? Did everyone see that post, or is it just my little corner of the internet?

This is exactly it.

Consider a scenario that's likely fairly common given experiments I've done in the last several years. Say a site people still use to talk to/keep in touch with friends sometimes like IG/FB decides a user is "toxic" and either shadowbans them, or starts hiding their posts from friends. Maybe it isn't even because of a bad interaction, maybe the algorithm just decided their "content" wasn't suitable to be towards the top of this user's followers' feeds.

What would that look like to this user? It'd look like their friends were ignoring them, weren't interested in them, etc., possibly leading to depression (which has been proven pretty undeniably that high levels of social media use in teens results in higher levels of anxiety and depression).

The fact that people en masse are not pointing out how ridiculous this is, that a social media site can have such enormous influence on one's perception of "reality" is staggering and it should die and die quickly.

Right, the myth of the neutral aggregator.

The aggregator is going to generally have some opinion on it, whether it be your own opinion fed back to you, or those of the author.

Whether that opinion is "right" or "wrong" is in the eye of beholder..

In some ways the recommendation engines feeding you your own preferences is the easiest thing to implement that satisfies the most people at once.