Algorithms are breaking how we think [video]

It's a great video, and a nice wakeup call for a lot of people online these days.

That said, there are a few things that need a bit more exploration here:

1. Context collapse (the idea of people finding conversations out of context and responding to posts not meant for them) feels like an issue created by a generation gap in how to use the internet. In the olden days, there was an expectation that any post you make online was fair game for responses from anyone and everyone. You posted on a forum or mailing list, and any rando there would respond. Period.

But with social media, I suspect there's a group of people who don't see things like this, and kinda think their conversations are more private than they actually are. So people aren't used to their conversations going viral and being interrupted by half the internet, since they're still used to the 'conversation in a pub/bar' model.

2. A lot of the media's issues aren't just because of clicks, but because they themselves have fallen victim to the same sort of algorithmic complacency. Journalists also have biased feeds showing issues that only their friends and colleagues care about, or which agree with their political views or subject matter interests. So they've gotten themselves into echo chambers that make mountains out of molehills, and their reporting reflects that.

Regarding 1, the key difference in those days was the barrier to entry. Sure, your post on the gardening forum was fair game for any user to respond to, but every user with that ability had to make an active decision to join a gardening forum. HAM radio hobbyists or political campaigners who don't have interest in gardening wouldn't gatecrash the party to respond to conversations out of context. On global, single-feed social media, you have to sign up, but then every bubble and subculture has the possibility of running into each other with an easy interface to join the conversation with no required context.

One change Alec has been in favour of is a setting to only allow followers to respond to a post. Sure, it takes 2 seconds, but it's that extra bit of friction that forces you to confront more context of who you're responding to.