One thing that complicates people’s willingness to devote their energy to vibrancy is context collapse, a term that Alice Marwick and I coined long ago. When a social media site grows slow and steady, it starts out for each user as a coherent context. Things get dicy over time as people struggle to figure out how to navigate divergent networks. But... See more

but whether parasocial content is desirable or not, it points to a growing crisis on the internet: So much of what we encounter online just doesn’t matter , and even worse, offers no mechanism for us to start caring about it. The average human living today sees more things they don’t care about in one week than a medieval peasant did in their entir... See more

In addition, perhaps there is a general limit to how far a single feed of random content arranged algorithmically can go before we suffer pure consumption exhaustion. Perhaps seeing curated snapshots from everyone will finally push us all to the breaking point of jealousy and FOMO and, across a large enough number of users, an asymptote will emerge... See more