One of the most useful concepts for understanding why social networks so often drive us to despair is context collapse: taking multiple audiences with different norms, standards, and levels of knowledge, and herding them all into a single digital space to coexist. Predictably, this regularly leads to conflict — and, at the scale of an entire countr... See more

A flock of birds has the astonishing ability to travel together and shift course without the individual birds bumping into one another. They do it, scientists have learned, because each bird follows three simple rules: maintain minimum distance between you and the neighboring bird; fly at the same speed as your neighbor; always fly toward the cente

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That experiment failed. Humanity does not want to be a global hive mind. We are not rational Bayesian updaters who will eventually reach agreement; when we receive the same information,  it tends to polarize us  rather than unite us. Getting screamed at and insulted by people who disagree with you doesn’t take you out of your filter bubb

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This was the overwhelming lesson of the early internet. It works because it mirrors the social interaction of real life, where social groups exclude people who don’t fit in. And it works because it distributes the task of policing the internet to a vast number of volunteers, who provide the free labor of keeping forums fun, because to them maintai

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