“Link in Bio” Is a Slow Knife

But it’s not that innovation isn’t happening; it’s that innovation is improving only in the direction of the feed, encouraging the development of products that serve the structure of digital platforms, as Nigel Kabvina’s cooking videos do. The perfect piece of algorithmic culture, after all, is almost intentionally uninteresting. Its emptiness can

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Platforms today are double-edged swords for creators: creators rely on them to grow their audience, but also want to be able to reduce their dependence on them over time.

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

Social media, search, spam, recommendations — when faced with an abundance of information, we often find ourselves needing to separate wheat from the chaff. Many systems reach for stars, hearts, upvotes, and downvotes as quick fixes for user-generated quality signals. But what if we just used links?