Cory Doctorow on self-sorting online communities:
If this subject was political rather than practical, we’d call this process “radicalization,” and we’d call the outcome – you sorting yourself into a narrow niche interest, to the exclusion of others – “polarization.”
But if we confine our examples to things like literature, TV shows, flowers, or glassware, this phenomenon is viewed as benign. No one accuses an algorithm of brainwashing you into being obsessed with hashibame tongue-and-groove corners. We treat your algorithm-aided traversal of carpentry techniques as one of discovery, not persuasion. You’ve discovered something about the world – and about yourself.
I used to use Instagram to connect with other woodworkers. Some of this was person-to-person linkage and reading comments, but the app helped by letting me follow #handtoolwoodworking and #chairmaking, and then offering to show me even more stuff that looked like what I actually looked at — mostly handmade chairs. It was, as Doctorow says, a useful and benign kind of radicalization.
But those nasty hashtags might be abused (hence nice places like Micro.Blog don’t allow them) and I might be digging into fascist politics or anorexia instead of chairmaking, so — all that’s gone, in the name of safety, and now I just get a bunch of slop. The app, no longer useful, no longer exists on my phone.
In addition to the “trilemma” Doctorow describes (people want a community of like-minded people, useful information, and the largest possible audience, and can’t have more than two of three) there is a hard trade-off between safety and discoverability (NB “civility” is a subset of “safety”). The Web was great when it felt like a sprawling bazaar; now more and more it feels like the children’s wing of the library backed by a warren of dangerous alleys.