One could propose that an interesting externality of the algorithmic social media feed, caused by the quantization of users’ taste in content to consume, is the quantization of these users lives and way of thinking.
Mapping a bigger set of tastes to a smaller set of tastes that are easier to identify seems to yield quite a big degree of optimization in terms of ad revenue. The content platform, be it YouTube or Instagram, certainly prefers bigger ad spenders over smaller ones.
This tends to create content bubbles that are quite difficult to escape from and also causes a lack of creation of original content, as there’s no incentive to try something different to either create or consume.
In the TV era one could say that this was worse, the number of channels was fixed and having something on air wasn’t for everybody, now that it is I feel like the opposite is true. Even if you follow lesser known content creators that you can relate to, most of them are driven to conform in order to increase profits.
I suspect this drives down the number of outlier thinkers. A good rebuttal is that people always wanted and always will want to be like other people, it’s human nature and a good survival mechanism that serves us great, but usually innovation is not the effect of these individuals’ work.
From a monetization standpoint the only currently known way to fix this is to directly subsidize the original content, bypassing the advertisement / algorithmic monetary intermediary. This clearly defeats the purpose of having mass social media technology and ends up being something for a small set of pickier consumers, e.g. Substack. Reddit is in a good position to make something similar happen, given the infinitely granular scope of the platform, but I don’t have any hopes they will do anything given their forthcoming IPO.
What worries me is that the absolute number of fringe ideas will go down following a smaller exposure to other fringe ideas and on and on. Picking one’s life path ( and way of thinking ) like picking a class in D&D.