How "the algorithm" shapes public discourse...
The Past:
1. Someone makes content.
2. Content is appealing to their followers.
3. Followers disseminate the content and if more people like it, it becomes more popular.
4. Content becomes trending and trending therefore becomes an accurate representor of popularity.
Today:
1. Someone makes content.
2. Content is appealing to their followers.
3. Followers attempt to disseminate content, but because there is now a robotic proxy the transmission never carries through.
4. Algorithm decides to promote something else because it works off of positive reinforcement cycles. Instead of promoting artistically risky opinions or content, it just goes with what sells over and over again.
5. Many people are perpetually exposed to the same content repeatedly.
6. What is trending now no longer becomes representative of what is popular, but instead what a robot thinks sells.
7. Discourse becomes monochromatic.
Censorship exists to keep people working as individuals. Even if the majority believes something is wrong, if they can't communicate, they have no way of working together. The longer the majority grows unheard, the more resentful and vindictive they become.
While modern technology is flawed and people seek to exploit those flaws to gain power and prevent their opponents from having platforms, those flaws are only temporary.
What happens when the resentful, angry majority are finally able to communicate and wield an audience again? Does all of that resentment magically subside? Or does it erupt?
Nobody is obligated to engage in rational thought and reason, and this is an important premise to understand when trying to analyze the prevailing culture of online debate.
We think that because of advancements in science and technology, people have a universal appreciation of science, but the truth is what people really value is results. They enjoy things that have the sticker label of "science" or "truth" slapped on it without really knowing what it means.
I see this all the time at my university. Credentials triumph reason and shutdown meaningful discussion.
Although many people fight viciously to end this supposed dark age of internet information, it is actually an interesting moment to learn from that may never come back again. We are a part of the apparatus of a globalized social experiment: What happens when we remove the requirement for people to think rationally?
Well, it turns out that most people will just do what is profitable or appeals to their emotions the best. The important thing to know is critical thinking is not the natural state of human psychology.
We just lived through an era where critical thinking fell out of fashion, not by volition, but by force. Popular truth-speakers would be removed off the internet, and because these opinions were no longer in the face of many people, they stopped thinking critically because they realized they could attack the platform and not the message.
What makes NOSTR unique is everyone is entitled to the right to captivate an audience, irrespective of their opinion. These people can't do that anymore. They have to silence bad ideas with better ones, and even worse it backfired.
Decentralized platforms would have never gained popularity if there weren't a necessity for them to be built. By the ideas of the free-market, it would have made sense that many social media platforms enforce free speech as it invites all sorts of audiences and businesses.
However economic incentives are a more unstable system than those engineered by cryptographic guarantees and mathematical principles.
My prediction? In a couple years, this censorship tirade will fail catastrophically. The free internet will not only be accelerated because of its attempt, but now become popularized.
People with various opinions will once again be able to establish audiences and platforms, and now that those opinions that have once been suppressed gain popularity again, everyone will have no choice but to address their message rather than silence them.
Debate and critical thinking will return to the internet, and people will once again be forced to face reality and rationality rather than hide under their unchallenged ideas.
When you have the ability to deplatform, censor, or shadowban someone in any way shape or form, you don't actually have to engage in the discussion. You're bigger than them: you can just shut them up and save yourself the headache.
Will you win in the short term? Of course, because the idea is still there all you did was sweep it under the rug.
When you don't have any of these tools at your disposal, all of those ideas come out of the rug and your only choice is to engage in discussion and speak rhetorically. You are forced to learn to be persuasive, forced to learn to make a logical argument, and forced to understand the other person's perspective in order to refute it.
This dichotomy is a causal link. If you're in a part of the internet and no real discussion is happening, it's because someone has power over the other.
Dislikes should be normalized on NOSTR. Hear me out. Removing dislikes from forms of content first happened at around the same time YouTube started removing them. Since then, people have been less and less able to communicate their dissatisfaction and this has led to more polarization.
The idea behind removing dislikes is because we are a polite society and we don't want toxicity. The issues with this is now you have the opposite which is toxicity but in forms of virtue signaling.
Toxicity is necessary and often times the litmus test for a free and open platform. We may not like it, but we have to recognize its place in general communication and subsequently social media.