LogFAQs > #976808072

metralo posted...

what specifically do you think changed?

Places like twitter/facebook where "engagement" was the driving force for profit made conflict in discourse much more incentivized.

If you are spammed the worst takes by the most upsetting people you are going to lose your patience and start assuming that everybody is as dense as the dumbest people in your feed. So financial incentives pushed people in divisive directions and contributed to the election of further divisive individuals.

It's an engagement aka conflict feedback loop, and things like wokeness played a part in that. Small group of people get "outraged" for shallow contextless reasons, there's a backlash to it, there's a backlash to the backlash, social media acts like it's the most important thing in the world because it gets clicks and then some episode of a show is removed or somebody's career is ruined. And then the whole discourse continues to get worse and more divisive.