I think part of the issue is that our exposure to other people (and other people's opinions) has increased, but our perception of their importance hasn't decrea

I think part of the issue is that our exposure to other people (and other people's opinions) has increased, but our perception of their importance hasn't decreased. Pre-massive-interconnectedness, if you do something good, 9 people say nice things, 1 person says mean things. That gives you a good signal that you're doing something right. These days it's 90/10 or 9000/1000. The signal is still the same, it's only the scale that's different. But we don't – maybe can't – feel that way. 1000 people calling you names feels terrible even if that's a tiny proportion of the whole. To feel otherwise would mean scaling the value of each individual opinion, each person, down to an insignificant level. Numbers like upvote counts are pretty good for that, it's hard to picture the human life behind each click when all you see is (+200). But messages, even short ones, leave a lot of the human in there. Of course, even if we could consistently eliminate the human importance of messages we receive, I'm not sure that would leave us better off. It's hard to believe that what internet discourse needs is less humanity. Maybe a way to do it would be to representatively sample the messages. So you turn the 9000/1000 back into 9/1 by merely deleting 99.9% of messages as they come in. That feels a bit unjust, like your message is arbitrarily thrown away as soon as you write it, but in a de facto way that's probably similar to how messages get filtered now. Another alternative would be to summarise each kind of message with a number attached to it indicating how many people said a similar thing. It would be possible, though not easy, to do that automatically if you designed your whole system around it. Reddit kinda sorta works this way, and I know political types use a similar process to manage constituents' opinions. One thing seems obvious to me, though: we want massive connectedness and scale, we want everyone to feel like their individual voice is heard, and we want to not be crushed by impossibly massive waves of human noise. I don't think we can have all three.