> ... social media freeing people from the norms of polite society, which turned out to be load-bearing. I'm the first to acknowledge human nature has a dark s

> ... social media freeing people from the norms of polite society, which turned out to be load-bearing. I'm the first to acknowledge human nature has a dark side to it, but I think this phenomenon is heavily tech driven. These problems weren't so bad back when mailing lists and forums were the predominant modes of communication. We did still have issues back then, due to the flat-comment systems. In them, every man is an island, so you're routinely staking your reputation on everything you say, which is nuts. And commentary doesn't scale; comment sections are either dead, or overwhelmed. Once they're overwhelmed, people aren't getting their ideas noticed. We have a natural impulse to raise our voices to be heard, so we do that rhetorically. Social media makes it far, far worse, because beyond the problems of the flat-comment system, it has an incentives problem. They get paid for more user engagement. That leads them to prioritize content that drives user engagement, which means everyone is being rewarded for amping things up. And this is feedback loop is fully automated by AI.