It's also a smaller distance to close to find common ground in meatspace than online. In physical spaces, you gain a ton of information about social connections

It's also a smaller distance to close to find common ground in meatspace than online. In physical spaces, you gain a ton of information about social connections and interests just by who's where. If I'm at an academic conference (the regular in-person kind), odds are very high that the other attendees have similar esoteric research interests to mine. And if I see a friend talking to someone who's a stranger to me, it's likely that "stranger" is only two degrees of separation from me. >That isn’t possible at scale because there is no common ground at scale. And online, everything is at scale. You are definitely talking to everyone. The term for this is context collapse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse