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This is my first exposure to this idea and it’s quite compelling. Couple that with the perceived tone being argumentative instead of inquisitive or ignorant and that’s a recipe for disaster.
The fact the algorithms only care about engagement, positive or negative, means rage bait takes over too so that doesn’t help the perception that a question is actually an attack.
I first heard about it due to my buddy (a high school English teacher) complaining about how his incoming students were incredibly far behind in basic reading comprehension skills. We ended up having a pretty long talk about it, and he mentioned that all of his colleagues have noticed the same thing.
I did some digging, and discovered that language teachers everywhere have basically been lamenting the fact that the upcoming generation just straight up doesn’t know how to interpret media when it falls outside of their personal algorithms. I ended up talking with another buddy of mine (a writer for a magazine) and he mentioned that they have started needing to change the way they write, because people have simply lost the ability to comprehend what they read. Skimming the first one or two paragraphs is the new norm, even for in-depth news articles. So they have to load as much content into the early paragraphs as possible.
