[marbletiles]

I think the problem is exactly the opposite: people are now getting way too much of the content they can’t help but like, and that in way too many cases turns out to be deliberately polarising and extreme content.

The marketplace of ideas no more leads to good content choices than the marketplace of food leads to healthy eating.

[stcredzero]

(EDIT:

I think the problem is exactly the opposite: people are now getting way too much of the content they can’t help but like, and that in way too many cases turns out to be deliberately polarising and extreme content.

In the long run, that works out like the children's story where the young girl gets to decide she'll eat nothing, ever, but peanut butter and jelly. If it's stupid nonsense, then most people eventually figure that out, and you're left with a fringe and ironic onlookers. Hell, if they left Alex Jones alone, he'd just have wound up being the 2019 version of The Weekly World News. Eventually, his viewership would have devolved to sundry weirdo plus college students watching him while playing a drinking game.

As it is now, big tech has fueled his conspiracy narratives by engaging in behavior that looks an awful lot like a cabal of big tech colluding as in a Sci-fi dystopian movie.)

The marketplace of ideas no more leads to good content choices than the marketplace of food leads to healthy eating.

Over time, the marketplace of ideas has lead to wealth, freedom, and public health unprecedented in all of human history.

[fzeroracer]

Contributing all of that to the 'marketplace of ideas' is ultimately a fallacious remark. It cannot be proven or disproven because it casts a net so wide that it reaches absurdity.

It's placing two points far apart in history and trying to point at one thing as being responsible for all of it.

[jimmy1]

We give content personalization far too much credit for the modern issue of both social and political polarization, it is much more fundamental. We've had "filter bubbles" since the dawn of civilization -- in fact it's where those concepts come from: tribal thinking / group thinking.

The mistake I see made time and time again is when we believe we are more rational than we really are! It's an evolutionary battle we are fighting, and evolution had a big head start.

[BigBlueBanjo]

You can argue that when given a choice, many people make the wrong one. However this is better than having the government make the wrong choice for you.