[baxtr]

Not refuting your point, just want to point out that I can think of many other isolating experiences like:

- reading a newspaper/books

- binge watching Netflix

- refreshing HN every 2 minutes

I’m not sure that’s a specific aspect of social media.

[jchw]

The interesting thing about reading a newspaper or book, though, is that it is the same for everyone. So you can feel a sort of connection to others who are or have also done this. I think this is also a good explanation for why it's so easy for people to bond over things like sports.

Same for Hacker News and older bulletin board style forums: it's largely the same experience for everyone (at least at any given moment). When you load the frontpage, it's roughly the same stories at the top for everyone (sans whatever you've manually hidden, of course.)

Social media isn't completely different, but it sure is weirder, especially with algorithmic feeds. I don't use social media anymore, but sometimes when I would talk with friends it would become apparent that the posts that were surfacing for them were completely different than the ones surfacing for me, which gave us very different ideas of what the general feeling on some issues was. I think this probably amplifies the living shit out of false pluralities.

[nine_k]

The idea is that your newsfeed eventually becomes uniquely tailored to you.

Of course it contains posts that may be shared widely and thus unifying, or posts from your close friends and relatives and thus also unifying in a way. This is not a given though, and the context of your newsfeed is effectively unique.

This is one of the reasons community feeds exist, which are the same for the members of a community and thus somehow unifying, around a topic of interest.

[Syonyk]

I'm not sure I'd agree reading a book is isolating. At a minimum, you can (assuming a human author...) "get inside the author's brain." Some books are better at this than others, certainly.

But even without that, look at the popularity of book discussions, book clubs, and things like that. Multiple people, reading the same book, at the same pace, and discussing it. That's the opposite of isolating, and is impossible to achieve with "personalized feeds." There's no common point to discuss.

And, as yet another example, have you ever read a book that someone else has marked up and taken notes in? Passing a book around a few friends, each with a different color pen to make notes, is certainly not isolating.

[Nevermark]

> I'm not sure I'd agree reading a book is isolating. At a minimum, you can (assuming a human author...) "get inside the author's brain."

I think that's it.

You are not connecting with "people", but you are connecting deeply with the highly concentrated (and presumably original and high quality) thoughts of one person.

Quality beats quantity for most types of relationships. We don't need lots of close friends, although that's great. But we really benefit from even one, two or three very close friends.

Social media increasingly isolating, full of dreck, and often shallow. But the last one, shallow, is not the problem the other two are. It is also healthy to maintain wider looser social circles.

[ljm]

I think there’s something quite cosy or comforting about simply enjoying the company of a friend with a book as well. Don’t even have to read the same thing, it’s just another way of spending time together and is anything but lonely or isolating.

Maybe it’s just one of those things that becomes more pleasant as you grow older and enjoy a more laid back pace, but I appreciate having those friends you can just chill with without really having to ‘do’ something or needing to fill the space with conversation. You’ve become close enough (not necessarily romantically) that you can just enjoy the presence.

[burningion]

Yeah, agreed. The essay I linked to adds the cost of choice for a medium against a potential reward too.