[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.