Ask HN: What are unintended consequences of new tech you've noticed?
Internet usage starts with users querying information they want, and services learning&#x2F;adapting to deliver information in a format&#x2F;context based on their activity. This has created some stellar search tools, a personalized network of services and communities available to people, and made the internet a paradise for new content from all over the world.<p>Despite that all the information in the world is available to us, we only seek out what we want to see&#x2F;hear&#x2F;read and then get fed new information based on those queries. It doesn&#x27;t lead to free exchange of ideas and values, it has created polarized societies where we are digitally segregated by our own sense of identity and community.<p>People talk a lot about the political side of this, the &quot;echo chambers&quot; online. But I think it&#x27;s worse than that. We see racial segregation on Twitter, feedback loops of content on YouTube that reinforce themselves, news outlets tailoring their content for users that reach them from their own site and optimizing for usage metrics that feed usage metrics... and we all are in love with it.<p>It reminds me of <i>Farenheit 451</i> in the sense that this almost-dystopia wasn&#x27;t created by some fascist dictator or single-party state; we built it ourselves. We wanted it.<p>That&#x27;s not to say there isn&#x27;t beauty on the internet, and we live in an era where more people talk and share and love and fight more than ever with language and ideas. It&#x27;s just a strange departure from where most futurists thought we were going to be.