I am more and more convinced that the Internet is a net negative for discourse and human socialisation, and no one is really exploring this possibility. We are all trying to make the social media experiment work and I am horrified by its result. The more we tweak and add to it (upvotes, user moderators, likes, retweets, the Algorithm), the worse it gets.

We're so used to the fast pace of modern science that we forget cultural evolution sometimes takes hundreds of years. What if we are 500 years before enough Internet philosophers have taught us how to behave online?