With these attributes, the Viral Editor should improve conversation, content, and even participants themselves. Regardless of all the nonsense and filth posted online, people generally want to put their better selves forward. The mechanism should be tuned to improve everything it touches.

Alas, that’s not how things have unfolded. That analysis of the Viral Editor may have seemed plausible in an era of Internet romanticism, when citizen journalism still dominated digital engagement. But with the rise of social-media platforms came a different and automated mechanism for determining relevance: algorithms. …

People still select and deliver important content to one another, but content no longer takes the form of logical statements with truth-values that can be tested against the absolute truth. Instead, content becomes a vehicle for the expression of emotional attitudes. The automatic means of reaction, such as likes and reposts, on social media do not require logical deliberation. Under such a design, the point is to express the right attitude, not to convey true information.

[This is the main reason I have all but stopped engaging in debate on Twitter. I use it mainly for friendly conversation, water-cooler talk, and promoting content at Hot Air. You can’t effectively make an argument on Twitter, because Twitter (and Facebook to a lesser degree) is all about reaction rather than rationality. One of the more persistent of my critics often doesn’t even bother to read the posts, so he ends up arguing about either (a) something I already covered, or (b) non-sequiturs to my point. I prefer to let the writing here do the arguing. — Ed]