Weird&hateful conspiracy stuff existed back in the Usenet days too.
I like the move from the huge silos Twitter, Insta, Facebook and similar back to forums and mailing lists for purps of a resistance to being exploited commercially, but, we're not going to become immune to polarization and the echo chamber effect. That part might even get worse.
Agreed, and that will always be the case. The critical difference is that in those other methods all input is from other humans and we all see the same thing. What FB has done is perfect the algorithms that magnify biases by detecting those (or even just our interests), and literally showing each of us a different reality.
Weird&hateful conspiracy stuff existed back in the Usenet days too.
It did, but it was only accessible to techies and university students until 1993, and until the Eternal September newbies arrived in sufficiently small numbers that they could be acculturated and encouraged to view the kooks' postings with appopriate skepticism.