# Trendism & cognitive stagnation

(This is a follow-up to Against Trendism)

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### Trendism & cognitive stagnation

(This is a follow-up to [Against Trendism](https://medium.com/@enkiv2/against-
trendism-how-to-defang-the-social-media-disinformation-complex-81a8e2635956))

Basing visibility on popularity is a uniquely awful version of ‘tyrrany of the
majority’ because uncommon views become invisible, even if, were they to start
on an even playing field, they would become popular.

In this way, it encourages mental stasis: since ranking is based on an
immediate appraisal of how popular something already is, and visibility is
based therefore on past shallow popularity, there’s no room for rumination.

This is NOT an attribute of ‘technology’ or ‘social media’, but an attribute
of visibility systems based on immediate ranking. Visibility systems based on
ranking delayed by, say, three days, or with the top 25% most popular posts
elided, would be fine.

Our capacity to imagine new possibilities is based largely on our familiarity
with the bounds of possibility space — we can only imagine views that are in
the neighborhood of views we’ve heard expressed in the past. So, making the
already-unpopular invisible limits imagination.

(There are hacks we can use to make it possible to imagine views nobody has
ever held. We can make random juxtapositions, impose meaning on them, and then
figure out a justification for them — like tarot reading. Or, we can merely
iterate from some basic idea, getting more and more extreme, while
internalizing the perspective of each iteration as something someone could
possibly believe in good faith. The former — the bibliomancy approach — is
common in experimental art, while the latter is typical of dystopian science
fiction.

But, these hacks are pretty limited. We need a starting place. If we’ve only
heard mainstream ideas, we’re going to have a hard time going off the beaten
path with the dystopia approach, while we will struggle with the bibliomancy
approach because most ideas can only be made to seem reasonable with the help
of other ideas. Getting into uncharted territories with either of these
approaches is difficult unless you’ve already filled out the middle of your
possibility space with other ideas, because in their absence you would need to
independently reinvent them.)

This is not a justification, in of itself, for banning metrics entirely. After
all, this kind of exponential distribution happens with ideas even without the
use of popularity signifiers: ideas spread, and popular ideas have more
opportunities to spread. Trendism merely accelerates the process and widens
the gap between the most popular ideas and everything else.

Sites like reddit use segmentation to prevent total ordering of popularity
from dominating, although this ultimately means that [popular subreddits have
a disproportionate impact on this total ordering when it is
seen](http://redditp.com/r/all). Similarly, we have seen piecemeal attempts to
limit the effects of trendism for particular topics — the curation of trending
topics at twitter and facebook, for instance, or ad-hoc ranking demerits for
particular tags on lobste.rs.

However, we could be applying the measurements we already take to counteract
trendism rather than accelerating it: making popularity count less the higher
it gets, removing overly-popular content entirely, boosting the visibility of
mostly-unseen content, using information about organic reach in sites like
twitter to boost the synthetic reach of people who don’t have many followers
(instead of boosting the synthetic reach of the rich), systematically demoting
posts that comment on trending topics, spotlighting spotify tracks and youtube
videos with zero views, and so on.

Where trendism devalues the function of recommendation systems as novelty
aggregators, these tools could be modified to be anti-trendist, pro-novelty,
and promote a cosmopolitanism that broadens our horizons in ways traditional
word-of-mouth never could. This is a unique capacity of recommendation systems
over curators: recommendation systems can recommend things nobody has ever
seen, and can recommend them on the grounds that nobody has seen them.

By [John Ohno](https://medium.com/@enkiv2) on [May 26,
2018](https://medium.com/p/21c8e003df83).

[Canonical link](https://medium.com/@enkiv2/trendism-cognitive-
stagnation-21c8e003df83)

Exported from [Medium](https://medium.com) on September 18, 2020.