alt Hacker News> Anyone being able to directly reach anyone is a massive change from the gate-kept pre-internet media landscape.
Sure, but how are we supposed to disentangle this change from the concurrent growth of algorithmic feeds driving what people see? I have no doubt that democratization of communication would have social effects on its own, but we don't really know what those would be sans the simultaneous centralizing effect that dominant social media companies impose.
I think it's pretty easy to see on the face of it that a direct access for anyone to potentially reach everyone is a massive change from a system where that gets filtered through media companies. We don't really have to decide how much of which effect we attribute to that it's a fundamental reordering of the ecosystem of media production and consumption.
It was even easier before genAI and NLP where you could reliably say they're not really putting forward precise variants of genres because there just wasn't the capability of distinguishing (and still to this day I think they'd have trouble) genuine vs bait versions of videos. I think people want to believe the algorithm is more manipulated than it is generally because it serves a bunch of junk and it's more appealing to believe it's being pushed rather than that's just what people consume a lot of.
For a completely anecdotal bit of anecdata I've had good luck over the years with stuff like the Youtube algorithm because I've been fairly judicious with the "don't show me this" button(s) and I habitually watch stuff I know is pure junk food in an incognito window instead of on my 'main' feed.