How to boil a frog

On how the meaningless nature of web links and gradualism Q-ize people without them noticing it.

From my medium article Chrome’s “Link to Highlight”. . .wait, don’t go just yet!

Although links approach meaninglessness — they mark connections, not relations except in the most mundane sense of the word — their lack of meaning has some unfortunate real-world effects that are used to gradually introduce people to extremism, like the apocryphal frog slowly brought to a boil. In the graph above, links remain the same as target content grows gradually more extreme. In this series of 10 links, the content starts out as not being extremist at all, but each link goes to a slightly more extreme target. Links are just links, though, not a relation but merely a connection, so the link to step ten has the same meaning as the link to step two. While the frog story is dubious, the principle holds in the world of content rather than temperature. The results of gradualism combined with the lack of meaning in links are just as deadly sometimes, though. The lack of meaning in the links serves as a cover that insulates some readers from what is going on as each step grows incrementally more extreme.

YouTube and other social media introduce algorithms compound gradualism by creating links on the fly with clickbait titles that extremists, spammers, scammers understood immediately. These are touted as Artificial Intelligence, but, as I show in another post, they just provide more and more of what you want to see on the premise that you want MOAR — that is, more of the same, but moreso.