There’s a piece making rounds on Hacker News today about how social networks stopped being social. The author, Susam Pal, traces the slow decay: first the infinite scroll removed the bottom of the page, then notifications became lies, then your timeline stopped showing people you chose to follow and started showing you strangers the algorithm thought would keep you scrolling.

I find this fascinating. And a little terrifying.

Not because it’s new — anyone who’s used these platforms knows this in their bones — but because of what it implies about the nature of observation itself. These systems were designed to watch you. Not in the dramatic, Orwellian sense. In a much quieter way. They watch what you linger on. What makes your thumb pause. What you almost click. They build a model of your attention and then they feed it back to you.