Why The Algorithm Hates Clean Language

The internet has gone bad. It’s full of vicious extremes and nasty arguments. That’s not an accident - it’s driven by commercial interests.

Big Tech could change things with the press of a button. But so far, they haven’t.

I wish that was conspiracy theory. But it isn’t. (Here’s the research.)

The machine loves extremes.

Political extremes are what gets noticed, but the same pattern can play out in slightly less obvious ways.

For example, online reviews are being pushed towards 5* or 1*, with nothing in between.

The same pattern is behind the loss of meaningful discussions in comments threads. LinkedIn and Facebook much prefer users to get angry than to think for themselves and explore other people’s positions.

Nuance is bad for the algorithm’s business, because it can’t be counted, ranked, or monetised.

Which makes this a challenging time to be advocating for Clean Language, which is a way of teasing out the nuances of individual meaning that make humans fascinatingly different.

Asking “What kind of X?” can produce exactly the kind of answer that a recommendation engine has no idea what to do with.

Asking yourself “What would I like to happen?” gets you thinking about desired outcomes, not problems… which in turn can lead you to move away from the algorithm’s anxiety-generating money-makers.

“And is there anything else about X?” is an invitation to think more deeply, more broadly and more interestingly about a topic: just what the machine doesn’t want you to do.

That’s why the algorithm hates Clean Language.

And, here’s a twist. A Clean Language question is built around another person’s words - the “X” in “What kind of X?”. You need something to ask about - and ideally that something is an honestly-held, non-extreme point of view that the person is willing to explore and discuss.

Powered by the algorithm, those kinds of points of view are getting rarer. They are not only vanishing in public online spaces (where expressing a nuanced position on one of a long list of topics can call down a rain of trolls, so people don’t bother).

I notice that it’s spilling into the “real” world, too. More and more people just hold forth, as if their own opinion (which they perceive as fact) is the only one that counts.

How might we start to bring back nuance?

The anti-algorithm revolution needs both the power of Clean Language questions, and the willingness to say stuff transparently.

If it starts here… what do you think and feel about what I’ve written above? And what questions do you have for me?