When a system optimizes faster than it can preserve context, fidelity to reality starts to slip.
Examples are everywhere. Social feeds tighten around whatever drives engagement, and the range of content shrinks until everything feels like a remix of itself. Customer support flows become friendlier but less helpful because the metric rewards tone over resolution. Helpful AI assistants become smoother and more cautious while quietly dropping specificity. Even individual users fall into it, once you learn what works, your online behavior slowly converges toward the safest version of yourself.
Nothing catastrophic happens. The system still functions. But the texture that made it feel real gradually thins out. You get efficiency without depth, volume without variety. That gap between what the system optimizes for and what humans actually experience is where the drift shows up.
Curious how others here think about this pattern, or whether you’ve seen better language for describing it across domains.
sunscream89•3mo ago
Something must come along that devours or is devoured. That is the natural progression.
You have touched upon something no doubt. There is a natural rule that nothing good lasts forever, and it leaves things to those of us who will try to get a good decade in here and there.
Appreciate what you have before it’s depleted. You never know who will bankrupt themselves next, or will rise from obscurity to give us just what we want and need, before that too fades to our oblivion.
realitydrift•3mo ago