Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

I think this is a great overview of how the modern internet works to filter and manage content. If you work in the space and you know how this stuff works, there's nothing groundbreaking.

I enjoyed the tail section about DJs and the last vestiges of human-led curation.

I would have liked to see an exploration of the rise and fall of modern internet human-curated sites like StumbleUpon, Digg and Reddit. There are still convergences and flattening of culture as power is concentrated (c.f. u/GallowBoob).

A nice counterpoint might be yCombinator's hackernews which is intentionally slower, manually moderated and strictly enforced community guidelines.

Post-publication of this book, we've also seen a rise in burgeoning, decentralized social networks like Mastodon, Lemmy or similar platforms-as-a-service creating their own niche communities