and the usual social media outlets don't let us tailor what we post to particular audiences.

I used to have friends that I could talk politics with, and other friends that I knew I shouldn't try to talk politics with --- it's a waste of time, and just causes tension for everyone.

But nowadays, we hold on to friends in far-flung places thanks to social media. That's great, but it does mean that if anyone wants to talk politics, they do so with everybody they know, including the people they wouldn't have brought these things up with before.

I've lost friends from way, way, way back, when they said things meant for their right-wing crazy friends and facebook didn't know not to show them to me. And I'm sure it's gone the other way. I also have some cousins who I love --- really bohemian, artsy, and smart people. They fervently supported Bernie Sanders in '16 and when he lost they ended up going all in for Jill Stein. That didn't go well between us and we haven't really communicated since. As far as I know we're still basically cool, but I don't really know because we haven't spoken since an OKP-style argument just after election day. And whether we're cool or not, we certainly don't respect one another like we once did.

The funny thing is, people talk about "social media bubbles." (I talk about them a lot, and find them very troubling.) But ironically, this is an example of social media refusing to respect the bubbles that people have always put up in their regular social lives since long before the internet.

Everybody's more open than they used to be, because the technology has forced it on them. And because we haven't generally recalibrated around it, everybody seems more radical than they used to seem.

I'm reminded of the "killer feature" of Google+, back when Google+ existed. You could divide your contacts up into groups (I think they were called "circles" or something), and address particular comments to particular circles. I remember people talking about how revolutionary that was and that it would change the structure of social media. But of course, facebook had won that war before Google+ even came to be. Now that that's all in the distant past, I'm a little surprised that FB, twitter, etc. haven't implemented something like that. It seems like an easy fix for one of the major flaws of the medium.