It used to be if you wanted to talk on the Internet you might encounter a dissenting opinion.

Luckily, we’ve made it really easy to filter the ideas and opinions we hear to better match exactly those that we have and agree with (or Like^TM).

If you sat in IRC long enough and weren’t just idling you would pretty quickly hear a wide spectrum of thoughts about whatever words you were putting in that little chat box. You couldn’t unfriend someone or downvote their comment anonymously, it was there. Sure, you could add them to your ignore list but the logistics of that were a little iffy. Suddenly your conversation would have intermittent gaps or strange responses to seemingly nothing. And that kind of mattered. You were, after all, trying to participate in a conversation among a lot of people.

That’s the kind of thing that builds character. Like chopping firewood or kissing your grandma; sure there are robots to do it now, but that’s not doing you any favors.