The Flat Age

Algorithms define our age. Or rather, search and recommendation algorithms have brought the information age out of its childhood. We no longer need tree structures or hierarchy. Information can return to the shape of a network. We have entered the Flat Age.

The most popular app of the moment may well be Xiaohongshu, also known as RedNote. Leaving aside the careful cultivation of its friendly community, Xiaohongshu uses recommendation algorithms to help every interest find a sympathetic audience. The contrast with old-school forums and Reddit is striking. A traditional forum was divided into boards, each devoted to a particular subject, but the categories were necessarily broad. A general-purpose forum had to contain everything and could never classify it all in minute detail. Otherwise, a person had to wander from forum to forum in pursuit of different interests. Reddit took the idea a step further: almost any interest could have a subreddit of its own, making the categories infinitely divisible. I once thought that, with the right stewardship, this kind of product would always have a place on the internet. Now it seems that every subreddit still needs its borders maintained. Someone must decide what can and cannot be discussed, keep irrelevant posts from overwhelming the main conversation, and allocate scarce attention through pins, highlights, and other forms of promotion. In the end, only a small number of carefully tended communities truly flourish.

Recommendation and search algorithms changed all of this. Everything can now live in a single repository; no piece of content needs to make its home beneath a particular directory. All records are created equal. From the same forest, every user receives an independent, personalized view. There are now, quite literally, as many Hamlets as there are readers. It was a great innovation, and its success has been unprecedented.

This is more than the success of a handful of products. It is the turning of an age. Beyond online communities, note-taking has undergone the same transformation. At first, every popular notes app—OneNote, Evernote, Notion—adopted the folder as its organizing principle: hierarchy, a layered structure assigning every item to a category. People who enjoyed organizing made thirty or fifty categories; those who did not made three or five. In the beginning, 90 percent of the effort went into the content and 10 percent into maintaining the structure. Later, as the directory grew more elaborate, 90 percent went into maintaining the structure and only 10 percent remained for the content. On it went, dividing everything into fifty categories, until the edifice collapsed, until the password was forgotten.

Then a savior appeared. Roam Research revived the Zettelkasten method and told us that the linear organization of traditional notes had never resembled the way our minds worked. A piece of content is a point; our notes should exist as a network. A personal network is far smaller than the internet—small enough to need no recommendation algorithm. Hyperlinks between notes are sufficient. Countless people fell in love with Obsidian, built on this idea. Perhaps it has not conquered the world yet. Perhaps it is only a matter of time.

Xiaohongshu. Obsidian. Xiaohongshu may simply be an enormous Obsidian. Perhaps algorithms do not define our age after all. Perhaps the ideas set in motion by algorithms do. We no longer need to build one meticulously tiered pagoda after another. As people become atomized, thought too has entered the Flat Age.