Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language

by Adam Aleksic

If a post is shared 20 percent less, it’s going to be seen not by 20 percent fewer people but by 90 percent fewer, because fewer people will even be given the chance to share it in the first place.[6] On video platforms, this 20 percent difference determines whether a video gets a hundred thousand or a million views, and that’s before we consider human behavior in information cascades.

All families speak in unique familects—intimate registers of communication characterized by certain words or expressions only recognizable to that family—and all romantic partners teach each other a secret language that can’t be spoken with anyone else.[*1]