Jack I agree with everything you’ve said but there is a caveat to the correct functioning of the wisdom of the crowd, which I don’t see in your excerpt of Wikipedia. The caveat is clear visibility to all people, of the whole picture, i.e. visibility of the whole truth.

I believe that the crowd is an excellent discriminator of what is truth, provided they are presented equally with an unbiased view of the evidence.

As we can see, profit driven platforms, including Medium, don’t do that, because to do so would impact the revenue available to the platform.

The platform presents new stories to each reader prioritised on what the the reader is most likely to react to, which is either what they love or hate, rather than something they might never have read about before.

Despite all of that, I think we can see that there is a general enlightment underway. The crowd is still more clever than the algorithms created to manipulate them for profit, in general, I believe.

So the truth is propagating, just much more slowly than it might do in an ideal system.

Medium for me also is far from ideal, but I think it is about as good as it gets, as far as profit driven platforms go.

I have faith that at some point in the very near future, the gate to unlimited revenue for all people, from free power (from the sun) will be unlocked, and will open. After that, there will be no further reason to distort truth, and our development as a species will leap onto a new phase.