Rabbit Hole
Etymology
From the tunnel Alice falls down in Lewis Carroll’s 1865 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, long used for any disorienting descent. In the 2010s it acquired a specific algorithmic sense as video and social platforms learned to auto-suggest steadily more extreme or engrossing content. The old image of falling into another world fit the experience exactly.
noun phrase · /RAB-it hohl/
A self-reinforcing path of recommended content that pulls a user ever deeper into a topic or ideology.
What it names
How recommendation engines convert idle curiosity into hours of escalating consumption.
Example
One repair video and the autoplay rabbit hole had him watching conspiracy documentaries by midnight.
Related idea
A rabbit hole is the dynamic path; a filter bubble is the resulting state, an information environment narrowed to one’s existing interests.