You may have witnessed feedback in a concert or when your speaker output in a live chat feeds back into your microphone input. A high pitched noise slowly gets louder, then raises exponentially until someone pulls the plug and suddenly a breakdown of signal strength occurs.
You have experienced a bubble.
Being a designer of digital filters, I want to raise awareness of how destructive these bubbles may be to democracy and diversity of opinions - contributing to instability and irrationality.
Stockmarkets, search ranking algos, facebook likes, reddit/mastodon upvoting, opinion polls, “news” in general - all have their respective feedback channels built in.
Feedback is established when past voting results (or price feeds) are visible to those voting in the future.
This may seem benign. It is not. It creates a exponential response. It risks getting chaotic and tends toward bifurcations/splitting. The complexity of not one but many such feedback channels will be explored next.
Pump 'n Dump
Of course, it works the other way round, called Pump 'n Dump.
Example: The great btc God-Candle-FOMO
Some clever guy tweeted on the account of a well known fishface he’d approve the long awaited btc etf. Prices went parabolic, Grayscale dumped and the bad-bad hacker COUGH COUGH was awarded the golden cross for the best crypto bro pump since the invention of Tether.