If you’ve ever used a Kindle, you may have noticed the “other people highlighted this passage” message as you read. It’s similar to how Medium handles its highlighting feature. It serves to call out what other people found popular, presumably to help you identify the key points and quotes from the book.
But by highlighting popular passages, this simply reinforces those same passages to receive even more highlights.
Other than seeing what other people thought was profound, I don’t think this social sharing of highlights does much good.
Reading should be about forming your own opinions about the work – the availability of these highlights instead has you leaning on what others found valuable (or rather, what others found others found profound).
Rather than simply reinforce what’s already popular, you can fortunately disable this functionality I’ve discovered. Just go to Settings > Reading Options > Highlights and then disable the “Popular Highlights” option.
Not everything in our world needs to be loaded with social recommendations. Here’s to a more focused, independent reading experience.