10 ms·

This article is making a very important point. A lot of people thought that the internet would allow people to be confronted to different point of views, and as

by Jyaif 10y ago

This article is making a very important point. A lot of people thought that the internet would allow people to be confronted to different point of views, and as a result people would grow more tolerant and open minded. The opposite seems to happen: people are using the internet to be with people with the same beliefs, and this results in people being more certain about their beliefs. </rant> <entrepreneur> I'd love to see a product/social network that confront their users with opposite point of views.

crusso 10y ago
There are definitely vacuum chambers that form, but I'd be hesitant to generalize the overall effect. Does the increased access to points of view override the insular effect of seeking out like-minded thinkers? Additionally, is it all bad that some people find support on the Internet that allows them to become firmer in their beliefs? If a homosexual boy finds support on the Internet for his feelings that he otherwise doesn't get in his real-life social environment - is that a bad thing?
Klockan3 10y ago
> I'd love to see a product/social network that confront their users with opposite point of views. Debates tend to polarize people so it wont do much good.
- tremon 10y ago
  Good debates don't. Shouting matches, to which many unmoderated "debates" devolve, do.
hobs 10y ago
This would be the social media equivalent to eating your vegetables, while many people know they should, they probably wont, confronting your users is a simple way to get them to leave for more comfortable surroundings.
jerf 10y ago
The concept of "wisdom" is generally considered passe in the modern world, but it is becoming increasingly evident to me that we are going to have to develop some wisdom around a lot of our technology, and that a lot of our usage of it can be described as nothing less than "unwise". Unfortunately, I don't know what "wise use" of social media looks like. Personally, I don't use it at all, but freely acknowledge this may be overkill. It's just my current adaptation. Another example of what I mean is all the articles that pop up on HN about how the modern internet is destroying attention spans. How do we address that best? I'm not sure. I'm not sure anyone really knows. There's some people with some ideas, but I don't think we have enough people experimenting with pushing back against this to really know.
- klodolph 10y ago
  I don't think it's passé, just that we view the wisdom of previous ages in a generous light because we see them at their wisest.
  - jerf 10y ago
    That's how it works, though; it gets refined by time. The wisdom is not from "wise people", it's the stuff that survives, regardless of source. I think the concept has gone passé [1] because ~60 years ago we flipped to a youth-focused culture, and youth generally have little respect for wisdom. However, I'm not slagging on anybody for not knowing how to wisely use technology, because it does take time, and we haven't had much time! The best we could possibly be doing today is just considering the question, which is still better than not considering the question. I think there are a lot of people who would find the idea that there could be features of a social network that are "unwise" to use still a foreign concept. (Though I feel like certain aspects are starting to get into popular culture. The idea that Facebook can literally be depressing is starting to get out there, for instance.) And I wouldn't expect even tentative answers for another few years, minimum. It's a hard problem. [1]: Hey, if you're going to make it easy to copy & paste I will :)
    - klodolph 10y ago
justsaysmthng 10y ago
And this isn't happening just to our political views. In music, videos, movies, etc - the whole 'recommended for you' concept is a bit of a paradox, because after an initial seed, the algorithm starts to influence your preference and then feeds in on itself until it becomes the exclusive provider of content and generator of your preferences. After some time the line between 'recommended' and 'mandatory' becomes very thin - in theory you still can "just say no", but in reality we don't, because we like what we're being offered.
- reitanqild 10y ago
  Not entirely true: Spotify is hopeless. I train it by listening to high quality instrumental (i.e. no spoken words) music and it tries again and again to tell me I'd possibly like vocal music :-/ Whrn it comes to the music I use for work I'd like more bubble.
buro9 10y ago
> I'd love to see a product/social network that confront their users with opposite point of views. I've long believed that forums are this answer. Interests bring people together across political and geographical divides. I run cycling forums, some tech forums, and even had a startup called Microcosm to try and spread this benefit I really believe in more widely (it failed, there's a story, there is always a story). The things I think forums do best: 1. Bring people together around an interest, regardless of race, gender, class, wealth, and political or religious beliefs. 2. Because they bring people together, this frequently (especially when geographically centred) spills over into real life. Forums can be a cure for the modern disease of loneliness that cities spread. 3. Re-thinking political engagement and societal structures. Forums are able to model, test and implement on a small subset of a cross-section of society, various political systems. From dictatorships, through to shades of anarchy. In doing so they are able to imbue a sense of disenfranchisement, or ownership, or whatever... in the user of the forum. Crazily, in an age of social networks, I believe in the forums and the interest network as the obvious solution. I am perhaps wrong, my startup failed, but I still believe.
- tremon 10y ago
  But what you are describing is not a forum per se, it's "topic-specific" meeting place. That can be anything, from an irc channel to a closed mailing list. Twitter could do this with access-moderated hash tags, for example.
  - buro9 10y ago
    That is true. But... If one of the primary functions of a service/site/app is to organise relationships via a network of people... then that isn't suitable for this purpose. The core function needs to be organising around an interest (composed of 1 or more of: topic, place, time), and that core function is so strong that it shouldn't offer the secondary function of then networking around people. People are very good at backing into small groups, forming cliques and communicating privately. Of constructing the very bubbles that are the issue here. A system that puts interests first has to avoid this by not encouraging it. It will still happen, but it shouldn't be a primary function.
simonswords82 10y ago
> I'd love to see a product/social network that confront their users with opposite point of views. You mean https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview
- Jyaif 10y ago
  Yes!
splintercell 10y ago
I have thought about it too. Something like FilterBuster.io which analyses your Friendslist and tells you about your filter bubble rating, and then recommends friends of friends who might hold different viewpoints than you. Or maybe for MVP, a subreddit which does the same thing but manually.
ffggvv 10y ago
> I'd love to see a product/social network that confront their users with opposite point of views. Something like https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/ https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/ ? Indeed it is a fantastic idea for a site, but how can you hope for people to be open-minded when even HN is a big echo-chamber?
niftich 10y ago
> I'd love to see a product/social network that confront their users with opposite point of views. 4chan Strong opinions voiced a certain way will still probably devolve into a shouting match with crass language and potentially seething hate. But it's by definition not personal, as the responders are either responding to your points in earnest, or just trolling.
- hollerith 10y ago
  >4chan OK, then I'd like to see a social network that confronts their users with opposite points of view and is not routinely used by people to get off on pictures and videos of someone's being or having been maimed or killed.
- sevenless 10y ago
  I was going to say. That's probably the one place you can easily interact with conservative (racist, anti-gay, sexist, xenophobic, etc) views.
dang 10y ago
> I'd love to see a product/social network that confront their users with opposite point of views. It has dawned on me over time that HN is like this, mainly because there's a single front page, i.e. no subreddits into which people silo themselves. That means that on any divisive topic, anyone who feels strongly has comments in their face that they strongly dislike, and vice versa. (I wrote more about this downthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12003205 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12003205). This is not an entirely good thing. It's responsible for most of the conflict that happens here.
- IanCal 10y ago
  I would definitely not describe HN as a place I come to get opposite points of view. I'm actually really very surprised anyone would see it that way, can you elaborate at all on why you do?
  - Nadya 10y ago
    Dang is speaking about scenarios where there is no /r/ForHillary or /r/The_Donald to intermingle yourself with. You get both sides in one thread and are confronted with ideas that you may not agree with - or that you vehemently disagree with. Not that people "come to HN to see opposing views". Rather that they must see opposing views when browsing a thread. Then you get a bunch of conflict from both sides. As an example, HN often has socially-related posts that hit the front page, such as today's Voice Modulation in the Interview Process (not actual title). This gets people from two very different sides that are informally split, depending on who you ask, as "overly politically correct regressives" and "stupid racist [___]phobic bigots". A bunch of conflict that detracts from the study/topic happens when those two groups butt heads.
    - IanCal 10y ago
      You're assuming that there's a very wide range of people that visit HN, you can't get viewpoints from people that don't visit the site. I'd be surprised if a highly tech focused site called "hacker news" didn't have a strong bias towards certain demographics and viewpoints.
joelrunyon 10y ago
I remember when facebook & google were talking about personalization & knowing what you liked in order to show you more. People talked about it beforehand that it would create insular thinking - that people would only receive articles that already confirmed their biases. Seems that's happened :-/
zxcvvcxz 10y ago
Agreed. This reminds me of a related unexpected networking effect. I read a study that hypothesized that internet-enabled chat on mobile phones would distribute more messages across a more diverse set of one's friends and acquaintances. Instead, the study found the opposite: communication became more concentrated, with a greater proportion of communications going to a smaller subset of people. To analogize, messaging habits became "deeper" not "wider"; more extreme, not more diverse.
bogomipz 10y ago
Is it making fun of that though? The confirmation bias that Facebook has created is indeed scary. Now that they wan't to be your source for news this is really troubling. There's also another side to this which is is just a strange apathy that FB enables. People seem to think that ranting on FB to their friends of like mindedness somehow constitutes being an aware, informed and active citizen when all it is just a strange and sad malaise. There's a new tragedy? - quick change your profile pic to the flag of the country where said tragedy occurred - social responsibility fulfilled! Sure all news is biased to some extent that's why its important to get your news from multiple sources. However if I could only choose one I would take a newspaper with an editorial bias which allows me to at least see all the articles over something that chooses and filters that for me based on some mystical weighting.
omginternets 10y ago
>I'd love to see a product/social network that confront their users with opposite point of views. I'm with you, but I'm still looking for reliably high-quality reading suggestions. My Pocket feed is abysmal. I mention this because confronting someone with a poorly-reasoned argument is not good UX, especially when one disagrees with the content.
jdavis703 10y ago
I think Brigade (https://www.brigade.com/ https://www.brigade.com/) has the potential to be a social network that gives you both opposing views and your own views. However this will probably never be a mass-market social network, so it's impact on the democratic will probably be minimal.
sedachv 10y ago
> I'd love to see a product/social network that confront their users with opposite point of views. This kind of moral relativism is exactly part of the problem. Some positions are wrong no matter how many people believe in them. Things like Brexit happen exactly because we choose to tolerate things like religion, giving all the homophobes, creationists, conspiracy theorists, racists, math phobes, etc the idea that their world view is acceptable.
- x5n1 10y ago
  It's a difficult line to walk social justice warrior. At the end of the day it's a fact that religion sets up a psychology that is more positive than the mass psychology of the consumer civilization. That part of religion, a psychology that is resistant to the chaos and disappointment of the world is definitely something that's positive about religion and there are no alternatives in other discourses that are equivalent.
  - sedachv 10y ago
    > That part of religion, a psychology that is resistant to the chaos and disappointment of the world is definitely something that's positive about religion and there are no alternatives in other discourses that are equivalent. Have you heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism or are you trolling?
    - x5n1 10y ago
      Christianity is an the answer to Stoicism. Stoicism has no good news and prescribes suicide if you can't take it any more. Christianity promises Heaven.

by Jyaif 10y ago

crusso 10y ago

There are definitely vacuum chambers that form, but I'd be hesitant to generalize the overall effect. Does the increased access to points of view override the insular effect of seeking out like-minded thinkers? Additionally, is it all bad that some people find support on the Internet that allows them to become firmer in their beliefs? If a homosexual boy finds support on the Internet for his feelings that he otherwise doesn't get in his real-life social environment - is that a bad thing?

Klockan3 10y ago

> I'd love to see a product/social network that confront their users with opposite point of views. Debates tend to polarize people so it wont do much good.

tremon 10y ago
Good debates don't. Shouting matches, to which many unmoderated "debates" devolve, do.

hobs 10y ago

This would be the social media equivalent to eating your vegetables, while many people know they should, they probably wont, confronting your users is a simple way to get them to leave for more comfortable surroundings.

jerf 10y ago

The concept of "wisdom" is generally considered passe in the modern world, but it is becoming increasingly evident to me that we are going to have to develop some wisdom around a lot of our technology, and that a lot of our usage of it can be described as nothing less than "unwise". Unfortunately, I don't know what "wise use" of social media looks like. Personally, I don't use it at all, but freely acknowledge this may be overkill. It's just my current adaptation. Another example of what I mean is all the articles that pop up on HN about how the modern internet is destroying attention spans. How do we address that best? I'm not sure. I'm not sure anyone really knows. There's some people with some ideas, but I don't think we have enough people experimenting with pushing back against this to really know.

klodolph 10y ago
I don't think it's passé, just that we view the wisdom of previous ages in a generous light because we see them at their wisest.
- jerf 10y ago
  That's how it works, though; it gets refined by time. The wisdom is not from "wise people", it's the stuff that survives, regardless of source. I think the concept has gone passé [1] because ~60 years ago we flipped to a youth-focused culture, and youth generally have little respect for wisdom. However, I'm not slagging on anybody for not knowing how to wisely use technology, because it does take time, and we haven't had much time! The best we could possibly be doing today is just considering the question, which is still better than not considering the question. I think there are a lot of people who would find the idea that there could be features of a social network that are "unwise" to use still a foreign concept. (Though I feel like certain aspects are starting to get into popular culture. The idea that Facebook can literally be depressing is starting to get out there, for instance.) And I wouldn't expect even tentative answers for another few years, minimum. It's a hard problem. [1]: Hey, if you're going to make it easy to copy & paste I will :)
  - klodolph 10y ago

justsaysmthng 10y ago

And this isn't happening just to our political views. In music, videos, movies, etc - the whole 'recommended for you' concept is a bit of a paradox, because after an initial seed, the algorithm starts to influence your preference and then feeds in on itself until it becomes the exclusive provider of content and generator of your preferences. After some time the line between 'recommended' and 'mandatory' becomes very thin - in theory you still can "just say no", but in reality we don't, because we like what we're being offered.

reitanqild 10y ago
Not entirely true: Spotify is hopeless. I train it by listening to high quality instrumental (i.e. no spoken words) music and it tries again and again to tell me I'd possibly like vocal music :-/ Whrn it comes to the music I use for work I'd like more bubble.

buro9 10y ago

> I'd love to see a product/social network that confront their users with opposite point of views. I've long believed that forums are this answer. Interests bring people together across political and geographical divides. I run cycling forums, some tech forums, and even had a startup called Microcosm to try and spread this benefit I really believe in more widely (it failed, there's a story, there is always a story). The things I think forums do best: 1. Bring people together around an interest, regardless of race, gender, class, wealth, and political or religious beliefs. 2. Because they bring people together, this frequently (especially when geographically centred) spills over into real life. Forums can be a cure for the modern disease of loneliness that cities spread. 3. Re-thinking political engagement and societal structures. Forums are able to model, test and implement on a small subset of a cross-section of society, various political systems. From dictatorships, through to shades of anarchy. In doing so they are able to imbue a sense of disenfranchisement, or ownership, or whatever... in the user of the forum. Crazily, in an age of social networks, I believe in the forums and the interest network as the obvious solution. I am perhaps wrong, my startup failed, but I still believe.

tremon 10y ago
But what you are describing is not a forum per se, it's "topic-specific" meeting place. That can be anything, from an irc channel to a closed mailing list. Twitter could do this with access-moderated hash tags, for example.
- buro9 10y ago
  That is true. But... If one of the primary functions of a service/site/app is to organise relationships via a network of people... then that isn't suitable for this purpose. The core function needs to be organising around an interest (composed of 1 or more of: topic, place, time), and that core function is so strong that it shouldn't offer the secondary function of then networking around people. People are very good at backing into small groups, forming cliques and communicating privately. Of constructing the very bubbles that are the issue here. A system that puts interests first has to avoid this by not encouraging it. It will still happen, but it shouldn't be a primary function.

simonswords82 10y ago

> I'd love to see a product/social network that confront their users with opposite point of views. You mean https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview

Jyaif 10y ago
Yes!

splintercell 10y ago

I have thought about it too. Something like FilterBuster.io which analyses your Friendslist and tells you about your filter bubble rating, and then recommends friends of friends who might hold different viewpoints than you. Or maybe for MVP, a subreddit which does the same thing but manually.

ffggvv 10y ago

> I'd love to see a product/social network that confront their users with opposite point of views. Something like https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/ https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/ ? Indeed it is a fantastic idea for a site, but how can you hope for people to be open-minded when even HN is a big echo-chamber?

niftich 10y ago

> I'd love to see a product/social network that confront their users with opposite point of views. 4chan Strong opinions voiced a certain way will still probably devolve into a shouting match with crass language and potentially seething hate. But it's by definition not personal, as the responders are either responding to your points in earnest, or just trolling.

hollerith 10y ago
>4chan OK, then I'd like to see a social network that confronts their users with opposite points of view and is not routinely used by people to get off on pictures and videos of someone's being or having been maimed or killed.
sevenless 10y ago
I was going to say. That's probably the one place you can easily interact with conservative (racist, anti-gay, sexist, xenophobic, etc) views.

dang 10y ago

> I'd love to see a product/social network that confront their users with opposite point of views. It has dawned on me over time that HN is like this, mainly because there's a single front page, i.e. no subreddits into which people silo themselves. That means that on any divisive topic, anyone who feels strongly has comments in their face that they strongly dislike, and vice versa. (I wrote more about this downthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12003205 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12003205). This is not an entirely good thing. It's responsible for most of the conflict that happens here.

IanCal 10y ago
I would definitely not describe HN as a place I come to get opposite points of view. I'm actually really very surprised anyone would see it that way, can you elaborate at all on why you do?
- Nadya 10y ago
  Dang is speaking about scenarios where there is no /r/ForHillary or /r/The_Donald to intermingle yourself with. You get both sides in one thread and are confronted with ideas that you may not agree with - or that you vehemently disagree with. Not that people "come to HN to see opposing views". Rather that they must see opposing views when browsing a thread. Then you get a bunch of conflict from both sides. As an example, HN often has socially-related posts that hit the front page, such as today's Voice Modulation in the Interview Process (not actual title). This gets people from two very different sides that are informally split, depending on who you ask, as "overly politically correct regressives" and "stupid racist [___]phobic bigots". A bunch of conflict that detracts from the study/topic happens when those two groups butt heads.
  - IanCal 10y ago
    You're assuming that there's a very wide range of people that visit HN, you can't get viewpoints from people that don't visit the site. I'd be surprised if a highly tech focused site called "hacker news" didn't have a strong bias towards certain demographics and viewpoints.

joelrunyon 10y ago

I remember when facebook & google were talking about personalization & knowing what you liked in order to show you more. People talked about it beforehand that it would create insular thinking - that people would only receive articles that already confirmed their biases. Seems that's happened :-/

zxcvvcxz 10y ago

Agreed. This reminds me of a related unexpected networking effect. I read a study that hypothesized that internet-enabled chat on mobile phones would distribute more messages across a more diverse set of one's friends and acquaintances. Instead, the study found the opposite: communication became more concentrated, with a greater proportion of communications going to a smaller subset of people. To analogize, messaging habits became "deeper" not "wider"; more extreme, not more diverse.

bogomipz 10y ago

Is it making fun of that though? The confirmation bias that Facebook has created is indeed scary. Now that they wan't to be your source for news this is really troubling. There's also another side to this which is is just a strange apathy that FB enables. People seem to think that ranting on FB to their friends of like mindedness somehow constitutes being an aware, informed and active citizen when all it is just a strange and sad malaise. There's a new tragedy? - quick change your profile pic to the flag of the country where said tragedy occurred - social responsibility fulfilled! Sure all news is biased to some extent that's why its important to get your news from multiple sources. However if I could only choose one I would take a newspaper with an editorial bias which allows me to at least see all the articles over something that chooses and filters that for me based on some mystical weighting.

omginternets 10y ago

>I'd love to see a product/social network that confront their users with opposite point of views. I'm with you, but I'm still looking for reliably high-quality reading suggestions. My Pocket feed is abysmal. I mention this because confronting someone with a poorly-reasoned argument is not good UX, especially when one disagrees with the content.

jdavis703 10y ago

I think Brigade (https://www.brigade.com/ https://www.brigade.com/) has the potential to be a social network that gives you both opposing views and your own views. However this will probably never be a mass-market social network, so it's impact on the democratic will probably be minimal.

sedachv 10y ago

> I'd love to see a product/social network that confront their users with opposite point of views. This kind of moral relativism is exactly part of the problem. Some positions are wrong no matter how many people believe in them. Things like Brexit happen exactly because we choose to tolerate things like religion, giving all the homophobes, creationists, conspiracy theorists, racists, math phobes, etc the idea that their world view is acceptable.

x5n1 10y ago
It's a difficult line to walk social justice warrior. At the end of the day it's a fact that religion sets up a psychology that is more positive than the mass psychology of the consumer civilization. That part of religion, a psychology that is resistant to the chaos and disappointment of the world is definitely something that's positive about religion and there are no alternatives in other discourses that are equivalent.
- sedachv 10y ago
  > That part of religion, a psychology that is resistant to the chaos and disappointment of the world is definitely something that's positive about religion and there are no alternatives in other discourses that are equivalent. Have you heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism or are you trolling?
  - x5n1 10y ago
    Christianity is an the answer to Stoicism. Stoicism has no good news and prescribes suicide if you can't take it any more. Christianity promises Heaven.