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I always wondered if social media instead of polarizing could actively counteract bubble metrics to lead people to a more centrist view. Essentially by "inverti

by ginko 7y ago

I always wondered if social media instead of polarizing could actively counteract bubble metrics to lead people to a more centrist view. Essentially by "inverting" the interest function partially.

vangelis 7y ago
Who gets to decide what is extreme?
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  The targets of extremism.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  The local majority.
manfredo 7y ago
Studies show that YouTube does largely do this. The recommendations are usually proximal to the current video but they do generally trend toward the center. I wrote my own YouTube crawler to test this empirically (or at least as empirically as I can, recommendations aren't exposed through an API and I had to use selenium). It is possible to go towards either extreme if one selectively chooses more and more left/right leaning videos, but a random traversal usually doesn't result in extreme content. It's generally difficult to gauge, because recommendations usually fall into what I call "topic pits" where once you view a few videos in a topic all subsequent recommendations will be in that topic. So my crawler would often fall into viewing a bunch of videos about gardening or math or something that is totally not political. By the point is, I never saw any trend of my crawler going down the "rabbit hole" that allegedly exists. The problem I see is that people's preexisting polarization means that they see a trend of centrist content as radicalizing. So you end up with liberals seeing centrist recommendations as pushing people to the right wing, and conservatives see a push to the center as restricting conservative content
goda90 7y ago
Years ago I daydreamed about making a social news aggregation website like Reddit(though I was more into Digg at the time) that focused the "karma" on getting multiple, mixed view points and perspectives on a story/topic. So like if there is an event, someone posts the first source they find on it. Others get karma by linking other sources. I think I was brainstorming ways to record where sources disagree and other ways of keeping things open and balanced.

by ginko 7y ago

I always wondered if social media instead of polarizing could actively counteract bubble metrics to lead people to a more centrist view. Essentially by "inverting" the interest function partially.

vangelis 7y ago

Who gets to decide what is extreme?

anigbrowl 7y ago
The targets of extremism.
dsfyu404ed 7y ago
The local majority.

manfredo 7y ago

Studies show that YouTube does largely do this. The recommendations are usually proximal to the current video but they do generally trend toward the center. I wrote my own YouTube crawler to test this empirically (or at least as empirically as I can, recommendations aren't exposed through an API and I had to use selenium). It is possible to go towards either extreme if one selectively chooses more and more left/right leaning videos, but a random traversal usually doesn't result in extreme content. It's generally difficult to gauge, because recommendations usually fall into what I call "topic pits" where once you view a few videos in a topic all subsequent recommendations will be in that topic. So my crawler would often fall into viewing a bunch of videos about gardening or math or something that is totally not political. By the point is, I never saw any trend of my crawler going down the "rabbit hole" that allegedly exists. The problem I see is that people's preexisting polarization means that they see a trend of centrist content as radicalizing. So you end up with liberals seeing centrist recommendations as pushing people to the right wing, and conservatives see a push to the center as restricting conservative content

goda90 7y ago

Years ago I daydreamed about making a social news aggregation website like Reddit(though I was more into Digg at the time) that focused the "karma" on getting multiple, mixed view points and perspectives on a story/topic. So like if there is an event, someone posts the first source they find on it. Others get karma by linking other sources. I think I was brainstorming ways to record where sources disagree and other ways of keeping things open and balanced.