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I created my own bubble on Facebook. People would write or share these inflammatory political posts I disagreed with, but I just knew if I commented it would ca

by umvi 6y ago

I created my own bubble on Facebook. People would write or share these inflammatory political posts I disagreed with, but I just knew if I commented it would cause contention (which I wanted to avoid since these are my friends), so instead I "unfollowed". A few dozen unfollows later, and I'm now magically in a bubble where my feed is devoid of inflammatory political posts! I did the same thing with reddit. Unsubscribed to subreddits I didn't want to see anymore and subscribed to ones I did, and now my reddit front page is 100% programming links, gamedev links, 3d modelling, cooking, and a few other niche interests I have.

ben509 6y ago
Likewise. What's dismaying is that there's no practical way on Facebook to have civil discussions about politics, it just doesn't work. I don't think it'd even be all that hard. What you'd want to do is have a mode for contentious topics whereby personal identities are hidden, so there's no personal investment and only ideas are presented. And you'd want to be able to cite problems with a claim, i.e. you select some text to flag "this is confusing / inflammatory / unsupported," so that people don't go in circles because they don't understand each other or can deal with something that's insulting by having the person tone it down.
- optimalsolver 6y ago
  >What's dismaying is that there's no practical way on Facebook to have civil discussions about politics, it just doesn't work I think that applies to the Internet in general, including HN. I've never seen an online community improved by allowing more object-level political discussion.
overthemoon 6y ago
That's the ticket. I did the same. Still friends, because staying connected on FB does matter to me on some level, but I don't see the political thoughts that annoy me. For what it's worth, disagreement != annoying. I still read the stuff published by people I disagree with but find challenging in some way, and unfollowed people I agree with but who present their views in frustrating or obnoxious ways. This is purely my own experience, but I find that I need to be in the right mindset to read something that's going to challenge me. If I'm scrolling for a few hits of updates from people I care about, I'm not going to be in the right state of mind to read something that's going to get me riled up. The bubble may or may not be inevitable, but it's a necessity. Being aware of feedback loops and managing your own media intake is probably more important than finding ways to prevent those loops entirely, IMO.
esperent 6y ago
I did the same, but I unfollowed everyone - literally everyone, including my family. Blissful peace! The obvious result of this was that I realized nothing changed when I did this, except for less useless info entering my eyes, and I gradually stopped using FB almost entirely. Now I check if there are any interesting events on every week or two, and that's it (although I still use messenger - attempts to get friends and family to switch have had mixed results).
- choward 6y ago
  Just delete your account at this point. No reason to log into an account just to make it easier for Facebook to track you around the internet.
  - dharmab 6y ago
    I keep an account for three reasons: - To prevent identity theft by someone creating an account in my name. - To access some local event planning that only happens on Facebook, e.g. local motorsport competition/HPDE events - To access Facebook Marketplace
    - SkyPuncher 6y ago
      Facebook marketplace is literally the only reason I still have a FB account
  - esperent 6y ago
    No, it's still the only way that people in my area share info about events, and I like finding out about them so the account is still useful to me.
- codyb 6y ago
  Did this as well a few years ago. Was a pain in the ass. Never log in anymore and use my messenger account to communicate one on one with friends occasionally.
frompdx 6y ago
Unfollowing everyone was how I was eventually able to break myself of my addiction to Facebook. Before I did this I would mindlessly pull my phone out of my pocket and look at facebook. One day I just started unfollowing people and kept doing it until my feed was empty. Empty feed meant no reason to check. I haven't logged in since 2017.
sleepysysadmin 6y ago
>I created my own bubble on Facebook. Everyone does. There's nothing wrong with it. People at the coffee shops or the pubs were often people with similar interests. The problem is that we exited the culture wars in around 2009. We went into societal crisis. For the next 10-15 years or so we will be looking for the collapse of the crisis. The funny thing is that people still think it's the culture wars. Especially the mass media. It's not. It's why culture wars like Gamergate or Greta Thunburg are not winning anything at all for their cause. The reason people are very concerned about these filter bubbles and the problems of social media is because those were fine during culture wars. They are huge problems now we are in the crisis era. The problem? The collapse of the crisis is always violent revolution or a world war that does not hold back. People want to break these bubbles in order to prevent what is rather inevitable. The funny thing is that nobody can predict who or what is the revolution. Which side has to lose? There's a bit of a problem. The democrats want to ban guns and generally dislike guns as a group. So if the revolution happens, who loses is pretty clear.
- simmerup 6y ago
  This comment is a great example of something produced by an online bubble. I'm sure if you talked like this in real life most people on your street would have no idea what you're talking about, because you're referencing niche ideas from niche internet subcommunities. It's a problem because it alienates you from your irl community
  - amanaplanacanal 6y ago
    This seems spot on. I couldn’t tell what they were talking about, except the part at the end about gun control, which I disagreed with. Plenty of democrats own and like guns.
  - sleepysysadmin 6y ago
    >This comment is a great example of something produced by an online bubble. I'm sure if you talked like this in real life most people on your street would have no idea what you're talking about, because you're referencing niche ideas from niche internet subcommunities. Im in an online bubble because im talking about a niche idea? What if I start talking about Django ModelAdmin templates? That would be quite niche. I bet there's only 5 other people in my city who could have that conversation with me. Point Im making is that yes it's quite niche and quite the bubble. I never denied the bubbles exist. I explicitly said everyone lives in a bubble and there's nothing wrong with it. The important reality is the rest of the subject. We aren't in culture wars anymore. We are in crisis akin to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glorious_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glorious_Revolution 77 years later https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolution 78 years later https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War 78 years later https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II 2021 - 1945 = 76 >It's a problem because it alienates you from your irl community what IRL community? nobody is allowed to see anyone else. It's also not like this is only subject I know about. Im not getting alienated.
belval 6y ago
I did the exact same thing but what you are describing is (imo) not the kind of filter bubbles that are problematic. Unfollowing and tailoring content to your interest is great and makes a lot of sense. The issue arise when dealing with news. If Facebook is your main news source and you decide to unfollow any medias, you can end up in a bubble where the world news you are presented with are really skewed to reinforce your world view which ultimately could lead you to full own fake-news consumption. That being said, inflammatory political posts by your friends are not news.
scythe 6y ago
It takes two to tango. Or maybe it's just a two-way street. Sure, I decide who to interact with. But I make that decision based on how they post. They post, in turn, based on how other people react to their posts. About half of the things on my FB feed never get a single like or comment. I'm not sure why I still post them. Some of my misses: "Judge permanently dismisses charges against [Breonna Taylor's boyfriend]": https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kenneth-walker-breonna-taylor-judge-dismisses-charges/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kenneth-walker-breonna-taylor-j... "TikTok assures users worried about Myanmar that they're aggressively monetizing the situation": https://www.theonion.com/tiktok-assures-users-worried-about-myanmar-that-they-re-1846407729 https://www.theonion.com/tiktok-assures-users-worried-about-... "Here's why Texas is still without power ... and why other states are vulnerable too": https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/02/why-the-power-is-out-in-texas-and-why-other-states-are-vulnerable-too/ https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/02/why-the-power-is-... Here are some things that got multiple interactions: this image mocking TX Gov Greg Abbott: https://i.redd.it/wlq9vk0k9ri61.png https://i.redd.it/wlq9vk0k9ri61.png this meme about Gamestop: https://i.redd.it/vdfzutt6b4e61.jpg https://i.redd.it/vdfzutt6b4e61.jpg It's easier for me to post low-info, high-emotion, easily-consumed polit-ideological junk food and get likes than it is to get attention with a link containing some information or argument, or even just inoffensive satire. Explanations are out, newsfeed-optimal screenshots of brief text are in. It's very misleading to ignore the influence of the environment when considering how people choose whom to interact with.
- clairity 6y ago
  > “It's very misleading to ignore the influence of the environment when considering how people choose whom to interact with.” yah, that’s a form of the fundamental attribution error, a pretty common error in any discussion. we won’t get more civil discussions anywhere without systemic changes that lure us further into such errors by design.
guerrilla 6y ago
That's just a bubble, not a filter bubble which is a specific type of bubble automatically generated for you, not one that you manually created.
908B64B197 6y ago
This was my observation as well. Just like a garden, for a social media feed to grow it needs to be taken care of and curated. There's a block and mute button for that.
yosito 6y ago
I've created several bubbles on Twitter by curating lists. One thing I don't want to see is outrage, so I remove anyone who posts outrage from my lists. And it actually works! I've tried to create a bubble on Instagram of the content I want to see. But Instagram is more agressive about pushing algorithmic content at me against my will. After days of trying to train the algorithm, I got it to only show me real photos of travel and nature. But slowly new things are always creeping in. Liking one photo can set off echoes that are hard to get rid of. If I accidentally like a photo with a pretty girl in it, or someone's sweet workstation setup, or a map, or a meme, Instagram starts filling my feed with low quality junk related to those topics. Even the travel and nature photos are low quality junk. The inability to set up a feed of content I actually want to see (friends and genuine non-influencer travel photos with under 200 likes) is pushing me away from Instagram as a platform. Facebook's news feed is so bad that I never scroll it at all. For me, RSS via Inoreader is my new way to curate most of my content. The only problem is that most of my friends don't post RSS friendly content. Including friends in filter bubbles seems to be an area that no existing platform does a good job of anymore.

by umvi 6y ago

ben509 6y ago

Likewise. What's dismaying is that there's no practical way on Facebook to have civil discussions about politics, it just doesn't work. I don't think it'd even be all that hard. What you'd want to do is have a mode for contentious topics whereby personal identities are hidden, so there's no personal investment and only ideas are presented. And you'd want to be able to cite problems with a claim, i.e. you select some text to flag "this is confusing / inflammatory / unsupported," so that people don't go in circles because they don't understand each other or can deal with something that's insulting by having the person tone it down.

optimalsolver 6y ago
>What's dismaying is that there's no practical way on Facebook to have civil discussions about politics, it just doesn't work I think that applies to the Internet in general, including HN. I've never seen an online community improved by allowing more object-level political discussion.

overthemoon 6y ago

That's the ticket. I did the same. Still friends, because staying connected on FB does matter to me on some level, but I don't see the political thoughts that annoy me. For what it's worth, disagreement != annoying. I still read the stuff published by people I disagree with but find challenging in some way, and unfollowed people I agree with but who present their views in frustrating or obnoxious ways. This is purely my own experience, but I find that I need to be in the right mindset to read something that's going to challenge me. If I'm scrolling for a few hits of updates from people I care about, I'm not going to be in the right state of mind to read something that's going to get me riled up. The bubble may or may not be inevitable, but it's a necessity. Being aware of feedback loops and managing your own media intake is probably more important than finding ways to prevent those loops entirely, IMO.

esperent 6y ago

I did the same, but I unfollowed everyone - literally everyone, including my family. Blissful peace! The obvious result of this was that I realized nothing changed when I did this, except for less useless info entering my eyes, and I gradually stopped using FB almost entirely. Now I check if there are any interesting events on every week or two, and that's it (although I still use messenger - attempts to get friends and family to switch have had mixed results).

choward 6y ago
Just delete your account at this point. No reason to log into an account just to make it easier for Facebook to track you around the internet.
- dharmab 6y ago
  I keep an account for three reasons: - To prevent identity theft by someone creating an account in my name. - To access some local event planning that only happens on Facebook, e.g. local motorsport competition/HPDE events - To access Facebook Marketplace
  - SkyPuncher 6y ago
    Facebook marketplace is literally the only reason I still have a FB account
- esperent 6y ago
  No, it's still the only way that people in my area share info about events, and I like finding out about them so the account is still useful to me.
codyb 6y ago
Did this as well a few years ago. Was a pain in the ass. Never log in anymore and use my messenger account to communicate one on one with friends occasionally.

frompdx 6y ago

Unfollowing everyone was how I was eventually able to break myself of my addiction to Facebook. Before I did this I would mindlessly pull my phone out of my pocket and look at facebook. One day I just started unfollowing people and kept doing it until my feed was empty. Empty feed meant no reason to check. I haven't logged in since 2017.

sleepysysadmin 6y ago

>I created my own bubble on Facebook. Everyone does. There's nothing wrong with it. People at the coffee shops or the pubs were often people with similar interests. The problem is that we exited the culture wars in around 2009. We went into societal crisis. For the next 10-15 years or so we will be looking for the collapse of the crisis. The funny thing is that people still think it's the culture wars. Especially the mass media. It's not. It's why culture wars like Gamergate or Greta Thunburg are not winning anything at all for their cause. The reason people are very concerned about these filter bubbles and the problems of social media is because those were fine during culture wars. They are huge problems now we are in the crisis era. The problem? The collapse of the crisis is always violent revolution or a world war that does not hold back. People want to break these bubbles in order to prevent what is rather inevitable. The funny thing is that nobody can predict who or what is the revolution. Which side has to lose? There's a bit of a problem. The democrats want to ban guns and generally dislike guns as a group. So if the revolution happens, who loses is pretty clear.

simmerup 6y ago
This comment is a great example of something produced by an online bubble. I'm sure if you talked like this in real life most people on your street would have no idea what you're talking about, because you're referencing niche ideas from niche internet subcommunities. It's a problem because it alienates you from your irl community
- amanaplanacanal 6y ago
  This seems spot on. I couldn’t tell what they were talking about, except the part at the end about gun control, which I disagreed with. Plenty of democrats own and like guns.
- sleepysysadmin 6y ago
  >This comment is a great example of something produced by an online bubble. I'm sure if you talked like this in real life most people on your street would have no idea what you're talking about, because you're referencing niche ideas from niche internet subcommunities. Im in an online bubble because im talking about a niche idea? What if I start talking about Django ModelAdmin templates? That would be quite niche. I bet there's only 5 other people in my city who could have that conversation with me. Point Im making is that yes it's quite niche and quite the bubble. I never denied the bubbles exist. I explicitly said everyone lives in a bubble and there's nothing wrong with it. The important reality is the rest of the subject. We aren't in culture wars anymore. We are in crisis akin to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glorious_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glorious_Revolution 77 years later https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolution 78 years later https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War 78 years later https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II 2021 - 1945 = 76 >It's a problem because it alienates you from your irl community what IRL community? nobody is allowed to see anyone else. It's also not like this is only subject I know about. Im not getting alienated.

belval 6y ago

I did the exact same thing but what you are describing is (imo) not the kind of filter bubbles that are problematic. Unfollowing and tailoring content to your interest is great and makes a lot of sense. The issue arise when dealing with news. If Facebook is your main news source and you decide to unfollow any medias, you can end up in a bubble where the world news you are presented with are really skewed to reinforce your world view which ultimately could lead you to full own fake-news consumption. That being said, inflammatory political posts by your friends are not news.

scythe 6y ago

It takes two to tango. Or maybe it's just a two-way street. Sure, I decide who to interact with. But I make that decision based on how they post. They post, in turn, based on how other people react to their posts. About half of the things on my FB feed never get a single like or comment. I'm not sure why I still post them. Some of my misses: "Judge permanently dismisses charges against [Breonna Taylor's boyfriend]": https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kenneth-walker-breonna-taylor-judge-dismisses-charges/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kenneth-walker-breonna-taylor-j... "TikTok assures users worried about Myanmar that they're aggressively monetizing the situation": https://www.theonion.com/tiktok-assures-users-worried-about-myanmar-that-they-re-1846407729 https://www.theonion.com/tiktok-assures-users-worried-about-... "Here's why Texas is still without power ... and why other states are vulnerable too": https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/02/why-the-power-is-out-in-texas-and-why-other-states-are-vulnerable-too/ https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/02/why-the-power-is-... Here are some things that got multiple interactions: this image mocking TX Gov Greg Abbott: https://i.redd.it/wlq9vk0k9ri61.png https://i.redd.it/wlq9vk0k9ri61.png this meme about Gamestop: https://i.redd.it/vdfzutt6b4e61.jpg https://i.redd.it/vdfzutt6b4e61.jpg It's easier for me to post low-info, high-emotion, easily-consumed polit-ideological junk food and get likes than it is to get attention with a link containing some information or argument, or even just inoffensive satire. Explanations are out, newsfeed-optimal screenshots of brief text are in. It's very misleading to ignore the influence of the environment when considering how people choose whom to interact with.

clairity 6y ago
> “It's very misleading to ignore the influence of the environment when considering how people choose whom to interact with.” yah, that’s a form of the fundamental attribution error, a pretty common error in any discussion. we won’t get more civil discussions anywhere without systemic changes that lure us further into such errors by design.

guerrilla 6y ago

That's just a bubble, not a filter bubble which is a specific type of bubble automatically generated for you, not one that you manually created.

908B64B197 6y ago

This was my observation as well. Just like a garden, for a social media feed to grow it needs to be taken care of and curated. There's a block and mute button for that.

yosito 6y ago

I've created several bubbles on Twitter by curating lists. One thing I don't want to see is outrage, so I remove anyone who posts outrage from my lists. And it actually works! I've tried to create a bubble on Instagram of the content I want to see. But Instagram is more agressive about pushing algorithmic content at me against my will. After days of trying to train the algorithm, I got it to only show me real photos of travel and nature. But slowly new things are always creeping in. Liking one photo can set off echoes that are hard to get rid of. If I accidentally like a photo with a pretty girl in it, or someone's sweet workstation setup, or a map, or a meme, Instagram starts filling my feed with low quality junk related to those topics. Even the travel and nature photos are low quality junk. The inability to set up a feed of content I actually want to see (friends and genuine non-influencer travel photos with under 200 likes) is pushing me away from Instagram as a platform. Facebook's news feed is so bad that I never scroll it at all. For me, RSS via Inoreader is my new way to curate most of my content. The only problem is that most of my friends don't post RSS friendly content. Including friends in filter bubbles seems to be an area that no existing platform does a good job of anymore.