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Perhaps I misunderstand your idea, but this clustering sounds like exactly the thing to drive polarization. Put me in my comfortable bubble where I only see con

Perhaps I misunderstand your idea, but this clustering sounds like exactly the thing to drive polarization. Put me in my comfortable bubble where I only see content and comments from like-minded people, and I'll be increasingly unable to understand where people outside the bubble are coming from. The only thing I see about those people is ragebait about how awful and stupid they're being this week, written by other people I agree with. Even if I start on the edge of a cluster or in the overlap between two clusters, the feed will likely drive me towards one or the other. That's how I feel with YouTube's aggressive recommendation system -- I watch a funny Bill Burr comedy clip, and YouTube knows there is some overlap between "Bill Burr fans" and "men's rights advocates", and now I get a bunch of recommendations for Jordan Peterson stuff and if I click one of those then its next recommendations want to take me down the MRA/incel rabbit hole. It's a radicalization pipeline where I touch some innocent surface-level stuff and YouTube goes, "hmm, well, of the people who liked that, our most highly-engaged users who click through videos all day long REALLY like THIS" and wants me to become that person.

MrStonedOne 5y ago
> I watch a funny Bill Burr comedy clip, and YouTube knows there is some overlap between "Bill Burr fans" and "men's rights advocates", and now I get a bunch of recommendations for Jordan Peterson stuff and if I click one of those then its next recommendations want to take me down the MRA/incel rabbit hole. I do not think it is productive to a healthly discussion to link wanting to end discrimination against men with incels or Jordan Peterson
- rspeele 5y ago
  Well, that might be an example of how my perception is swayed by these recommendations. There are probably plenty of people out there making YouTube videos purely advocating for equal treatment in things like the draft, or allocation of child custody in divorce, or whatever. But if I were to watch a few of their videos I suspect I would be swamped with recommendations for other videos which are more in line with what I was referring to. Stuff made by and for men who are bitter and resentful of women and spend a lot of time online seething about it. I mentally lump it all together because it all appears together. That's admittedly unfair.
  - MrStonedOne 5y ago
    >I mentally lump it all together because it all appears together. That's admittedly unfair. and another example of how such algorithms can influence collective thought. I'm sure there are people who do the same with other equality measures as more divisive content of the same vein like "you're a fucking white male" is gonna be more likely to show up until the viewer links it with social justice entirely.
fpgaminer 5y ago
Somewhat related to this, I recently watched a video essay on VR Chat and one of the takeaways was how VR Chat is much more like the earlier internet (think around the dawn of Web 2.0 and before). There's no recommendation systems or an algorithm partitioning people into isolated spaces. It's just a bunch of random strangers browsing through uncurated rooms. And, as the author argues, that lends itself to a much healthier environment where people are exposed to and more understanding of those outside of what would otherwise be their bubble. I definitely feel some nostalgia for those days. To be clear, it's not like VR Chat or even the early internet were completely bubbleless. But without an algorithm dividing people, it was just the path of least resistance to ... explore. Click on links and see where they go. Would you end up on some neo-nazi forum sometimes? Sure. But you were just as likely to end up on a Pokemon fan page. It was far more random and diverse. As you point out, that's different today with these algorithms driving people directly towards radical content.
- rspeele 5y ago
  I know what you mean. Tangentially, I also liked the experience of gaming (FPS) more when you would choose a server from a list, which was hosted by some person or group other than the game company, and you played with whoever else happened to join, from outright beginner to expert. Often on community-created and self published maps that wouldn't meet the quality standards of a game company, but could be much more varied and novel. The players would be a mix of one-time visitors and some regulars who you could expect would be on every night or a few nights a week. One such server in TF2 was like the bar from Cheers to me for a couple years in my late teens. The modern experience of matchmaking is simpler to jump into, less intimidating, but it's empty and lifeless. Like candy vs. a meal. Anyway, back on the social media thing, I fear there is no reason for it to change. Success, for a recommendation algorithm, will always be defined as what keeps you on the site, scrolling and clicking. Success for a person, we can be fairly sure, is not that. So we will always be fighting the algorithms to try to keep our own "engagement" at the level that is good for us, not good for them.
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  The bubble-ization I see today is less "I am intolerant of your alternative subjective views! The Beatles are totally better than the Rolling Stones!" and are more often a struggle of information vs. willful disinformation. So many of today's "bubbles" don't even involve subjective ideas; they involve willful distortions of facts such as anti-vaccine propaganda, flat Earth theories, and the like. how VR Chat is much more like the earlier internet [...] a much healthier environment where people are exposed to and more understanding of those outside of what would otherwise be their bubble I miss those early days, but I think the notion of the internet as a more tolerant place back then is mostly an illusion. The internet population itself was kind of... a single bubble back then. It was way less diverse than the general population. Early internet discourse was dominated by tech-savvy folks at universities, and folks working in the tech/engineering sectors. Therefore users tended to be male, white, college educated, young, technologically savvy, and economically upper/middle class. We were less likely to see the walls between bubbles because we were in a single bubble.
breuleux 5y ago
The clustering could possibly be leveraged into an anti-polarization tool, if you start promoting the content within each cluster that is the least objectionable to opposite clusters. Basically, show leftists the leftist content that rightists like the most/dislike the least, and show rightists the rightist content that leftists like the most/dislike the least. I assume this system for countering echo chambers would require good clustering.

MrStonedOne 5y ago

> I watch a funny Bill Burr comedy clip, and YouTube knows there is some overlap between "Bill Burr fans" and "men's rights advocates", and now I get a bunch of recommendations for Jordan Peterson stuff and if I click one of those then its next recommendations want to take me down the MRA/incel rabbit hole. I do not think it is productive to a healthly discussion to link wanting to end discrimination against men with incels or Jordan Peterson

rspeele 5y ago
Well, that might be an example of how my perception is swayed by these recommendations. There are probably plenty of people out there making YouTube videos purely advocating for equal treatment in things like the draft, or allocation of child custody in divorce, or whatever. But if I were to watch a few of their videos I suspect I would be swamped with recommendations for other videos which are more in line with what I was referring to. Stuff made by and for men who are bitter and resentful of women and spend a lot of time online seething about it. I mentally lump it all together because it all appears together. That's admittedly unfair.
- MrStonedOne 5y ago
  >I mentally lump it all together because it all appears together. That's admittedly unfair. and another example of how such algorithms can influence collective thought. I'm sure there are people who do the same with other equality measures as more divisive content of the same vein like "you're a fucking white male" is gonna be more likely to show up until the viewer links it with social justice entirely.

fpgaminer 5y ago

Somewhat related to this, I recently watched a video essay on VR Chat and one of the takeaways was how VR Chat is much more like the earlier internet (think around the dawn of Web 2.0 and before). There's no recommendation systems or an algorithm partitioning people into isolated spaces. It's just a bunch of random strangers browsing through uncurated rooms. And, as the author argues, that lends itself to a much healthier environment where people are exposed to and more understanding of those outside of what would otherwise be their bubble. I definitely feel some nostalgia for those days. To be clear, it's not like VR Chat or even the early internet were completely bubbleless. But without an algorithm dividing people, it was just the path of least resistance to ... explore. Click on links and see where they go. Would you end up on some neo-nazi forum sometimes? Sure. But you were just as likely to end up on a Pokemon fan page. It was far more random and diverse. As you point out, that's different today with these algorithms driving people directly towards radical content.

rspeele 5y ago
I know what you mean. Tangentially, I also liked the experience of gaming (FPS) more when you would choose a server from a list, which was hosted by some person or group other than the game company, and you played with whoever else happened to join, from outright beginner to expert. Often on community-created and self published maps that wouldn't meet the quality standards of a game company, but could be much more varied and novel. The players would be a mix of one-time visitors and some regulars who you could expect would be on every night or a few nights a week. One such server in TF2 was like the bar from Cheers to me for a couple years in my late teens. The modern experience of matchmaking is simpler to jump into, less intimidating, but it's empty and lifeless. Like candy vs. a meal. Anyway, back on the social media thing, I fear there is no reason for it to change. Success, for a recommendation algorithm, will always be defined as what keeps you on the site, scrolling and clicking. Success for a person, we can be fairly sure, is not that. So we will always be fighting the algorithms to try to keep our own "engagement" at the level that is good for us, not good for them.
JohnBooty 5y ago
The bubble-ization I see today is less "I am intolerant of your alternative subjective views! The Beatles are totally better than the Rolling Stones!" and are more often a struggle of information vs. willful disinformation. So many of today's "bubbles" don't even involve subjective ideas; they involve willful distortions of facts such as anti-vaccine propaganda, flat Earth theories, and the like. how VR Chat is much more like the earlier internet [...] a much healthier environment where people are exposed to and more understanding of those outside of what would otherwise be their bubble I miss those early days, but I think the notion of the internet as a more tolerant place back then is mostly an illusion. The internet population itself was kind of... a single bubble back then. It was way less diverse than the general population. Early internet discourse was dominated by tech-savvy folks at universities, and folks working in the tech/engineering sectors. Therefore users tended to be male, white, college educated, young, technologically savvy, and economically upper/middle class. We were less likely to see the walls between bubbles because we were in a single bubble.

breuleux 5y ago

The clustering could possibly be leveraged into an anti-polarization tool, if you start promoting the content within each cluster that is the least objectionable to opposite clusters. Basically, show leftists the leftist content that rightists like the most/dislike the least, and show rightists the rightist content that leftists like the most/dislike the least. I assume this system for countering echo chambers would require good clustering.