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I want a button on each user (that opts in) that allows me to see their feed just as they do. A read-only impersonation. When I see a take that I wildly disagre

I want a button on each user (that opts in) that allows me to see their feed just as they do. A read-only impersonation. When I see a take that I wildly disagree with I frequently wonder what set of views of the world they are operating from. This feature would help look at the world from behind the eyes of those I need to learn from the most: those that seem to live in a different one. A starter pack in comparison is a one-click embubbler. We need better bubble explorers and comparers. Like "Grok, me and @joe disagree on <topic-x>. Compare the relevant items in each of our feeds and summarize the difference in values, facts and sources that we consume."

righthand 1y ago
Personal tracking? What is stopping you from building a bot that uses this feature to view other peoples personal taste and building a shadow profile that then is used to manipulate them? You can already do this by scraping their follows list and building a pseudo display of what a person looked at.
- tokyolights2 1y ago
  You are just describing what advertisers actually do in practice. Maybe if everyone had the same access people would realize how invasive it is.
  - righthand 1y ago
    So we give everyone single click access and people become bigger monsters or people wake up finally? Make it a separate tool.
  - bombcar 1y ago
    Advertisers less track you and more decide what demographic bucket to stick you in. It’s a subtle but important (and hard to admit) difference; because it relies on realizing that we’re not special snowflakes, but we have a whole group of people we’re like.
    - s1mplicissimus 1y ago
      It seems that the most effective method of sticking people in buckets is actually track them, so I don't see the practical difference for this discussion. > because it relies on realizing that we’re not special snowflakes, but we have a whole group of people we’re like yet buckets become more valuable the more specific they are (for example "dad of 3" is more valuable than "male"). it's not hard to see how that would scale into "every detail about the person would allow maximally manipulative advertising = most valuable", just think about any vulnerable position you might find yourself in that can now be used to manipulate you
    - sorcerer-mar 1y ago
      Is that true? Pretty sure everything is way, way fuzzier and ultra-high dimensionality now. Not placing people in discrete buckets.
    - pitched 1y ago
      I’d love to meet more of the people in my bucket. I think we’d get along well.
      - schmookeeg 1y ago
        ...until it's time to fight over the same scarce holiday gift item that your bucketeers all crave also? :D
    - yellowapple 1y ago
      That might've been true 20 years ago, when fine-grained individual data was expensive for marketing teams to store, organize, and access. Nowadays that's dirt-cheap; advertisers absolutely do track you on a very individual level. Yes, they also correlate you with other individuals based on various demographic buckets, but those buckets are getting tinier and tinier.
- Dilettante_ 1y ago
  Yeah! The only people who should be allowed to see my own feed are me and the malevolent corporate entity that owns the platform!
  - righthand 1y ago
    I said this was already possible by anyone.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
_Algernon_ 1y ago
I (and I assume this is probably true for most people) don't want you to have access to this kind of information about me. It's as if you'd want to know every book on my bookshelf. I'm not letting strangers into my home to get that information.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- mostlysimilar 1y ago
  Follows are already public information.
  - slg 1y ago
    So is one's location while in public. It doesn't mean I want someone tracking my location every time I leave the house. The aggregation of public data can end up being an invasion of perceived privacy.
    - esperent 1y ago
      Nonetheless, follows have always been public information on Twitter and Bluesky.
  - slowdog 1y ago
    A lot of what drives feed algorithms are interactions rather than just follows. I imagine it’s one reason why X/Twitter made likes private as they want people to like things for the algorithm but not be judged for their likes.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
AlienRobot 1y ago
Funny. I want the opposite. I want people to stop posting their opinions on the Internet. Every time I go to Youtube and I see "the X situation is insane!" I'm like "what is even X? Why are you showing me this?" The whole social media landscape is engineered toward drama and people arguing over pointless things they have no control over, being controversial all for "engagement." It's pretty depressing.
- mosura 1y ago
  > I want people to stop posting their opinions on the Internet. Interesting that you do not feel the need to lead by example.
  - MangoToupe 1y ago
    They're right, though. So many problems are caused by thinking that opinions matter.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - whstl 1y ago
    "Yet you participate in society. Curious!" https://imgur.com/sl3fXat https://imgur.com/sl3fXat
    - slg 1y ago
      Ironically this comment is doing the exact thing the comic is criticizing because it is a subtle bastardization of what the comic says. The comic is about not criticizing people who want to see improvement in something in which they participate. It isn't saying hypocrisy can't be criticized, just that we shouldn't misidentify hypocrisy. Notice the characters aren't saying that no one should buy an Apple product/car or participate in society. The replies are tangential to their original complaints. In order to see hypocrisy, the replier needs to view any participation as a full fledge endorsement, which is a silly thing to do. Meanwhile, OP genuinely is acting hypocritically because they are doing the exact thing they are criticizing, posting an option to the Internet. The original replier is therefore not the one embodying this comic, it's you.
MangoToupe 1y ago
> Compare the relevant items in each of our feeds and summarize the difference in values, facts and sources that we consume." Surely it'd be easier to just view the delta? Once you have an algorithm in there summarizing things that value is lost.
lonk11 1y ago
This is definitely doable and anyone can build such a feed using Bluesky's APIs. As an example, I built a "For You" feed https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:3guzzweuqraryl3rdkimjamk/feed/for-you https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:3guzzweuqraryl3rdkimjamk/fe... that finds the posts you liked, finds other people who liked the same posts and shows you what else they liked. To help me debug the algorithm I built a simple web UI that allows you to see the feed for any user by plugging their account id: https://linklonk.com/bluesky https://linklonk.com/bluesky You can switch perspective to other users and explore how the would experience the feed.
lovetox 1y ago
You want to judge someone based on some social network feed algorithm, sounds crazy and dystopian to me.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- GuB-42 1y ago
  He doesn't want to judge people he wants to understand people. It is the opposite of a judgment. The idea is that you see someone on social media with ideas you disagree with, but instead of stopping there and dismissing that guy as an asshole, you try to see where these ideas come from and maybe realize that he has a point. Now this feature could be used to reinforce your bubble (the crazy and dystopian scenario you refer to) instead of bursting out of it. How you see such a feature may be more telling about your own personality than about the feature itself.
aaron695 1y ago
[dead]

righthand 1y ago

Personal tracking? What is stopping you from building a bot that uses this feature to view other peoples personal taste and building a shadow profile that then is used to manipulate them? You can already do this by scraping their follows list and building a pseudo display of what a person looked at.

tokyolights2 1y ago
You are just describing what advertisers actually do in practice. Maybe if everyone had the same access people would realize how invasive it is.
- righthand 1y ago
  So we give everyone single click access and people become bigger monsters or people wake up finally? Make it a separate tool.
- bombcar 1y ago
  Advertisers less track you and more decide what demographic bucket to stick you in. It’s a subtle but important (and hard to admit) difference; because it relies on realizing that we’re not special snowflakes, but we have a whole group of people we’re like.
  - s1mplicissimus 1y ago
    It seems that the most effective method of sticking people in buckets is actually track them, so I don't see the practical difference for this discussion. > because it relies on realizing that we’re not special snowflakes, but we have a whole group of people we’re like yet buckets become more valuable the more specific they are (for example "dad of 3" is more valuable than "male"). it's not hard to see how that would scale into "every detail about the person would allow maximally manipulative advertising = most valuable", just think about any vulnerable position you might find yourself in that can now be used to manipulate you
  - sorcerer-mar 1y ago
    Is that true? Pretty sure everything is way, way fuzzier and ultra-high dimensionality now. Not placing people in discrete buckets.
  - pitched 1y ago
    I’d love to meet more of the people in my bucket. I think we’d get along well.
    - schmookeeg 1y ago
      ...until it's time to fight over the same scarce holiday gift item that your bucketeers all crave also? :D
  - yellowapple 1y ago
    That might've been true 20 years ago, when fine-grained individual data was expensive for marketing teams to store, organize, and access. Nowadays that's dirt-cheap; advertisers absolutely do track you on a very individual level. Yes, they also correlate you with other individuals based on various demographic buckets, but those buckets are getting tinier and tinier.
Dilettante_ 1y ago
Yeah! The only people who should be allowed to see my own feed are me and the malevolent corporate entity that owns the platform!
- righthand 1y ago
  I said this was already possible by anyone.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

_Algernon_ 1y ago

I (and I assume this is probably true for most people) don't want you to have access to this kind of information about me. It's as if you'd want to know every book on my bookshelf. I'm not letting strangers into my home to get that information.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
mostlysimilar 1y ago
Follows are already public information.
- slg 1y ago
  So is one's location while in public. It doesn't mean I want someone tracking my location every time I leave the house. The aggregation of public data can end up being an invasion of perceived privacy.
  - esperent 1y ago
    Nonetheless, follows have always been public information on Twitter and Bluesky.
- slowdog 1y ago
  A lot of what drives feed algorithms are interactions rather than just follows. I imagine it’s one reason why X/Twitter made likes private as they want people to like things for the algorithm but not be judged for their likes.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

AlienRobot 1y ago

Funny. I want the opposite. I want people to stop posting their opinions on the Internet. Every time I go to Youtube and I see "the X situation is insane!" I'm like "what is even X? Why are you showing me this?" The whole social media landscape is engineered toward drama and people arguing over pointless things they have no control over, being controversial all for "engagement." It's pretty depressing.

mosura 1y ago
> I want people to stop posting their opinions on the Internet. Interesting that you do not feel the need to lead by example.
- MangoToupe 1y ago
  They're right, though. So many problems are caused by thinking that opinions matter.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- whstl 1y ago
  "Yet you participate in society. Curious!" https://imgur.com/sl3fXat https://imgur.com/sl3fXat
  - slg 1y ago
    Ironically this comment is doing the exact thing the comic is criticizing because it is a subtle bastardization of what the comic says. The comic is about not criticizing people who want to see improvement in something in which they participate. It isn't saying hypocrisy can't be criticized, just that we shouldn't misidentify hypocrisy. Notice the characters aren't saying that no one should buy an Apple product/car or participate in society. The replies are tangential to their original complaints. In order to see hypocrisy, the replier needs to view any participation as a full fledge endorsement, which is a silly thing to do. Meanwhile, OP genuinely is acting hypocritically because they are doing the exact thing they are criticizing, posting an option to the Internet. The original replier is therefore not the one embodying this comic, it's you.

MangoToupe 1y ago

> Compare the relevant items in each of our feeds and summarize the difference in values, facts and sources that we consume." Surely it'd be easier to just view the delta? Once you have an algorithm in there summarizing things that value is lost.

lonk11 1y ago

This is definitely doable and anyone can build such a feed using Bluesky's APIs. As an example, I built a "For You" feed https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:3guzzweuqraryl3rdkimjamk/feed/for-you https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:3guzzweuqraryl3rdkimjamk/fe... that finds the posts you liked, finds other people who liked the same posts and shows you what else they liked. To help me debug the algorithm I built a simple web UI that allows you to see the feed for any user by plugging their account id: https://linklonk.com/bluesky https://linklonk.com/bluesky You can switch perspective to other users and explore how the would experience the feed.

lovetox 1y ago

You want to judge someone based on some social network feed algorithm, sounds crazy and dystopian to me.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
GuB-42 1y ago
He doesn't want to judge people he wants to understand people. It is the opposite of a judgment. The idea is that you see someone on social media with ideas you disagree with, but instead of stopping there and dismissing that guy as an asshole, you try to see where these ideas come from and maybe realize that he has a point. Now this feature could be used to reinforce your bubble (the crazy and dystopian scenario you refer to) instead of bursting out of it. How you see such a feature may be more telling about your own personality than about the feature itself.

aaron695 1y ago

[dead]