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Ask HN: Do you feel like you're in a filter bubble?

• jgrahamc 12y ago
  What do you do to break out of it? Read something else? It's not rocket surgery. Also, read on paper with your phone in your pocket.
  • guizzy 12y ago
    It's not that easy. Filtered news is addictive. It's like children's breakfast cereal with just the candy. It validates your world views, makes you feel smart for agreeing with all the other "smart" people. I wouldn't be surprised to hear it triggers the same positive feedback loops as other psychologically addictive things. Once you're thoroughly filtered and addicted, opinions that disagree with your bubbled opinions are painful to read. They feel like agressions.
• captn3m0 12y ago
  I recently subscribed to a lot of tech and non-tech subreddits and unsubscribed from all the default subreddits (the old ones). I sometimes browse /r/all for fun, but its working out well for me.
  • thenomad 12y ago
    Reddit's a huge filter bubble all of its own, though, with a definite bias in its userbase.
    • m52go 12y ago
      Yeah, that's my exact issue with it. It seems very diverse on the surface, but its faults become apparent after spending just a little time on it.
    • captn3m0 12y ago
      I haven't found this to be true in the technical subreddits. Sure, you won't find many php haters in /r/php, but isn't that expected? The filter bubble is definitely there in the non-tech subreddits.
    • fragmede 12y ago
      A subscription to /r/programmingcirclejerk/ helps with that and not taking things too seriously.
• 27182818284 12y ago
  These were helpful for me and may or may not be helpful for you: Mix in editorialized content. Read the New York Times or another major, old publication rather than only sites that have user-generated and user-moderated content. There are certain things that will get upvotes all the time on Reddit, etc. Similarly, read blogs that are outside your normal areas. For example, if you're into tech and work in tech, read the http://www.scotusblog.com/ http://www.scotusblog.com/ Read new science fiction from the library, not the same user-generated recommendations from Reddit and HN. Anthologies of short stories are great for rebooting my brain with new ideas. Worms using tunnels in ice to form a sort of neural network over millions of years? Drag racing aliens? Tattoos that administer medicine? Also with that, just pull random books off your local library's shelf from time to time. A book about the history of Target? A book about socialism and electricity? Why not?
  • m52go 12y ago
    The serendipity of book browsing is something I find very underrated. I do exactly that, in real life, but can't find a way to do it properly (and enjoyably) online.
• Red_Tarsius 12y ago
  99% of my browsing is gmail (work), HN (shared values, it makes me feel less lonely) and boardgamegeek. Daily news are junk food for your brain: highly addictive and unhealthy. > What do you do to break out of it? imho the solution is not more news. Take a break from news sources. I don't use facebook anymore, since I realized it was a major source of unhappiness. You could try to engage your brain with different inputs, like books. After cutting down my browsing habits, I have been reading tons of ebooks, from front to cover.
  • untog 12y ago
    Not to pick on you (too much?) but a combination of coming to HN because of "shared values" and ignoring daily news sites because they're "unhealthy" doesn't sounds great to me. HN is very much a bubble. Not just that it's tech news based, but it's also very geographically centered around Silicon Valley and economically centered around the affluent. To pick a topical example, I'd say that every American ought to know what is going on in Baltimore right now - HN is most definitely not the place to get the full view of a topic like that. And daily news sites don't just do daily news - by example, the Baltimore Sun has a great, in-depth piece that is directly relevant to what's going on right now: http://data.baltimoresun.com/news/police-settlements/ http://data.baltimoresun.com/news/police-settlements/
    • igravious 12y ago
      Or US-centric. A fair proportion of HN-ers are not from the States and we are not interested in local US news. Really, we're not.
      • untog 12y ago
        HN is pretty US-centric, though. I get that a significant number of users are not from the US, but the site is undeniably US-centric - and I say this as a non-American. (and just so that we're clear: I'm not suggesting that people should be talking about Baltimore on HN. I'm saying that they should broaden their reading sources to include news like Baltimore rather than just relying on HN for all their reading)
• thenomad 12y ago
  Yes. It's actually one of my major concerns about 21st-century life: the filter bubble effect promotes extremism in all issues and breaks down consensus. I'm working on a couple of things to attempt to combat it, but more ideas would be very, very, very welcome.
  • m52go 12y ago
    Me too. That's why I made this post, but I didn't include any details because I just wanted honest opinions. Since your profile invites pings, I'll ping you. I'm interested to learn about your approach!
    • thenomad 12y ago
      Very interested to hear from you too! Looking forward to the email.
• lmm 12y ago
  I don't feel like it's a filter bubble, or if it is, it's a society-wide one. There are certain political questions where I feel like it's unacceptable to express particular views, but that seems to be the case everywhere. Non-tech hobbies have helped me meet people from a wide variety of classes, which means I have at least some exposure to a variety of viewpoints. It's worth getting out and off the internet every so often.
  • m52go 12y ago
    Getting off the internet is crucial. But the internet is a cornerstone of our lives no matter what, and every major service (search, social networking, e-commerce, etc) has made personalization part of their core strategy.
  • beat 12y ago
    In America, you can express whatever political views you want. Of course, you might wind up with most people thinking you're an asshole for it. If you express your opinion and almost everyone thinks you're an asshole, then you're either a genius, or an asshole.
    • lmm 12y ago
      What about if a small proportion of people think you're an asshole, but they're enough to get you fired?
      • beat 12y ago
        Then you needed a new job anyway.
      • soylentcola 12y ago
        The flip side is that if you only discuss controversial opinions with people who agree, congrats! You're in the bubble again. Still, whenever I do run across an online or offline community where people are capable of civil debate and discussion without getting all red-faced, it can be incredibly valuable. It's how I've refined or changed many of my opinions as I got more info and perhaps I've informed the opinions of some other people as well.
• beat 12y ago
  What does your social life look like? Do you have a truly diverse collection of friends, or just a handful of people who are like you in terms of race, gender, age, profession, income, hobbies, etc? News sources are just a symptom. If you don't have a diverse social life, friends and peers who live and think differently from you, you won't have a why when encountering new ideas and information. You won't have the perspective of someone who lives what you just encountered. You'll lack perspective. Without perspective, it's easy to reject and ignore things that contradict what's already in your bubble.
• klaustopher 12y ago
  I had exactly that feeling a while ago. I was looking at HN, lobste.rs, reddit, my tech-news-filled RSS reader at least hourly. My Twitter timeline was packed with tech people, and my podcatcher was subscribed to 50 or so tech podcasts. This way, I always heard about the newest scandals, *-gates, dramas, etc and I spent a lot of energy and time thinking about them, discussing them with people on Twitter. I let every little piece of drama get to me. I felt exhausted. I felt angry most of the time. I was frustrated. So, I just stopped. No HN, deleted my Twitter account, didn't attend any tech related event. I unsubscribed from most of the podcasts I was listening to, added some about the things that are going on in the world or other topics that interest me. Or simply didn't listen to anything at all. When I was walking home from work, listening to nature and interacting with the people around me helped so much getting out of this "oh my gosh, there's so much going on in the tech world, I cant' miss out on anything..." feeling. I also (re)started some hobbies that involved me getting away from the computer. Started building and flying multicopter/drone (well, ok, this is somewhat tech related, but not sitting in front of the notebook all the time), cycling, taking long walks, geocaching, ... I started feeling better and I think that I found a good mixture of "both worlds". I usually look at the top page of HN once a day (before I was constantly refreshing the newest-section), have a new Twitter with a good mixture of tech- and non-tech-people. And I usually stay away from the computer in my free-time. I don't feel like I'm missing anything. The important topics will reach me eventually (maybe through colleagues). So I might not be on the forefront of everything that's going on. But who really needs this? I thought, I did. Now I know, I don't. edit: Added a sentence about the hobbies that I forgot to put there.
  • didsomeonesay 12y ago
    This way, I always heard about the newest scandals, *-gates, dramas, etc and I spent a lot of energy and time thinking about them, discussing them with people on Twitter. I let every little piece of drama get to me. I felt exhausted. I felt angry most of the time. I was frustrated. It's like regular news all over again!
    • klaustopher 12y ago
      Yeah, it's the same about the "real-world-news". I watch the news once a day on TV (in Germany, there's the really good "Tagesschau." 15 minute round-up of what happened during the day on public television), and read a weekly news paper. No breaking-news sites, no news-outlets in my RSS reader. And I still feel well-informed.
• Haul4ss 12y ago
  Get off the internet and spend some time outdoors. It's so easy to sit in a little digital universe that you are in the center of. You have to consciously move yourself out of that comfort zone. Ride public transportation and strike up conversations with people. Go for a hike. Volunteer at the library. Sign up for a 5K race. If you are in a filter bubble, it is of your own choosing, and you need to loosen the filter to let more things in.
  • mbillie1 12y ago
    Not to mention that daily exercise will improve your overall happiness / mental health noticeably. Run, bike, find a rock climbing gym and learn how to rock climb, anything. It is important in so many ways for people like software developers who have highly mentally stressful but physically sedentary jobs to do something physically active and not involving a screen, and to do it daily. Your quality of life will improve exponentially.
    • arcticfox 12y ago
      Amusingly, these are some of the ideas that are surely posted constantly as part of OP's filter bubble. Because, of course, they are good suggestions.
  • EricSu 12y ago
    I'm deeply into photography (as a hobby/creative outlet) and I'm on a triathlon team (as a way to be outdoors and stay active). Having these two things motivates me to peel myself off my computer and definitely shifts my focus to something other than tech news which is very refreshing for the mind and body. You don't have to get deeply involved in a hobby, but I definitely agree that physically getting away from the computer and outside will help a lot to expose yourself to something different and get you thinking about something else.
• Strilanc 12y ago
  Yes. Because of reading [1]. 1: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...
• tjradcliffe 12y ago
  The suggestions here to track down a diversity of sources are good, but I'm increasingly finding that as soon as I've read a source for a while I come to recognize that it is living inside a filter bubble of its own and start discounting a lot of what I'm reading. The only places I can stick with are the large, old, mainstream media sites: BBC, the Atlantic, the National Post (in Canada). Each of them has biases and a definite editorial policy, but they are all still making some kind of attempt to be objective about the news they choose to report, where by "objective" I mean "they don't ignore obvious facts, flat-out lie about stuff, or deliberately cast stories in terms of abstractions that make them look like something completely different from the way they'd look if you focus on the concretes." They also tend to provide background pieces to major stories that look at multiple perspectives on them. These organizations all have some notion that what they are doing involves helping their readers understand their world. Most other places see their mission primarily in terms of either entertainment or influence. Maybe I'm just old, but keeping those sources for news and following a diversity of people--including a number of mainstream media print reporters and several academics, particularly economists--on Twitter to get personal views of events and ideas seems to be working OK. With regard to "new content", there are only a few new ideas in the world. Every startup story on HN is going to have some similarities. Every science story likewise. Tech stories even moreso. Our ability to communicate has increased by... how much? A million-fold?... in the past thirty years, but our ability to find things to say has stayed the same. It follows from this that most of what we find online is repetition and drivel (including, likely, this comment).
  • guizzy 12y ago
    A suggestion I have to avoid filter in news is to read news directly from news agencies (Reuters, AP, AFP and the like). They aren't perfect, but contrarily to newspapers that are incentivised to pander to their readers, news agencies have a business incentive to be neutral: they want to be able to sell the same article to all sides of the issue.
• matthewrhoden1 12y ago
  I see a lot of comments saying to go outside. Not a bad idea, but I think you were looking for new ideas. Ways to be innovative. If that's what you meant, I found one new way of thinking is finding a hobby or interest and pursuing it for a while. If it's ideas for software you want to write so you can make money, then you cross the two (your hobby and your job skills) with "hopefully" a fun project as a result. This is one of many routes to finding market niches. If it's no longer interesting to you, move on to your next item. Most people have a bucket list anyways, so I think it's a good practice for the sake of your feeling of life fulfillment.
  • m52go 12y ago
    Yeah, thanks. That's what I was getting at. Going outside without changing my information environment wouldn't help me escape the filter bubble. Thanks for the ideas.
• serve_yay 12y ago
  I find that people associated with things I'm interested in often have terrible things to say about different things I'm interested in. (For example I come across a lot of hostile anti-HN sentiment at conferences and among coworkers, HN pretty much hates John Gruber, etc) I'm not sure what that's a sign of, exactly, but I feel like if it were a filter bubble there would be less of that.
• antocv 12y ago
  Pick up a hobby, grow house-plants, flowers and see how good atmosphere you can create in your place just by playing a botanist.
• carrotleads 12y ago
  Growing up we used to wonder as to why our Dad was glued to the Radio or TV... he was used to watching/listening to news at every possible opportunity.. I realised later it ws no different to my constant refreshes of my favourite sites. My dad was a school dropout and I theorised this was his attempt to remain informed and that gave him a sense of achievement. I haven't figured out my addiction to the news, maybe I am taking after my Dad. I have tried to set limits at it and when I am away from the computer, I have no problem missing the news but when I am close, self-discipline is my only answer for now.
• derpderple 12y ago
  Make stuff, build stuff. Create a mental disconnection between new stuff you are learning, and stuff you have learned. Avoid making analogies. Consider that the things you must learn now, are challenges that you can only learn about inwardly. What I mean by that is, disconnect from the hive mind. Make an effort to see the difference. When you were in school, you had to put effort in to learn in a specific way. That way to learn may not be correct forever. Also, learn to live with the knowledge that we are always growing up, no matter how old we get. Sometimes it's not your teachers, society, mentors, authorities, or 'stuff' that have the capacity to make you feel different, or like you are learning something new. The meme of 'self knowledge' has been viral through the centuries, probably for a good reason. I struggle with it myself, obviously, always seeking the correct explanation, never certain whether I've found it, whether others have found it too. I like to pretend my brain is a machine designed to process information and it auto-optimizes the way it stores that information. This may not help, but maybe what you have to do is feel like you have to fight your mind to gain control over it, and once you have it, you might be able to destroy the auto-pattern construction mechanic, or at least make yourself more skeptical of it, in that it doesn't see the pattern meaning directly, but sees how it is constructed through a process you designed a long time ago.
  • CPLX 12y ago
    But what do you do if you keep seeing the same "make stuff, build stuff" idea over and over again?
    • derpderple 12y ago
      Do you understand the difference between choosing to create a connection between the memory and the present observation? I think you have to examine what you mean by 'ideas'. If you already know the answer, then does that not demonstrate to you why the pattern continues to repeat?
      • CPLX 12y ago
        That's some good weed huh.
• derrida 12y ago
  Read books. [1] Go to pub for conversation. Don't listen to normative cunts like me. rm -rf / that shit and get out there. [1] EVIDENCE IN WHICH I PRESENT THE NOVEL AND FAR FETCHED IDEA THAT BOOKS ARE GOOD (tm): Last night I read some shitty paperback about some traveler following the route of Marco Polo through Afghanistan, written for a 1980's audience. Cool, I get to find out what Iran / Afghanistan / Pakistan was like in the 1980's & what Marco Polo thought about the 3 wise men & the possibility of how this related to a myth in Zoroastrianism & that there was a parallel myth in a small town in Iran, and that Mathew may have been writing for a Zoroastrian audience, which presented the interesting idea that Jesus may have been a prophet of the Zoroastrians in a way that it was said he was for the Jews. I'm not religious or anything, it's just interesting.
  • brickcap 12y ago
    Sounds great! what's the name of the book?
    • derrida 12y ago
      Oh that one was "In Xanadu" - William Dalrymple. I should probably revise "some shitty paperback", what I mean is, I picked it up for $2, creased and it's a "travel writing" genre page turner. Time reading it has been time well spent :)
      • brickcap 12y ago
        Thanks for letting me know :) Yeah he is a good writer. I bought his book "The last Mughal" last year but haven't managed to read it yet. I'll also keep an eye out for "In Xandu"
• guizzy 12y ago
  Very much so. To try to avoid it, I'm ignoring anything political or opinion based on my Facebook account. I've added opinion blogs in my RSS reader that are obviously intelligent and thoughtful but completely infuriatingly different from my own opinions. Once in a while I read them and try to force myself to keep an open mind. It's tough. I'm trying to avoid using Reddit for anything but stuff that relates to hobbies. Unfortunately a lot of them are starting to get depressingly political. I might have to cut Reddit off entirely if it keeps up. I get my news from news agencies. Their stuff is significantly less biased than newspapers and news blogs. I'm starting to read more new litterature. Rethreading the same old stuff that's sure to reinforce my opinions is unhealthy in the long run.
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• ufmace 12y ago
  You have to aggressively seek out opinions and viewpoints that you disagree with. Even if - especially if - they make you feel uncomfortable and annoyed. Read all of the opinions that people say are garbage, make them sick, get downvoted, etc. Whatever your ideology is, find and read as much content as you can from the other side. You may feel especially weird if you intentionally spend a month or two in an artificially created filter bubble opposite to the ideology you hold now. Feeling anti-cop after the most recent string of incidents, for example? Try making an effort to ignore anything critical of the police and read only sources from or sympathetic to the police for a month or two - you might be very surprised how much this changes your point of view, and find yourself in a better position to see the full picture of an issue. Have faith that if an opinion really is nonsense, you will be able to realize that on your own, without taking somebody else's word for it. On the other hand, you might find that yourself and the people you agreed with are wrong, or biased, or missing an important perspective.
• thaumaturgy 12y ago
  > I feel like I'm seeing the same ideas over and over again. You are. I run a small MSP, we work with end-users all day long, small and medium-sized businesses and home users alike. The recurring topics on HN are completely irrelevant to them. Very few new services or products on HN -- maybe a couple per year -- are something we can recommend to them. GoDaddy, Dreamhost, Quickbooks, and Microsoft Office still rule their world. The only YC product that has become ubiquitous in their lives is Dropbox. HN tech topics often reflect small pockets of bleeding-edge techies talking to eachother. Also, a lot of the opinions expressed in software development here are the diametric opposite of what users want. "Move fast and break things" -- users hate that. "Release early, release often" -- users really hate that. "Don't optimize" -- users are sick of that, we hear about that just about every day, usually in the form of, "why should I bother getting a faster computer, it will still feel slow". Occasionally I try to relay users' opinions back to software developers and usually it doesn't go over very well. My life is a lot easier if I don't communicate with software developers, and instead tell users that software developers aren't an easy group to work with. > What do you do to break out of it? I use a custom news reader that helps me stay off HN. I focus on building things and working with users. I spend more time out in the world, instead of reading about it. I remind myself that news is actually not very valuable, that most of the things I read about aren't anything I can take any action on or will impact me directly. I haven't owned a television in years and have never been a cable television subscriber, and when I get a glimpse of TV at the gym or restaurant or someone's house or elsewhere, it doesn't look like something I want. Online news is gradually falling into the same bucket for me.
• feybay 12y ago
  Nope, go on 8chan and other controversial sites. You don't have to like what they say, but you'll get interesting ideas and points of view that people won't say on mainstream sites like HN and Twitter. Seek out writers and sites you don't agree with and read stuff that makes you uncomfortable. "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Aristotle
• nextw33k 12y ago
  This is all signal to noise ratio, you have to become aware that repetition is just noise that you need to remove. Factor down your Internet reading, trim news feeds to no more than 3. The cream should rise to the top. Most of all create something; craft beer, a novel, an App, mow the lawn, fix a squeaking gate. You'll get a clearer head from a menial task and a sense of something more.