It's more of an idiom than a prepositional formula.
It means that people would create their own filter bubbles, even in the absence of an algorithm, so blaming algorithms or trying to do away with them if your goal is to eliminate filter bubbles is moot.
That's a strawman argument. Seeing filter bubbles as bad doesn't mean the only approach is to remove all filter bubbles in all of existence. You can lessen the number of and ease of making filter bubbles and still have a positive impact on society.
Are you using the term 'algorithm' in the mathematical and computer-science sense of "a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations", or are you using it in the SV-marketing-hype sense of "an ML trained to produce the answer we want to see"? It can be very confusing switching back and forth.
> That, however, is one of the reasons I spend so much time working on recommender systems. There is always an algorithm. The default one promotes rage, controversy and misinformation. But we don’t have to stick with the default.
No we don't. But does anyone think that Twitter would have risen as it has if it did not select for rage and controversy? There is an algorithm on another layer of the stack that filters out more neutral content: The free choices of users in an open market. If Twitter (et al.) did make an effort to screen out its most viral content it would simply lose market share to a platform that doesn't.
On the subject of "should we blame algorithms", here is some nice new research with an elegant field experiment, which suggests that yes, Facebook's algorithm does lead to filter bubbles:
Isn't that a distraction from the real issue? If people want filter bubbles (for themselves but not others like usual) it doesn't matter who made a particular one. People don't want spam or crap they will never agree with and want stuff they are interested in.
I think it's non-obvious that Facebook's only following consumer demand here. People are on FB for lots of reasons, including network effects that are hard to change, and the company probably has a lot of leeway to alter its bubble without changing that. Indeed, they've already made many changes.
There's also a lot of possible variation in the strength of the bubble. Suppose I click on "Fox News". Should FB feed me more right wing news? Probably: as you say, people want news they are interested in, perhaps for good reasons. Should it try feeding me more extreme stuff, to see if I'm interested in QAnon? Maybe not, but it's easy to imagine how recommender algorithms could end up doing that.
The crux of the article, summarised by its two final sentences:
> That, however, is one of the reasons I spend so much time working on recommender systems. There is always an algorithm. The default one promotes rage, controversy and misinformation. But we don’t have to stick with the default.
> There is always an algorithm. The default one promotes rage, controversy and misinformation. But we don’t have to stick with the default.
And I guess the real problem is that the financial incentives are set up such that sites like Facebook are motivated to choose[1] algorithms that are most suited at stoking engagement via rage and controversy.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
>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.
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.
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:
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.
> “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.
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.
And "litterbug" was a term invented by the packaging industry in a PR campaign that shifted blame about packaging waste from the manufacturers to the consumers.
This is a low-effort content marketing fluff piece that just says this company's recommendation engine has a "serendipity knob." It avoids the pernicious bits like how business models built on eyeball engagement result in a death march towards maximizing engagement metrics, and engineering the most addictive filter bubble has proven a pretty effective way to juice some PM's quarterly numbers.
Make a post on how to break that model, don't say "we have a serendipity knob tuned to 9.4%!"
Litterbug is a real thing though, IMO. I don't want Coke to sell me a handful of Coke; I want it in a watertight container. If, when I'm done with that container, I throw it on the ground, how is that Coke's fault?
Same question for a fast-food wrapper. Do we think McDonalds should serve its food loose?
What assurances do you have that said containers are washed between uses?
A restaurant will wash their stuff to make sure that you're a return customer. But a big advantage of once-opened / once-disposed containers is that I can suddenly trust random street vendors with no relationship to me.
If you're willing to trust your restaurant you should also probably trust Coca Cola. Not because I think Coca Cola is more honest, but do you imagine the PR nightmare if employee #832453 captures a video on their smartphone of dirty bottles being reused?
This type of fraud/malpractice is much more likely to be seen in small restaurants with little oversight and loose processes that at a multi-million dollar bottling plant.
The issue isn't Coca Cola forgetting to wash reusable bottles.
Its Street Vendor #455. Who is refilling reusable bottles and selling them to his customers. I'm talking about people sitting with coolers and ice, selling $1 soda or $1 water.
I mean how do you trust that the shops you buy plastic bottles of coke from aren’t getting them from some dodgy counterfeit factory? Or draining the bottles with a syringe and replacing the contents?
I think you’re looking for a problem that doesn’t exist in the real world.
Reusable containers means that the container wasn't necessarily filled by Coca Cola. It could have been the street-vendor refilling glasses.
That's the thing. A disposable container guarantees that the bottle came from Coca Cola.
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> I get my milk in reusable glass bottles.
But you don't get your reusable milk from a street vendor. You trust your deliveryman, you trust the company they work for. You have a working relationship with them. (Or maybe you pick it up from a grocery store that you trust).
I'm talking about a street vendor: someone you have absolutely no relationship with. How do you know that you can trust the street vendor?
A sealed disposable bottle offers guarantees that reusable containers do not. That's simply a fact.
> That's the thing. A disposable container guarantees that the bottle came from Coca Cola.
My reusable milk bottles come with a small plastic top that's recyclable and functions as an anti-tamper seal. No reason you couldn't do the same with soda; plastic Coke bottles already have this.
I once bought a soda from the Philippines. They went to the back, and pulled out a reusable glass bottle with a straw in it. That's what got me thinking about this. I didn't see them unseal the bottle.
Unless you buy a sealed bottle to begin with, you don't really know if it was reused. I admit that you have a good point: if the glass bottle had an appropriate one-time seal on it, that would be proof enough for me.
You can trust random vendors because the container is sealed, and once open it can't be sealed again. Many "disposable containers" that we use can be filled with tap water and used again if you want.
What makes you think random street vendor will be refilling it? Back when you could buy sodas in glass bottles in grocery stores, you could take the empty bottles (even ones from random street vendor) back to any grocery store, and they'd go back to the bottling plant to be sterilized and refilled. It was very common, and yes, people trusted random street vendors, because the bottles were sealed at the bottling plant.
Really, if you are so concerned about random street vendors, you should consider that it is not hard at all to open a plastic soda bottle without breaking the seal ring on the cap, refill the bottle, and put the cap back on.
Multiple jurisdictions have bottle deposit schemes, which operate similar to what you described. It's not with reusable bottles though, presumably because the cost of transporting and cleaning the glass bottles outweighs the savings from reuse.
The roadside trash where I live is never packaging with a deposit attached to it. This seems to work really well, as there are enough homeless and poor people willing to collect that stuff.
It doesn't have to be binary. Consumer is responsible for making sure packaging ends up in the trash/recycling bin, but manufacturer is responsible for making litter-resistant products and packaging. For example, if your product is wrapped in thin plastic that comes apart in multiple pieces when you try to take it off... it's going to be a high litter risk compared to a can of soda which is a single continuous piece of aluminum.
>For example, if your product is wrapped in thin plastic that comes apart in multiple pieces when you try to take it off... it's going to be a high litter risk compared to a can of soda which is a single continuous piece of aluminum.
It's hard to win. Thin plastic = less materials consumed and less fuel spent on transport. Switching to thick plastic might make it harder to litter, but the flak will just shift to how wasteful the packaging is.
I will occasionally spend time picking up litter when I go on walks. The waste I find, in order of volume, is primarily:
1) Food packaging
2) Automobile detritus
3) Construction material
2 is because parts fall off of people's cars. 3 is because construction material will fall out of the pickup truck beds that are used by construction workers.
But the food packaging waste is dropped by people. If we accept the UX principle that it's easier to change the system than human behavior, then the best way to reduce the volume of litter would be to reduce food packaging waste. For example, if fast food, like McDonalds, were packaged in rapidly bio-degradable and low-pollutant things, like simple, un-dyed paper wrappings, then the amount of waste in the environment would be greatly reduced.
Disney found the best way to reduce littering is very frequent trashcan placement but that has practicality issues to roll out enmasse. Making the litter less bad is harm-reduction.
In fact, preventing filter bubbles (so to speak) is an explicit design goal of recommender systems.
This is one of those annoying articles where someone talks about their specific interest as if it's a universal truth for an entire domain of problems. For an Amazon product listing or a Buzzfeed news page that thrives on users seeing new and exciting stuff to click on and buy, sure, the recommender system needs to avoid getting stuck on one specific type of content. For your Facebook newsfeed or YouTube video sidebar where divisive politics rules the day it is not absolutely not goal because that would stray in to challenging user's beliefs, and that would push people away.
Maybe I misunderstand what a "filter bubble" is? Because this seems like a type of filter bubble to me. Perhaps a little looser (and less rage-inducing) than Facebook but it still seems designed to keep people reading content only within their bubble-of-interest while filtering out the rest.
Ya, I think recommender systems assume a filter bubble. I'm not an expert so hopefully someone can correct me, but filtering based on ones existing interest seems to be the use case no?
What I'd like to see is something that can select for quality, and not for interest.
I think this is what you often get with human manual curation. For example, I can happily read a well written well researched thought piece even if the content speaks to opinions I don't currently hold. Or news source that at least appear to have done their research and provide ample evidence and facts, no matter what the content is for.
Similarly with entertainment too, friends can recommend some new great war movie even if I'm not generally into war movies, or some new great book even if I rarely read fiction, etc.
I don't really know how to judge quality though. When someone asks me what kind of music I like, I tend to answer I just like good music. What does that mean? I'm not sure. Could machine learning figure out what that means if it trained on my personal liked music tracks? Would it learn the qualities I'm interested in, or would it end up only learning my personal preferences at the time?
preventing filter bubbles (so to speak) is an explicit design goal of recommender systems.
Of course it's a goal. They're just not very good at achieving that goal. I wouldn't expect someone who makes their living building these things to be unbiased on the question of whether or not they're currently a bad thing.
If I search incognito youtube for "Trump Speech" and select the first video, 3 of the next 4 "up next" are also Trump speeches, and the other one is "McCarthy SHREDS Pelosi". If I click on of those 4, the next "up next" videos are different, but also 3 of the first 4 are Trump speeches. The other one is a Trump-Biden debate. This is a filter bubble.
Sure, human psychology plays a part, that's why algorithms like this work in the first place. But compare this to the opposite extreme pre 24-hour news networks and there was simply much less opportunity for playing into this. That's what algorithms provide: The ability to "instantiate" filter bubbles much more readily than content that is passively delivered without consideration for past choices, and the consumer has to make all of their choices without that outside influence.
Reddit doesn’t use algorithmic curation (or pretends not to?) but it’s one of the most polarized sites I’ve ever used. Blaming machine learning or misinformation is just a comforting and easy way to dismiss real problems.
That would be far more constructive than the alternative theories floated, eg Eli Pariser (filter bubble), Ben Thompson (aggregation model), and this technopositivistic missive.
Has anyone asked Chomsky? I've looked, but no joy.
--
Edit:
> There is always an algorithm. The default one promotes rage, controversy and misinformation. But we don’t have to stick with the default.
I think recommendation algorithms provide a useful service, but I think the main issue is that for a lot of sites there's no way to explore the content _without_ that algorithm which is heavily biased in your favour. Things you dislike are minimised and slowly hidden from you to make it seem like no one likes these things. Things you enjoy are proliferated to make it seem like everyone likes these things. This gives a warped view of the world. Showing a random article 10% of the time isn't going to help with that. An experimental interface I worked on last year (and am working on) is using classification systems to let people explore the books of Open Library, https://openlibrary.org/explore (beta warning :) ). The idea being that you can quickly dive deep into a topic you're interested in, but just because you're interested in "Science", that doesn't mean the "Arts" or the "Religion" bookcases adjacent to it will become any smaller. You're always in the context of the bigger picture of the entirety of human knowledge.
The problem is not the filter bubble. The problem is who controls the filter bubble. If I can control my own filter bubble I'm fine with that. If some BigTech company or some Government is controlling my filter bubble I call that censorship.
Our household subscribes to The Washington Post and The New York Times. If the radio is on, it is tuned to NPR.
I have relatives who do not get a print paper, but tend to read the The New York Post and The Washington Examiner on-line. The watch Fox News and at some point probably listened to Rush Limbaugh.
Do we get rather different views of what is going on? I can't see how we could not. Did an algorithm have anything to do with this? You would have to dramatically stretch the sense of "algorithm" to say so.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] threadIt means that people would create their own filter bubbles, even in the absence of an algorithm, so blaming algorithms or trying to do away with them if your goal is to eliminate filter bubbles is moot.
They were granted to us by the Ixians.
No we don't. But does anyone think that Twitter would have risen as it has if it did not select for rage and controversy? There is an algorithm on another layer of the stack that filters out more neutral content: The free choices of users in an open market. If Twitter (et al.) did make an effort to screen out its most viral content it would simply lose market share to a platform that doesn't.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3653388
There's also a lot of possible variation in the strength of the bubble. Suppose I click on "Fox News". Should FB feed me more right wing news? Probably: as you say, people want news they are interested in, perhaps for good reasons. Should it try feeding me more extreme stuff, to see if I'm interested in QAnon? Maybe not, but it's easy to imagine how recommender algorithms could end up doing that.
> That, however, is one of the reasons I spend so much time working on recommender systems. There is always an algorithm. The default one promotes rage, controversy and misinformation. But we don’t have to stick with the default.
> There is always an algorithm. The default one promotes rage, controversy and misinformation. But we don’t have to stick with the default.
And I guess the real problem is that the financial incentives are set up such that sites like Facebook are motivated to choose[1] algorithms that are most suited at stoking engagement via rage and controversy.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-it-encourages-di...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
- 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
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.
It's a problem because it alienates you from your irl community
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 77 years later https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolution 78 years later https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War 78 years later 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.
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.
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-j...
"TikTok assures users worried about Myanmar that they're aggressively monetizing the situation": 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-...
Here are some things that got multiple interactions:
this image mocking TX Gov Greg Abbott: https://i.redd.it/wlq9vk0k9ri61.png
this meme about Gamestop: 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.
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.
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.
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.
This is a low-effort content marketing fluff piece that just says this company's recommendation engine has a "serendipity knob." It avoids the pernicious bits like how business models built on eyeball engagement result in a death march towards maximizing engagement metrics, and engineering the most addictive filter bubble has proven a pretty effective way to juice some PM's quarterly numbers.
Make a post on how to break that model, don't say "we have a serendipity knob tuned to 9.4%!"
Same question for a fast-food wrapper. Do we think McDonalds should serve its food loose?
A restaurant will wash their stuff to make sure that you're a return customer. But a big advantage of once-opened / once-disposed containers is that I can suddenly trust random street vendors with no relationship to me.
This type of fraud/malpractice is much more likely to be seen in small restaurants with little oversight and loose processes that at a multi-million dollar bottling plant.
Its Street Vendor #455. Who is refilling reusable bottles and selling them to his customers. I'm talking about people sitting with coolers and ice, selling $1 soda or $1 water.
I think you’re looking for a problem that doesn’t exist in the real world.
Or we could have laws and inspectors for that at the bottling facilities because the above is not going to work.
The same assurances I have that they didn't let a rat piss in it at the factory the first time around; inspections and safety regulations.
I get my milk in reusable glass bottles. I have absolutely zero concern that they forgot to wash them between uses.
That's the thing. A disposable container guarantees that the bottle came from Coca Cola.
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> I get my milk in reusable glass bottles.
But you don't get your reusable milk from a street vendor. You trust your deliveryman, you trust the company they work for. You have a working relationship with them. (Or maybe you pick it up from a grocery store that you trust).
I'm talking about a street vendor: someone you have absolutely no relationship with. How do you know that you can trust the street vendor?
A sealed disposable bottle offers guarantees that reusable containers do not. That's simply a fact.
My reusable milk bottles come with a small plastic top that's recyclable and functions as an anti-tamper seal. No reason you couldn't do the same with soda; plastic Coke bottles already have this.
Unless you buy a sealed bottle to begin with, you don't really know if it was reused. I admit that you have a good point: if the glass bottle had an appropriate one-time seal on it, that would be proof enough for me.
Really, if you are so concerned about random street vendors, you should consider that it is not hard at all to open a plastic soda bottle without breaking the seal ring on the cap, refill the bottle, and put the cap back on.
It's hard to win. Thin plastic = less materials consumed and less fuel spent on transport. Switching to thick plastic might make it harder to litter, but the flak will just shift to how wasteful the packaging is.
2 is because parts fall off of people's cars. 3 is because construction material will fall out of the pickup truck beds that are used by construction workers.
But the food packaging waste is dropped by people. If we accept the UX principle that it's easier to change the system than human behavior, then the best way to reduce the volume of litter would be to reduce food packaging waste. For example, if fast food, like McDonalds, were packaged in rapidly bio-degradable and low-pollutant things, like simple, un-dyed paper wrappings, then the amount of waste in the environment would be greatly reduced.
[1]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...
This is one of those annoying articles where someone talks about their specific interest as if it's a universal truth for an entire domain of problems. For an Amazon product listing or a Buzzfeed news page that thrives on users seeing new and exciting stuff to click on and buy, sure, the recommender system needs to avoid getting stuck on one specific type of content. For your Facebook newsfeed or YouTube video sidebar where divisive politics rules the day it is not absolutely not goal because that would stray in to challenging user's beliefs, and that would push people away.
But then...
> newsletter, selected based on your interests
Maybe I misunderstand what a "filter bubble" is? Because this seems like a type of filter bubble to me. Perhaps a little looser (and less rage-inducing) than Facebook but it still seems designed to keep people reading content only within their bubble-of-interest while filtering out the rest.
What I'd like to see is something that can select for quality, and not for interest.
I think this is what you often get with human manual curation. For example, I can happily read a well written well researched thought piece even if the content speaks to opinions I don't currently hold. Or news source that at least appear to have done their research and provide ample evidence and facts, no matter what the content is for.
Similarly with entertainment too, friends can recommend some new great war movie even if I'm not generally into war movies, or some new great book even if I rarely read fiction, etc.
I don't really know how to judge quality though. When someone asks me what kind of music I like, I tend to answer I just like good music. What does that mean? I'm not sure. Could machine learning figure out what that means if it trained on my personal liked music tracks? Would it learn the qualities I'm interested in, or would it end up only learning my personal preferences at the time?
Of course it's a goal. They're just not very good at achieving that goal. I wouldn't expect someone who makes their living building these things to be unbiased on the question of whether or not they're currently a bad thing.
If I search incognito youtube for "Trump Speech" and select the first video, 3 of the next 4 "up next" are also Trump speeches, and the other one is "McCarthy SHREDS Pelosi". If I click on of those 4, the next "up next" videos are different, but also 3 of the first 4 are Trump speeches. The other one is a Trump-Biden debate. This is a filter bubble.
Sure, human psychology plays a part, that's why algorithms like this work in the first place. But compare this to the opposite extreme pre 24-hour news networks and there was simply much less opportunity for playing into this. That's what algorithms provide: The ability to "instantiate" filter bubbles much more readily than content that is passively delivered without consideration for past choices, and the consumer has to make all of their choices without that outside influence.
https://www.algotransparency.org/
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.03318.pdf
https://www.brookings.edu/techstream/how-youtube-helps-form-...
This line would be a full-stop for my librarian SO:
> It’s referred to in the literature as “serendipity.”
But otherwise I'm very grateful for this article.
For it reminds me that someone should update (adapt) the Propaganda Model for social media. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model#Filters
That would be far more constructive than the alternative theories floated, eg Eli Pariser (filter bubble), Ben Thompson (aggregation model), and this technopositivistic missive.
Has anyone asked Chomsky? I've looked, but no joy.
--
Edit:
> There is always an algorithm. The default one promotes rage, controversy and misinformation. But we don’t have to stick with the default.
Clap louder, and surely Tinkerbell will fly.
"There is always an algorithm. The default one promotes rage, controversy and misinformation"
This guy is a massive idiot and he doesn't know it yet.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210309163058/https://news.find...
Shameless plug: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/filterbubble/amgno...
I have relatives who do not get a print paper, but tend to read the The New York Post and The Washington Examiner on-line. The watch Fox News and at some point probably listened to Rush Limbaugh.
Do we get rather different views of what is going on? I can't see how we could not. Did an algorithm have anything to do with this? You would have to dramatically stretch the sense of "algorithm" to say so.