Most subreddits tend towards complete bubbles, where anything that goes against the prevailing opinions gets down voted into oblivion or outright deleted by mods.
This might be obvious, but to me, it was an important realization that a lot of subreddits that deal with, say, chronic health issues, are going to skew towards people who have extreme conditions. People who get better aren't necessarily going to want to be hanging around in such spaces.
Even subreddits that don't deal with health conditions are going to skew a certain way over time just as a result of who hangs out there all the time and who is accepted, so the "reality" you see in a subreddit is not necessarily the true reality of the greater population. (Again, this should be obvious, but it's easy to forget this when you start reading a reddit post and thinking, "I don't agree with all these people, but there are many people with this opinion. Should I be thinking more like they do?")
I used to think that the people who accused Reddit mods of being "power hungry" were overreacting and were just using that to deflect from their own bad behavior.
Then, weird things started to happen. Some of the things I would post/comment would only get one upvote, and my posts would frequently get immediately removed by an auto-mod. A year or so later, Reddit updated their UI, and the posts with one upvote had a message from Reddit saying they were intentionally hidden.
I conclude it's most likely a combination of subreddits auto-blocking people who post in certain subs, and in some cases the Reddit spam algorithm going completely off the rails. I think a few of my blocked posts criticized Reddit or another social media platform, but most weren't really that notable.
Reddit, in my opinion, is the absolute worst platform for this. It's incredibly easy to manipulate the appearance of consensus opinion. Also, the degree of power the individual moderators have on shaping conversations means instead of an algorithm choosing what you see, someone who spends up to 8 hours a day on Reddit chooses what you see. Lots of these moderators are not the sort of people who should have any place shaping conversations.
Absolutely. The known ease with which voting manipulation is possible and the lucrative incentives for motivated actors and organizations to do so, and the fundamentally flawed moderation structure are the two key issues that, unless they are radically changed, systemically compromise the integrity of the entire platform. This is the natural, inevitable state of a system such designed.
I wish Aaron Swartz were still here. Such an absolute injustice.
I don't think it's a flaw as much as the system is operating outside the intended design capacity. Imagine how sideways HN would go if nothing at all changed in the way the site operates, and it scaled up to 100x the userbase.
Reddit absolutely had issues in the early days (ie: violentacrez), but the issue was mostly a dogmatic concept of free speech, rather than the moderation, and manipulation now. When your subreddit's user-base in in the hundreds, or thousands, rather than millions, it's much easier to pin down bots, and bad actors.
Even so, reddit is a huge echo chamber. The moderation is completely opaque so if a subreddit moderator doesn't like something you've said they can remove it at will, and they often do. And the upvote system encourages groupthink. Votes being hidden on HN I think is excellent.
> The moderation is completely opaque so if a subreddit moderator doesn't like something you've said they can remove it at will, and they often do.
That's true of any real community in the physical world, too.
I'd go as far as saying that it's impossible to have fully inclusive and 100% objectively fair community that's also interesting, or even a community. It's not how humans operate, it's not what they want from a community, and even trying to enforce this "perfection" would require infinite resources feeding an omnipresent bureaucracy to moderate perfect order and compliance into people.
I can't help thinking that those receptive to the message would have drawn consequences long since. The feeds themselves would have chased them away. Can you wean a crack addict by telling them to stop using? Maybe, but I don't see a high probability of success. I sure hope I'm wrong.
> 5. Talk about it - if you’re reading this you a already know this is a problem. Your friends and family may not be aware of how their feeds are manipulating their attention and beliefs. Without intervention, the radicalisation of opinions, and the consequences we’re already seeing, will only escalate.
This is not Crack fortunately.
Physical dependence -> dopamine -> euphoria, escape, coping with stress + anxiety -> cannot feel pleasure without the drug -> craving for the drug / dependence. Recovery includes confronting the physical feeling that the drug is essential for perceived well-being.
Psychological dependence (TikTok / Insta Feed) -> sense of belonging, validation, purpose -> sense of identity via subculture, especially for "marginalized" or "insecure" individuals -> (side-note, some TikTok / Insta / MAGA+Dem / feeds CREATE+encourage the sense of marginalization / insecurity) -> us versus them -> isolation, only valuing subculture views, promoted distorted beliefs, detachment -> dependence (again). Recovery includes depression, anxiety, and feelings of loss.
WEANING
- Drug: medical intervention, therapy, support, relapse prevention
The thing is that those needs people are trying to fulfill with social media feeds are mostly real and legitimate. The problem is to find alternate, and better, sources of fulfillment. This is something you cannot talk into existence.
Seems like a mode of thinking that is appearing everywhere, not just on social media. Go to MOD Pizza. You can order any toppings you want--your favorites. Yet many if not most people will go through the menu of preselected toppings combos to see if there's one they'd like. This makes no sense to me.
That... does not seem analogous. MOD isn't giving you a personalized set of combinations they think you'd like, with the top recommendations happening to include some sponsored ingredient. It's like every other pizza shops since the dawn of pizza shops: fixed toppings menu or a build-your-own option.
It is easier to communicate a pre-selected option (maybe with a change or two) than to order from scratch sometimes.
But ordering pizza and getting news have different stakes anyway, so I think these problems should be handled differently. It is reasonable to offload pizza topping decisions, but we should try to learn a bit about the actual positions/competencies of our elected officials.
Freedom of choice isn't that freeing if you don't have time/money to actually permute through all the options to find what you like.
This is the actual reason why the door is continually held open for propaganda and centralized control. Decentralizing everything struggles with inefficiency problems.
The first person to really discover and popularize this was Edward Bernays — who invented Public Relations to help corporations and politicians weaponize this inefficiency. He kicked off the "Mad Men" of 20th century New York.
The introduction to Bernays's book "Propaganda" lays this out very clearly:
We will keep giving up control to centralized forces until we can share information freely and efficiently about what choices lead to better/worse outcomes in a decentralized way.
Choices take energy. If there are curated defaults it's often more pleasant to save that energy for something else. And most people don't have a sole "favorite" choice that they'd go to every time vs trying variety. Heck, you could even spend more energy on deciding whether or not to go somewhere else entirely.
Algorithmic content feeds are a much more important battle to fight, but "spend more effort on every single other decision too" is not gonna put people in a place to want to be more selective. It'll tire them out more and make them more likely to just put on the default idiot box feed.
The combinatorial space is huge, and when I scan through the _curated_ list, I expect the establishment to provide some options from that space that are Actually Good. Maybe something I wouldn’t usually go for calls out to me. It’s an idea generator.
There’s this concept of “babble and prune” (https://www.lesswrong.com/w/babble-and-prune) and I argue that for food (and probably most opinions…) the prune aspect is where your personal taste gets most expressed. So they are doing you a service by pre-babbling a set of options for you prune.
Maybe this framework can shed some sense :)
In other words: I’m just trying to get a good pizza, man, I’m not some kind of pizza artist.
This reminds me of the 90s trend for applications to boast about their customizable user interfaces, which meant you could drag panels around or choose what should appear on which menu ... but none of them provided a good user interface. Saying "you can make it any way you want it!" excused the devs from putting in any design effort.
Sometimes I just want to eat some food without making 50 decisions. I'm not a chef, I don't know what pairs well together. If picking my own toppings, I will end up getting a plain pepperoni pizza. If there is a pre-built combo that looks appealing, it gives me the opportunity to branch out a little more and maybe find something new I like.
I'm happy places exist that let people be a little more creative, or allow me the same if I'm in the mood, but it's not something I want all the time. I really like places where I can simple order a #4 without any substitutions and my order is done. Growing up as a picky eater, I caught a lot of flack as a kid for substitutions; my orders never felt easy like other people. I like when my order can be easy.
Interesting because I've always been the picky eater (in Western food) which is why ordering exactly what I like is especially appealing. You must have grown very weary of the substitution process.
If I'm going to MOD Pizza, I'm going because I want to eat something quick and easy. I'm not necessarily going there to maximize my pizza-eating experience. I honestly prefer picking something from the menu and maybe adding some extra toppings.
In general, I don't personally enjoy having to make decisions about particular ingredients when I go somewhere to eat. It's mental energy I don't want to have to expend. Not having any dietary restrictions, I personally prefer somewhere that offers a fixed set of items. I'd also say that when I was younger, I was afraid of making the wrong choices and didn't know what some ingredients were whenever I'd go somewhere that did have choices, so that added a little bit of anxiety.
I would disable all short videos in the feed on every platform because they are completely useless but it is not possible in these apps.
I can't remove the apps because I might need them to check something important or write someone, so I forced to use my willpower to skip these videos everyday.
Last year I realized I could block things on facebook with the ublock ad blocker. Now when I go to facebook there's a clean empty page and I can navigate to just what I want to see. If you're using something app based that won't work though
Social media has really proven that phrase that "the medium is the message", which I remember long ago thinking was a little odd and not obviously true.
With all the new stuff coming out in the LLM field, I've taken a cynically mechanistic view to this:
We're basically being conditioned by (the currently popular crop of) social media to work in very short context windows, which aren't sufficient for advanced reasoning.
> So yes, totally. Turn it off and go read a book.
For what its worth, 500 years ago people were just as worried about books as we are today about newsfeeds. But it took a long time for books to ultimately decentralize enough to become a more egalitarian, community knowledge. But even that's not entirely the case now. Books can be propaganda just like everything else.
Books can be terrible, but they can be good to a level that (most popular) social media can't, due to the limitations of the medium.
Without long text, to a good approximation, you just can't convey long, multi-step reasoning chains at the limit of human intellectual capacity.
Personally I've started reading again much more recently, and it's done wonders for what's going on inside my head. I was feeling so dull! I can only recommend it.
It's also common to think that you should only read non-fiction and that fiction is a waste of time, but I absolutely don't agree. Fiction is amazing and it'll help your reasoning, creativity, helps give perspective on things, and improves your outlook on life in a way that non-fiction has a very hard time to do.
Non-fiction is very good for other reasons and it's good to aim for a healthy mix of the too I think.
I agree, but struggle to find fiction books to read. Most of my reading just consists of a historical period / event that I find interesting and read more about. From that I sometimes come across an "alternate history" type fiction book, but not much else. What do you do for discovery?
Walk into a library or bookstore. Pick up something that looks interesting (LITERALLY judge a book by its cover for this) and start reading right then and there. If the book doesn't capture your interest immediately, maybe skim a little bit, or just move on to the next book. Also, ask trusted friends that know you well for suggestions.
You have to first know what your own particular tastes are, and afterwards, do the harder steps of understanding why you like what you like, and expanding your horizons. Once you get to the point where you both know what you like and start to know why you like it, discovery just solves itself. Eventually, you'll be able to tune into any random discussion about a book or author, and discern from context whether or not the works in question are for you, even if you don't share the opinions of those you're listening to.
I'm currently in a big fantasy phase so what I've done is search for "best fantasy series", "most underrated fantasy series", gone through r/fantasy, and "books similar to X" type of searches.
I've also listened to some YouTube channels who review or go through books they've read. Of course it's important to find someone who have similar taste to you or you'll have a bad time.
On the point of "alternate history" I'll throw out "Matt's fantasy Book Reviews" YouTube channel where he also has some alternate history type books he brings up from time to time.
Yes! This so much! In my circles, I have seen a tendency to perceive fiction as a kind of low-brow, less intellectual reading. But then these people go on and pick up self-help non-fiction books.
Fiction has so much more to offer! On top of what you wrote, fiction helps you to develop an ability to put yourself in others' shoes. Empathy is anyway scarce in this politically-charged and ragebait-filled world.
Fiction has helped me develop empathy and to stay empathetic. It has helped me develop my philosophy of life; morals and values I strive to stay close to. The fictional characters have given me courage during hard times. And so much more.
Lot of people prefer to start with self-help kind of non-fiction which is, IMO, the least helpful category of books. I don't know what draw people to it.
The problems with social media aren't its capacity or limitations - it absolutely can be at least as good as books for long-term, coherent narrative building and multistep reasoning. The problems are the incentives against using social media for fostering and sharing deep experiences and thought. Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent yearly promoting disposable, reactionary content, at the expense of robust, complex work that's risky to create and takes time to engage with. The moneymen want the money now, their future selves and their own children be damned.
I don't know about that. Your analysis is correct in that it's ultimately about business incentives, but those incentives lead businesses to choose certain formats over others, thus promoting certain kinds of content.
It seems very far fetched that an app that looks like HN might become as popular as TikTok, and that's because the TikTok format is excellent at creating something that pulls people in by delivering short term rewards.
I'm not a Luddite, I'm sure there are some creators out there making clever tiktok videos, but that format really isn't conducive to, as you say, "long-term, coherent narrative building and multistep reasoning".
Books can be propaganda, certainly. However, books promote long attention span. Social media generally removes that aspect and focuses on dopamine hits. It’s hard to condition critical thinking when jumping from one truth sentence to another truth sentence without context.
No doubt. However, I didn’t focus on any of that. It’s also not the premise of the article. The premise of the article is “don’t remain in your echo chamber, don’t trust just because it fits your narrative, step out and confront the world”.
What's weird about the kind of responses in this thread stating "books" or whatever "can also be bad so social media is no different" is that it's not as if we don't already have data about this. We have a lot of data on the outcomes of people that spend time reading books vs people glued to social media, regarding attention spans, etc. The proof is in the eating, we don't have to speculate about hypotheticals.
I think the opposite, just like we used to tell people to "go read a book", now we'll tell people to "spend some time with an AI" to get cultured. The more AI time the better for your education.
My kids read plenty and I am indeed always telling them to "go talk to the LLM". It's more work than reading (I suspect), they have to engage more with the topic - ask good questions.
I don’t even let my kids watch YouTube. Imagine what an llm could hallucinate to impressionable minds.
Edit (addition):
How the fuck did we decide that a large language model somehow became artificial intelligence? It’s like claiming a dictionary is intelligent. I just don’t get it.
> The Licensing of the Press Act 1662 (14 Cha. 2. c. 33) was an act of the Parliament of England with the long title An Act for preventing the frequent Abuses in printing seditious treasonable and unlicensed Books and Pamphlets and for regulating of Printing and Printing Presses.
I never understood this mentality, you can justify literally anything by saying "they thought X was bad but now X is OK, so we can't say Y is bad"
The scale and pace of modern changes have absolutely nothing to do with what we witnessed thousands or even hundreds years ago. Word of mouth in 1700 can also propagate propaganda but no one is going to argue 1700s word of mouth propaganda is "the same" as foreign propaganda being served straight to your citizen through third party services 24/7
All propaganda isn't created equal either. If 99% of the news you get comes from the state owned journal and the state owned radio you're drinking your own Kool aid, if the propaganda comes from a foreign source straight to your population through third party services you have a whole bunch of different problems
The feed's >contents< are the message. And >the feed< is easily abused by content providers who have a PROFIT (Ferengi!) motive.
BUT I agree that The Feed is tightly intertwined with The Message. It is the enabler for HUGE audience capture. Versus the much smaller old-school audience capture of cult-psychology tactics.
Your social media tools allow you to block content. I use this feature on youtube all the time. If I see a channel that's posting garbage or propaganda or flat out lies I just click the three dots and say 'Don't Recommend Channel.'
My youtube feed is a pleasant experience every day. There's no CNN or Fox news, no yelling talking heads trying to convince each other in existential terms, no jingoistic propaganda trying to influence me.
It's like what it was meant to be 20 years ago. Why do people not do this?
Your approach (which I share) requires thought and discernment, which is a scarce resource nowadays. People intend to turn their brains off when they doomscroll. (I'll never understand the desire.)
There are some people you just can’t reach. The people who won’t manage their media feeds will never “read a book”. It’s like asking people to stop eating junk food, some just won’t even if it’s making them miserable.
YouTube provides me the ability to block certain ads. I got an ad with Mark Walhberg asking me to pray with him. I blocked it. Now I get ads with Chris Pratt asking me to pray with him.
“The medium is the message” goes both ways though. For social media, the inverse is not just “go read a book” but the far more challenging “go write a book”. That’s just not something I’m going to do. I’m certainly not going to find a publisher, get past the gatekeepers, and find a wide enough audience to make the big chunk of time I had to devote to writing worth it.
I highly recommend reading Marshal McLuhan's book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man from which that phrase originates (and not just a Wikipedia summary, different medium after all!)
There is a comment in the intro of that book about the pinnacle of human labor being the simulation of consciousness. Very prescient for being written in the 60s.
And as a follow-up, Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization.
Where McLuhan argues technologies shape worldviews, Mumford argues worldviews also shape technologies.
And then perhaps into the world of science and technology studies (STS), where these questions are explored more deeply, and specific cases are examined.
The author sort of (but not really) acknowledges this midway through, but this is basically a summary of the most recent Technology Connections video, Algorithms are breaking how we think:
I'd rather they acknowledge Alec as the inspiration/source for this post at the beginning and explicitly, rather than just mentioning the video in passing midway through, but at least they do link to it!
I was definitely influenced to write this by Alec's excellent video which I recommend everyone watch.
I'd hoped it would be a way to share my own opinions on it, summarise my own personal concerns, as well as adding my own recommendations - but totally appreciate if you feel it is derivative, and I appreciate the call out. As a big Technology Connections fan I certainly don't intend to steal his work.
It's also intended as something you can link to your friends and family that might be a little more digestible than a 30 minute video.
Hey, that's not fair. We all engage with other people's ideas all the time, no one is really a unique thinker. The best model I have for intellectual activity is that it's a multiple-millennia-long conversation between people over generations.
The main thing is that it's important to acknowledge who it is that you're replying to and to be very clear about to what degree you're synthesizing their thoughts versus contributing your own. But we're all derivative thinkers in the end, even those of us who get famous for original thinking.
If someone is going to expound on unique thought, I’d hope they live in a cave in the woods making unique cave drawings with their feces or riding a pale green elephant wearing magnetic boots upside down within a large refrigerator.
If you want to really be a unique thinker, sure you can listen, and aggregate, summarize, but don’t regurgitate.
sharing similar ideas is never stealing. Your vantage point is unique and everyone should be espousing their take on the lack of agency running our lives these days.
>by Alec's excellent video which I recommend everyone watch.
I get what your advice is about but to add some nuance which didn't cover... you should consider that I learned of Alec's Technology Connections channel 9 years ago because the Youtube algorithm suggested it to me.
Why did Youtube do that? It was because I had watched Ben's Applied Science excellent video showing vinyl grooves under an electron microscope: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuCdsyCWmt8
I'd argue that the Youtube algorithm is very good at finding adjacent videos of interest especially in educational topics and DIY repair tutorials.
You're suggesting people go to Youtube subscriptions feeds but people have a list of favorites in their subscriptions often because of the algorithm. There's a bit of chicken-vs-egg situation going on there.
- Explore --> Youtube algorithm sidebar recommendations of related videos.
- Exploit --> add a worthy creator to subscription feed and get alerted to new releases from that person
The "explore" part is helped by algorithms because they can suggest videos you would have never thought of because you don't know the keywords or jargon to type into a Youtube search box to get to it directly. "You don't know what you don't know."
But don't use the algorithm for politics or click on anything that has a thumbnail with the shocked Pikachu face. That just starts a feedback loop of crap.
Arguably, the algorithms could put one into a non-productive engagement loop never to escape. Personally, I don't think it's a big risk for educational/DIY topics because your brain gets saturated with "too much information" and hits a stopping point where you don't want to learn any more.
So... Algorithms can be bad ... but you can also make them work for you.
I agree with you almost completely. I never used YT as a content source until a few years ago - I’d never open the app and only watch videos linked or embedded / looking up a specific how to video. Now it’s different though.
I never go to my subscription feed - the front page algo keeps me up to date on any new content from people I want to see updates on. I’ve noticed too it almost has a “shadow subscription” where even though I am not subscribed to certain channels, it knows I watch every video by them so it gets on my front page too.
The front page really has a “vibe” that follows my interests around. Watch a few too many Minecraft videos or car repair and soon you start seeing more and more of the front page being those topics. Get a new interest in pyramids? Devlogs? Nature? The front page slowly decays old interests and promotes new ones.
Which is again why I don’t check my sub feed - it’s a graveyard of interests, many of which I don’t care about right now. The algo surfaces the ones I do.
> Watch a few too many Minecraft videos or car repair and soon you start seeing more and more
In my experience it's "watch one video outside of your recommendations and then half your next set of recommendations will be related to that". I'm scared to click on anything I'm not already subscribed to for fear of trashing the home page.
You can (almost) always tell you're not interested in those videos and it slowly stops suggesting them. You can also ask it to never recommend a certain channel.
You somehow must be able to, as everyone I know has feeds full of that sort of thing, and I've never seen even one short or game on my youtube home page.
You can use the three dots to say "Not Interested" on the Shorts shelf but it only hides it for 30 days and then the insidious little worm comes right back.
Yeah they tweak the HTML enough that static stylesheet overrides can become outdated real quick. Very annoying. It's been a while since I looked, but there probably is some uBlock Origin filter list that'll handle this and will stay fairly up-to-date.
If you have to go outside of youtube you modify its behavior, that doesn't really qualify as "you can make it stop". That's like saying you can make someone stop shooting you by wearing a Kevlar vest.
Sadly not available when using the Apple TV to watch YouTube. If there's a NextDNS / PiHole method that stops YouTube ads, I could probably implement that...
You can delete things from your watch history to clean up the algo. If I ever let a TV auto play for too long or have kids over watching things I go though and delete things I think will negatively affect the algo.
I feel like clicking a video and immediately clicking off is also a negative signal they use but YMMV.
Youtube disrespects any person that is multilingual. They shove AI translations into our faces because the content creator is responsible for disabling it not the user. Instead of German videos I get German videos with English AI audio.
I keep getting videos from the same game I always ignore or say not interested on my front page.
Youtube wants my money. They will never get my money when they come up with things like that. I will give them my money once they start cracking down on ads. And by that I mean actual moderated ads - not random ads with porn. As long as they serve scam ads I will never give them money - and it does not look like I will in my lifetime.
But most of the channels I'm interested in have "in video" ads (ads put there by the creator rather than Youtube, I don't know the industry terminology) that remain even if you pay for Youtube Premium.
I wish Premium provided some way for me to predict how many of these kinds of ads are in a video I am considering watching (e.g., by requiring the creator to tell YT how many there are and imposing consequences on creators that lie) but YT does not.
Those are sponser segments and I have no problem with them. These videos can be expensive to produce and these people need to support themselves still. If you take away or reduce their ad revenue, how do we expect them to survive?
There is an extension called SponserBlock that will automatically skip them and other marketing / time wastes. Otherwise I just skip ahead (the highest peak in the watch graph playbar at will usually be the end of the segment)
No, just public sources and seeing others review their income. Which part? YouTube shares details in [0] for how Premium earnings works, I believe the current split is 55% to creators. This is like Spotify where your payment is proportional to your eligible watch time over all watch time from all premium-eligible videos across all premium accounts. YT Premium Lite was announced here [1].
Ad blockers do the same and will be my choice. It is their choice to not moderate their main business. It is their choice to disable monetization on history, ..., people who say fuck in the first minute.
Is it that hard to look at all the BS and say - no not my money?
My interests vary so widely that my home feed is awful. I like watching videos on power tools, software development, video games, sports highlights, math, and other, less focused things like the hoard of cat video channels I sub to to keep existential dread at bay.
I get recommended right leaning videos and videos with ads for manscaped and I'm neither a conservative or a man. It's super weird so I tend to separate my interests into two apps: the YouTube web app for "junk food content" and FreeTube when I want to learn and focus. It's the only way I've found to not be fed the random content carrots while falling down the rabbit hole.
In all honesty I had no idea YouTube had a sub feed until you mentioned it. I still don't know how to access it, but the home page more than suffices for me.
Thanks, this is an important nuance. Recommendation algorithms are absolutely useful, and if you're so inclined you can absolutely make them work for you, but this is about making educated, conscious decisions about what you click next in your 'Related videos' section.
Algorithmic feeds don't give us that opportunity - they're designed to require minimal effort and to keep the dopamine coming without any conscious decisions.
One point to observe here is that there’s a difference between a “related content” section when viewing specific content and the more general algorithmic feed that is designed to be the primary mode of discovery and interaction.
Yeah, pro/anti "algorithms" is too reductive, especially since the old status-quo was also an algorithm of people and processes.
I'd rather use a lens more like all the open-source/free-software concerns about controlling your own computer:
1. Can I see how the recommendation algorithm is intended to work? The site-owner says it works for my benefit, but what if they're mistaken, or lying?
2. What has it recorded about my interests, and how can I fix bad records that don't represent them?
3. When it's not working well--or harmfully exploiting my baser weaknesses--how can I change to a different one?
Kind of comes down to one of Neil Postman's questions
"Whose problem is it that it solves?"
It's possible to get some benefit from an algorithm/process, just as a
side effect, that was never designed to work in your interest and is
an opaque cloud service. Maybe the service is solving the network
owner's problem of selling you to advertisers. If you want to maximise
for "interest and relevance to my life goals" there's nothing to stop
you running your own "algorithm" of course, except any obstacles put
in your way by the data network owner. For that reason it's more
important to pay attention to the freedom of the network (open API,
federated, maximally distributed etc) than the algorithms that run on
it. If you control the former you control the latter. HN (the network)
seems to allow a lot from the plethora of viewers I've seen.
This seems like the perfect place to once again recommend "Amusing Ourselves To Death" :-)
I also read "Technopoly" recently, and while it didn't have quite the same impact on me, I can't deny that it accurately describes the techno-political moment we're currently living in. Well worth the time.
TikTok in particular sneaks politics into everything. Even if it's not explicitly political.
I asked Deepseek once to walk me through what it knows about TikTok and it claimed the Chinese version uses an RL approach to sprinkle socialist core values into your feed even if you explicitly don't want politics. It also claimed TikTok absolutely promises it doesn't do this in the US. I'm not really convinced Deepseek knows what it's talking about but it was pretty plausible technically.
But in practice it's easy to tell if someone even in the US spends a lot of time on TikTok base on their strongly held opinions even when they explicitly say they never watch political content.
I doubt other social media companies do this because they aren't created specifically for political propaganda like TikTok is, but it's possible they do.
You may want to do some basic background reading on what socialism actually is.
People in the US tend to think it refers to things that are actually mixed economies or primarily market economies with strong social guarantees. Think things like the Nordic model or the European model.
Mixed economies with social welfare guarantees are mainstream economics. Actual socialism in the style practiced in reality by countries implementing socialism is mainly characterized by the absence of human rights (including zero worker rights), mass murder, poverty, and a ruling elite that are functionally oligarchs who have enslaved the rest of the population. And on top of this, all socialist states that I'm aware of have re-introduced markets in some form but retaining the dictatorship structure.
Socialism in the past (e.g. in the 18th century) has referred to other ideas, but it doesn't really anymore.
But even if you were to believe somehow that there's some morally redeemable version of socialism that has somehow just managed to hide all this time, the actual version of socialism embraced by China and promoted on TikTok is fully authoritarian, anti-democratic, and does nothing to improve economic equality in the US.
>People in the US tend to think it refers to things that are actually mixed economies or primarily market economies with strong social guarantees. Think things like the Nordic model or the European model...
Yes. This is what people in the US mean when they say socialism in general conversation. They don't mean pure Socialism as Marx talked about it. Similarly when people say the US is a democracy, we know they don't mean it's an actual pure Democracy where everyone votes on every issue.
Yes with the pedantic caveat that those aren't similar in the sense that one is a common confusion and the other is correct.
The Nordic model is the sort of economy and political structure that the 19th century socialists explicitly reacted against and rejected. It's a representation of mainstream liberal democratic theory not of socialism.
On the other hand democracy was always understood to be representative because you can't make every decision by plebiscite.
It has to do with being accurate rather than being "pure".
These particular words haven't evolved in any meaningful way in the last century or so. If anything socialism now refers exclusively to revolutionary/militant utopian socialism whereas it had more varied meanings long ago. That's probably largely an artifact of the fact that socialism since the early 1900s has mainly been promoted by socialist countries after a revolution.
Go on a socialist forum and ask them what they think about markets or mixed economies. E.g.
> version of socialism embraced by China and promoted on TikTok is fully authoritarian, anti-democratic, and does nothing to improve economic equality in the US
This oversells what China is. China is were government and oligarchy are in a strange symbiosis. Capitalism is worse in China in many ways. You are more free in China to exploit others on a large scale. H1B Visas seems to be an authorian idea to me and something that is heavily exploited in China.
What the US and China have in common is a strange kind of nationalism that I can not define, might be because I come from a smaller country.
All socialist states have been functionally authoritarian oligarchies in practice. I'm unaware of an exception. Someone once claimed Yugoslavia was, but I'm not familiar enough with it to have an opinion.
It's also confusing because there's the notion of State Capitalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism#Maoists_and_a...) that I believe Marx also wrote about but I don't remember the details off hand. I think this may more or less be the same idea as authoritarian capitalism, but it's also what socialist regimes eventually look like when they realize they need to re-introduce markets to prevent economic collapse.
My take is that the idea of socialism, communism, and capitalism are deeply muddled in theory and even more muddled in practice. Muddled or not, we have people who consider themselves socialists and followers of Marx, their theory is incoherent, and in practice they try to spread violence and destroy any country they take over. We don't really have people clinging to capitalism in the same way, although some right wing factions in the US tried in the 70s during the cold war to make a capitalistic sort of political religion modeled after the success of socialism.
We'd be better off not having to deal with any of these concepts except for the fact that some people have a strong allegiance to these concepts and there's no changing that in the short term. To me it's a bit like when people killed each other over ideas like how to interpret the tripartite Christian God. Is the son a separate person or the same person, and how does the holy spirit fit in? You get an entire tree of ideas, most of which eventually became heresies punishable by death. None of them made any sense but that didn't stop it from being a motive historical force.
You talking to a member of the DSA buddy. I read about this shit all day. Also, whenever an american uses the word "authoritarian" it is extremely unclear what they mean, usually it means "bad" because they have no principled way to identifying democratic or undemocratic procedures. Most Americans have barely experienced any democracy in their lives at all, just voting every once in a while for canned choices.
My only complaint is that it doesn't encourage enough innate curiosity. I am disincentivized from clicking on some things precisely because their recommendation engine is so tightly wound that I'll get bombarded with really tangential content for days or weeks after. Let me click a few videos about a topic before assuming I'd been hiding a lifetime passion for '80's John Deere combine trans-axle repairs that I need itched almost exclusively to within an inch of its life, all because I thought that guy in the thumbnail might get squished, and didn't adhere to my better angels. Besides that, it's pretty, pretty neat. Not great not bad. I can recommend farm machinery repair YouTube--it is a vibrant community of delightful weirdos and incredibly smart folk who talk about software more than you'd think.
> Personally, I don't think it's a big risk for educational/DIY topics because your brain gets saturated with "too much information" and hits a stopping point where you don't want to learn any more.
This may also be an artifact of the fact that you are the sort of person who seeks out educational content. I.e. you have a high need for intellectual stimulation. That makes you an outlier among all people who use social media.
Personally I think technical people underestimate the negative impacts of the models that drive the algorithms. We are basically training humans via a reward function that maximizes watch time. We are also heavily correlating errors in knowledge because popular stuff gets boosted so much. Correlated errors are bad for rubustness.
YouTube seems less of a social media site than Facebook and Twitter to me. But maybe that's because I mostly use it for educational content also. I want a good recommendation engine, but I don't care what videos my friends and neighbors are watching.
In today's ChatGPT age, I'm sure people are attempting to build contextually aware alternatives to feeds?
Something that will filter out the anger, but keep the insight. I vaguely remember someone posting about a tldr for twitter. Anyone know of tools like that?
I started using Youtube as a frequent content source in the past year. I've been aggressively curating my recommendations by clicking "Not interested" on anything I don't want to see a lot of. If I'm curious I'll watch the one video but in Incognito. If a channel gets repeatedly re-recommended I don't hesitate to use "Don't recommend channel". I also +like everything I've watched and subscribe to channels I'll more likely watch than not watch new content. Getting recommendations pruned feels like getting to a zero email Inbox.
Unfortunately, it doesn't really work like that. If you say "Don't recommend channel", the channel may in fact be recommended and similar channels will definitely still be recommended. "Not interested" works even less accurately.
IME, Not interested at least prevents that single video from showing in my feed. It may reduce similar content from same or other channels--I see some reductions. Don't recommend channel always works for me as far as I noticed, except in search results which seems correct. I never expected it to not recommend similar channels, e.g. I filtered out Linus Tech Tips but watch similar content.
It probably helps that I only permit a handful of specific topics: physics, fun math, synthesizers (but not modular), tiny bit of music theory/training, StarCraft 2 (not SC1/BW), and recently the Nvidia/AMD GPU release saga.
I'd be very skeptical of applying anything we knew about the YouTube algorithm 9 years ago to it, or any algorithm, today.
Google, Facebook, and the other algorithm-driven tech companies have been aggressively enshittifying their products at least since 2020. "I got fun/useful videos out of the YouTube algorithm in 2016" says nothing about what that algorithm is like in 2025, given that they can change it silently on a whim.
The issue is that algorithms are like a casino for your time.
We all know that gambling addicts exist and how destructive it is to their lives, the casino exploits behaviors and gets all their money. As a result people know casinos are dangerous, reasonable people avoid them, are warned about them, and the government forces regulation to reduce their ability to exploit vulnerable people.
Imagine if none of these controls existed and nobody talked about or generally knew that casinos were dangerous. Imagine if the casinos were 100x better at exploiting you and you were forced to walk through a casino every time you leave your house. You’d get a lot more people having their lives destroyed.
So what this video tries to do is important, naming the term, “algorithmic complacency”, allows it to be recognized, discussed, and actively kept in check by users. Ideally regulated by the government as well, just like casinos.
The casino also provides a service, entertainment, there’s nothing wrong with a reasonable person attending, spending some money and being entertained. But we as a society recognize that a company exploiting behaviors to get all of a person’s money, is bad, and try to limit that negative outcome even though we still allow casinos to exist.
Time, attention, and focus is so abstract people don’t even realize they’re spending it, or how modified their behavior has become because of the algorithm’s exploitation. As a result we let companies who are 100x better at manipulation than casinos operate without so much as mentioning they’re doing it, and steal increasing amounts of a user’s time.
You make a valid point about the benefits of algorithms in content discovery. While they can enhance our experience by introducing relevant material, it's crucial to maintain control over our consumption to avoid potential echo chambers.
On a related note, for those looking to access diverse content without regional restrictions, reliable proxy services can be invaluable. NodeMaven offers high-quality proxies that ensure secure and unrestricted browsing. I can drop a link for everyone as Iir realy helped me during mu thesis https://nodemaven.com/proxies/residential-proxies/.
> Arguably, the algorithms could put one into a non-productive engagement loop never to escape. Personally, I don't think it's a big risk for educational/DIY topics because your brain gets saturated with "too much information" and hits a stopping point where you don't want to learn any more.
In my personal experience, "edutainment" can certainly be addictive, and more often than not, consuming it is "unproductive" because (1) consuming content aimlessly is intrinsically mostly passive, (2) passive consumption is ineffective for retaininig knowledge or building understanding, (3) content is often superficially interesting because of a spectacular and/or highly simplified presentation.
This is only a counterpoint to the idea that educational content is limited in its potential to be addictive/unproductive; there is still, obviously, a great positive potential to high-quality educational content.
Don't feel bad about it. He wasn't the first person to point this out, it was pointed out much earlier than his video. It's enough that you cited him and gave credit.
This video is overall better in terms of emphasis, and goes into how to use tools available to intentionally curate the media that you choose to consume as a primary method, rather than it being hidden in a list.
This is exactly why I describe HN as “my home on the internet”
These are my fellow people that will happily watch a 20 or 40 min video about how dishwashers work, or his more recent video about replicating old style Christmas lights.
I tried box detergent because of his dishwasher video, and that's probably saved me hundreds of dollars at this point, with the added benefit of my dishes actually get cleaner.
I also dumped a crappy beverage cooler in my office for a cheap as hell box mini-fridge, which actually maintains temperature enough that I can store cream for coffee and ice down here, and it uses less energy then the unit before.
It focuses on the harmful nature of infinitely scrolling content. Cutting out all infinite scrolling apps has had a hugely positive effect on my productivity and mental health.
How does HN fit into that? I’m not trying to be cheeky, I’m genuinely interested, HN is technically an infinite website (though you do have to click “More”) yet you’re here.
Do you use the noprocrast settings? Does HN just fit differently into your brain? Something else?
There's a bit of a mental difference between being able to (literally) endlessly swipe up to the next tiktok vs having to click the next button on hn though.
On HN, at least, once I get a few pages in I usually realize I’m just seeing articles from a few hours/days ago. I know then it is time to take a break.
It isn’t infinite the same way TikTok will or YouTube used to keep playing something you haven’t seen yet.
One difference is that HN uses a ranked list. You can generally count on things getting less salient the farther you “scroll.”
It’s the same way that infinitely-scrolling Google results don’t have the same effect as infinitely-scrolling content chutes, which exploit the hunch that there might be something gold just around the next swipe…
A few years ago I set up a ublock filter to hide the next/more buttons on hacker news and reddit. It works great because I can still get my news fix, but I can't scroll endlessly.
Since they already reference Technology Connections in the article, and since this is a great essay but not new ideas, let's also call out other important voices - in particular Shoshana Zuboff's "Surveillance Capitalism", Cory Doctorow, and the many others who have put their backs into helping us understand how these sick systems work.
Steve jobs said computers are a bicycle for the mind. Falling off a bicycle without a helmet is a great way to become a donut. Maybe computer users need helmets too. Please join me in abusing this metaphor.
I tried watching that video, but found it to be pretty bad. The beginning was good - demonstrating how much information we have at our fingertips, yet don't use. But then it veers off into what feels like a lot of personal frustrations he has - with the replies he's gotten at BlueSky, with politics, with the media, etc., and it feels like he's using algorithms as an excuse to vent against things he doesn't like.
The worst part is, it feels like he's making the same mistakes he's warning others about yet doesn't even realize it. He claims the bad BlueSky users are the result of algorithms, but doesn't (from what I can tell) see that his problem is that he's paying attention to a feed that brings those people to him. He complains about social media turning everything into a monolithic good vs. evil outrage generator, but then he does the exact same thing when talking about the New York Time's Canada editorial. You can say he's justified in that, but isn't everyone going to believe that they're the exception and that their outrage is justified?
I've seen this kind of criticism before, where it feels like someone is captured by something, can't escape it, gets annoyed by certain elements of it, and then creates a criticism of it that's more about venting their personal frustrations than actually escaping it (since they can't see how trapped they themselves are).
I find this claim unlikely, since there have always been crazies on the internet, and main issue is that a single crazy person can be online 24/7 with an output that dwarfs a dozen normal people.
In the spirit of the video (and the article), I'm watching this on Freetube [0] while hiding the comments, recommended videos tab, and pretty much everything else apart from the video description.
Malgorhitms are. We could, if we didn't confuse use it with LoTR entities, have belgorhitms, which would not only be recommended by Kahneman & Tversky, but also recommend by intelligence analysts, the historical opposites of corporate analysts, minions Belegron.
Algorhitms, "changing how one thinks" is real, and ultimately good. The social changes, when they start expecting you to Anki your work contract (which would, if the Anki was monitored, be highly legally effective against you); or requiring you know Kellyed Bayesian decision theory because that's a prequsite for getting reasonably priced insurance, or simply, surviving, that is unknown. I give 37.7% confidence Elon Musk was gaming in 2025 U.S. politics using construct akin to a Bayesian decision tree.
It would be great if one didn't have to change how one thinks, whether they delve into CLRS or TikTok.
There will always be something dictating what you think until you really feel interested in actually thinking yourself and develop a critical and exploratory mindset. The active audience of this website probably is predominantly blessed with having this kind of mindset already but the general population probably lacks any incentive for developing it.
The general population figures out all kinds of complex things and loves it when tech provides solutions to those complexities. Commercials suck and Tivo flew off the shelves in part because of 30 second skip. Half of browser users have an ad blocker. No one was handed these by their Big Tech overlords, they sought them out and used them to fix their "feeds". Give people some credit that if we make good tools available, they'll avail themselves of those. The active audience of this website is probably capable of building some of those. So, get to it instead of lamenting the fall.
Recommendation for the EU, please force social media platforms to offer support for custom feed algorithms/plugins. If they don't offer them, ban them from the EU market.
Long term, once we figure out how to generate feeds that are aren't socially corrosive dumpster fires. Mandate platforms default to using one of a set of approved models (maybe we need a recommendation engine benchmark that scores social divisiveness).
> force social media platforms to offer support for custom feed algorithms
This sort of legislature could bankrupt a startup—and, by extension, discouragement investment—by driving them to pursue a technical achievement that's out of their league, and for potentially no reward.
I've a rudimentary familiarity with control systems, yes. Glad we're on the way same page!
I'm not satisfied with your response, but I'm losing my grasp on the analogy.
What are we dampening? Inertia, no? Imparted by the environment, and/or our own (fundamentally, inevitably) inaccurate thrust vectors?
It's a metaphor, so I guess we can only argue about the level of abstraction at which to apply it. I'm certainly glad I don't need to mutate and grow new internal organs just to cross the street, but I can be grateful for the mutation and growth of an ability to synthesize Vitamin D which allowed my ancestors to cross glaciers—two activities which are, arguably, helpful in maintaining homeostasis.
I think you might want to read up on the history of Japan post Warring States, to learn what happens when you priveledge "social stability" over innovation.
You don’t need legal solutions for something that technology can fix. Agents can gather, filter, rank, and display information in a way that works for you. Gatekeepers control both the information and the interface, but agents take that control back—especially local agents, which offer privacy and freedom from restrictive oversight. LLMs can adapt endlessly in how they present information. There’s no need to disconnect entirely or remain at the mercy of tech companies. I suspect advertising is headed for a rough patch soon, as agents will slice through spam and ads.
Wouldn't it be much better for the European Union to do what it would prefer which is to simply jail anyone that produces any content that doesn't follow correct opinions?
Unfortunately, the Bluesky Discover feed is utterly garbage, seemingly insistent on pushing political content, especially of the resistlib variety, no matter how many times I give "not interested" feedback. It's essentially the mirror version of the twitter For You algorithm; less overtly heinous but still a deeply unhealthy engagement trap. You definitely have to use custom feeds and the other features, but the most prominent and easiest point of entry for new users is a drip feed of ragebait.
This advice is missing something crucial which is how to discover new creators sans feeds. Not saying it's impossible, but it's something they excel at and they've extinguished a lot of the old ways.
Yeah this is super key. I think it's still possible to highlight new creators without algos, one way is to just involve more (only) humans in the process. This is what we're doing at Twigg, effectively letting users decide what gets highlighted and elevated to the rest of our members. - Too early to say how it'll play out, but it seems to be working well soo far...
I’m surprised there is never more acknowledgement of this. Just look around at the other people you see in public. If they aren’t actively walking, the phone is out, sometimes even while walking. You can’t really think deeply about your life and situation if every waking second is spent looking at brainrot social media. Even people with a nose buried in a book are trading precious time in their own mind developing their own thoughts for that to instead be filled with others words and ideas.
Socrates was even complaining about this, and it’s arguably far worse what is happening today than what he was seeing.
So while there is plenty of viral brainrot media out there, reading substantive material that promotes understanding or introspection looks almost the same. And it's more profound than what I'd be thinking about in the dentist waiting room or long hardware store line.
Reddit is unfortunately a major thing in my life. There's an eternal battle between left and right politics in my small European country's relevant subreddits.
Not very healthy - it's like a never ending feed of "someone is wrong on the Internet".
For the record: "right" here is roughly equivalent with the political position of the US Democratic party.
Unfortunately these subreddits are not very balanced, so when I do take a break, I see that the other side "wins" to a noticeably larger degree. Again, small country.
It's fascinating, and being "The Subject" of the fascination and never truly "Objective" is a particular conundrum! Good luck with the "unfortunately" aspect -- totally possible to stop. (sexual humor warning: https://imgur.com/dont-touch-girls-m0Qk8)
I think it's part of being human.
I invite a brain specialist to step in here and comment which regions of the brain compelled us to agree with those whom we also feel we "need".
EDIT: .. cut to ncr100 proceeding to open youtube.com ...
What finally helped me break out of those bad habits was reframing who I was trying to convince of an argument. Let's face it, it's highly unlikely you're going to ever convince someone you're directly arguing with online just by the simple fact you're arguing, which often suggests some sort of impasse.
Instead, argue as if you're trying to convince the bored reader who has climbed down through the comments (for some reason), who has found value in this discourse and is trying to get more or better perspectives. That is someone you can convince of your position.
It's been a lot easier to engage in text discourse ever since I had that epiphany, because instead of taking every bait and trying to correct every wrong, I'm only engaging with folks arguing with data, with perspective, with good faith more often than not. That leads to better outcomes, I believe, instead of just contributing to so much noise.
I try to keep a few things in mind whenever I'm arguing with somebody that I think are helpful (hopefully):
1. Most arguments come down to defining words, even if you may not realise it.
2. Don't follow rabbitholes. Don't deviate from arguing your core premise.
3. You're not trying to prove the other person wrong, you're trying to find the truth.
On #1 for example; I watched a video of a conservative arguing liberals (or something) about a few premises, including "gay marriage does not exist". It was immediately clear to me, but apparently not to the people in the video, that this guy has a different definition of "marriage" to me. That's the breadth of the disagreement. That's all people should've argued with him about. But not one person did. Even when he described his definition of marriage, and how his premise comes about from that definition, everybody immediately became sidetracked. There's just no chance of finding common ground behaving like that.
4. It's not that unlikely that you are arguing with an actual child who has picked up enough terminology to be dangerous but completely lacks any deeper understanding.
I would love to completely cut reddit out of my life but would enjoy a smaller, more positive alternative that aims to provide the benefits of reddit when it was at its best but without the inherent flaws of the system's design and the dark patterns it is now known to encourage. I'm a bit put off by lemmy from my initial, cursory glance for a variety of reasons, but maybe I'm just using it wrong. Would love to hear suggestions that people have used for an extended time and would personally vouch for.
I've quit Reddit off and on over the years, and one of my fears the first time was missing out on news or helpful tips from small professional/hobby subreddits. I ended up building a tool that would email me the top 3 posts from a list of subreddits every day, and that was all I needed to quit without feeling like I was missing out. My tool eventually broke after Reddit's api change, but now I use one called redditletter¹ which does the same thing.
This was exactly the same kind of motivation that prompted me to create a RSS project to allow me to interact with platforms like Reddit/HN/Lemmy in a more low-volume and healthy way, subscribing to just the top posts in my RSS reader with rich custom feeds.
Lemmy was founded by tankie Reddit expats, and the project has had super weird issues in the past like a hardcoded blacklist and no RSS feed support for a while. So, I can't say it's for me either. Would be nice to have a viable Reddit alternative. Although Reddit does still have RSS feeds, and Hacker News does scratch the itch for certain topics.
If you happen to use Reddit in a browser, Safari, then check out Protego for Reddit. You can add keyword filters to hide posts based on keywords, such as political terms. Makes browsing Reddit more positive for sure.
I disabled my YouTube watch history and installed Unhook. Combined, this essentially hides all recommendations, shorts, etc. I had tried blocking YouTube completely in the past, but it's a genuinely useful tool for learning and work. The new approach still lets me pull information while shielding me from the endless rabbitholes and passive consumption.
For me peak internet was mid 2000s StumbleUpon. Finding random sites at the click of a button lightly sorted by theme. One major difference was people weren’t competing to get the most views. Of course monetized sites wanted more but today’s feeds create a sort of homogeneity I find less interesting because people are trying to appease an algorithm not viewers.
While this isn't at all like StumbleUpon, I've been enjoying a similar sense of discovery by adding https://indieblog.page/random as a bookmark to my web browser. Whenever I have some spare time and feel like surfing the web the old-fashioned way, I click this bookmark and get a random post from an independent blog. It's definitely a refreshing and much calmer experience compared to the black-box-algorithm-driven feeds of mainstream social media.
I suggested a few years ago an alternative business model for platforms[1]. Rather than selling ads, sell people the ability to filter. Buy some in-platform filtration either from a provider or from another user of the platform. It had been a particularly frustrating day.
In a lot of ways I really like recommendation algorithms, regularly I've had youtube recommend a video that's converted into new sub (eg. LiamTronix and his electric tractor conversion).
What we really need is "responsible" recommendation systems (that allow the joy of discovery while aggressively damping rage bait and extreme view points). They'd need to be trained with some kind of socially beneficial reward function rather than pure engagement or advertiser dollars.
Could such a recommendation systems operate on top of existing social graphs?
Bluesky feeds are still server-side (due to needing to process all of the available posts to generate the feed) but at least you can choose which ones to use and people can make their own, which is an improvement over a single app-provided algorithmic feed.
How do you decide what is an extreme view point? This "socially beneficial reward function" could, and actually has, lead to things Google Gemini's depiction Founding Fathers or Vikings, etc.
It's ironic that we're discovering this article from a feed. Sorry to tell you folks, but there's no defense against FOMO other than willpower. And the willpower is currently in short supply.
After watching the Technology Connections video, I realized that YouTube ReVanced has an option to default to the subscriptions tab rather than the home page. It doesn't seem that different in my case, but I probably am catching some things that I would have missed otherwise.
I've been thinking about this, to get rid of feeds I need something that will allow me to find posts and videos via related keywords. I want to be able to search for information by myself, but in this time, I need to be able to do it at scale. AI Agents that do research for me is a step in the right direction. Also, I think the platforms would resist this by trying to gatekeep information by all means necessary.
I regularly use Twitter's search function with "latest" reverse chrono results, to follow topics without following people, and it works fine. I have a few bookmarked to save the typing and adjust the searches occasionally to refine them, minusing out some word or person, or adding another term to drill in (see advanced search for a decent set of options.)
My point is, search still works. We don't have to take their feed, or even the feed we create following people. We can just search that shit out. And search results bookmarks in a folder work great for managing that.
331 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 276 ms ] threadEven subreddits that don't deal with health conditions are going to skew a certain way over time just as a result of who hangs out there all the time and who is accepted, so the "reality" you see in a subreddit is not necessarily the true reality of the greater population. (Again, this should be obvious, but it's easy to forget this when you start reading a reddit post and thinking, "I don't agree with all these people, but there are many people with this opinion. Should I be thinking more like they do?")
Then, weird things started to happen. Some of the things I would post/comment would only get one upvote, and my posts would frequently get immediately removed by an auto-mod. A year or so later, Reddit updated their UI, and the posts with one upvote had a message from Reddit saying they were intentionally hidden.
I conclude it's most likely a combination of subreddits auto-blocking people who post in certain subs, and in some cases the Reddit spam algorithm going completely off the rails. I think a few of my blocked posts criticized Reddit or another social media platform, but most weren't really that notable.
I wish Aaron Swartz were still here. Such an absolute injustice.
Reddit absolutely had issues in the early days (ie: violentacrez), but the issue was mostly a dogmatic concept of free speech, rather than the moderation, and manipulation now. When your subreddit's user-base in in the hundreds, or thousands, rather than millions, it's much easier to pin down bots, and bad actors.
That's true of any real community in the physical world, too.
I'd go as far as saying that it's impossible to have fully inclusive and 100% objectively fair community that's also interesting, or even a community. It's not how humans operate, it's not what they want from a community, and even trying to enforce this "perfection" would require infinite resources feeding an omnipresent bureaucracy to moderate perfect order and compliance into people.
Learning how to think critically, I think that's the intersection of this cartoon and this blog post.
This is not Crack fortunately.
Physical dependence -> dopamine -> euphoria, escape, coping with stress + anxiety -> cannot feel pleasure without the drug -> craving for the drug / dependence. Recovery includes confronting the physical feeling that the drug is essential for perceived well-being.
Psychological dependence (TikTok / Insta Feed) -> sense of belonging, validation, purpose -> sense of identity via subculture, especially for "marginalized" or "insecure" individuals -> (side-note, some TikTok / Insta / MAGA+Dem / feeds CREATE+encourage the sense of marginalization / insecurity) -> us versus them -> isolation, only valuing subculture views, promoted distorted beliefs, detachment -> dependence (again). Recovery includes depression, anxiety, and feelings of loss.
WEANING
- Drug: medical intervention, therapy, support, relapse prevention
- Social: therapy, reconnection, critical thinking development, finding alt purpose, gradual separation
Talking isn’t a magic bullet, but it’s part of the solution.
see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue
But ordering pizza and getting news have different stakes anyway, so I think these problems should be handled differently. It is reasonable to offload pizza topping decisions, but we should try to learn a bit about the actual positions/competencies of our elected officials.
This is the actual reason why the door is continually held open for propaganda and centralized control. Decentralizing everything struggles with inefficiency problems.
The first person to really discover and popularize this was Edward Bernays — who invented Public Relations to help corporations and politicians weaponize this inefficiency. He kicked off the "Mad Men" of 20th century New York.
The introduction to Bernays's book "Propaganda" lays this out very clearly:
https://www.voltairenet.org/IMG/pdf/Bernays_Propaganda_in_en...
Or if you don't like reading... another overview of Bernays is Adam Curtis's "Century of the Self"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s
We will keep giving up control to centralized forces until we can share information freely and efficiently about what choices lead to better/worse outcomes in a decentralized way.
Algorithmic content feeds are a much more important battle to fight, but "spend more effort on every single other decision too" is not gonna put people in a place to want to be more selective. It'll tire them out more and make them more likely to just put on the default idiot box feed.
There’s this concept of “babble and prune” (https://www.lesswrong.com/w/babble-and-prune) and I argue that for food (and probably most opinions…) the prune aspect is where your personal taste gets most expressed. So they are doing you a service by pre-babbling a set of options for you prune.
Maybe this framework can shed some sense :)
In other words: I’m just trying to get a good pizza, man, I’m not some kind of pizza artist.
I'm happy places exist that let people be a little more creative, or allow me the same if I'm in the mood, but it's not something I want all the time. I really like places where I can simple order a #4 without any substitutions and my order is done. Growing up as a picky eater, I caught a lot of flack as a kid for substitutions; my orders never felt easy like other people. I like when my order can be easy.
In general, I don't personally enjoy having to make decisions about particular ingredients when I go somewhere to eat. It's mental energy I don't want to have to expend. Not having any dietary restrictions, I personally prefer somewhere that offers a fixed set of items. I'd also say that when I was younger, I was afraid of making the wrong choices and didn't know what some ingredients were whenever I'd go somewhere that did have choices, so that added a little bit of anxiety.
I can't remove the apps because I might need them to check something important or write someone, so I forced to use my willpower to skip these videos everyday.
With all the new stuff coming out in the LLM field, I've taken a cynically mechanistic view to this:
We're basically being conditioned by (the currently popular crop of) social media to work in very short context windows, which aren't sufficient for advanced reasoning.
So yes, totally. Turn it off and go read a book.
For what its worth, 500 years ago people were just as worried about books as we are today about newsfeeds. But it took a long time for books to ultimately decentralize enough to become a more egalitarian, community knowledge. But even that's not entirely the case now. Books can be propaganda just like everything else.
Without long text, to a good approximation, you just can't convey long, multi-step reasoning chains at the limit of human intellectual capacity.
Personally I've started reading again much more recently, and it's done wonders for what's going on inside my head. I was feeling so dull! I can only recommend it.
Non-fiction is very good for other reasons and it's good to aim for a healthy mix of the too I think.
Walk into a library or bookstore. Pick up something that looks interesting (LITERALLY judge a book by its cover for this) and start reading right then and there. If the book doesn't capture your interest immediately, maybe skim a little bit, or just move on to the next book. Also, ask trusted friends that know you well for suggestions.
You have to first know what your own particular tastes are, and afterwards, do the harder steps of understanding why you like what you like, and expanding your horizons. Once you get to the point where you both know what you like and start to know why you like it, discovery just solves itself. Eventually, you'll be able to tune into any random discussion about a book or author, and discern from context whether or not the works in question are for you, even if you don't share the opinions of those you're listening to.
I've also listened to some YouTube channels who review or go through books they've read. Of course it's important to find someone who have similar taste to you or you'll have a bad time.
On the point of "alternate history" I'll throw out "Matt's fantasy Book Reviews" YouTube channel where he also has some alternate history type books he brings up from time to time.
Fiction has so much more to offer! On top of what you wrote, fiction helps you to develop an ability to put yourself in others' shoes. Empathy is anyway scarce in this politically-charged and ragebait-filled world.
Fiction has helped me develop empathy and to stay empathetic. It has helped me develop my philosophy of life; morals and values I strive to stay close to. The fictional characters have given me courage during hard times. And so much more.
Lot of people prefer to start with self-help kind of non-fiction which is, IMO, the least helpful category of books. I don't know what draw people to it.
It seems very far fetched that an app that looks like HN might become as popular as TikTok, and that's because the TikTok format is excellent at creating something that pulls people in by delivering short term rewards.
I'm not a Luddite, I'm sure there are some creators out there making clever tiktok videos, but that format really isn't conducive to, as you say, "long-term, coherent narrative building and multistep reasoning".
"Go consume this form-factor because it's better" has always bothered me.
"Go Read a book" was really meant to be synonymous with "Go educate yourself"
No one really says "Go read a blog" or "Go read your facebook feed" the same way, at least as far as I know.
I sure hope "go spend more time on social media" or "go talk to an AI" never becomes synonymous with "educate yourself". I shudder at the thought
Edit (addition):
How the fuck did we decide that a large language model somehow became artificial intelligence? It’s like claiming a dictionary is intelligent. I just don’t get it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_1...
The scale and pace of modern changes have absolutely nothing to do with what we witnessed thousands or even hundreds years ago. Word of mouth in 1700 can also propagate propaganda but no one is going to argue 1700s word of mouth propaganda is "the same" as foreign propaganda being served straight to your citizen through third party services 24/7
All propaganda isn't created equal either. If 99% of the news you get comes from the state owned journal and the state owned radio you're drinking your own Kool aid, if the propaganda comes from a foreign source straight to your population through third party services you have a whole bunch of different problems
The feed's >contents< are the message. And >the feed< is easily abused by content providers who have a PROFIT (Ferengi!) motive.
BUT I agree that The Feed is tightly intertwined with The Message. It is the enabler for HUGE audience capture. Versus the much smaller old-school audience capture of cult-psychology tactics.
Your social media tools allow you to block content. I use this feature on youtube all the time. If I see a channel that's posting garbage or propaganda or flat out lies I just click the three dots and say 'Don't Recommend Channel.'
My youtube feed is a pleasant experience every day. There's no CNN or Fox news, no yelling talking heads trying to convince each other in existential terms, no jingoistic propaganda trying to influence me.
It's like what it was meant to be 20 years ago. Why do people not do this?
It’s like keeping a blog on the internet no one reads. Liberating.
However, as you say, writing something good enough and with a big enough audience is very hard.
Where McLuhan argues technologies shape worldviews, Mumford argues worldviews also shape technologies.
And then perhaps into the world of science and technology studies (STS), where these questions are explored more deeply, and specific cases are examined.
https://youtu.be/QEJpZjg8GuA
I'd rather they acknowledge Alec as the inspiration/source for this post at the beginning and explicitly, rather than just mentioning the video in passing midway through, but at least they do link to it!
I'd hoped it would be a way to share my own opinions on it, summarise my own personal concerns, as well as adding my own recommendations - but totally appreciate if you feel it is derivative, and I appreciate the call out. As a big Technology Connections fan I certainly don't intend to steal his work.
It's also intended as something you can link to your friends and family that might be a little more digestible than a 30 minute video.
The main thing is that it's important to acknowledge who it is that you're replying to and to be very clear about to what degree you're synthesizing their thoughts versus contributing your own. But we're all derivative thinkers in the end, even those of us who get famous for original thinking.
Some more derivative than others.
If someone is going to expound on unique thought, I’d hope they live in a cave in the woods making unique cave drawings with their feces or riding a pale green elephant wearing magnetic boots upside down within a large refrigerator.
If you want to really be a unique thinker, sure you can listen, and aggregate, summarize, but don’t regurgitate.
I get what your advice is about but to add some nuance which didn't cover... you should consider that I learned of Alec's Technology Connections channel 9 years ago because the Youtube algorithm suggested it to me.
Why did Youtube do that? It was because I had watched Ben's Applied Science excellent video showing vinyl grooves under an electron microscope: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuCdsyCWmt8
So the first Alec video I got exposed to was his related topic on vinyl records (click "Oldest" to see them) : https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections/videos
I'd argue that the Youtube algorithm is very good at finding adjacent videos of interest especially in educational topics and DIY repair tutorials.
You're suggesting people go to Youtube subscriptions feeds but people have a list of favorites in their subscriptions often because of the algorithm. There's a bit of chicken-vs-egg situation going on there.
What a good algorithm does is help users with the Explore-vs-Exploit tradeoff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration%E2%80%93exploitati...
- Explore --> Youtube algorithm sidebar recommendations of related videos.
- Exploit --> add a worthy creator to subscription feed and get alerted to new releases from that person
The "explore" part is helped by algorithms because they can suggest videos you would have never thought of because you don't know the keywords or jargon to type into a Youtube search box to get to it directly. "You don't know what you don't know."
But don't use the algorithm for politics or click on anything that has a thumbnail with the shocked Pikachu face. That just starts a feedback loop of crap.
Arguably, the algorithms could put one into a non-productive engagement loop never to escape. Personally, I don't think it's a big risk for educational/DIY topics because your brain gets saturated with "too much information" and hits a stopping point where you don't want to learn any more.
So... Algorithms can be bad ... but you can also make them work for you.
I never go to my subscription feed - the front page algo keeps me up to date on any new content from people I want to see updates on. I’ve noticed too it almost has a “shadow subscription” where even though I am not subscribed to certain channels, it knows I watch every video by them so it gets on my front page too.
The front page really has a “vibe” that follows my interests around. Watch a few too many Minecraft videos or car repair and soon you start seeing more and more of the front page being those topics. Get a new interest in pyramids? Devlogs? Nature? The front page slowly decays old interests and promotes new ones.
Which is again why I don’t check my sub feed - it’s a graveyard of interests, many of which I don’t care about right now. The algo surfaces the ones I do.
In my experience it's "watch one video outside of your recommendations and then half your next set of recommendations will be related to that". I'm scared to click on anything I'm not already subscribed to for fear of trashing the home page.
You can use the three dots to say "Not Interested" on the Shorts shelf but it only hides it for 30 days and then the insidious little worm comes right back.
But yeah, I do apologize for trying to offer solutions, as they are not perfect.
(Pretty sure uBlock works mobile too, but that's irrelevant)
I feel like clicking a video and immediately clicking off is also a negative signal they use but YMMV.
Youtube wants my money. They will never get my money when they come up with things like that. I will give them my money once they start cracking down on ads. And by that I mean actual moderated ads - not random ads with porn. As long as they serve scam ads I will never give them money - and it does not look like I will in my lifetime.
I wish Premium provided some way for me to predict how many of these kinds of ads are in a video I am considering watching (e.g., by requiring the creator to tell YT how many there are and imposing consequences on creators that lie) but YT does not.
There is an extension called SponserBlock that will automatically skip them and other marketing / time wastes. Otherwise I just skip ahead (the highest peak in the watch graph playbar at will usually be the end of the segment)
I want YT to pay them out of what I pay for YT Premium.
[0] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6306276
[1] https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/introducing-premium-lit...
Is it that hard to look at all the BS and say - no not my money?
I get recommended right leaning videos and videos with ads for manscaped and I'm neither a conservative or a man. It's super weird so I tend to separate my interests into two apps: the YouTube web app for "junk food content" and FreeTube when I want to learn and focus. It's the only way I've found to not be fed the random content carrots while falling down the rabbit hole.
Right now my homepage seems to be
- construction/DIY videos (Perkins, B1M, Megaprojects, Matt Risinger, NS Builders)
- video game dev (blackthornprod)
- "indie game of the day" channels (Aliensrock, Nialus)
- military videos (Battleship New Jersey, Ryan McBeth)
- freerunning / urban exploration (STORRER)
- movie & tv analysis / commentary (Frame Voyager, Corridor Crew, New Rockstars)
- chess (agagmotor, Magnus)
- Minecraft (Mumbo Jumbo)
- random documentaries (fern, Stewert Hicks, Half as Interesting)
- egypt / pyramids (History for GRANITE)
- science / engineering (Adam Savage, Colin Fruze, Applied Engineering)
- coding (Tsoding)
From just a quick scan of the topics / channels.
Algorithmic feeds don't give us that opportunity - they're designed to require minimal effort and to keep the dopamine coming without any conscious decisions.
I'd rather use a lens more like all the open-source/free-software concerns about controlling your own computer:
1. Can I see how the recommendation algorithm is intended to work? The site-owner says it works for my benefit, but what if they're mistaken, or lying?
2. What has it recorded about my interests, and how can I fix bad records that don't represent them?
3. When it's not working well--or harmfully exploiting my baser weaknesses--how can I change to a different one?
"Whose problem is it that it solves?"
It's possible to get some benefit from an algorithm/process, just as a side effect, that was never designed to work in your interest and is an opaque cloud service. Maybe the service is solving the network owner's problem of selling you to advertisers. If you want to maximise for "interest and relevance to my life goals" there's nothing to stop you running your own "algorithm" of course, except any obstacles put in your way by the data network owner. For that reason it's more important to pay attention to the freedom of the network (open API, federated, maximally distributed etc) than the algorithms that run on it. If you control the former you control the latter. HN (the network) seems to allow a lot from the plethora of viewers I've seen.
I also read "Technopoly" recently, and while it didn't have quite the same impact on me, I can't deny that it accurately describes the techno-political moment we're currently living in. Well worth the time.
I have no complaints about my Instagram and YouTube feeds. They give good recommendations.
TikTok in particular sneaks politics into everything. Even if it's not explicitly political.
I asked Deepseek once to walk me through what it knows about TikTok and it claimed the Chinese version uses an RL approach to sprinkle socialist core values into your feed even if you explicitly don't want politics. It also claimed TikTok absolutely promises it doesn't do this in the US. I'm not really convinced Deepseek knows what it's talking about but it was pretty plausible technically.
But in practice it's easy to tell if someone even in the US spends a lot of time on TikTok base on their strongly held opinions even when they explicitly say they never watch political content.
I doubt other social media companies do this because they aren't created specifically for political propaganda like TikTok is, but it's possible they do.
People in the US tend to think it refers to things that are actually mixed economies or primarily market economies with strong social guarantees. Think things like the Nordic model or the European model.
Mixed economies with social welfare guarantees are mainstream economics. Actual socialism in the style practiced in reality by countries implementing socialism is mainly characterized by the absence of human rights (including zero worker rights), mass murder, poverty, and a ruling elite that are functionally oligarchs who have enslaved the rest of the population. And on top of this, all socialist states that I'm aware of have re-introduced markets in some form but retaining the dictatorship structure.
Socialism in the past (e.g. in the 18th century) has referred to other ideas, but it doesn't really anymore.
But even if you were to believe somehow that there's some morally redeemable version of socialism that has somehow just managed to hide all this time, the actual version of socialism embraced by China and promoted on TikTok is fully authoritarian, anti-democratic, and does nothing to improve economic equality in the US.
Yes. This is what people in the US mean when they say socialism in general conversation. They don't mean pure Socialism as Marx talked about it. Similarly when people say the US is a democracy, we know they don't mean it's an actual pure Democracy where everyone votes on every issue.
The Nordic model is the sort of economy and political structure that the 19th century socialists explicitly reacted against and rejected. It's a representation of mainstream liberal democratic theory not of socialism.
On the other hand democracy was always understood to be representative because you can't make every decision by plebiscite.
It has to do with being accurate rather than being "pure".
Go on a socialist forum and ask them what they think about markets or mixed economies. E.g.
- https://www.reddit.com/r/Socialism_101/comments/w03n2p/what_...
- https://www.reddit.com/r/CapitalismVSocialism/comments/19558...
- https://www.reddit.com/r/Socialism_101/comments/19ewm26/can_...
- https://www.google.com/search?q=reddit+socialism+mixed+econo...
It's harder to search other socialist forums like the darknet ones, but you see the same patterns there
This oversells what China is. China is were government and oligarchy are in a strange symbiosis. Capitalism is worse in China in many ways. You are more free in China to exploit others on a large scale. H1B Visas seems to be an authorian idea to me and something that is heavily exploited in China.
What the US and China have in common is a strange kind of nationalism that I can not define, might be because I come from a smaller country.
All socialist states have been functionally authoritarian oligarchies in practice. I'm unaware of an exception. Someone once claimed Yugoslavia was, but I'm not familiar enough with it to have an opinion.
It's also confusing because there's the notion of State Capitalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism#Maoists_and_a...) that I believe Marx also wrote about but I don't remember the details off hand. I think this may more or less be the same idea as authoritarian capitalism, but it's also what socialist regimes eventually look like when they realize they need to re-introduce markets to prevent economic collapse.
My take is that the idea of socialism, communism, and capitalism are deeply muddled in theory and even more muddled in practice. Muddled or not, we have people who consider themselves socialists and followers of Marx, their theory is incoherent, and in practice they try to spread violence and destroy any country they take over. We don't really have people clinging to capitalism in the same way, although some right wing factions in the US tried in the 70s during the cold war to make a capitalistic sort of political religion modeled after the success of socialism.
We'd be better off not having to deal with any of these concepts except for the fact that some people have a strong allegiance to these concepts and there's no changing that in the short term. To me it's a bit like when people killed each other over ideas like how to interpret the tripartite Christian God. Is the son a separate person or the same person, and how does the holy spirit fit in? You get an entire tree of ideas, most of which eventually became heresies punishable by death. None of them made any sense but that didn't stop it from being a motive historical force.
This may also be an artifact of the fact that you are the sort of person who seeks out educational content. I.e. you have a high need for intellectual stimulation. That makes you an outlier among all people who use social media.
Personally I think technical people underestimate the negative impacts of the models that drive the algorithms. We are basically training humans via a reward function that maximizes watch time. We are also heavily correlating errors in knowledge because popular stuff gets boosted so much. Correlated errors are bad for rubustness.
Something that will filter out the anger, but keep the insight. I vaguely remember someone posting about a tldr for twitter. Anyone know of tools like that?
It probably helps that I only permit a handful of specific topics: physics, fun math, synthesizers (but not modular), tiny bit of music theory/training, StarCraft 2 (not SC1/BW), and recently the Nvidia/AMD GPU release saga.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leX541Dr2rU
Google, Facebook, and the other algorithm-driven tech companies have been aggressively enshittifying their products at least since 2020. "I got fun/useful videos out of the YouTube algorithm in 2016" says nothing about what that algorithm is like in 2025, given that they can change it silently on a whim.
We all know that gambling addicts exist and how destructive it is to their lives, the casino exploits behaviors and gets all their money. As a result people know casinos are dangerous, reasonable people avoid them, are warned about them, and the government forces regulation to reduce their ability to exploit vulnerable people.
Imagine if none of these controls existed and nobody talked about or generally knew that casinos were dangerous. Imagine if the casinos were 100x better at exploiting you and you were forced to walk through a casino every time you leave your house. You’d get a lot more people having their lives destroyed.
So what this video tries to do is important, naming the term, “algorithmic complacency”, allows it to be recognized, discussed, and actively kept in check by users. Ideally regulated by the government as well, just like casinos.
The casino also provides a service, entertainment, there’s nothing wrong with a reasonable person attending, spending some money and being entertained. But we as a society recognize that a company exploiting behaviors to get all of a person’s money, is bad, and try to limit that negative outcome even though we still allow casinos to exist.
Time, attention, and focus is so abstract people don’t even realize they’re spending it, or how modified their behavior has become because of the algorithm’s exploitation. As a result we let companies who are 100x better at manipulation than casinos operate without so much as mentioning they’re doing it, and steal increasing amounts of a user’s time.
On a related note, for those looking to access diverse content without regional restrictions, reliable proxy services can be invaluable. NodeMaven offers high-quality proxies that ensure secure and unrestricted browsing. I can drop a link for everyone as Iir realy helped me during mu thesis https://nodemaven.com/proxies/residential-proxies/.
In my personal experience, "edutainment" can certainly be addictive, and more often than not, consuming it is "unproductive" because (1) consuming content aimlessly is intrinsically mostly passive, (2) passive consumption is ineffective for retaininig knowledge or building understanding, (3) content is often superficially interesting because of a spectacular and/or highly simplified presentation.
This is only a counterpoint to the idea that educational content is limited in its potential to be addictive/unproductive; there is still, obviously, a great positive potential to high-quality educational content.
https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/product/sainsburys-conce...
I asked in Tesco and the young lad who worked there (probably 18-19) had never heard of it.
I still dispense it from a Finish powder bottle I've had for more than a decade.
These are my fellow people that will happily watch a 20 or 40 min video about how dishwashers work, or his more recent video about replicating old style Christmas lights.
I also dumped a crappy beverage cooler in my office for a cheap as hell box mini-fridge, which actually maintains temperature enough that I can store cream for coffee and ice down here, and it uses less energy then the unit before.
It focuses on the harmful nature of infinitely scrolling content. Cutting out all infinite scrolling apps has had a hugely positive effect on my productivity and mental health.
Do you use the noprocrast settings? Does HN just fit differently into your brain? Something else?
Things like hn or old.reddit still carry most if not all of the negative effects of infinite feeds.
What I would give credit to hn for is that being text only, it forces you at least to think a bit and not blindly consume a video for example.
It isn’t infinite the same way TikTok will or YouTube used to keep playing something you haven’t seen yet.
How you justify your addiction is entirely up to you though ;)
It’s the same way that infinitely-scrolling Google results don’t have the same effect as infinitely-scrolling content chutes, which exploit the hunch that there might be something gold just around the next swipe…
Ublock Origin: ! 2020-10-11 https://news.ycombinator.com news.ycombinator.com##.morelink
The worst part is, it feels like he's making the same mistakes he's warning others about yet doesn't even realize it. He claims the bad BlueSky users are the result of algorithms, but doesn't (from what I can tell) see that his problem is that he's paying attention to a feed that brings those people to him. He complains about social media turning everything into a monolithic good vs. evil outrage generator, but then he does the exact same thing when talking about the New York Time's Canada editorial. You can say he's justified in that, but isn't everyone going to believe that they're the exception and that their outrage is justified?
I've seen this kind of criticism before, where it feels like someone is captured by something, can't escape it, gets annoyed by certain elements of it, and then creates a criticism of it that's more about venting their personal frustrations than actually escaping it (since they can't see how trapped they themselves are).
I find this claim unlikely, since there have always been crazies on the internet, and main issue is that a single crazy person can be online 24/7 with an output that dwarfs a dozen normal people.
[0] https://freetubeapp.io/
Algorhitms, "changing how one thinks" is real, and ultimately good. The social changes, when they start expecting you to Anki your work contract (which would, if the Anki was monitored, be highly legally effective against you); or requiring you know Kellyed Bayesian decision theory because that's a prequsite for getting reasonably priced insurance, or simply, surviving, that is unknown. I give 37.7% confidence Elon Musk was gaming in 2025 U.S. politics using construct akin to a Bayesian decision tree.
It would be great if one didn't have to change how one thinks, whether they delve into CLRS or TikTok.
Long term, once we figure out how to generate feeds that are aren't socially corrosive dumpster fires. Mandate platforms default to using one of a set of approved models (maybe we need a recommendation engine benchmark that scores social divisiveness).
This sort of legislature could bankrupt a startup—and, by extension, discouragement investment—by driving them to pursue a technical achievement that's out of their league, and for potentially no reward.
In an ever-changing universe, how can we have social stability without innovation?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damping
I'm not satisfied with your response, but I'm losing my grasp on the analogy.
What are we dampening? Inertia, no? Imparted by the environment, and/or our own (fundamentally, inevitably) inaccurate thrust vectors?
It's a metaphor, so I guess we can only argue about the level of abstraction at which to apply it. I'm certainly glad I don't need to mutate and grow new internal organs just to cross the street, but I can be grateful for the mutation and growth of an ability to synthesize Vitamin D which allowed my ancestors to cross glaciers—two activities which are, arguably, helpful in maintaining homeostasis.
I know nothing about it, because exclusively use custom and niche feeds!
The more people that do this the more we can start rebuilding networks of people we trust and still retain control over the diversity of our sources.
1: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/
* In Bluesky I read retweets and comments to find new people to follow.
* I send content to friends and they send some back. I’ve found creators this way.
* Search for interesting topics, see who is generating content on those topics. Follow/subscribe if you’d like to see more.
Socrates was even complaining about this, and it’s arguably far worse what is happening today than what he was seeing.
Not very healthy - it's like a never ending feed of "someone is wrong on the Internet".
For the record: "right" here is roughly equivalent with the political position of the US Democratic party.
Unfortunately these subreddits are not very balanced, so when I do take a break, I see that the other side "wins" to a noticeably larger degree. Again, small country.
I think it's part of being human.
I invite a brain specialist to step in here and comment which regions of the brain compelled us to agree with those whom we also feel we "need".
EDIT: .. cut to ncr100 proceeding to open youtube.com ...
Instead, argue as if you're trying to convince the bored reader who has climbed down through the comments (for some reason), who has found value in this discourse and is trying to get more or better perspectives. That is someone you can convince of your position.
It's been a lot easier to engage in text discourse ever since I had that epiphany, because instead of taking every bait and trying to correct every wrong, I'm only engaging with folks arguing with data, with perspective, with good faith more often than not. That leads to better outcomes, I believe, instead of just contributing to so much noise.
1. Most arguments come down to defining words, even if you may not realise it.
2. Don't follow rabbitholes. Don't deviate from arguing your core premise.
3. You're not trying to prove the other person wrong, you're trying to find the truth.
On #1 for example; I watched a video of a conservative arguing liberals (or something) about a few premises, including "gay marriage does not exist". It was immediately clear to me, but apparently not to the people in the video, that this guy has a different definition of "marriage" to me. That's the breadth of the disagreement. That's all people should've argued with him about. But not one person did. Even when he described his definition of marriage, and how his premise comes about from that definition, everybody immediately became sidetracked. There's just no chance of finding common ground behaving like that.
4. It's not that unlikely that you are arguing with an actual child who has picked up enough terminology to be dangerous but completely lacks any deeper understanding.
https://www.reddit.com/r/nosurf/comments/1693ky4/you_should_...
¹ https://redditletter.com
https://www.upvote-rss.com
I feel so much freer!
A lot of the sites there are pre-2020 era but some weird and wonderful stuff!
Suggest to someone that they turn off their phone and leave it at home, and watch them have an almost painful physical reaction.
[1] https://blog.eutopian.io/building-a-better-linkedin/
What we really need is "responsible" recommendation systems (that allow the joy of discovery while aggressively damping rage bait and extreme view points). They'd need to be trained with some kind of socially beneficial reward function rather than pure engagement or advertiser dollars.
Could such a recommendation systems operate on top of existing social graphs?
Too much disinfo: community notes and grok are IMO just running cover for the disinfo firehose.
Saw the highest profile figure on the platform (yes him) retweet the most knee jerk takes that could be easily fact checked, but weren’t.
Instead of getting upset or trying to fight it, I yanked out the algo slop cable and am back in the real world. It’s great.
Edit: I didn’t really use it before 2024, so I cannot comment on what it was like under the last management.
I also tend to seek out conflicting views to my own when reading books, so it’s not that I’m just raging at ‘the other side’ either.
My point is, search still works. We don't have to take their feed, or even the feed we create following people. We can just search that shit out. And search results bookmarks in a folder work great for managing that.