Comment by FilterJoe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FilterJoe | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not getting this "filter bubble" meme that's floating about of late. My site is dedicated to helping people filter information (www.filterjoe.com), though not in the narrow sense discussed by the "filter bubble" proponents. Many regular people I know are totally overloaded and overwhelmed by the web, and most especially the social web (email, facebook, twitter, etc.).

Which is the best browser to use? How do I manage 200 passwords? What's the best kind of AA battery to buy? How do I read web pages without getting distracted?

It can be pretty hard for a normal person to get good answers to questions like these. Googling won't necessarily get you good answers and many people won't even know to ask (many people don't know that their password practices are extremely risky, or that the little "e" they click on to access the internet is a browser).

What's needed are better filters. This backlash against filtering takes one very small subset of possible reasons to filter - avoiding contradictory information to controversial topics - and makes a grand leap to the conclusion that all filtering is bad.

By this argument, if I do a keyword search on "passwords," it would be best if I were served the random top 10 results that happen to have the word "password" somewhere in the title or one of the subheadings. That way I won't be subjected to harmful biases . . .

EDIT: typo

I think the argument is much more nuanced. The danger isn't inherently in the filters themselves, it is in the way they shape people's beliefs unknowingly. Understanding that these filters exist give you the ability to start to think about how your beliefs may be being modified. The next step is empowering users to change these filters, modify them, so that if they /want/ to, they can use these filters, or they could switch them, to experience the opposite side of the story.

Again though, the first step is to acknowledge and raise awareness.

I get the idea about biases creeping in that you don't even know about. But it's pretty easy to do a search for the opposite of something. For example:

google Palestinian view

google Israeli view

I would be surprised if personalized search results got so extreme as to make that not work.

The problem of filtering out low quality or irrelevance is much harder. I believe I'm substantially better than the average person at finding things on the web yet I waste many hours per week trying to sift out high quality information on various subjects I'm researching. So I, for one, would welcome filtering that is far better and far more personalized than what exists today. And I don't want to have to spend hours per week fiddling with Yahoo Pipes or something along those lines in order to get there.

Whether any of the new attempts at automated personalized filtering will greatly improve quality/relevance is a separate question. The answer to that probably won't be known for years.

EDIT: inserted line break

Well, in the TED talk there was example of two queries about Egypt made at the same time from different locations, and the first results page from one was completely missing information about unrests that were going on at that time. It's a little bit scary to me.

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