Hacker News Reader

Comment by mstade | Hacker News Reader

I would love to read the research he's referring to, but I couldn't find any links or citations. I intuitively believe that there's truth to all of these so called myths, but I'd love to be proven wrong. Anyone know where I can read more about this?

View on HN

He tweeted a Dropbox link to the presentation at the end, and it has a list of papers referenced.

I would, too, because I've seen research that says otherwise. I've talked with this researcher[1] about it in the past, not sure if their page has the study they were conducting online yet, but the page has papers that are relevant/adjacent to this topic.

[1] https://kelleycotter.com/papers/

Did some digging, here is the paper he references on echo chambers/bubbles:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/21582440198327...

My initial concern, based on reading the abstract, is that since this study only looks at Twitter and not Facebook, it isn’t enough evidence to make any conclusions about echo chambers in a general way as so many people get their news from Facebook.

Facebook tends towards people you know in real life, so it’d be closer to the echo chamber that is your immediate social circle, but possibly a bit more open because it doesn’t concentrate your attention as much as you probably do offline, i. e. 50 % with spouse and only seeing your high school buddy every two years.

I guess a lot depends on your job: if you work in healthcare or retail, you‘lo have pretty diverse interactions. Software developer in their home office? Not so much.

Twitter and Facebook are what you make of it.

Reddit popular is a total echo chamber. Almost every sub, outside of focused hobby subs, turn into echo chambers eventually.

The dynamics of reddit, with downvotes totally squelching dissenting opinions and upvotes promoting popular ones, is naturally going to turn into a total echo chamber.

If you haven't touched Reddit in a while - especially if you've been involved in real conversations/work on the same topics in the meantime - it's a bizarre experience to visit various subreddits and see the particular subcultures which have developed. It tends to be very narrow, uninteresting, and annoying. I think most any monolithic community is going to be more or less like this.

It definitely includes hobby subs too. Like, you may find everyone reciting "never do X", even though it's actually correct to do X sometimes, and that's just an oversimplified rule for beginners.

It's why I keep coming back to Twitter, because it only gives me exactly the people I choose to follow, even if I sometimes have to fight the app to keep that default chronological view with no garbage added.

The last Tweet links to a Dropbox with slides & citations:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6q94dkimrk75xr7/FT%20H%C3%B8ring%2...

> I intuitively believe that there's truth to all of these so called myths, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

His opinions are based on claimed research while yours are based on intuition. I’d sooner trust his opionions compared to yours because he at least could be exposed as a liar if it turns out that the research doesn’t back up his opinions. You on the other hand would at worst be called naive.

As they say, a paper is worth the peer review performed on it.

Then the intuition of random commenters is worth close to nothing.

The reproducibility issue show that your average not peer reviewed paper, is also worth close to nothing.

My intuition tells me that that is an overstatement.

I think the myth is the misinterpretation of scale. People tend to believe social media is primarily hate and misinformation, that most users are simply addicted to it like dope fiends, and that it's nothing but echo chambers, etc. All of these things are true, but likely to a lesser degree than assumed.

Agree, the negative part is disproportionately impactful.

As an analogy, my g/f and I recently went grocery shopping. As we got out she was fuming at how old people completely ignore COVID rules, whilst society is largely making sacrifices for them.

I was part of the whole experience, and two people ignored the rules. One did not have a mask, another did have one but ignored social distancing.

There were probably some 200 people in the store. So actual reality is that almost everybody complied. But it takes just one or two that don't, to make a sweeping conclusion like that.

You know what the vast majority of old people are doing? Not going to the store with you. Hello, sampling bias!

Exactly my thoughts. OP needs to read _Thinking, Fast and Slow_ and/or _The Scout Mindset_. Actually COVID as a whole has been yet another revealing of the amazing ability of the irrationality of humans and our failure to understand statistics, numbers, and growth rates, large and small.

Aren't you only confirming my point?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com