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Comment by xiphias2 | Hacker News Reader

While I agree with most of the comments that it can be easily abused, if the bots can be kicked out, this (trying to get rid of echo chambers and highlighting posts from people with different viewpoints recognized by the algorithm) would be a better way for all social media to work than what we have now.

In the current situation (showing most liked posts) the only common ground is good looking people (TikTok/Instagram/Youtube shorts) and most outraging posts with lies to get more likes (Twitter/Youtube)

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> this (trying to get rid of echo chambers and highlighting posts from people with different viewpoints recognized by the algorithm) would be a better

But people _want_ echo chambers. No one wants to be in a group where people share opinions that they dislike. It’s just human nature. Why do you think private Facebook groups are so popular?

> No one wants to be in a group where people share opinions that they dislike.

The relevance of this is way overstated. Most people haven't formed opinions on most topics and just want to hear different viewpoints so they can form an opinion.

> It’s just human nature. Why do you think private Facebook groups are so popular?

Because people have specific interests they want to pursue and engage with other enthusiasts, without being inundated with other crap. Might as well ask why subreddits are popular.

> Because people have specific interests they want to pursue and engage with other enthusiasts, without being inundated with other crap.

i suspect this is exactly what the comment you're replying to means.

i too have a problem with how many times i read people crying out "echo chamber" repeatedly as if this is always a bad thing.

i mean, when i have a party, i don't invite assholes.

when we go to bars, we don't invite spazzy people.

i don't invite people who think its oppressive if they're asked to have common courtesy.

i dont invite abusive people who have the social skills of a tantrum throwing 3 year old.

they just ruin the time for everyone. by many of these people's definitions, this is an echo-chamber.

we exist in the real world. i can have parties with friends and discussions with friends, this doesn't mean im somehow _never_ exposed to different ideas--no one ever shuts up about their ideas. not wanting to be around people we find weird is absolutely normal.

at the end of the day, if a website or party or bar is full of shitty behaving people, ill just go to a different space where people behave with basic social skills. thats not weird. thats not an echo chamber.

every bar or club in the world has different expectations of behaviors, its not evil of them, its not nefarious, its not scandalous of them. its just the culture the owners are curating. that isn't some scary echo-chamber. its a completely normal thing that happens _all_over_the_place_ in the real world.

but oddly theres a weird segment of people who are trying to convince me if someone is just constantly rude or spazzy, and im like "yo, this dudes kinda weird" that everyone should always have to be around them. thats just strange and not the norm in the physical real world. its really odd from the foundations.

edit to add: a perfect example of curation is this site that we all spend a decent amount of time on. dang curates the discussion. its not an echo chamber by any rational definition of the term. the site owners and mods have curated the patrons, the environment, the overall tone of the site--and from an end-users perspective, it works very well. its fun. its an enjoyable experience.

That isn't what anyone means by "echo chamber". You're talking about manners, not different viewpoints.

i think you’d find that the vast majority of the time people are removed from spaces due to behavior, not beliefs, despite their personal conspiracy delusions that it’s belief.

as i mentioned above, people who think it’s oppressive when they’re asked to have common courtesy. for example many people have been banned because they can’t stop insulting people of different races—they’re being banned for behaviors, they refuse to have common courtesy. they cry loudly when asked not to be abusive. that’s a behavior. and most of the time these weirdos are banned, it’s because they’re too socially inept to understand basic social skills.

The other day I saw "Trending in Sports: The Jews" on the Twitter trending topics page. I do not want to see that. Maybe we need the "echo chambers are better than gas chambers" slogan.

The reason echo chambers are dangerous is precisely because of the lack of dissent. Imagine politics is little more than a math problem. The actual answer is 0, but one group insists the answer can't be any smaller than 43, and another group insists there's no way it can be large than -51.

Split these two groups off on their own, and they're just going to diverge more and more. Those in the bigger group will flaunt their in-group virtue by insisting on ever large numbers, and vice versa for those in the other group. They will diverge further and further from reality, but bring them together and the two sides help keep other in check.

Getting back to real history, the Nazis were never notably popular. Their best result in anything like a fair election was in 1932 where they took 37% of the vote [1]. They managed to get an enabling act passed by political maneuvering, not genuine popularity. At that point they created an artificial echo chamber, and the rest is history.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_1932_German_federal_elect...

So does that mean it's "dangerous" for Jews not to have someone following them around debating their right to exist? After all, their continued existence might be a mistake, and their erroneous insistence on survival merely in-group virtue.

No, but it is _very_ dangerous to Jews for those people to be isolated, never have their ideas challenged, and miss out on the moderating influence of other viewpoints

It’s also dangerous if those ideas are widely circulated to people who wouldn’t otherwise have had them reinforced.

What this comes down to is the level of good faith at play: hearing dissenting ideas is good if you’re in a place to take them seriously and the dissenter is being genuine and willing to discuss them in good faith. If those aren’t true, it’s not a win: nobody benefits from giving a liar or propagandist a podium and someone who can’t agree on some kind of objective baseline won’t be able or willing to adjust their beliefs.

> people who wouldn’t otherwise have had them reinforced.

You mean people without access to niche communities / echo chambers?

I grant there are people ready to embrace destructive ideas, but the fraction of them that don't already have access to those ideas is small enough to be irrelevant, especially in the age of the internet.

Better to have them out in the open, for the reasons I mentioned, and moreover, because it's better to have an accurate view of what they think.

It’s more the people who might get pushed to the next level as they get positive reinforcement and, especially, as more moderate people leave because they’re tired of dealing with the zealots.

Extremists don’t care about disagreement – they’re there to talk, not listen – and if they see a few fellow travelers they’ll start to tell themselves their position is mainstream.

> Getting back to real history, the Nazis were never notably popular. Their best result in anything like a fair election was in 1932 where they took 37% of the vote [1]

This seems misleading. The governmental system at the time was a parliamentary system, not a first-past-the-post like most American elections. In a parliamentary system, there are ~dozens of parties and it's vanishingly rare for any party to ever get a simple majority. Your own link lists 16 parties who had enough votes to get at least one seat in the Reichstag. Selecting the leaders to form an overall government normally involves political maneuvering to bring multiple smaller parties into an alliance to form an actual voting majority. Naturally if there's so much division that it's impossible to form a majority in favor of any particular government, weird stuff is gonna go down.

If they formed a normal coalition government, I would wholeheartedly agree with you. But they did not, and could not. They couldn't get 13% of the other 63% of people to side with them, even in exchange for shared political control!

And that 37% was brief and their biggest moment in light of absolute civil chaos including things like a 30% unemployment rate. 4 months later, elections were held again - elections that the Nazis were exceptionally optimistic about. They ended up going down to 33%. Then shenanigans started. There would be no more fair elections in Germany for nearly 2 decades.

37% is quite a lot of support tho. It is not majority, but it is a lot in multi party parlament system. Second most popular part got 21%.

Yes, those elections were violent and also final step to power was under threat of violence. At this point, nazi were already clearly violent. Their first steps after getting power were creation of concentration camps for opposition.

Violent elections... well this is deeply disturbing for the US.

Having spent most of my adult life in or near Nuremberg, I am dreading this upcoming election back home, in large part because the various possibly-armed, self-appointed ballot drop box/poll watchers who have been marinating in conspiracy theories for the last several years is just a little too reminiscent of one of the displays at the Dokumentationszentrum in the 1918-1933 section.

Echo chambers lead to gas chambers.

For me, the "trending topics" show me plenty of people screaming at each other from diverse (and often vile and insane) viewpoints. Maybe I've brought that on myself though.

I'm in favor of letting people pursue their preferences, but echo chambers are antithetical to civil society - much more dangerous than so-called misinformation (indeed, they are environments in which errors and lies are more likely to flourish), so counteracting then is a valuable goal, in my book.

I think you are diametrically mistaken and echo chambers are actually good for civil society because they allow the illusion that people outside your ingroup are basically good. I think what happened is our echo chambers got punctured and so we suddenly got the realization that other people lived in echo chambers, which is why it seems like those suddenly popped up. But well-insulated echo chambers (ie. not what controversy-driven twitter gives you) are good for mental health and society as a whole.

This has some internal logic, but every experience I've had contradicts your proposition.

For example, I'm in my late forties. When I was growing up, it was rare to encounter (out) gay people outside of major cities, and people would believe practically any negative statement about them, not so much anymore. Conversely, in my college town today, most of my accquaintences have never met a Republican, and they predictably believe in a stupid cartoon caricature of red staters. I'm definitely not buying it.

Maybe if you have safe spaces (echo chambers) and overlapping meeting places, but also a strong standard of not policitizing the meeting places, you can get the best of both worlds?

> if the bots can be kicked out

The problem is that people disagree about the term bot.

It should mean an account whose content is controlled exclusively by an algorithm.

But instead it has come to mean anything they consider low-quality which often includes a lot of real people who are either paid to do so by state actors, have been radicalised or are just looking to troll. And it's very hard if not impossible to detect and ban those people.

Not to mention most studies on Twitter bots define one as "fifty interactions per day". If you define "heavy Twitter users" and "bots" to be the same thing, of course Twitter is going to be full of 'bots'.

I have a prior, validated by experience, that anyone spending that much time of their day on Twitter likely has nothing of value to contribute.

It would imply they work in PR, marketing, propaganda, or failing all of those, have little life outside the internet. Either way their content is likely to be of extremely low quality.

There is also the side case that they just have friends that use the platform. Or they like to retweet pictures of cats.

> get rid of echo chambers and highlighting posts from people with different viewpoints

Sounds good in an internet comment, but in practice that means I end up reading racist propaganda, which is not something that improves my life. So then you eliminate the crap, and boom, you have an echo chamber.

No. It’s the echo chamber that leads you to believe all content that disagrees with the echo chamber is crap.

People are capable of deciding content is crap on their own, without an echo chamber leading them to that belief. I’ve looked at the facts, analyzed a lot of situations, and have come to the independent conclusion that bigotry is pretty unhelpful so I don’t want to see it (online or anywhere). I don’t have a responsibility to engage with it online, so I frequent online spaces that have a minimum of it.

Sorry, but no. I tried following people with different political perspectives than mine, and it was a total shit show. These people don't have incentives to post well-thought-out arguments. They have incentives to bander to the base, telling them how smart they are and how bad the people who disagree with them are.

And I purposefully chose a person who had other qualities outside of the political opinions that I very much admired. If the Twitter algorithm were to just show me things outside of my buble, it would be even worse.

I’m of two minds with opposing viewpoint presentation, one of them being I respect giving a reader the opportunity to consider multiple viewpoints for themselves. The other I worry about giving false equivalency to flat earthers or something like that. I don’t know if I want holocaust denial presented as an equal opposing viewpoint to holocaust remembrance, for example.

They don't have to be given equal treatmet, the idea is only that we should not normalize suppressing things that are "distasteful", because that is easily abused by people with power to oppress those without. Speaking truth to power is not possible if arbitrary and capricious rules prevent you from speaking.

Totally agree, but how would you go about categorizing ideas into those that are worthy of equivalency and those that aren’t? Seems easy enough for fringe conspiracy theories but harder as you get into the realm of well sourced but bad ideas.

> but how would you go about categorizing ideas into those that are worthy of equivalency and those that aren’t?

obviously this is one of the most complicated questions that would require actual libraries full of books and experienced actual experts to properly come to any solid conclusions, but my suspicions are that some of the pieces that would be important would circle around:

- we start by recognizing that most of us are dumb in most areas. if we're lucky, we have expertise in one or two areas. if we're really lucky, peers in our field will publicly recognize our expertise. outside of our areas of expertise, compared to the experts in those fields, we're dumb. and thats ok. comparatively im an idiot in fluid dynamics, soil sciences, and millions and millions of other areas. i might have some hobby level interests, but compared to recognized experts in those fields, im an idiot. collectively we seem to have forgotten our limitations. i mean, the old phrase is there for a reason: the smartest person is the one who recognizes what they don't know.

- i dont know shit about anesthesiology, if an algorithm weights my comment discussing anesthesiology with the same weight as an actual widely peer-respected anesthesiologist, something is _severely_ broken. this type of thing is happening across the board.

- often, more speech is not necessarily better. if the more speech is all nonsense babble, the conversation is just DDOSed and the situation is absolutely worse. as yishan said in that incredible HN post the other day [1], its about managing signal-noise. if its just simply "more" speech, we end up with noise.

- if we've already collectively decided that 2+2=4, yet someone keeps screaming they're not convinced, maybe its ok to ignore them. i can't tell you how many times ive seen people's arguments get thoroughly dismantled, then we'll see them screaming the exact same arguments an hour later pretending the dismantling didn't happen.

- this is gonna be a hard pill to swallow for many but, when we're building something with social as the primary, we _need_ to have _more_ people deeply involved in the building process who have expertise in humans. people who understand the human condition. some of us don't understand people very well and its absurd how many of us (myself included) turn our noses up when our projects involve human complexities. could you imagine a party planner building a bridge without heavily including engineers?

this is a hard problem, but the very first place id start is, no, not all of our opinions have equal weight in all topics. i know how difficult that is for some people to take. but its just true.

[1] https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1586955288061452289

> i dont know shit about anesthesiology, if an algorithm weights my comment discussing anesthesiology with the same weight as an actual widely peer-respected anesthesiologist, something is _severely_ broken. this type of thing is happening across the board.

Facts are one type of content, but what about these types of prompts?

* An an anesthesiologist walks into a bar…

* I’d rather be an anesthesiologist than a …

* My recent experience with an anesthesiologist was …

* Can someone please explain why an anesthesiologist …

Also, the problem with a peer-reviewed domain expert approach is that if we took a collection of randomly sampled domain experts from 100 years ago, many might have opinions and theories about their own area of expertise that we consider abhorrent or factually wrong today. It’s only through loudly questioning those enshrined, institutional beliefs that we make progress.

And often times those questions are raised by those folks that experience the outcome of those theories. It’s one thing to be a peer reviewed domain expert operating in the realm of controlled studies and intellectual thought. It’s another to be a human being with one life to live, who’s on the receiving / implementation end of these theories.

> i can't tell you how many times ive seen people's arguments get thoroughly dismantled, then we'll see them screaming the exact same arguments an hour later pretending the dismantling didn't happen.

There's no modern cannon to these arguments and their discussion, so the dismantling basically didn't happen. Only the readers of that dismantling know about it

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