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Comment by ethbr1 | Hacker News Reader

> Somewhere along the way (my belief is that it was around the time social media took off, but I don't have proof for that), we forgot that we're more alike than we are different, and that people can grow and learn and change, and that both of those things are good, actually.

The difference between The Before Times and now is that it was historically hard to curate and communicate with a group of people who exclusively agreed with you. This had two primary consequences:

(1) You were constantly exposed to nice people who nonetheless disagreed with you about something / everything.

(2) It made you realize that you're the asshole, if you couldn't at least be polite to someone with different views than you.

Now, living in a bubble is trivial. It's also the subtle default on a lot of social platforms.

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> Now, living in a bubble is trivial. It's also the subtle default on a lot of social platforms.

Indeed. IMO, social media should have very limited facilities for blocking/muting (e.g., maximum number of accounts to block, no blocking accounts that have never previously interacted with you, and no import functionality), so that it could only be used to stop true harassment, and not to intentionally live in such a bubble. That's one of my biggest criticisms of Bluesky: the whole design of their blocklist system seems to be to intentionally encourage this sort of thing.

This assumes that mass social media is some kind of idealized “meeting of the minds” rather than like…the digital equivalent of a loud and raucous bar.

The ability to block obnoxious and hateful people is fundamentally far, far less of causative factor of information bubbles than the pervasive engagement-driven algorithmic feeds are.

True harassment is VERY easy if you can create infinite amount of new accounts and each new account can harass the person and cant be blocked. True harassment is very easy if you are someone with many followers who will target whoever you choose to.

What you suggests is setup designed so that large scale harassment is easy. Alex Jones will love it, psychopaths will love it.

uhm, hard disagree. Harassment is the #1 problem blocking helps with but... I block anything the platform suggests to me as a form of protest against it shoving click bait triggering channels in my face. I see this as resisting getting forced into a bubble by the platform.

I can't not use social media because it is the only way to get local info and it is a terrible way when you consider that for every post from someone i subscribe to, there are 6 ads and 6 channel suggestions specially chosen to entice me to join in a flame war of comments. I'd just give up if i didn't have the hope of at least from time to time catching a break because i blocked all the things the platform thought to suggest for a few weeks. My hope is to one day achieve a whitelist of local posts which is driven by geography, not agreement/alignment on politics or ideaology. since that's not an option, i'll blacklist the entire world if i must...

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