Beware online "filter bubbles" | Eli Pariser

What Hacker News said

Strong rec throwawy64 · 2016-11 · on “Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation”

The Filter Bubble Ted talk is what motivated me to dump social media. [this video] Gone are my Facebook, G+, Reddit accounts. I have a Twitter which I curate manually with numerous feeds from all over. I generally look at content like links first then read the Twitter discussion if any. I treat posting as a personal catharsis anymore, and use throwaway accounts. IMO my online opinions are going to get lost in the crush so why bother curating an identity. One that just creates a signal trail for advertising and snoopers? I talk to the people in my life more instead. These have been conscious decisions on my part and honestly I think I'm mentally happier and less frustrated "at the world" for it. M

Recommends AkThhhpppt · 2012-03 · on “Google told to halt auto-complete”

I did put "vaguely related" in the rant warning, didn't I? :-) Though news.google.com is what I was thinking of with the current affairs example, it generalizes to the whole Google edifice, and to Facebook too. I really suggest having a look at this: [this video] to see what I'm talking about, with actual examples. Minor quibble: autocomplete isn't to aid in searching common topics, it's to help Google avoid failed searches through misspelt queries. ",)

Cites gengkev · 2016-01 · on “Iran's blogfather: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are killing the web”

I think part of the problem is that one benefit of the web is to be exposed to new ideas, and passive users are hardly benefiting from seeing stuff that doesn't challenge them. Centralisation of power is not just a problem in that Facebook tailors content to your preferences, but also that it has the power to choose how it does so. For example, I believe that Facebook said that it might choose to ignore that a user clicked "Show me less of this", because what we say we want isn't always what we actually want. Another example is that when even people who have liked an organisation's page don't see its content, Facebook basically forces them to pay for advertising. Some of these ideas I found

Cites bewareFB00 · 2020-12 · on “‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)”

Beware the filter bubbles: [this video] Using scientific unification as a cognitive guide to understand this holistically: [LINK] Developers! Startups! Cap tables! Unicorns! Disrupt YC and tune it out.

Cites darkclouds · 2023-07 · on “Are You a Late Bloomer in Work or Love? Maybe You’re Right on Time”

Clap for Carers during Covid was a national psychological experiment to measure conformity. Brexit was the closest you could get to resurrecting the Nazi party in the UK 60 years later as another conformity experiment. How do you measure conformity across a country? TV Set top boxes being paused at 8pm on Thursday, wifi connected devices seeing a weakening signal, social media posts. The internet is a security services and big businesses surveillance tool wet dream. Whats been interesting since is how various websites and their algorithms are being used to challenge your view point. What Eli Pariser highlighted in his Ted talk 12 years ago ( [this video] ) has grown to all the major US tech compa

Cites hn_throwaway_99 · 2024-05 · on “AI Personalization Fuels Groupthink and Uniformity”

This really is completely independent of "AI". I remember seeing a famous presentation (maybe it was a TED talk?) about the "echo chamber" effect of personalization from the mid 00s - and IMO nearly all of the negative impacts discussed in that talk came to pass and then some. AI just makes it worse. Edit: I think it was this I was referring to about "filter bubbles", [this video] . I was a tad mistaken, this was from 2011.

Cites poopoopadoo · 2025-03 · on “What Game Is Jeff Bezos Playing?”

If only someone had seen this coming: [this video] It’s because humans latch onto language as if their map is reality Even here there’s a pretentious filtering to conform to the memory of the group in charge; this syntactic structure is of course the proper and correct format! It’s our biology choosing self which socially is to conserve our own perception Online everyone is being normalized the conserve the perception of mods/platform owners (aka just more normal vain humans, no need to deify them) rather than out in the world normalizing to a more unique creole of sorts The abstracts of STEM are a terrible philosophy for building social life. Created a bored and repetitive culture that depends o