Who Filters Your News? Why We Built Gobo.social

Gobo's a very interesting experiment in social media and news aggregation.

I think the premise for the service is very insightful -- we're inundated with information and we want to filter it. FB, Twitter etc. give us very few tools to do that -- why? Because we're the product, not the customer. They want to customize us. They don't want us customizing them. They want to make our attention as saleable to advertisers as possible.

So Gobo turns that on its head and gives you the power to filter as you like. I think the filters Gobo has chosen to implement, such as "only show me posts from a certain gender or race," are stupid beyond belief and I hope they never become popular.

This post nails the problem statement though.

The nice thing about Reddit is that content is strongly encouraged to group into subreddits making it easy to filter. My only problem is the opt-in model. I'd rather it be an opt-out model, show me r/all minus the blacklisted subreddits. They added a filter to r/all recently but it is limited to only 100 subreddits and is a pain to manage on mobile. So I wrote a script that periodically signs in as me and hides posts from subreddits I've blacklisted. It was initially getting the list from a google sheet but I've recently done something smarter. I have the script auto-subscribe to all new subreddits it sees on the front page and then monitor whether I stay subscribed. If it notices that I manually unsubscribed from a subreddit it takes that as a sign to blacklist that subreddit. It works amazingly.

If I understand it right, gobo uses twitter's and facebook's APIs using user's access token to fetch the results and applies filter to it.

What if the feeds from the APIs are already conditioned/personalized for the user ? I didn't sign up for gobo because I don't have a twitter or facebook anymore. I left these social medias for the very reasons that Gobo is trying to solve.

I'm glad the minds over at MIT are working on this issue, as I think it will be the most trying problem of our time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_pr...

It's the reason propaganda works: people can only stand against the flow for so long before their will is broken down. If you are assaulted every day by messages, without any possibility of verifying their veracity, you will either shutdown completely, or become influenced by lies. Trust is a huge part of the human experience, and the internet has eroded that.

It's amazing how much of the past we ignore. We already learned years ago that the best filtering is one you manage yourself. kill-files, procmail rules, spam-filters, etc all work better when the user has control. I don't see why you would use a system that lets anyone send anything to you without that personal level of filtering available.

The problem in my mind with the world of social media is that we can filter our content until we've created a bubble around ourselves and an echo chamber with only those who think like we do. It's important to be able to see things we don't agree with. It's important to that people with different opinion collide on social media and debate their ideas.

“What is Gobo?” Is buried deep in the article:

To use Gobo, you link your Twitter and Facebook accounts to Gobo and choose a set of news publications that most closely resembles the news you follow online. Gobo retrieves recent posts from these social networks and lets you decide which ones you want to see.

Apparently google and the traditional media ( nytimes, wapo in collusion with the government/cia ).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15748579