Social media is giving us Trypophobia | Hacker News Reader

Social media is giving us Trypophobia

techcrunch.com

29 pointsLearnerHerzog12 comments

I honestly can't see the comparison the author is drawing to trypophobia. Seriously, am I missing something? Or does this writer just not really understand trypophobia?

The best this article does is imagine the world of Facebook as a wall of a million eyes which would definitely bother a trypophobe. It's actually pretty hilarious in that it takes a bunch of words to talk about how bad social media could be for us but doesn't show how it's GIVING people a fear of things that look like a lotus flower.

"Trypophobia is a proposed phobia (intense, irrational fear, or anxiety) of irregular patterns or clusters of small holes or bumps." (wikipedia)

I read the whole article waiting for them to define this term - which they never did.

i gave up reading after the first few paragraphs. The author might have had an insightful point at the end but man.. they could have been much more succint.

I have a phobia for delayed definitions. Is there a term for that?

An awfully sesquipedalian way of saying what could be said much more succinctly. Social media is an echo chamber that surrounds us with information that confirms our biases.

> sesquipedalian

This is my new favourite word.

One of my favorite irony words. Like monosyllabic or ineffable.

You misunderstand the raison d'être for pieces like this.

AI-powered filter bubbles are a problem with massive consequences, and op-eds like this one are an important part of the broader discourse; not only for casual readers (the wordy but poignant imagery is for them) but more importantly for legislators and corporations to whom, in the context of other such opinion pieces across the publication landscape, such pieces signal political will for regulation in this space. That's what matters: that people are out there are articulating these arguments, trivial though they may seem to tech folk like us.

Indeed, it is a pleonastic bit.

What a horrible moan fest of an article.

The trypophobia comparison is nonsense and the author is obviously just trying (and failing) to include a memey word in the hopes of minor virality.

And it’s always fun to hear ‘reveal the algorithm’ as though it’s KFC’s blend of spices.

Also complaining about the societal impact of bad content, then complaining that good content is sometimes inaccurately caught in a filter is just insane. The filters are either too strict or too soft, they can’t be both at the same time (human reviewers follow rules just like algos).

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