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Comment by ddingus | Hacker News Reader

Seconded.

My beef with all this is our current Overton window has been compressed to right of center economically.

American opinion and general support for solid, center left economic policy is high and growing.

Medicare For All, and friends.

Our mainstream media simply does not report on, nor offer much opinion favorable to labor, and or framed from a labor point of view.

It used to. When I was a kid, we would compare the various points of view, learn to identify them, and discuss what having the means to society.

This lack of control is a good thing. I think we've got problems it's a struggle with, but I don't think they're as bad as what's being represented, nor do I think a nicely centered window makes any sense. I think the people should decide that.

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Ideally, the best way to balance online rhetoric is for left of center creators to generate more frequent and more compelling content (without admins needing to finesse algorithms or censor/shadow ban content in pursuit of a digital Fairness Doctrine).

By sheer quantity mainstream media leans center left and online indie media leans center right. You could say that taking the whole landscape into account that constitutes some kind of tenuous balance overall - but it would be nice if both mediums were more balanced.

Interesting aside: conservative talk radio has always been more popular than liberal talk radio - is this just the online expression of the same phenomenon? People on one side of the aisle tending to enjoy listening to and watching political content at greater length than their counterparts?

I happen to have some knowledge of radio. Lefty talk, where it got a hot stick (good antenna and respectable signal), did quite well. In my market, the progressive talk station did just fine.

Advertisers, who got it, would support the station. We had a couple who paid well, and got results.

Dirty secret in talk radio: most owners are conservative. Deffo bias there. In my market, the progressive talk station got next to nothing from the owners. Rightie talk got tons of cross promotion.

Where a leftie talk station was not owned by a major cluster, it also would do just fine.

In mainstream media, there is a basic conflict of interest. Flat out, big business does not air progressives, because progressives would cost them and regulate them.

Online, the majors are making a push to get relevant with younger people, who now call them legacy media. (Gotta hate that if you are CNN)

Access journalism, actually a basic fail to do journalism, for fear of losing access, coupled with the same big business bias, means we do not produce economic left content in major media in the US.

Some of this "extreme" discussion centers on the fact that big business simply does not want that on the air, or in people's feeds.

Progressives struggle with this constantly.

Labor just is not in most big platform interests, and many younger people simply ignore the major media for this reason.

I, at a much older age, get pushed to watch legacy media online every day, multiple times per day.

I do not want to watch them. I want more about ordinary people, labor and the political movements seeking better.

I think left-wing creators are getting better at making compelling content on YouTube and having it as part of a discussion. Hbomberguy, Shaun, PhilosophyTube, and ContraPoints come to mind.

They are. Well spotted.

The important thing for Lefty's, who are interested in resolving this problem, is to realize they need to support those voices. And we need to do it rather directly, because of the big systems, and the large money, really won't do it.

It’s not a lack of control, it’s a different kind of control. Driven by algorithms and engagement metrics which appear to promote extreme content.

That difference is what has people worried because the political and social endgame is not yet clear.

It is both. There are plenty of places to have discussions online, sans a managed feed.

I think the extremeness of content is just another anti-free speech talking point. I'm sure there is vile stuff on youtube but if it actually comes down in these threads are are videos by Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan and Tim Pool. These people are simply not extreme and smearing them this is way is only about shutting down opposing ideas.

I also don't doubt that you can (sometimes) get to really extreme content within four clicks but we have to keep in mind that the recommendation lists can be 40 videos long. So just roughly estimating it: if 1% of videos was extreme content because 1% of the population are extremist you would expect, on average, to see roughly one and a half extreme video if you sampled 4 * 40 random videos.

In addition, just doing a quick test with Jordan Peterson in incognito mode I get the following very telling result.

If I click a video called "Jordan Peterson EDUCATES College Professors In An Epic Q & A", I get mostly other Jordan Peterson videos with some Ben Shapiro sprinkled in.

If I click on "Jordan Peterson Destroys Q&A | 25 February 2019" I suddenly get a wide range of people suggested with the common thread being that the title also contains "DESTROY", "SNAP", "OWNS" and so on. This makes me think the 'problem' might just be that people who keep clicking on the most outrageous titles will eventually see the most outrageous videos. From a technical perspective I would say that is working as intended.

They are not extreme.

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