Hacker News Reader

Comment by jsonne | Hacker News Reader

Twitter used to drive me crazy. I had an account but didn't login for years at a time. My use has gone up significantly by:

1. Only following industry people and chefs. Basically just work and hobby. Anyone that strays into politics or social issues is hard cut. Not because they're wrong for doing so, but because with an anxiety disorder I'm not equipped to handle the constant bombardment of that. 2. I got a plugin that blocks the trending topics. 3. I have a keyword blocker for anything politically or socially related.

With that my experience has improved dramatically, but I really only was able to curate that experience because I work in the social media marketing industry. Regular users aren't as well equipped in the slightest. It's great because now I can use it for networking and my interests in a way thats much better than Facebook groups (which is what I formerly used to make industry connections).

View on HN

I fervently believe that having software "agents" that work to overcome the algorithmic feed and provide us with balanced / beneficial social media. It's going to be a long slog to get there, kind of like our generations fight for safety at work legislation (or pollution legislation).

This needs not only the software to exist (what plug-in do you use?) but the regulatory environment to allow / support / promote it and controversially the default settings - which I suspect will be the biggest political fight - I think we need to explore the concepts of Libertarian Paternalism exposed by Richard Thaler.

This is the plugin I use for chrome. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hide-twitter-trend...

As for the keyword blockers that actually is a Twitter feature now though it's a bit buried. The "hard cuts" I talked about were a combo of unfollowing/muting/blocking depending on how aggressive they were / are.

Can you define balanced or beneficial? Can you define it remotely mathematically?

If no to the second algorithims are flat out impossible. They aren't magical genies regardless of what you believe. If no to the first you can't even make ill-considered laws.

Even somehow having the concept is no guarantee - it could be a largely useless tautology of the Drake equation. If we knew the density of intelligent alien life and parameters of signals they would actually use we wouldn't be asking why we haven't found any yet. If you cannot obtain the information how are you going to tell if it is "beneficial" or "balanced" as opposed to your own assumptions as articles of faith?

Oh hell - this is politics not mathematics. We as humans are being outclassed in a digital fight with tech companies. We need to have software on our side individually. But we also need the political environment for that.

A generation or two ago most of the western world fought wars over the spoils of the industrial revolution - and built a political-economic environment that benefitted individuals and shared the wealth more so than in hundreds of years.

The countries that do this again for the digital revolution are going to benefit as much as the west did last time.

It might not be us.

Writing the software to guide our lives is the easy part. It's not about social media - that's just the obvious part. This is going to be about all parts of our lives - banking software that considers your long term budget and stops you buying the crap item on amazon.

Software that sits down each evening and reviews how you spoke with your wife / child / co worker

I am going to have to put this into a book form to gain any traction - plus it's 1 am so I am likely not making best sense, but this is so inherent in the technology it just seems obvious as a next step. We will be guided by technology - we cannot possibly absorb all the information in the world so something will curate for us.

The political challenge of the 2-C is defining what does the curation and on what terms. Facebook optimising for engagement is wrong on all counts. What is right is politics not algorithm.

I can certainly define "balanced or beneficial" for me, and I read the parent's post as suggesting just that: Giving me control over what feeds I see and codifying my right to individual control with the force of law.

Or something like federated platform which supports federated feeds, federated messaging, federated moderation/spam filtering. The idea is to have all the different aspects of the platform federated separately, and have all the aspects under control by the user, they choose who to get services for each aspect from, and can set up their own stuff as well. The user can move on from a service provider for that distributed platform if they don't like it any more.

Completely agree. Ideally these agents would work as very smart proxy servers, so they can work for everybody in a household without futzing around with browser-specific extensions. And such agents must to be completely outside Twitter's control; i.e. they have to be based on scraping, not some API that can be yanked at any time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com