Hacker News Reader

Comment by wingerlang | Hacker News Reader

Is that your only experience with Twitter? Twitter fills about a million more roles than venting. I don’t see any “cesspool” on my feed in fact.

View on HN

My direct experience with Twitter is I have one dude's account bookmarked and I check it almost daily because he's a great source of local news. I have a profile but I haven't logged in or used it for a long time. My experience is fine.

There sure seem to be a lot of people, though, who have the cesspool experience I mentioned. It's great that you and I don't have this experience with Twitter. It's also anecdotal and not really relevant to my comment which was about people who aren't you and me.

I really think that people need to have an AI shield or body guard that monitors and controls ones access to media, to protect them from harmful concepts and behaviors. This might sound fantastical, and I understand the vastness of implications, but it will be viewed as no different than wearing sunglasses or mittens. We wear clothing and protect ourselves from the environment, the mental environment out there is unlike anything humans have ever come across.

At some point, the weatherman will tell us about rates of state sponsored AI powered psyops campaigns across social media sites for the day.

I forsee some problems with people being able to literally lock themselves in different realities in real life depending on their personal views

We have that already, and we also have people that don't participate because it is too dangerous psychologically.

At the lowest level, I am talking about even being able to watch a movie on Netflix and not be exposed to the most grotesque violence. Just black out the 36 frames of someone taking a hook through the eye. Or doing sentiment analysis on a thread and recommending that you not partake.

My experience is that there's a ton of value there, but the trending tab is like a siren call I can't resist even though I regret it almost every time. Usually I can't imagine why something is trending, click on it and lose ever more faith in humanity.

> I don’t see any “cesspool” on my feed in fact.

You should file a bug report. Your feed should make you equal parts angry, sad, and horny.

It's a personalized echo chamber. YMMV

Following stuff that interests you is not an echo chamber.

A machine learning algorithm then uses that stuff to recommend content which is similar. If one engages with opinionated stuff, then they'll only get recommended stuff that conforms to their original opinion, forming an echo chamber.

Imagine following some people who talk about houseplants. Maybe you like some tweets with the kind of information you consider of above-average usefulness for you. Maybe you praise someone for a beautiful pic of their monstera variegata.

The algorithm decides to show you more high-quality tweets and prettier photos.

If you consider that an echo chamber then all right, but I don't think it's a useful definition. Is going to a scifi-focused bookshop an echo chamber?

Maybe it’s because houseplants aren’t a controversial topic. Take any topic where people hold strong opinions (politics, religion, ...) and start following people you agree with. I guarantee you’ll have to very deliberately look for people on the other end of the spectrum at some point because your feed and your follow recommendations will indeed be an echo chamber.

I agree, that's exactly my point — online communities might be (for sure often are) an echo chamber, but that depends on what content you subscribe to. Specifically on how opinionated-ness-y and on-topic that content is.

If it only were that well. In reality, when I follow people who posts on various niche subjects, it turns out the algorithm believes I'm mostly interested in American Politics because quite a few of those posters are into that and that overshadows all the niche subjects.

Looking at the list of things Twitter believes I'm interested in is quite enlightening about the limits of recommendation engines.

I think the proper analogy is a bookstore whose titles rearrange themselves on the shelves based on your liminal reactions to the covers.

You need to change the viewing setting to "latest first"

And, as far as I can understand, it will disengage itself from "latest first" as soon as it detects you are not addicted enough to not miss every new update with it engaged, thus having zero echo-cancelling powers.

It did that for a while, but in the last months it stopped doing that. I'm not even using it very frequently but it remains at "sort by date"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com