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Comment by montenegrohugo | Hacker News Reader

I'd add that algorithmic feeds are another part of the triad (quartet?), and probably the worst offender. Personalized addictive content is on the rise (tiktok, YouTube, even Facebook and Twitter curate your newsfeed "for you" ), and these ml-determined feeds drive engagement to the highest possible levels, leading to an incredible waste of time, a distorted world view (mostly the posts with the highest engagement will be those that call for outrage, which leads to radicalization [1]), and just in general a society where our information consumption is determined by black boxes with opaque goals that do not optimize for the common good.

I attribute a significant part of the political rift and radicalization that has occurred in the western world in the past few years to specifically this feature, the algorithmically determined, engagement maximizing, feed.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-00550-7

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I have moved from using reddit to frequenting a traditional forum where the content is ordered chronologically and that makes an insane difference to the quality of the conversation.

You go from the most outrageous at the top to the most discussed at the top. All content gets a chance to be read. Even if it the first user find it uninteresting. On reddit, if what you post gets a downvote very quickly, you're basically done.

Yes, Reddit basically encourages flashy comments.

But the rub with traditional message boards is, that they don't scale well. Some subreddits have many, many thousands of active regular participants. It's hard for a single subforum to operate at that scale.

Isn't this the same as the algo-driven placement of HN stories and comments?

To a certain extent, yes, though my understanding is that HN's comment ranking algorithm is substantially different from Reddit's.

Also, HN is more of a news feed than a forum, so it makes sense to favor newer posts over knowledge-base type threads.

Makes me sort of want an HN forum though. Maybe limited to self posts and with a more chronological feed.

> I have moved from using reddit to frequenting a traditional forum where the content is ordered chronologically

Chronologically by last update, otherwise you could always read /r/yoursub/new, but that's only chronologically by last original post. By last original post doesn't help much. For slow-moving subs, it doesn't change anything much; for fast-moving subs, it's okay-ish if you care about posts more than comments, but you still lack curation (however imperfect).

It's such a shame that most hobby-related content has moved to Reddit. Because of the way the algorithms work there are no long-running threads and recent content is heavily favoured.

This is terrible for hobby boards because it means that content from long-timers gets drowned out by newbies asking the same questions over and over. In my experience hobby subreddits are completely dominated by inexperienced newbies giving one another the same cargo-cult advice. That, and straight up image posts with literally 0 value (for example the front page of /r/simracing at any given moment is usually about 30-50% pictures of just a steering wheel / rig from someone saying "got my new wheel/rig today").

The old days of forums were great for hobbyists because the long-running threads would stretch into the dozens or hundreds of pages of comments. Newbies could be directed to the longer threads or deep-linked directly to older comments. The format surfaced all posts, but did not favour recency - old threads could be revived (necro'd) or kept up top indefinitely. It wasn't perfect but it was a system that favoured long-timers over newbies.

Reddit has "1 account for everything", Markdown editing, collapsible threaded conversation, and limited or no on profile pictures and signatures (much like HN). All of this amounts to a more seamless user flow that lets you quickly skim large amounts of conversation quickly.

People switching to Reddit has less to do with "it's Reddit" and more to do with the UX of Reddit being better for what people tend to want to do on a forum. Discourse is OK and comes close in some places (has great Markdown editing for example), but "1 account for everything" alone is somewhat of a killer feature.

It's a shame that Stackexchange didn't get OpenID to catch on anywhere other than Stackexchange. Could have been a big help in driving more attention to independent (and maybe even federated) platforms.

Some of my hobby forums have seen a resurgence in the past few years now that Reddit has consumed all of the low-effort posters.

I think it's mostly a problem of not having sub-subreddits.

Any reasonable forum with - checks simracing - 168k members would have a dozen subforums for different reasons soas not to drown out the general forum. One might even be "post your rig" or "newbie questions".

I think this is how AI takes over humanity.

Humans are so short-sighted, we don't even need a superintelligence to outsmart us. We happily stand by and collect profits while letting the AI do whatever it wants. Really, we need regulation that makes companies care about side-effects of their AI technology.

I have sometimes mused about how we have worried about "sky net" since the 90's, but we've already let AI have power to control our lives to some extent.

For instance, there are cases you can point to where some normal person on Twitter with a couple dozen followers posted the wrong thing, it blew up into an international story, and they eventually got fired from their real-world job for it. Who made the decision that this person's views should be widely scrutinized? In a lot of cases it was the algorithm: for whatever reason that tweet drew engagement, so a massive spotlight was put on this mostly-private individual.

In a real way that's an example of an AI system deciding to take away someone's livelihood.

> Who made the decision that this person's views should be widely scrutinized?

This is a serious stretch. The algo didn’t force that person to sign up and post their every ignorant thought on a public forum. People can just put down their phones but they love the attention. Individuals are just as guilty for giving power over themselves to social media.

I'm not "blaming the AI" for this person's behavior. My point is that there was a non-human component in this decision process which led to this person losing their livelihood.

To make an old-world analogue, in 1980 for someone to be held to account for an objectionable view, it probably would have involved some journalist making the decision to write a story about the comments which someone made. That human component in deciding what is newsworthy has been replaced by a machine in some cases.

Another example would be dating apps. Now we have algorithms which make decisions about which parts of the dating pool an individual will have access to. In a real sense, non-human intelligence is playing some role in who gets to pass on their genes to the next generation, and with whom.

I'm not saying that our lives are ruled by machines, but they're not completely not governed by machines either.

If anything, the next generation of people will learn to avoid online polarized engagement using their own identities. They will create these curated and sterile personas under their real name while using a nom de plume for actual content.

I'm kind of surprised that aliases have not widely taken off already. But I suppose the consequences are not very severe yet.

>I'm kind of surprised that aliases have not widely taken off already.

The funny thing is that these aliases already existed, but we've largely eschewed them for our "real" identities. Prior to probably Facebook I think every interaction I had with other people online was behind a screen name detached from my real world identity.

Aliases used to be the default before the social media revolution, though. If anything the trend has been decidedly in the other direction - using one's real name was seen as irresponsible just 15 years ago, whereas now it seems the average internet user is not even aware pseudonymity is an option.

It's not the ignorant thoughts which are considered wrongthink nowadays, but reasonable opinions that don't toe the line on controversial topics.

Wait until people figure out how much power the AIs already have over election outcomes.

What?

The AI determines which political articles and posts you see. The AI determines if you get reminded to register/vote. At the extremes the AI has a very strong impact on whether you believe Obama is a secret Muslim or Trump is a Russian asset.

Which means people best able to play people to increase the "this post is good" score of the AI will sway the election results. It's not enough to control them, but I'd imagine you can tip a close election by 10% or so.

Dr. Robert Epstein has done some research on this and has testified before Congress about it. Here's one article. https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-google-search-bia...

Most people in democracies are entrenched into two blocks (even in European multiparty systems), and AI/ML/statistical methods/mathematical optimization allows interested groups to target the people inbetween the blocks. And based on their personality profile you can goad them to one side or the other with targeted advertising.

(I’m not making any claims about where or how or how much these things are happening.)

I'm French and this comment really doesn't reflect our political landscape.

It reminds me of Spirited Away and how everyone fed No Face for a little gold in return, but in the end they all got eaten.

The other component is that algorithmic feeds encourage echo chambers. People engage with outrage most when they are on the “same side” of it.

But what of trolling then, a sort of counter reaction to the echo chamber where large outliers enter the room and disturb the equilibrium?

For my part I think it's asynchronous written debates that are the source of these problems, so even earlier than facebook.

On a large massive forums, people write for themselves, not the others, and barely read the discussion. Oral debates or written rendering of them, had the advantage to be slow, less variate, and adaptative to a single argumentative line.

Nowadays when you discuss an issue online, everyone starts new train of thought to escape adaptation, and care little about an audience they d need to seduce or convince.

I suppose I just did the same anyway, you can reply but I wont read :)

Trolling pushes people further into their echo chambers. It isn't intended to encourage a wider world view, it's intended to hurt. It just convinces people that they're already on the right side.

I think this is partially correct. People write for themselves, but they also write for an audience. The latter is a problem because they can essentially ignore whatever they are responding to as long as triggers n upvote. This disincentivizes honest and productive dialog in favor of nitpicking, gotchas, or simple ridicule.

The former is like a bunch of drunk grandpas mumbling to themselves in a room, the latter is like a self interested orator playing to a crowd. Asynchronous written debate can be the one of the best forms of communication. Think about Jefferson’s letters or other famous correspondence. The incentives are just wrong on boards with ranking and voting

Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radicalization I'm honestly surprised to see the world "radicalization" used as a net negative thing, rather than positive/negative/neutral depending on context.

E.g. Gandhi would have been called "radical" without implying any violent tendency.

Since 9/11 it's been common to use "radicalization" to refer to crossing the line between regular Islam and Radical Islam.

And (to a lesser extent) the equivalent process for other domestic terrorist groups.

People will still understand what you mean if you use "radicalization" to refer to positive things, but they'll wonder if you're making a very dry joke.

I think this emerges as a collective version of the "my views are always normal" fallacy.

* Anyone who drives slower than me is an idiot and anyone who drives faster than me is reckless.

* Anyone who's worse than me at me at Overwatch is a noob, anyone who's better than me has no life.

* Anyone who's views are less extreme than me is a sheep, anyone who's views are more extreme than me is a radical.

It takes a lot of effort to realize that I'm on the "radical" spectrum for a lot of my political views (I'm hella progressive) and that that isn't a bad thing, but neither are other people's, in my view less aggressive, ideas for tackling problems.

It certainly feels tricky because "radical" can apply to ideas about goals and also to ideas about ways of achieving goals ("tackling problems").

It's hard to suss out people's goals. They might not understand their goals themselves, and "goal" may be an abstract and unknowable thing. But I think it's necessary to find some goals to be a bad thing in order to figure out your own politics.

> Personalized addictive content is on the rise (tiktok, YouTube, even Facebook and Twitter curate your newsfeed "for you" ), and these ml-determined feeds drive engagement to the highest possible levels, leading to an incredible waste of time

I like watching YouTube, I learn a lot from it. My wife likes watching tiktok, it is an exchange of culture. How exactly is this a waste of time? What would be a better use of my time? Making money for someone else? Watching TV? If I (and many others) enjoy it, why does it matter?

> distorted world view (mostly the posts with the highest engagement will be those that call for outrage, which leads to radicalization

This is propaganda. Do you think the perspective imposed on the public by an elite group of individuals, hand-fed information by government press conferences doesn't lead to a distorted world view?

I liked Facebook much more when I could scroll back far enough and my perfectionist mind would see where I previously left off and I'd feel "caught up". You can still do it, but the content changes a bit every time. Twitter seems a lot worse; you'll never be able to "go back" and find that thing you just saw a minute ago before you closed the app, and it's just infinite.

Tiktok's algorithm is on a completely other level.

I’ve used TikTok, and the way its algorithm made me feel is unparalleled. It’s truly something else. I’m not sure how it does it, but it’s one of the only apps where one truly feels they have a live being behind the screen watching and tweaking the recommendations. It’s fluid, responds almost immediately, and feels like it knows everything about how I consume the content. Tiktok must employ some smart statisticians.

Smart statisticians or the next best thing - the kitchen sink black box method

what method is that?

I agree. In fact, I wrote about that fact on my blog. https://gavinhoward.com/2019/11/recommendations-and-radicali...

> even Facebook and Twitter curate your newsfeed "for you"

At least for Twitter, it allows you to turn that algorithm crap off and it respects that choice - iirc even across devices.

Facebook, meanwhile, has entirely turned off that ability.

The functionality is still there, but they've made it harder and harder to access. It used to be an obvious choice. Then it was buried in options, then deeper in options, and now I can't even find it any more. However, if you add the magical "?sk=h_chr" to your Facebook bookmark you'll get a chronological feed (at least until you click on the icon to go back to the top so refresh instead).

I'm sure they'll completely break it some day. They broke it briefly once already. Since I was working at Facebook at the time I filed a task on it. The response was the rudest I ever got in 3.5 years at the company. If it works, as long as it works, it's basically by accident (or because some front-end developer is resisting management's constant pressure to deprecate it).

It is still working. But no, uncurated chronological feed is just too dense for me.

Is the culture at fb really toxic like that? Like surely they can't possibly claim 'we take feedback seriously! :D' and then ignore the hoardes of screaming masses who are being held hostage by a monopoly where the platform pretty much literally owns their social graph

I’m pretty sure Twitter switches you back to the algo feed after a certain amount of time (or at least they used to).

I definitely think personalized feeds are the worst in terms of "negative value creation." I don't think Qanon for example would be a popular movement without having ridden the YouTube recommendation algorithm and Facebook's personalized feeds before those companies were forced to ban it.

I think of it this way. Lets say I walk past someone on the street and say "hi." Now lets say I punch them in the face. What creates the most engagement?

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