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Comment by speedybird | Hacker News Reader

A social network that automatically prunes friends I haven't talked to in years sounds benign. Except I'm quite certain that once they get into the habit of pruning friends without asking me directly, they'll start to distance and/or prune friends for other reasons too. 'The algorithm' deciding who is or isn't a positive influence for me sounds like I'm back in 6th grade and my mother is telling me who I may or may not be friends with. Except 'the algorithm' isn't my mother and I am far less certain that it has the good intentions for me.

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a benign version would be instead of the connection being a boolean, have it be a float, with interactions re-inforcing the connection and apathy diminishing it, then your social graph would develop sort of like neurons, links rarely if ever being snapped out right, but connected only tenuously.

This is exactly how my hobby project works: https://linklonk.com

The interest graph is built in response to your content upvotes/downvotes. The connections are float values instead of booleans. Here is how these float values are updated:

1. You start off weakly connected to all users and you see generally popular content.

2. When you upvote something - you get stronger connected to other users that upvoted that content before you (you don't connect to those who upvoted after you - this is a proof of work that Eugene wrote in https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service). The stronger your are connected to someone => the more weight their other upvoted items have for you => the higher their other upvoted items show up in your feed.

3. When you downvote - your connection to those who upvoted that content goes weaker. And your connection to those who also downvoted it goes higher.

4. Every time someone you are connected to upvotes something, your connection becomes slightly weaker to them. They sort of place a bet that this item is worth your attention and that bet is lost if you ignore that item. So if you ignore those who no longer post useful content or simply post too frequently for you - they will gradually disappear from your list. This prevents the old money problem from the same "Status as a Service" post above.

5. You can put the items you upvote into user-defined collections, so your tech content could go into your "tech" collection and users that are connected to your tech collection will not be bothered by the stuff you put into your "film" collection. This is similar to different boards on Pinterest.

This system is somewhere between popularity based systems (Reddit), subscription based systems (RSS, Twitter) and algorithmic systems (TikTok, Pinterest).

Your connections to other people capture how useful their previous recommendations have been to you (ie, their signal-to-noise ratio) and so can be thought of: how much you can trust them that their future recommendations will be worth your time.

Based on your description alone, it sounds like a great way to generate echo chambers.

This is a very common reaction. I was just responding to this yesterday on Tildes: https://tildes.net/~tech/yrf/as_of_october_2021_what_is_in_y...

I hope you will forgive my quoting: """ You seem to be concerned that the mechanism of LinkLonk will lead to a filter bubble where people would group by opinions they agree with and they would simply be preaching to their own (often misinformed) choir. That is a concern, but I'm not sure it is an inevitability.

Now that you know how LinkLonk works, what type of content would you personally upvote:

1. Content that does a good job at persuading the reader to agree with the opinion you hold, even if that content gives little useful information to you, or even if the reasoning is a bit disingenuous.

2. Content that informs you even if it does not promote "we are right, they are wrong" narrative.

My hypothesis is that you would be more inclined to upvote content (2) on LinkLonk more, than you would in other social systems (Reddit/Facebook/Twitter).

In existing social systems, upvoting content (1) is logical because you are trying to promote your opinion to others. The upvotes are used as a tool to win opinion popularity contests. And you are less likely to post/upvote content (2) because it may be seen as non-conformance to the group. That results in the tribalism you mention.

On LinkLonk:

- The main effect of upvoting content is to get more content from people who also upvoted it. If you upvote content (1), then you would personally increase the amount of noise your "future-self" will see (since it has little new information). If you upvote (2) then your "future-self" will be better off.

- Your ability to influence what other people see is limited by how useful they found your past upvotes. You can easily lose that ability if you misuse it - they can just downvote any useless content you try to push. There is no such feedback mechanism in popularity based systems. Every upvote has the same weight. And so it can be misused.

I'm not saying that LinkLonk will avoid the echo-chamber/filter-bubble problem. I'm saying that LinkLonk has a different system of incentives that it is not fair to apply the behaviour seen in other systems to it. And what kind of system level behaviour LinkLonk will have is impossible to predict just using a thought experiment. That's because this behaviour is emergent. The only way is to run an actual experiment - which is what LinkLonk is. """

I guess the "easy" solution to that is to have a small fraction of presented content to be randomly selected from outside the echo chamber. Either by presenting completely random content or randomly from contributors that have already been downvoted.

There is no benign version, it will be simply wrong initially, and then very shortly coopted to be used for control.

"Big Mother"

This sounds stupid but is indeed as troubling as the big brother

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