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Comment by somewhereoutth | Hacker News Reader

A good start. However let's go further, simply ban personal tracking and personalized algorithmic feeds. This would combat the echo chamber effect and social media can become a broad community experience, like TV and newspapers. It would also cripple tech advertising revenues, thus redressing the balance with traditional media.

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I’ve seen the difference between what YouTube presents to me when I’m logged in v.s. when I’m on a clean computer it can’t associate with me, and I do value the personalisation — when not logged in it shows me a hundred duds for every one thing I care about, and logged in it’s about 50:50.

How much of this improvement is a mysterious machine learning algorithm and how much is it just looking for new things from my subscription list, I’m not sure, and that’s important: being trapped in a torrent of self-reinforcing falsehoods is something I fell for in my teenage-goth-New-Age phase, which Carl Sagen condemned in The Demon-Haunted World, and which people in general have been falling for with every sychophant and propagandist from soothsayers to tabloids telling them what they want to be so.

> I’m not sure, and that’s important: being trapped in a torrent of self-reinforcing falsehoods is something I fell for in my teenage-goth-New-Age phase, which Carl Sagen condemned in The Demon-Haunted World.

Genuinely curious here: how can you tell you've escaped one set of self-reinforcing falsehoods while being sure you haven't fallen into another, different set?

You can’t be certain of not falling into a different set of false beliefs, but you can look for inconsistencies in your beliefs and be less and less wrong.

Spotting inconsistencies in my beliefs is what pushed me out of New Age mode, and ironically what pushed me into it in the first place (from Catholicism).

An alternative might be for personalisation to be opt-in rather than opt-out even when signed in with an account (which shouldn't even be necessary for many services anyway)

One of the things that frustrates me about discussions of censorship here on HN is that there’s a lot of intense focus on censorship via deleting a tweet or Facebook post, but no focus given to the more insidious problem of censorship by algorithm.

I am wholeheartedly in favor of a free marketplace of ideas where (we would hope) good ideas win out over bad, but as it is, once you’re deemed by an algorithm to be susceptible to a certain category of extremist information, that’s all you’re ever going to see again; the competing ideas are never going to have a chance.

Algorithmic distribution of ideas is sorta like distributing ideas via gasoline-powered leaf blower directly to the face. I am free to speak my competing ideas, and so technically I haven’t been censored, but no audience is going to hear me over the leaf blower.

We need to get some level of control over the criteria for ranking and filtering. A third one is the UI - it is the place where all sort of dark patterns hide.

I'd like to see the browser put in a sandbox and its inputs/outputs sanitised and de-biased before being presented to the user. Could also protect privacy more. We need more browser innovation. A neural net should be in every browser ready to apply semantic rules.

I don't think people should be forced into the public square by law. If you want to live in an echo chamber, you should be able to. We don't forcibly close convents. If I want to choose the "Smart Feed™, although I can choose not to, that should be my choice to make.

I don't know TikTok, but people seem to like its choices.

I think the distinction is that generally it should be a conscious choice to be in the echo chamber - and not the easy unknowing default choice (if you even have a choice) for smart feeds.

> personalized algorithmic feeds

But there are good uses, like for music. I can’t really think of a downside for music tbh, it’s not like music tends to spread extremism, and on the upside lesser known artists have a better shot at being discovered through the algorithm.

I usually have few reasons for being concerned about the future.

I think wars (even with the on-going war that Russia started), climate issues (even with the high consumption present today) and poverty (even with many countries still in it) will all have a trend of declining. However, this echo chamber fueled with miss-information is one of the things I care for.

I am so happy the EU has power and will to make good changes that gives mutual benefit to everyone when other parts of the world does not.

I think it's fair to use personal data collected on the same site. Without it, most sites would be rendered useless.

Indeed - that would be a legitimate use of cookies etc. In fact, if that were enforced, we can get rid of the annoying cookie warnings.

How does a ban on personalized algorithmic feeds work if each user is subscribed to a different set of others?

"news from friends" might be ok if it is presented without algorithmic curation - i.e. strictly on time order or similar.

Strict chronological runs into the issue that some people post far more frequently than others and can flood the feed. Perhaps some minimal algorithm to up-rank infrequent posters would be helpful without being engagement-driven.

So should I be prevented from following only anti-capitalistic people on twitter or only following right wing subreddits? Should people also be banned from subscribing only to a single newspaper versus a mix of newspapers with different political leanings? What about looking at only socialist web pages that link to other such web pages. Should web pages we forced to link to pages with other political leanings?

No, that's not what I meant. More that it should be a conscious decision to knowingly consume content with a particular bias - as you do when you pick up a certain newspaper or turn over to a specific tv channel, as opposed to being algorithmically presented with a stream of content that may veer in a direction without you being aware.

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