Comment by davidork | Hacker News Reader

Comment by davidork | Hacker News Reader

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so... don't get rid of search engine filter "bubbles" that turn the web into an echo chamber, let the people build their own echo chambers?

I mean, its at least transparent, people are aware of it or have to opt in.

It feels like a weird compromise in terms of misinformation, cultural division, etc... but letting people choose which kool-aid they're drinking instead of letting the "totally not hand tweaked for edge cases in favor of the creator of "the algorithm"" to decide. Out of the handful of "ideas" around wrangling the the trashfire that is the modern internet, this seems like the most sane the best fit solution so far.

In terms of it being an actual search tool for finding information, answers, documentation, references that are actually relevant or useful it sounds insanely useful.

Narrow down searches for anything + "datasheet" to manufacturer websites and a handful of non paywalled datasheet catalogs - fuck yeah!

I forsee lots of angry website owners who run fluff content or bury reposted useful info under mile thick layers of ads.

From another corner of the "search" universe, I get most of my daily information doses through the lens of a collection of RSS feeds I've built up over the years. My feed collection is intolerant to toxic content, although I still see random toxic stuff on the "wild web" (YT, FB, etc.) every now and again.

Does it put me in a bubble? Yeah. But it's a bubble of my own design, and it's a pretty nice place from my POV, that reflects my real world interests, hobbies, etc.

I see goggles as a parallel system for "I'm looking for something specific" search.

I think Goggles might turn out to be a mild retardant to toxic bubble formation, because toxic content is rocket fuel for the kind of "engagement" metrics that google/youtube/twitter/fb have spent the last decade min-maxing.

IMO, existing "search" players (Google, FB, Twitter) are culpable for toxic echo chamber formation, only to the extent that they push toxic content "by default". By allowing users to fine-tune their weights, Brave+Goggles is attempting to dislodge this norm by introducing user feedback into the equation. Like you, I think it's a good idea.

Some people will always opt-in to toxic bubbles, but I think that's more of a human/society problem and not one for a search player to solve.

I see the "bubble" issue differently.

Everyone has context bubbles already. You have work, outside of work, your hobbies both online(IE HN) and offline. You influence these bubbles composition. Hobbies in particular are entirely self selected.

But you are aware of which context you are communing in and are free to move between them and outside them into the general public sphere.

I see this as more of the same. As you say, "its at least transparent, people are aware of it or have to opt in"

Interestingly by the comments here, a big driver for these self selected bubbles are so that people can avoid the advertising they don't wish to see. IE Pinterest and other SEO spam. If "self selected bubbles" are bad, then "targeted relevant advertising" is worse.

I'm waiting for Reddit & Twitter to let me specify who I trust to moderate what I view. Or for a scrappy young startup to show them how to do it. I see no reason for Twitter's hired fact checkers to exclusively perform this function, just like there's no reason why the first user-and-their-friends-to-grab-a-subreddit should have anything other than "recommended moderator" status.

Twitter's social graph is fairly exposed. You can start with a few trusted "role models" (i.e. you'd want to follow anyone they're following) and build a pretty sizable graph from there, with minimal pruning necessary.

I built a tool to recursively scrape RSS feeds from web pages linked to twitter bios. You pass in a "root" trusted user, and look in their bio and every "followee"'s bio for a website, then look for anything "rss" "feed" "atom" or "xml"-y on the link itself or in the domain's sitemap.xml.

Surprisingly very useful. There's a decent amount of value in twitter's content, but arguably much more value in the followee network of "smart people", and the websites "linked out" from their profiles and tweets.

Reddit, similar but in a different way, filters itself into variously useful, well-moderated communities. Top X posts of subreddits A, B, C is a great heuristic for getting 90% of the value out of reddit with very little of the toxicity.

You needn't limit yourself to r/all and the twitter equivalent! :)

alternately just get rid of consistently bad results - I don't want to see pinterest and simiilar aggregators in any result I'm looking for, ever.

Pinterest is ad fueled zombie. Scrape the web, rehost thumbnails of other useful/interesting images, put up ads, pollute image search results until the heat death of the universe.

believe it or not, other people do

which is why this Goggles concept is so good - let me get rid of the search results I consistently want to remove, like pinterest.

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