Is my email inbox an echo chamber because I don't get random newsletters from political activists?
According to this research study, these are the two main ingredients: 1) Homophily in the interaction networks 2) Bias in the information diffusion toward like-minded peers https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2023301118
Substack Notes is their way to venture into the social platform realm, which differs from the personal email inbox model, which isn't a social platform. With that in mind, for ingredient #1: people can only see notes from people they follow. People will overwhelmingly only follow people that align with their ideas/political leanings/beliefs. This creates the homophily in interaction networks. For #2, users can easily share biased information to their like-minded peers without pushback/opposing views since their social network is comprised of people with the same viewpoints.
To be clear, algorithms can definitely create echo chambers as well but ideally an algorithm based feed will promote discourse and dialogue about ideas.
An anecdote: I follow quite a few people on TikTok that post about housing policy in NYC. TikTok's algorithm exposes these videos to people with varying viewpoints, which creates a ton of dialogue on proposed solutions and pushback on ideas that could potentially harm certain demographics/historical areas, etc. This pushback is very important but is only possible when there is a chance for those with opposing views to discover it, which means there needs to be an algorithmic recommendation feature.
If TikTok had no FYP and instead people could only watch videos from people they follow, this would create a closed loop system and those opposing views for housing policy would not be nearly as prevalent.
Is that what people actually want? To be algorithmiclly fed content from strangers? Why is this the imputed ideal?
> but ideally an algorithm based feed will promote discourse and dialogue about ideas.
Is there any evidence that this is true or should be an expectation? Is that really why billions of dollars are spent on this space?
Yes. If people only used social media to connect/follow people they know the industry would be making nothing.
I never made the argument that it's the imputed ideal. Rather, my point is that in the context of a social platform, having an option for an algorithmic feed leads to other people with opposing views to discover the content and have dialogue about it/contest that viewpoint. Otherwise, it's a closed loop system that contains only like-minded viewpoints that can lead to an echo chamber. How do we prevent echo chambers from forming? Well, the most straightforward option is to introduce opposing viewpoints. How do we introduce opposing viewpoints? Well the people with opposing viewpoints need to be able to discover the content - so it needs to be shown to them somehow. The best way to do that (right now at least) is through an algorithmic recommendation engine.
> Is there any evidence that this is true or should be an expectation? Is that really why billions of dollars are spent on this space?
That's why I said "ideally". There's huge differences in algorithms for all the major social platforms. Algorithms can easily be used to make echo chambers worse, but algorithms can also be used to reduce echo chambers on a platform. To your point, that's why billions of dollars are spent on this because it's a complicated problem. One thing is a fact though, dissenting opinions create engagement and keeps people on the platform. If you responded to my comment and said "I agree with you", I wouldn't be commenting here right now and back on Hackernews. Most social platforms take advantage of this feature of our human psyche to get people to stay on the platform to then show them more ads and drive more ad revenue. That's why engagement is such a critical factor in social media algorithms and also has the unintended consequence of promoting controversial content - because it receives the most engagement. Which goes back to the need of having an algorithm that can balance reducing echo chambers by showing the content to others with dissenting opinions without unintentionally promoting only the most controversial content because it has the highest engagement. There's really no easy answer to this and again, that's why they spend billions like you said.