Hacker News Reader

Comment by tqi | Hacker News Reader

> Advertiser-funded social networks will always have incentives that are misaligned with users.

That's fair, and to clarify I am not saying that users have complete control. My point is just that looking back on the last 7(!) years of discourse about the ills of social media (misinformation, radicalization, polarization, mental health toll), I don't really see how control or choice would help?

> comment is equally ideological as you're accusing mozilla as being I'm not sure I completely followed this part, but to be clear I'm not advocating for or against an ideology re: Truth Social. I'm just saying that it feels like a counter example to their position that choice is a solution.

View on HN

> > > People have plenty control over what content they see (via follows, blocks, hides, downvotes etc),

then

> I don't really see how control or choice would help?

It's possible that someone has some X but could still use more of X.

While users have a lot of "control over what content they see", there's also far more hidden; IOW, users could have additional control and choice.

As an example, "social media" services often promote two-way blocking over one-way blocking (e.g. "muting"), or may not even offer one-way blocking. This means that if I tire of John Smith and "block" him, he's likely to be unable to read anything I've written before or write in the future. That's poor control for users. (Especially if I continue to smear John Smith after I've blocked him.)

Services often censor discovery, even absent a block: a post may be only accessible via direct link and cannot be found via search or user re-posting.

Social networks boost misinformation, radicalization, and polarization because they actively promote content that engagement, which gets them more ad impressions.

That's true, but misinformation, radicalization and polarization also may occur for ideological reasons. Mozilla would not allow everybody with all points of view to use their own fediverse instances; they'll block people they find reprehensible. Those people will then go to another instance, which mutually block each other. Now you've reinvented radicalization and polarization without a profit motive.

There's a large difference between people choosing more or less private clubs and FB tuning their feeds to promote conflict.

Two very different kind of systems can produce very similar results. "people choosing more or less private clubs" is an apt description of many fringe religions / cults which eject people who question the narrative and tell their adherents to cut off friends and family who aren't in the group. The Jehovah's Witnesses come to mind in particular, they're very different from Facebook but they nonetheless polarize and radicalize people.

Private clubs are not necessarily bad, but ideally they should moderate for basic decorum. If they moderate for ideological alignment, they frequently become radicalization machines; echo chambers where people get their biases reinforced without being challenged.

What happens on Facebook is much less legible compared to the effects of organized religion.

But perhaps only because it's so new ? (Parallels with the printing press => Protestantism and other propaganda come to mind again...)

While I agree that ideological reasons will exist in any medium, I think you're proposing an equivalence between the solutions that is made up. Only people with 100% ideological bent will take the actions you suggest; the rest are likely to have many different interests that happen to span purely ideological boundaries, and they will want to remain engaged with those interests such that they avoid finding themselves roped into a place where they only associate with the extreme ideological outliers.

I think you see this in the various ideologically-driven twitterlikes, which have succeeded in only really capturing the extremes and have not made a dent in the mainstream.

I will note that this already had happened with Mastodon when Gab decided to "join" :

https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20691957/mastodon-decentr...

Notice the different reaction of various instance admins and client developers.

From what I have heard, since then Gab broke compatibility with other Mastodon instances ?

So the crisis was dealt with reasonably well for all involved ?

(Truth Social is also based on Mastodon.)

Yeah the behavior of instance blocking is an inevitability for these systems. This creates the conditions for those nearer to or already at the extremes to self-select out of the mainstream by choosing to join already radicalized networks.

I think this instance-level blocking helps contain overall radicalization tho, versus the more pernicious radicalizing via mainstream social networks. Basically I don't see them as equivalent in effect, which was the point I was making.

non ad funded social networks will still have the issue that "influencers" want followers and clickbait hate topics will get them more.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com