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Comment by kromem | Hacker News Reader

After spending a number of months on Lemmy as my primary social media, I actually think the fediverse makes one of the biggest issues of social media much worse.

There's a very real and dangerous trend towards extremist positions as a result of social media bubbles. I'm sure most people have noticed how large family gatherings have shifted over the last 15 years, and how some family may no longer even be invited as a result of social media driven shifts.

The fediverse makes these bubbles so much worse, with servers of like minded moderation creating a trend towards groupthink as opposed to representing a variety of opinions.

So while it's promising from a standpoint of shrugging off corporate driven issues in managing social media, the fragmentary nature is perhaps the opposite of what social media actually needs, which is less bubble driven optimization with regression towards extremist means and more broad exposure and interaction with regression towards the normal mean.

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The supposed "social media bubble" is a silly myth. The exact opposite is the case: On even the most algorithmically filtered social media platform, you cannot avoid encountering opinions and viewpoints that are dramatically different from what you find in your real-life circles.

The real bubbles are your family, your workplace, and your friends. Most of them are the same nationality, roughly the same social class, and roughly the same level of education as you. Your colleagues, by definition, all work in the same business as you. You have (subconsciously) hand-picked your friends to align with you on a multitude of levels.

Meanwhile, on Facebook or Reddit, you suddenly read a comment written by a veterinarian in Azerbaijan – someone who you would almost certainly never have met in real life and who is more different from you in every way than all the people you interact with as part of your daily routine.

> on Facebook or Reddit, you suddenly read a comment written by a veterinarian in Azerbaijan – someone who you would almost certainly never have met in real life and who is more different from you in every way than all the people you interact with as part of your daily routine.

that veterinarian may be more different than the people you see in everyday life, but the point of a social media bubble is that the veterinarian and you are likely to be very similar. Otherwise, why would you be on the same subreddit? How would you have met them on the internet if not because you were interested in common topics?

Interested in one common topic. If I like crocheting, interacting with people in a crocheting subreddit doesn't create a "filter bubble". The people in that sub are still going to have wildly different opinions and preferences from myself on any topic besides crocheting. And large subs like AskReddit are obviously being frequented by people from every imaginable background.

A forum on a single common topic can still create a filter bubble. For example, I know some music and outdoor-sports forums where the participants now post about not only those topics, but also a limited spectrum of US political rants or social-justice advocacy. If you come from somewhere else and you have different views or do not participate in such discussions, you can feel outright excluded from the club.

On any anglophone forum, it can happen that just enough participants are North Americans with the same views, that their political and social concerns are considered relevant and important. Some Reddit subs have seen this, too. Obviously a moderation rule of “no politics” or “no off-topic” would help, but sometimes even the moderators are passionate about those same political or social concerns, and believe that preventing discussion of such would be fascist.

> Obviously a moderation rule of “no politics” or “no off-topic” would help, but sometimes even the moderators are passionate about those same political or social concerns, and believe that preventing discussion of such would be fascist.

Worse, as long as the the mods have free reign to decide what is and isn't politics this is just yet another way of phrasing the real rule of "no things we don't approve of".

Could not have said it better myself. The bubble idea is a myth and, as we've seen here, when people attempt to articulate it, it cashes out as something astonishingly shallow.

It's such a lazy analysis that it overlooks countless ordinary and familiar examples that are not controversial or problematic at all, niche communities of every variety, convergences of common interest where the commonality is a baseline of curiosity about ideas are interests that supports healthy and curious and varied discussion, communities that aren't in any strict way of bubble but are just proactive about filtering out hate, communities where a common interest doesn't clearly map onto the analysis of bubbles or politics that people have in mind when they say bubble is a problem (eg tech early adopters, FOSS enthusiasts), and on and on. It's totally ignorant of the kinds of communities that in practice have emerged and taken advantage of the ability to form these niches, which in Mastodon's case was things like comic book artists, the furry community, astronomy nerds and so on.

Not to mention the theory of this "bubble" is fundamentally broken, because it lazily equates common interests specifically to the narrow idea of political escalation and extremism, and the actual convergence of human interests plays out with any number of social dynamics that can't necessarily be mapped on to the specific one of political extremism.

It's just across the board an embarrassing and intellectually lazy idea that misses out on dozens of counterexamples and dozens of social dynamics that it can't and doesn't even bother to explain, and assumes everything fits a narrow theory that's specific to certain kinds of political conversations among specific kinds of political groups.

The difference is that with your real-life social bubble you try to not embarrass yourself, so you only discuss your more moderate views with them. While on the internet if you support some extremistic view, you can just shout it out without much consequence.

Without much consequence?

Only if you hide behind the shield of anonymity. Which you can't really do in the real world.

The other problem is that ideas are contagious, so when a few wackos shout out their extremist views, other people start thinking this may be normal, and more and more of them become sympathetic to it. This is why so many Americans believe in crazy BS conspiracy theories like "adrenochrome" now; in the pre-internet days, this stuff couldn't go very far. This is why those family gatherings have gotten so bad: decades ago, very few people believed in "extremist" stuff, but because of social media and other internet media sources, many of those views have become somewhat normalized so that a large portion of the population believes them.

We all live in bubbles. But, for some reasons, people think that some places are "bubble free".

They see right-wing fascists all the time on the television and think it is normal. They see a few moderate leftists on the fediverse and "the fediverse is a bubble, a niche".

> They see right-wing fascists all the time on the television and think it is normal. They see a few moderate leftists on the fediverse and "the fediverse is a bubble, a niche".

This does feel a little like a bubbley description of things.

> They see right-wing fascists all the time on the television and think it is normal.

Other than as a generic pejorative, what "fascists" are regularly on television? What tenets of Fascism are they preaching?

I think the idea of a "bubble" is less that "bubbles" don't exist in real life or that it's impossible to hear anything outside them and more that the internet makes it particularly easy to find communities offering mutual reinforcement and insisting it's everyone else that's wrong. Even for people who are initially only idly curious about whether anyone else has ever felt that way.

This includes things you might have happily accepted you might have just made a mistake on (but I thought I remembered this documentary about Mandela's assassination...) when your real world social circle pushed back, if only it wasn't so easy to find other people that thought the same, and theories of why you are right all along. Usually with a lot of other baggage linked into you being right and everyone else being wrong

Obviously this isn't always a bad thing: people also use the internet to discover that same sex attraction is actually accepted in places outside their community or that their government's position on a border dispute isn't universally accepted in environments where alternative views are legal to express. And it happens offline too (the original 'Mandela Effect' was apparently conceived by a bunch of paranormal enthusiasts in an offline environment). But if the Azeri vet is one of the few people in the world to not think what you're saying is complete nonsense, you'll be much more likely to find him online. Not all taboos are against stuff which is inherently bad to discuss, and not all beliefs universally held within a community are accurate. But a lot of fringe stuff on the internet is fringe for good reason, and even when such views are quiet widely-held "bubbles" suck in people who would never have had the motivation to seek out an offline group for discussing the coming race war or whose fault their lack of confidence in dating really was.

> The real bubbles are your family, your workplace, and your friends

And the newspaper/channel/site(s) you frequent.

> veterinarian in Azerbaijan

This is not the average vet in Azerbaijan. It's the vet telling a story that fits the values of YOUR bubble. There are probably Azerbaijanis in your own city who you don't know and wouldn't even listen to because they don't live in the same bubble. They might be struggling to put food on the table and they may think that you are a privileged ** and that you think you are morally superior because your bubble also contains privileged **s who happen to live in other countries.

You'd probably get more outside of your bubble by getting acquainted with a person at your local bus stop. But the reality is: you wouldn't want to because they don't live in your bubble.

Your hatred is steaming out of your ears like if you were a cartoon character. Relax, some random poster on the internet is not to blame for your suffering. And just because they have a different opinion on something meaningless, doesn't mean they're an ass, "privileged", or ignorantly living in a "filter bubble".

It sounds like you're in a bubble where only cartoon characters convey their opinions passionately. And there are people outside of your bubble that have a different opinion on something you do consider meaningful. At least on the topic 'what is meaningful' I think you will find many different opinions being held.

> you suddenly read a comment

That phrase is hiding the real issue: on the internet, people engage with what they want to, and ignore what they want to. Attention, respect, engagement don't result from 'suddenly reading a comment'.

When there was only establishment newspapers and media they presented (what they considered) a balanced and responsible view. Now they've lost control of information and communication. Journalists dug deep to find a problem with the internet, and landed on 'the bubble'. The bubble is when people lack a balanced and responsible view...

There is just enough truth to 'the bubble' to keep the idea alive. On the internet it's easy to find radical information, and restrict your information sources to what you want. Back when everyone read the newspaper it kept public discussion narrowly focused [1]. Now we have lots of people who 'do their own research' and hold radical views. Also, the views that were suppressed under the establishment media are public and accessible to everyone.

There have always been people who live in their own little world, or bubble, but now it's much larger number. From the view of companies and social establishments that controlled the news this is a huge problem. From my view of society, I now sympathize with the US being a republic rather than a pure democracy, and I never thought that would happen.

[1] The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum..." -Noam Chomsky

> The fediverse makes these bubbles so much worse, with servers of like minded moderation creating a trend towards groupthink as opposed to representing a variety of opinions.

You say groupthink bubble, I say place where I don't have to brace as much for racist or sexist views being expressed.

> regression towards the normal mean.

Yeah, the normal mean is something to strive for... If it already benefits you.

What you described as a safe space can quickly become, ironically, an intolerant one, albeit not for you, as you self-selected by joining.

I think OP is addressing the paradox of tolerance, hence the call for differing but not hateful opinions. There’s a fine line between the two and cloistering oneself among likeminded people seems to inevitably lead to some form of intolerance.

No one questions that living in a bubble is comfortable. But your comfort comes at a cost, which is that people you disagree with aren’t exposed to disagreements with you. They’re now in a bubble (or “safe space”) where everyone agrees with them, so they’re more convinced than ever that they’re right.

And yeah ok, you say that’s not your responsibility. That’s fine, but then you shouldn’t be surprised when society is torn apart by these differences.

This comment is the slippery slope fallacy because the person responding to you has rightly pointed out that not every situation that's described as a "groupthink bubble" actually is one; sometimes it's just people not wanting to hang out with guys who drop the N-word "as a joke" or overtly support authoritarianism or whatever. Maybe the assholes getting shown the door in such situations always tell themselves that "Society is about to get torn apart by me getting treated this way" but thinking it does not make it so.

> sometimes it's just people not wanting to hang out with guys who drop the N-word "as a joke" or overtly support authoritarianism or whatever.

When they exit, the remainders are going to more and more normalize these, as more and more of the moderates exit. Eventually it could even become the default norm.

(The process has occasionally been compared to evaporative cooling[1].)

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporativ...

>sometimes it's just people not wanting to hang out with guys who drop the N-word "as a joke" or overtly support authoritarianism or whatever.

those people were formed due to and in part of a bubble; and denying them the opportunity to have their bubble popped as it causes you discomfort is the exact opposite of being able to express oneself at all - it always comes with the chance of making someone uncomfortable.

"In order to be able to think, you must risk being offended." -JP, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BW9haau6Hw

I’m really confused here. Are you saying black people live in a bubble for not wanting slurs thrown at them? It’s not like black people are unfamiliar with that word or the word is particularly enlightening? Who are we making uncomfortable by barring calling black people racial slurs, here? This is absolutely baffling logic when applied to racial slurs and black people.

The kids call the kid the n-word because they are in a bubble where that was okay.

Until they get their bubble popped.

But you think it's better to all live in separate, but presumably equal, bubbles.

Maybe this is some cultural difference, but I kinda don't get why using n-word is different from using any other slurs. Most people would agree (I hope) that slurs are not part of normal, civil discussion, and I cannot understand why would anyone try to create a safe space for discussion with someone who calls them "motherf*** fa**". I think such person has no interest in polite conversation, unless, of course, in other countries being showered with word vomit is considered a normal conversation starter, akin to "We have different views, let's talk about that"

The problem is that like there are safe spaces for people to not hear slurs, there exists safe spaces for people to say slurs without backslash. The first is not a problem but the second very much is.

If you can exclude the ppl that say slurs, the ppl that say slurs can do the same, ending up in slurland, were they get worse and worse until they go to the street and kill someone.

I really am not convinced that for the sake of the not-serial-killers-yet racists we have to let them call people slurs everywhere. Choosing to commit hate crimes is purely in the realm of irredeemable pieces of shit and society barring them from calling black people slurs on social media shouldn’t be considered a causal factor to it.

No they aren't irredeemable, or at least weren't always.

This doesn't respect the power of the radicalization pipeline and let's others escape accountability for their part such as avoiding conflict when their friend says a racial slur or joins an incel forum rather than providing a less extreme take.

The cost of freedom and liberty is the occasional tolerance of offensive things and ideas.

Small price to pay for a functional democracy comprised of unprecedented individual liberties.

But since some of the least-creatively-programmed amongst us want to use the "n-word" as an example (how surprising,) let's.

When and who get to decide which buzzword becomes a slur today? Tomorrow?

There are black Americans who prefer the word "negro," instead of the latest white-savior siccophant, acting as a virtue-signaling intellectually degrading euphemism.

Basketball Americans do not need your saving, thank you Mr Mayonnaise Man.

I was being exagerated a lil bit with the go to the streets and kill someone. What I mean is that bad people start creating circles of bad people and people that are slightly bad and would become good otherwise end up joining these circles and going extreme.

It is not that we must allow people to say slurs, is that it is better for those people to say slurs in a public multicultural site, so that good people can essentially social pressure the slurers into simply not saying slurs. This was possible with centralized social networks, but with decentralization is not possible as the nature of decentralization means that those kind of people now can create their own bubbles of hate instead of having to behave to be in the public spaces.

The parent's point is by separating everyone has a different mainstream imagine they believe everyone else normal lives in. Some of those bubbles may deem your bubble groupthink a certain way.

We had segregation at one point. I'm not sure that benefited everyone equally. Why return to that?

Woah, how did we get from “we don’t call black peoples slurs here” to “WHITES ONLY drinking fountains”?? White people arent weird troglodytes unable to be around a black person without slurring them. Calling black peoples the n word is not an essential part of being white!

You are helping the troll string up a straw man, no one has mentioned blacks aside from him.

And the left is completely ideologically unable to be around a black person without first acknowledging their privileged presence by an oppression tirade of apologizing blithering woke-double-speak.

The left and the right are equally racist for similar reasons, for example; they both think blacks should had gotten the vaccine first.

Dude I’m literally just saying that I don’t get how calling black people the n word is some kind of bubble. Basic human decency is a crazy social filter I guess. I feel like this jump is hysterics.

You don't understand how social bubbles THEMSELVES lead to kids normalizing the 'n' word?

You and OP are confusing "safe spaces" for "bubbles"

> But your comfort comes at a cost, which is that people you disagree with aren’t exposed to disagreements with you.

Whats the alternative? That most shared discourse happens in a single space? I think its fairly clear that that doesn't work so well when everyone has write access to that space: it either dissolves into q conflict zone, or bubbles form within it, or both.

Before social media there was less of a problem because of gatekeeping by traditional journalism and state regulation, and because print media moves too slowly to permit high-freqency positive feedback loops to form.

I'm not suggesting going back to the situation before social media, but I'm not convinced that "comfortable bubbles" are the main problem. I suspect that the frequency and scale of discourse are at least as important.

Bubbles are safe until the day you realize a bubble that would like you dead has now grown large enough to vote in a like minded government in your country. Then nothing is safe.

Jesus Christ the hyperbole. Name a single example of a country where a government that "wants certain people dead" has been voted in recently, other than such countries where this has been happening for decades anyway without social media even existing.

That's the pint isn't it? Social media is relatively recent however I'd say all those countries you tried to discount essentially had real life bubbles of various sorts.

Social media has been around for 15+ years. That's 3-4 election cycles in most countries. And the way I see it, the same kind of people are getting voted in that have been for decades. Yes, that includes Trump, who is just Reagan with a fouler mouth.

Myanmar.

USA. They only didn't succeed with their coup.

Myanmar has been in a nearly continuous civil war for decades. It's a failed state and always has been. That has nothing to do with social media.

And no US government in recent history, including the one before the current one, had killing people on their agenda. That's just complete and utter horseshit.

Fun fact, both of those countries don't use SI for everyday measures.

There are two kinds of countries, I guess. Those that ~landed on the moon~ voted in fascist leaders and those that use metric system.

> You say groupthink bubble, I say place where I don't have to brace as much for racist or sexist views being expressed.

There is a real risk that avoiding topics or people one finds offensive can make a person less resilient. Its a totally reasonable response to the internet where you have the opposite problem of being exposed to more than you otherwise would have, but creating too tight of a bubble can have downsides.

> You say groupthink bubble, I say place where I don't have to brace as much for racist or sexist views being expressed.

Creating a space where you don't have to face the fact that your fellow humans are sexist or racist is the very definition of a bubble.

This "filter bubble" is not true, and does not seem to be the issue people think it is.

We interact with more diverse people online outside of our bubble. It's actually our real life that's the bubble, and bubbles aren't necessarily bad.

Link to paper: https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.2207159119

You didn't read more than the headline, did you? Directly from the abstract:

"When individuals interact locally, the outcome is a stable plural patchwork of cross-cutting conflicts. By encouraging nonlocal interaction, digital media drive an alignment of conflicts along partisan lines, thus effacing the counterbalancing effects of local heterogeneity. The result is polarization, even if individual interaction leads to convergence. The model thus suggests that digital media polarize through partisan sorting, creating a maelstrom in which more and more identities, beliefs, and cultural preferences become drawn into an all-encompassing societal division."

So the paper is supporting exactly what I'm saying. That in your local community you need to engage with differences of opinion to successfully navigate local social structures, but that online with an expanded network you can interact with only like minded people.

Yes, the overall bubble is larger online than in real life, but as a result it allows for self-selecting subnetworks which align with confirming your biases and further radicalization rather than compromising with differences of opinion.

I indeed read the paper. No snark needed.

I disagree with your interpretation of the stable plural patchwork that you’ve represented here as supporting your claim. However, the nuance in difference of our opinion isn’t that important in the grand scheme.

For your last two paragraphs, I think you are actually describing social sorting - which the paper asserts as the underlining mechanism for which polarization happens online. The filter bubble is colloquially known as not seeing differing opinions online, yet as the paper states is untrue. Online we counter more diverse opinions. That’s what I wanted to point out.

Best of luck to you.

> I'm sure most people have noticed how large family gatherings have shifted over the last 15 years, and how some family may no longer even be invited as a result of social media driven shifts.

So because of social media bubbles, people split their families into bubbles too? If even in a real life setting, where no algorithm curates who they interact with, people choose to segregate despite of family bonds, then that sounds more like a people problem than a social media problem to me.

There's definitely families out there who can get together despite holding diametrically opposed political opinions, even discussing them at the dinner table without getting overly emotional about it and needing to un-invite people from later gatherings. I'd call that a normal, functioning family.

This is normal human behavior, per Schelling. Social media has made everyone's opinions more visible to others, which often turns out to be antithetical to maintaining friendly relations.

It's a mental health problem. Social media etc. are actually driving people comparatively mad.

People have always grouped together into communities with extremist views in the physical world. And I am not even talking about fringe elements. Many sects of all major religions for thousands of years have thought the entire outgroup is going to hell.

The problem with social media is not that. It is the feed algorithms that make expressing any extremist position the only way to get other people to talk to you. Fix this problem and many of the problems will go away.

Unfortunately, as it is a social coordination problem, the only way for this to happen is government regulation that either bans feed algorithms altogether, or ensures that users individually have full control over the algorithm for their own feed.

This is exactly what's happening. I never thought I'd make a positive comparison to twitter but twitter threw everyone into one big melting pot. People could block each other but by default they had to listen to a lot of differing opinions before they blocked anyone.

In fedi borders are being drawn and they're creating these little bubbles of opinions. So you know that within your border your opinion will never be challenged because the admin already took care of that for you.

If I were to find any glimmer of hope in that it would be that certain instances will be more inclusive and perhaps some borders will be drawn around that, but I'm not sure.

I actually ran a node since 2017 but left in 2022 because of this very reason.

What borders? Do you mean the basic rules of good behaviour?

No. Specific rules of political purity, and the transitive demand that you also cut off any nonbelievers lest ye be branded yourself

>but twitter threw everyone into one big melting pot.

Threw everyone using twitter into one big melting pot.

humans can't be trusted to not censure information they dislike. corporate or private people will all follow their own self interests. there is no version where this ends well.

Humans have dealt with serious society-wise cultural issues rooted in base emotional desires like these many, many times before, and evolved beyond them.

We can still develop common sense and a culture that is highly cautious of these attempts to censor everything, the stuff motivated by an ever expand hyper sensitivity to anything in shades of grey of something they don't like.

We've experience half a decade where being censor-happy has become the norm, rather than merely cleaning up communities of the fringe edge cases that are truly bad. As usual with humans a good idea leaned on taken to the extreme, a hammer seeking nails. Definitely not the first time humans attempted something like this.

The constant negative outcomes of these impulsive behaviours usually build up ad nauseam, and almost always result in cultural backlash which eventually turns into a new common sense. Democracy was built of a similar reaction to negative base desire for isolated hyper centralized authority. I'm confident a similar shift will happen in reaction to the hyper-ideological "everyone I disagree with should be banned from commenting" safe space movement. At least as long as the force of government doesn't turn it from merely cultural to criminal or regulatory as it already starting to in some countries.

i hope so too!

I think this is largely moot because just about every social media site will either allow you to select your communities or algorithms will filter for you based on your behavior.

By fragmenting you move off of a global platform with family and into a silo of like minds. That change means there is no need to pollute the global newsfeed with opposing views. Everyone can agree on a common dominator and family will start getting invited back to dinner.

Right, because we all know the antivaxx member of the extended family never brings the topic up in person...

People radicalized have their entire identity structured around a need for confirmation.

When you only talk about a specific topic 24/7 online, what happens in person is that you still bend over backwards to tie every possible subject into that topic. A QAnon believer sees it everywhere and points it out to family. A flat earther is going to make some comment about NASA at dinner guaranteed.

It existed previously in cult behavior, but that sociological structure has now been distributed from small local gatherings to global reach online.

the extremism you're experiencing is definitely because you're on lemmy

Thing is, with current social media, bubbles are quite limited. Social media likes interactions and comments and the best way to gain those is by exposing totally opposite info to a person with certain views. This will also drive toxicity way up. The fediverse is more like some local cozy communities. Yes, there are some bad groups of ppl, but generally it's ok to be part of a smaller community compared to being exposed to constant hate, rage by social media algorithms to gain more interactions

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