Hacker News Reader

Comment by delichon | Hacker News Reader

I want a button on each user (that opts in) that allows me to see their feed just as they do. A read-only impersonation. When I see a take that I wildly disagree with I frequently wonder what set of views of the world they are operating from. This feature would help look at the world from behind the eyes of those I need to learn from the most: those that seem to live in a different one.

A starter pack in comparison is a one-click embubbler. We need better bubble explorers and comparers. Like "Grok, me and @joe disagree on <topic-x>. Compare the relevant items in each of our feeds and summarize the difference in values, facts and sources that we consume."

View on HN

I (and I assume this is probably true for most people) don't want you to have access to this kind of information about me. It's as if you'd want to know every book on my bookshelf. I'm not letting strangers into my home to get that information.

Follows are already public information.

So is one's location while in public. It doesn't mean I want someone tracking my location every time I leave the house. The aggregation of public data can end up being an invasion of perceived privacy.

Nonetheless, follows have always been public information on Twitter and Bluesky.

A lot of what drives feed algorithms are interactions rather than just follows.

I imagine it’s one reason why X/Twitter made likes private as they want people to like things for the algorithm but not be judged for their likes.

You want to judge someone based on some social network feed algorithm, sounds crazy and dystopian to me.

He doesn't want to judge people he wants to understand people. It is the opposite of a judgment. The idea is that you see someone on social media with ideas you disagree with, but instead of stopping there and dismissing that guy as an asshole, you try to see where these ideas come from and maybe realize that he has a point.

Now this feature could be used to reinforce your bubble (the crazy and dystopian scenario you refer to) instead of bursting out of it. How you see such a feature may be more telling about your own personality than about the feature itself.

This is definitely doable and anyone can build such a feed using Bluesky's APIs.

As an example, I built a "For You" feed https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:3guzzweuqraryl3rdkimjamk/fe... that finds the posts you liked, finds other people who liked the same posts and shows you what else they liked.

To help me debug the algorithm I built a simple web UI that allows you to see the feed for any user by plugging their account id: https://linklonk.com/bluesky

You can switch perspective to other users and explore how the would experience the feed.

Funny. I want the opposite. I want people to stop posting their opinions on the Internet.

Every time I go to Youtube and I see "the X situation is insane!" I'm like "what is even X? Why are you showing me this?"

The whole social media landscape is engineered toward drama and people arguing over pointless things they have no control over, being controversial all for "engagement." It's pretty depressing.

> I want people to stop posting their opinions on the Internet.

Interesting that you do not feel the need to lead by example.

"Yet you participate in society. Curious!"

https://imgur.com/sl3fXat

Ironically this comment is doing the exact thing the comic is criticizing because it is a subtle bastardization of what the comic says.

The comic is about not criticizing people who want to see improvement in something in which they participate. It isn't saying hypocrisy can't be criticized, just that we shouldn't misidentify hypocrisy. Notice the characters aren't saying that no one should buy an Apple product/car or participate in society. The replies are tangential to their original complaints. In order to see hypocrisy, the replier needs to view any participation as a full fledge endorsement, which is a silly thing to do.

Meanwhile, OP genuinely is acting hypocritically because they are doing the exact thing they are criticizing, posting an option to the Internet. The original replier is therefore not the one embodying this comic, it's you.

There is an interesting other layer here where the posting of an opinion is triggered by the way the content is presented. “The medium is the message.” The opinion posted didn’t itself exist before the content was consumed, making it all self-fulfilling and a positive feedback loop.

The interesting thing about HN in that context is it doesn’t fine-tune its algorithm per-user, it presents a consistent view to all users. Content should be much less positive-feedback-loop because of that.

And so OP might not be hypocritical if that consistent-view is the change we need to better our society.

There is zero irony for anyone not engaged in black and white thinking, Mr Gotcha.

OP is talking about very specific kinds of opinions here, not forum posts. Other than that, a librarian often has to talk out loud in order to tell people to keep quiet.

They're right, though. So many problems are caused by thinking that opinions matter.

I do lead by example, but comment replies don't count ;)

Sometimes. Sometimes people actually do care about things and wish to express their opinions on it.

Personal tracking? What is stopping you from building a bot that uses this feature to view other peoples personal taste and building a shadow profile that then is used to manipulate them?

You can already do this by scraping their follows list and building a pseudo display of what a person looked at.

You are just describing what advertisers actually do in practice. Maybe if everyone had the same access people would realize how invasive it is.

Advertisers less track you and more decide what demographic bucket to stick you in.

It’s a subtle but important (and hard to admit) difference; because it relies on realizing that we’re not special snowflakes, but we have a whole group of people we’re like.

It seems that the most effective method of sticking people in buckets is actually track them, so I don't see the practical difference for this discussion.

> because it relies on realizing that we’re not special snowflakes, but we have a whole group of people we’re like

yet buckets become more valuable the more specific they are (for example "dad of 3" is more valuable than "male"). it's not hard to see how that would scale into "every detail about the person would allow maximally manipulative advertising = most valuable", just think about any vulnerable position you might find yourself in that can now be used to manipulate you

That might've been true 20 years ago, when fine-grained individual data was expensive for marketing teams to store, organize, and access. Nowadays that's dirt-cheap; advertisers absolutely do track you on a very individual level. Yes, they also correlate you with other individuals based on various demographic buckets, but those buckets are getting tinier and tinier.

I’d love to meet more of the people in my bucket. I think we’d get along well.

...until it's time to fight over the same scarce holiday gift item that your bucketeers all crave also? :D

Is that true? Pretty sure everything is way, way fuzzier and ultra-high dimensionality now. Not placing people in discrete buckets.

So we give everyone single click access and people become bigger monsters or people wake up finally? Make it a separate tool.

Yeah! The only people who should be allowed to see my own feed are me and the malevolent corporate entity that owns the platform!

I said this was already possible by anyone.

> Compare the relevant items in each of our feeds and summarize the difference in values, facts and sources that we consume."

Surely it'd be easier to just view the delta? Once you have an algorithm in there summarizing things that value is lost.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com