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Comment by flir | Hacker News Reader

My wife was complaining about far right knuckle draggers turning up in her feed. I assume the algorithm was shovelling more of them at her because she was rubbernecking. I told her to try a "block every time" approach. It took about two weeks until her feed was (mostly) free of them but it still throws one at her now and again.

I offer this as a data point about how hard it is to turn a polluted feed around. But I'm now wondering if "feed cleaning" is a service that could be automated, via LLM.

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How can we complain that everyone is siloed and no one talks to each other and complian that their feed is full of ideas outside of the silo.

Do you think you should have full control over the web browser on the computer you own?

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.”

Having the right to choose what you see doesn't mean you should choose to build yourself an ideological bubble.

I avoid hateful people and pub bores in real life, too.

If you use the web without an ad blocker, more power to you, I guess.

Assuming that everyone in the other tribe is "hateful people and pub bores" is kind of the problem.

What next? The intellectual dark web? I think we can have a free market of ideas or whatever you’re fetishising without it meaning that I can’t sit on the couch and open an app to see some family photos without it being intermingled with some loser saying that trans people should be hanged on the street.

And you know for a fact that I am not exaggerating. This is where the current political discourse is at.

Can I please have the freedom to do that without the lecture?

Your family photos should be on the Photos app and you'd have no problems.

That sort of rage bait is literally targeted to rile up people sitting on the opposite side of the kind of people watching that other media site that rhymes with socks. It’s all fake bullshit algorithmically optimized to divide.

Everybody thinks their tribe is immune to this sort of stuff but it isn’t. It’s all the same nonsense packaged for different echo chambers.

At the end of the day, everybody is human. It isn’t us vs them, it’s just us.

what the poster mentioned did not sound like a balanced exchange of ideas was about to happen...

I want Facebook to be like the current top post on here: my family and friends social stuff. I can come to hn to get out of my silo.

My wife uses the app, hence the "consistently block the assholes" approach. But if you're willing to stick to the website I can actually offer you this. Write a browser plugin that redirects you to "/?filter=all&sk=h_chr" every time you land on "/". That's what I use for myself.

The worst to me is the way people dehumanize other people who don't agree with them.

The other side politically doesn't just have different views, they are barely human knuckle draggers. Basically neanderthals, so who cares if they go extinct.

"don't agree with them" is carrying a lot of weight here, isn't it?

It's a month-old account.

It’s HN. People create new accounts here all the time to protect their anonymity.

Trolls do as well. Very often if a comment is "bad", it comes from a relatively new account. Then it gets banned and a new account is created. Technically it's ban evasion, but dang doesn't really want to change anything at this point.

It does.

One side: this group of people shouldn't even exist. The other side: no, let them exist actually.

The other side sees you the same way, congrats on being enlightened.

I did this on reddit to try and get a useful /r/all and it ended up being mostly cats. I never look or vote on cat pictures but by just removing political serial posters, thats what I got.

They offer controls in the three-dots menu that say:

+ Interested Show more this like this in my feed

and

- Not Interested Show less things like this in my feed

They even allow clicking those repeatedly on the same post.

I mainly want to clean other people's feeds. There are an enormous amount of people that I need to undergo an algorithm detox.

Yeah, there's always someone saying "Just delete your Facebook account" as if that solves the underlying "Facebook is actively encouraging divisiveness" problem.

My mother-in-laws Facebook feed is full of fake news - from the left, politically. My own mom doesn’t have a Facebook, but she still manages to balance out the universe with fake news from the right on her YouTube feed.

The internet is a mistake for a lot of people and I don’t think we can fix that.

I think the feeds depends on the posts you read, even accidentally.

My feed is free from extreme left content but I didn't have to block anything. Simply by not reading that kind of content, the algorithm knows I am not interested.

Yes, hence my comment about "rubbernecking". If you tend to slow down for car crashes, the algorithm shows you more car crashes. It amplifies our worst instincts.

That effect also applies when you try to block car crashes. That happened to me years ago with the same genre of videos. Like car crashes and people falling and hurting themself a little bit.

> My wife was complaining about far right knuckle draggers turning up in her feed.

This is what is so difficult in facebook vs. HN. Here if people post angry insulting rants, it gets collectively downvoted to oblivion. That is effective.

On facebook there is no equivalent. All I can do is block an individual, but I personally have to do it for every offensive person, which is for practical purposes impossible. Facebooks needs a downvote button and an option to hide any comments which have N downvotes.

"I'm not interested" and "Don't show posts from this person" is the dowvote button for the algorithm. If you use those functions liberally your feed gets pretty clean and aligned.

Except here on HN, other people take care of the downvoting for me. I only have to reach for the downvote button a few times a year.

Whereas on Facebook style algorithmic feeds, you have to "use those functions liberally" and the result is only "pretty" clean.

HN model works, people do downvote for you, if you are just like everybody else here. You indicate that by visiting HN.

In more universal platform such as Facebook you need to indicate who you are by subscribing to specific groups or downvoting some of the content yourself. Just visiting. Facebook is not enoug. Once you signal who you are you also benefit from other people just like you downvoting content you wouldn't like, for you.

I used to belong to a FB nostalgia group that was being relentlessly farmed by Indonesian accounts. The group members (and even the admins) weren't sophisticated enough to spot what was happening. They were absolutely engaging with the spam. They love AI colorizations too.

I don't trust "facebook users" as a group to provide a signal I consider useful.

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