The "filter bubble" is going to get worse and worse, it seems. Has anyone had any good experiences where a piece of information technology (forum, reddit, twitter, insta, etc) didn't encourage a filter bubble?
It is a bubble, of course. Most or all my Facebook friends are from the same age, same few countries and more or less similar economic background. Twitter and Reddit have their particular leanings and dogma. So, there is definitely a "filter bubble" compared to "the sum total of world opinions". But I'd still argue that there are more view points in that filter bubble than in the editorial voices within the press of a given country targeting a particular political affiliation. Perhaps not as much as there should be, given the possibilities, but still...
Compared to that social media is a cornucopia/vomitorium of diversity. Alternate opinions are easy to find and sometimes hard to escape.
Also note that for someone getting their news from FOX News, the New York Times is a left-wing outlier. News is pretty terrible in Norway too, but I always feel like I'm in a sitcom whenever I visit the US/Canada. Where BBC and the Guardian appear as bastions against the establishment -- while they of course are very much mainstream.
On the other hand, I'm quite grateful to many of the Republican bloggers/commenters for offering their view on US politics -- it can be easy to forget that the US has a strong intellectual tradition, and while you'll find me agreeing with/quoting Chomsky or Klein more often than anyone on the other end -- there are quite a few voices on the right that have strong and interesting opinions on freedom, independence, commerce, curbing of federal powers etc.
Anyway, with HN being so dominated by the US in general, and Silicon Valley (including the part of SV that lives in NYC ;-) -- I find it can be quite a contrast to my other echo chambers...
I'm afraid I couldn't suggest anything similar that is more left leaning -- maybe https://zcomm.org/znet/ or http://monthlyreview.org/ (but I don't really follow either -- and they certainly can't compare in any meaningful way with hn).
"If you don't agree with the person who made this video why are you posting here?!?! Get a life troll!"
Trolls is the heroes of the internet, the diversity.
You need us. :)
There are people in the set of "others" who very much deserve harassment and ridicule--consider people actively working against the common good, like Scientologists or other online trolls or robber barons or city bosses.
We can achieve more without them than with them.
There is no such thing as trolls, that person you call a troll is making a joke or making a point and you're too far inside your own bubble to not call them an asshole.
People who try to make others commit suicide don't have a valid point.
I'm not familiar with those.
The sorts of things I've seen are more like Berta Lovejoy / Doritan Cheeto.
I've always wondered if you could make some sort of website with an anti-bubble. Probably in the style of Twitter, since you'd want to minimize reliance on outside content of dubious provenance, but possibly in the style of reddit with a system that instead of just linking, there'd be some kind of automatic reputation system for the websites linked to. (For the reddit example, think hybrid link and self-post, where you link to a item and then write an opinion about it.)
Rather than try to show you things that it thinks you'd find agreeable, it shows you opinions that meet your epistemological and deductive methods, but have different conclusions. Detecting reasoning method would likely be difficult, but it might be possible to analyze your argument for similarities to another one, and then show you how people responded to that post.
Of course people would still think that there are logical faults in the other person's argument and dispute their facts, but the goal is to match you with people you'd like to argue with rather than with views you'd get a warm fuzzy by agreeing with. Likely, you'd want to put in a mix of the opinions that's roughly reflective of the user base (eg, X% of users support abortion, so about X% of the posts you see on the topic will concur with that view).
An interesting extension would be to see how far you can go down the formalism path without encumbering the process beyond what people are willing to put up with. (Perhaps require more formalism when introducing external sources, eg websites, and less when just talking about a free standing opinion.)
Regardless, I think we're going to see the rise of communities meant to mix and compete opinions, instead of making echo chambers of them.
https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page
I seem to recall it was practically defunct for a while, maybe while google news was in vogue/before it made (more of?) a point of showing "news fit for you". I suppose it might still show an interesting sampling, if opened in an incognito tab? (actually the Norwegian edition appears identical to me, logged in or not - so who knows?): https://news.google.com
Either way Google News insist on one choosing an "edition" -- would be more interesting if there was an "International English" edition IMNHO.
FWIW during the height of the #Occupy protests, I always found the various local/community web/fb pages more interesting than mainstream media. But it can be hard to sort through the deliberate and accidental mus-information when one hasn't got the ability to just walk down and talk to people there, to find out who's writing what, and get a sense of the why (I did eventually have the chance to visit and do that -- but travelling to another continent whenever something interesting is happening is obviously not a workable strategy. And I wouldn't exactly go hiking through Syria just to have a chat with people from all sides of the conflict...).